Susan Pevensie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quote_gentle_unquote) wrote2023-12-13 10:38 am
quote_gentle_unquote) wrote2023-12-13 10:38 am
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[pre-threaded] !
Lucy sits in the garden under a tree, eating an apple. It's a funny thing. Whenever she was pulled into the world of Narnia, when she was a living girl, she had noticed that the Narnian air worked strangely. One could arrive as a little English schoolgirl, and an hour or so later your mind would grow sharper and your arms and legs would remember the strength of a Queen.
Now, the place she's found herself is having quite the opposite effect. Lucy has lived for some time in Aslan’s country, and her life in England (or rather, the place she once called England, which is like a shadow of its mirror twin in Aslan's country) feels like quite a distant dream. But as she has been sitting here, her mind has started to remember what it was to be the living Lucy Pevensie. She notices, marveling at the novelty, that the back of her shoe has rubbed a sore onto her ankle and left a gray mark on her stocking. It occurs to her that it's quite chilly. Oughtn't she have brought a coat? Susan does fuss so if she rushes out without one.
And when she takes from her pocket the apple she brought for the journey, it is quite an ordinary apple, not one of the mouthwatering fruits from the trees in Aslan's country. Biting into it gives her such a queer feeling, like hearing an old favorite song that never comes on the radio these days, and suddenly Lucy very much feels like crying.
Susan has been (dare she say it?), against all odds, settling in to life at the Mansion. It helps that she's created a rigorous schedule: mornings, with a strong cup of tea and a light breakfast, spent in the nook in her room, while she reads voraciously all of the nonfiction that captures her attention in the library. Ethology, of course, and political science for Edmund, and psychoanalysis, but also traditions that followed her time in London: newer sciences and psychologies. Neuroanatomy, human factors engineering, even the first of Freud's essays on homosexuality.
Lunch she usually takes with Lancelot or Thomas, sometimes Janet. Afternoons are for busier work: continuing to inventory what she can of the Mansion's resources twice a week in her search for the bow, mapping the shifting grounds as best she can... essentially, the work of a Queen surveying her nation to know what is there. Occasionally Susan will interview residents who are more familiar with little pockets of the area than she: Mothwing, for example, has a good accounting of the fish in the lake.
Today, she is tramping through the verge where the forest meets the lawn in a light tangle of underbrush, wearing her favorite fashionable, yet sensible boots and a bright red coat over her mourning dress. Her pencil is once more tucked into her hair; her notebook is held loosely in one hand. There are gardens she has not yet visited, further-off than the ones Claudius seems to keep tidily handled. She thinks, perhaps, that they can be more usefully employed.
For a split second, Susan does not recognize the girl underneath the tree, and thinks to introduce herself. But then she takes one step closer. Her fingers flex. Her notebook falls. Her hands fly to her mouth, but they cannot contain the queer yelp she makes: it is all at once hopeful, and longing, and anguished.
On seeing her, Lucy scrambles to her feet, tossing the apple core to the ground, and rushes to embrace her. “Susan! Dear Susan, I’ve come to see you—has it been awful? No, of course it has, I’m being silly—“ The sight of Susan is like the apple, something familiar that she remembers to yearn for only at the point of having it before her again. It is strange, this business of coming out of Aslan’s country. Lucy did not miss anything while she was there, and yet the ability to want things, and to miss them, is coming back to her with the air. She suddenly feels that she must have missed Susan terribly—only, just hours ago, it didn’t matter half so much as it does now. “I’m glad to see you,” she says fiercely, “terribly glad. Oh, Susan.”
"Lucy?" Susan pulls her sister to her — hugging her, but also running her hands over Lucy's arms, her shoulders, her face, to make sure that there is a solid and intact body in front of her and not just a figment of a wish, or a dream. "Is it really you? Are you really here? Lucy," she cries, and kisses Lucy's cheeks: first one, and then the other, and then her forehead too, for good measure.
Then she stops, and grips Lucy's shoulders tight in each hand, and leans back, frowning. "Whatever are you doing here?"
“Well, we all died—you know that, of course. Only it isn’t like you’d think, Susan, it’s all right, really. But I think of you often—it isn’t like worry, exactly, you can’t be worried in Aslan’s country even if you try to be, it’s the queerest feeling, actually. You just sort of know that things will turn out right in the end. But I do think about you, all alone in England. And I wish we could hurry up and be all together again, but I don’t want you to die—even if death seems like such a little thing, on the other side of it—but it seems momentous from your side of it. I’m always saying, ‘Dear Aslan, what news of Susan?’ but you know how he is—if he doesn’t want to say, then there’s no point in asking. Only I kept asking anyway. And we aren’t to know anything about what’s happening in England, in the Shadow-Lands—that is, the places that aren’t Aslan’s country—but then he said that you weren’t in England, and not really in the Shadow-Lands either. Because even in the Shadow-Lands, one can know Aslan—but not where you are. Aslan can’t even reach this place. When he told me that, I didn’t know what to think. I think I was quite worried, even though you aren’t meant to be. I just thought it meant you were even more alone than before. So I begged to be allowed to send you a message, or to see you, and Aslan would only look at me—you know how he can look so terribly sad sometimes, sadder than you would think a lion’s face could manage. I didn’t know if he was sad because he couldn’t reach you himself, or because he was disappointed in me—and Peter kept saying, ‘Lu, you know Susan, she’ll work it out’—but I kept asking. And eventually Aslan said there was some change, and he could reach this place, but only today. So I came.” Lucy has no idea if what she’s just said makes sense, or sounds like utter rot—it has been far too long since she’s spoken to anyone living.
Susan is frowning by the end of Lucy's speech. "Lucy," she says — to her chagrin; her voice sounds a little sharp even though her heart is beating against the very walls of her chest. "Lucy, you're not making any sense." She puts her hand on Lucy's forehead, as if checking for a temperature.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter—I’m just so glad to see you.” She throws her arms around Susan again, tears overflowing. “Are you still cross with me about our fight? From before the train?”
"No, Lu, of course not," Susan says. Ever the little mother, she reaches in her pocket for a handkerchief (managing even with the force of Lucy's hug) and pulls free enough that she can wipe busily at Lucy's eyes. It gives her something to distract herself, something to do with her hands, as she says, "I've been feeling ever so guilty about that fight, Lucy. I shouldn't have said the things I did. I was terribly worried about you but that's no excuse."
“Oh Susan, don't feel bad—it’s too awful, I can't bear it. We were always fighting back then, and now I can hardly remember why.” She lets out a laugh that might well be a sob. “I say, it's jolly cold here, isn't it? Can't we go inside?”
"You always were terrible at remembering your coat," Susan says, fond, and then stills at her own use of past tense. It takes her a moment to rouse herself back into movement. With no small amount of forced cheer: "Yes, yes of course. She links her arm with Lucy's. "Come. There's a parlor with a nice fireplace. And no rationing here!"
It's really just that Lucy never needs a coat in Aslan's country. But it feels strange to remind Susan of how they are different, now. Aslan did warn her, anyway, that it would be hard for Susan to understand. Likewise, rationing is hardly a concern of Lucy's these days, but once Susan mentions food, she realizes that the empty feeling in her stomach is hunger. She follows along with Susan, putting aside the queer sadness that's come over her. "That's wonderful, how lucky for you! I'm famished. I have a million questions. Where are we?"
"I haven't the foggiest," Susan says. She's slipping back into the no-nonsense tone she uses to distance herself from the depths of her feelings, and she knows it, but she doesn't try to course-correct. If Lucy is here — for only today, whatever that means — she doesn't want to get overwhelmed. "I don't believe anyone has. It's the queerest place, Lu. All sorts of people are here. Do you remember the books I used to read you and Edmund when you were small? Fillory, and King Arthur's knights, and all that?"
“Why, of course I do.”
"There's a Queen here from Fillory. She's not in the books; she knew of Fillory from the books, too, before she went." This is important to emphasize, since, according to Thomas (and Shen Yuan, and the angel...), Susan and Lucy and their brothers are in the books about Narnia. "And there are several knights here. Sagramore, who you mightn't remember, but also Galahad. And Lancelot." She pauses there, caught up in the thought of Lancelot's heavy, warm gaze fixed on her — in her room; over the table at lunch; from across the increasingly-bustling cafe.
Then she realizes she's also paused in walking, and shakes herself, forging onward once more. "And an unpleasant angel, and some perfectly pleasant demons, and some magicians from the future. A horrid sword that sings and flies about. And —" She pauses again. This is a more fraught topic, but if anyone should know, it's Lucy. Lucy, who delights in such things; Lucy, whose wonderment is remarkable to behold. "I think perhaps a dryad, but she's like no dryad you've ever heard of, Lu. She's older, for one, and dresses in the queerest fashion. Not queer for a human, mind, but certainly not what one might expect of a dryad."
“Lancelot and magicians and a dryad! It sounds like quite an adventure. Do tell me everything, won’t you?” Lucy clings to her arm, happily settling into the role of being fussed over by Susan and told stories. “What do you like best about it?”
"I—" Susan hesitates. She does not think she can bring herself to say It has made me remember Narnia. "I don't know."
“But you do like it here? Oh—“ Approaching the mansion distracts Lucy. “I say, it’s big! Susan, doesn’t it remind you a bit of where the dear old Professor lived, that summer when we stayed with him? He’s back there too, you know, in Aslan’s country—they call him Lord Digory, very dignified and everything.”
Susan had known the old professor died in the accident, too; she'd paid keen attention to the list of names when it was printed in the papers. At the time, she'd thought Oh, of course, and then wondered why it would seem so natural for the old professor and his friend Polly to have died alongside her family.
She says, "Yes, it does, but we haven't a stream through the gardens here, or any housekeeper to bring strangers on tours to see what's inside. And it's ever so much more full of people."
“You'll have to give the tour, then, and all those people will hide in a wardrobe from you,” Lucy says merrily. She tugs Susan up the steps to the mansion, aware of how little time they have and how much she wants from it.
Just inside, she spies a sign at a small table and pauses to read. It all sounds like some thrilling mystery to Lucy. An enchanted house one can never leave is the kind of magical puzzle that she (and Edmund and Eustace and Caspian) might have encountered while traveling on the Dawn Treader. Yet the additional literature makes it seem all too real—the explanations of strange worlds Lucy cannot imagine, the scrawled personal notes, and—is this a sign-up sheet for a talent show? It shows that there are people really living here, not only waiting for a hero from another world to break the trap. Lucy wants more than anything to know that Susan is well, even without her, and she doesn't know quite what to make of everything.
Susan watches Lucy as she starts to thumb through the Welcome Table materials, aching, and then (every single fiber in her body protesting the move) slips off. The cafe is convenient, close and well-stocked with food that's reliably easier to produce than any of the kitchens. Surely Enjolras won't mind if she liberates a few items. So she slips a large glass bottle of apple juice from the drinks cabinet — the kind that looks almost like it could come from the larder at Cair Paravel — and caps it with a couple of glasses, tucking it under her arm and swiping a platter of the food that's laid out today. With a nod at the few souls in the corner (Enjolras and Grantaire and some men she hasn't met), but ignoring their greetings beyond that since she doesn't want to be apart from Lucy for one second more, she rushes back to the Welcome Table.
Lucy has clearly finished her survey of the materials. "This way," Susan says, a little breathless from her scramble, and leads Lucy to her favorite of the parlors. There's a fire roaring in the fireplace, and a few books scattered cozily about. She sets the platter and the bottle of juice on the table, shrugs off her coat, and sits, reaching out to implore Lucy to sit next to her.
Lucy does so. She always feels younger around Susan, because Susan treats her like a child, even though she was nearly a grown woman before she died. It’s hard to say if she is still seventeen now, or older, or something else entirely. But Susan fussing over her makes her feel quite like a girl again. She takes a pastry from the platter. “Su, it’s so lovely to see you, lovelier than you can imagine. But there are things we really ought to talk about. Don’t you have any questions for me?”
"Too many," Susan says. She's straightening Lucy's collar. It wasn't askew, but Susan still isn't fully convinced that she's not dreaming. Lucy is solid under her touch, though. She forces herself to settle down. "You're alright? You're not — are you warm enough now? Do you... Edmund and Peter? Do you know if they're well?"
“They are, of course they are. Didn’t you hear me? We’re all in Aslan’s land now, it’s impossible not to be well.”
"Narnia." Despite herself, even though she knows it's real, now, Susan's tone conveys this, again? more than she'd like. Habit, perhaps. "So I've heard."
“No, no—“ Lucy takes her hand, clasping it with both of hers. It’s terrible to be the one to give Susan this news, but how could she know? “Narnia is gone. We all watched it end. The seas rose, and the sun went dark, and every man and woman and creature passed through a doorway to Aslan’s country. It’s not like Narnia—well, it’s quite like it, but it’s different. We’re all well—but, you know. We’re not living there. We just—are there.”
Susan exhales sharply. This puts paid to — many of the questions she's been grappling with. She files the information away. We are meant to understand things in pieces, Lancelot had said, the day that she remembered Narnia. So she doesn't try to wrap her mind around what Lucy is saying. She will let herself understand it in pieces. "And now you're here."
“Yes, briefly.” Lucy frowns at her, worried. Susan is listening to her, but she still doesn’t seem to understand. “I needed to see that you were all right. It must feel terribly unfair.” Lucy is too kind to say that she told Susan that Narnia was in danger, and to come quickly. Susan could have been on the train platform with them.
Briefly. That's right; Lucy had said she was just here for the day. Susan frowns. That old urge to dig her teeth in and fight is welling up inside of her. She's glad Lucy is here, so terribly glad, but the habit of arguing heatedly about Narnia has worn a footpath in the open field of their relationship, and it's easier to tread there.
She takes Lucy's hands in her own. It is terribly unfair: while objectively it has only been a few months, Lucy looks so young, frozen forever at seventeen. When Susan looks at her, she sees Queen Lucy the Valiant's face superimposed on this soft one: older, but with the expression — the underlying gravity and earnestness — much the same. Lucy had an entire life in front of her, snuffed short by the train. But were they all called to Narnia, or wherever Aslan's country is, first, or just brought there because of the train?
Either way, it reeks. Especially if Narnia is gone... Susan's entire family, pointlessly dead. She looks earnestly at Lucy, trying to tamp down her myriad feelings and gut-instinctual reactions. "You died," she says, voice breaking on the words. "Nearly six months ago now, for me. Lucy, you died."
“Yes,” Lucy says gently. Of course Susan couldn’t have known all the details—about Narnia and Aslan’s country and their parents being there too. She was left behind. And Lucy knows that they’ll be together again someday. It’s only about waiting, and time is so different where she is that waiting might feel like nothing at all. But it’s not only waiting, for Susan. She still has to live in the Shadow-Lands for the rest of her life.
The moment Aslan told them about the train crash was a joyous one. Lucy knew they were dead, but at that time she was so grateful to be permitted to stay—and with nearly all her family! A life didn’t seem like such a great loss. But some other perspective is creeping into Lucy’s mind along with the taste of apples and the cold and the hunger. She wants to reassure Susan again that death isn’t so bad, but she can hear the thought in two voices—one hers, and one how it might sound to Susan: ghoulish and macabre. She squeezes Susan’s hands, suddenly uncertain.
Reproachfully, Susan adds, "I had to plan your funeral with Harold and Alberta Scrubb."
Lucy covers her mouth with both hands, letting out an undignified snort. “Oh Susan, that’s awful—oh, I don’t mean to laugh. I don’t quite know how to feel. I think it sounds far easier dying than doing that.”
Susan might miss her friends back home, and the life she'd created for herself, but — "I'm glad to be rid of them," she confesses. "They came calling a few times, after, and it was rotten every time. Oh, Susan, you must have some of this vegetarian cottage pie, you're looking so thin! this — and you know how dreadful their cottage pie is. Susan, dear, is that liquor on your worktop? You know how dreadful that stuff is that. I say, Susan, if it hadn't been for those tiresome little stories your siblings kept nattering on about, Eustace Clarence would never have got on that train." She rolls her eyes, even though at the time she had agreed with that last. "I think perhaps they were terribly sad, too, but they're so odious, don't you think? Oh, it's terrible of me to say this. But you asked what I like about this place and that's one thing. No more surprise visits from the Scrubbs."
“They are, they are—surely saying it isn’t as terrible a crime as being odious in the first place. If they were better, they shouldn’t have people saying it.” But it’s awful to think of Susan after the train crash growing thin and drinking liquor, perhaps just as awful as it is for Susan to think of Lucy dying. If only Susan hadn’t been so stubborn about Narnia!
“You are remembered, you know,” Lucy says. “As a Queen of Narnia. Peter was still sore with you at first—he can be fairly beastly when he thinks someone’s done wrong, can’t he? But those things matter less, when—in the place where we are. I know we fought terribly. It makes me ill to think of it. But you’re our sister, and—and you should be with us. I don’t mean you should die—I just—you know what I mean—or I hope you do, anyway.”
"What on earth did Peter think I did wrong?" Susan wonders, affronted, even though she thinks she knows. It occurs to her, then, that underneath her mourning dress she's taken to wearing nylons again. Ever since Lancelot, really, and wouldn't Peter just hate that! Peter and all the others, really, except perhaps Edmund, who she thinks understood her better than the rest did. It's not just the nylons, either: she's been regularly wearing lipstick again, and for all that the population here is limited, her social calendar is quite full.
She hasn't let herself think about this, yet — she's been trying to process the reality of Narnia carefully, never looking at it too directly so that she doesn't get overwhelmed by it again — but she wonders if perhaps Peter never forgave her for leaving Narnia behind after Aslan told her that they could never go back. Peter, hadn't, after all; he had loved Narnia until the day he died. Susan hadn't intended to forget, she thinks, but she did intend to accept her exclusion and make the best of a life without. Perhaps that's why her family's death felt so punishing to her, as well: for the crime of refusing to dwell within the past, she lost all possible ties to it.
But Lucy is here now, even if it's only for a short while. The ties are, at least for now, not lost. "Never mind," she says; she can try to be glad for what she has.
“Yes, please don’t mind it—what I mean to say is that we love you.”
Lucy bites her lip, her eyes growing wet again. To forestall the tears, she reaches for another pastry: brie and walnut, savory and salty and a little sweet. The flavor explodes on her tongue. Of course, everything tastes wonderful in Aslan’s country, more wonderful than anything possibly could here. (For even if this is not like any world Lucy has heard of, it’s clear that it is a living world.) The pastry is not perfectly done—it’s a little denser and chewier than it ought to be, and it could use more walnut. Someone made those mistakes, because someone made it—a living person worked with their hands to make it—and it strikes Lucy as so beautiful that she does begin to cry. She puts her hands over her face.
"Lucy?!" Alarmed, Susan takes her handkerchief back out of her pocket. She tugs Lucy's hands away from her face, and presses the handkerchief to her tears. "Lucy, whatever is wrong? I love you too, you silly girl, you needn't cry."
“I don’t know—everything seems perfectly fine and so perfectly horrid at once.” She’s seeing everything in two ways again. Aslan’s country is the most wonderful place she’s ever known, but she had wanted to be a nurse. If they had stayed alive, she would have become one, or found something else to do—and Peter and Edmund would have made up with Susan eventually—and they’d all be gearing up to go home for Christmas. She wouldn’t be so sad to miss it all if Susan were with them, but Susan is here watching everything go on without them, and it seems so terribly unfair to everyone.
"Yes, that's life," says Susan, with a wry twist to her mouth. She wraps an arm around Lucy's shoulders and tugs her in close. She misses their first time in Narnia, when there was a clear-cut evil to defeat and the most complicated thing they'd felt was their concern after the White Witch had shaved Aslan's mane and tied him down. They'd known they needed to go on and fight the Witch, but it felt so impossible because they'd thought Aslan dead. It had been dreadful, but it was a magical sort of dreadful, and simpler with their childish morality.
Every time she'd felt the shakes of grief coming on, after the railway incident, Susan had thought of the look of wonder dawning on little Lucy's face, when the snow started to melt and the dryads came from their trees. The simple joy she'd had, looking at the beauty that came after the long, dark cold of a Christmas-less winter. Susan has been as cold as Jadis's Narnia; she has been waiting for the thaw, hoping desperately that it might come more quickly than the hundred years of the Long Winter. And it has been. Remembering Narnia was like the arrival of Father Christmas. Finding a purpose after the zombies was like the first crocus peeping through the snow; Lancelot and Janet are like icicles falling from the trees. Winter isn't over yet — not by a long shot — but now she thinks she might one day know spring again.
Fine and horrid is right, but it's more than that. Lucy, and her wonder and faith, used to be the biggest proponents of life being marvelous that Susan knew. She doesn't point this out, though, just tugs her closer still. "Has it been just six months for you too, there or does time move faster still?"
Lucy makes no effort to move back. “It’s different. It’s more like time doesn’t move at all, because nothing changes—but you wouldn’t like anything to change, because it’s already as good as it can be. And you have infinite time to explore everything, and meet everyone you’d like, and learn all the ways that it’s wonderful.”
Susan gives Lucy a look of muted horror — that sounds miserable, actually; half of the joy of life is in the way things change! — but she lets it lie. "Tell me about our brothers?" she asks. "I'd like to know how they fare."
“They’re well, as are our parents. But—it’s difficult to explain. I can’t give any news of them, because it’s not as though I can say ‘Edmund has got a new hobby’ or ‘Peter’s found a girl he likes’. It’s not like the difference between England and Narnia. When you’re there, you just know that everything is all right, and will go on being all right.” She sighs. “I know it must all sound very odd. I suppose there’s a reason one can’t understand dying until one does it.”
Susan's horror grows. "Some of the people here have died," she says, carefully. "But it sounds like they've had a different experience of death than you."
"Well, I'd imagine—they're not in Aslan's country if they're here." Lucy presses a little closer to Susan. "You're thinking of it like being alive there, but it's quite different. The best that I can explain it is that every country you can think of, England and Narnia and every other country in any other world, has its counterpart in Aslan's country. And every place has all the things and people in it that it ought to have, but it's all more, somehow, like everything is just as it really ought to be. And you don't even know what that looks like until you see it and think, Yes, that's exactly right. And it's like everyone has spent their lives practicing and practicing to be the versions of themselves there, and trying so hard, but after you die you don't have to anymore. You can just rest."
Susan is so used to looking at people and seeing Lucy in them that she's shocked to look at Lucy and see a shadow of Enjolras in her. She presses her lips together and wraps her arm more firmly around Lucy's shoulders. She doesn't like the things Lucy is saying, but if she only gets Lucy for the day... Don't let's fight, she thinks: the same plea Lucy gave her the day before Lucy died, when Lucy was trying to compel Susan to remember and care about Narnia again.
It seems that Lucy cannot satisfy Susan's desire to know of her family, with whatever strangeness is going on in this Aslan's country. Susan will not belabor the point. This, too, she will file away, to understand in pieces later. For now she will accept that they do not feel the pain of their own deaths, and try to take comfort in this knowledge.
"Let's see, then," she says. It's her little-mother voice again. "If you're all well and have no news, what can I tell you about? To take back to them, if they would like to hear it?"
"Well, I want to know everything." Lucy pulls back from Susan's embrace, but takes her hands again, pressing them fervently. The fit of sadness that overcame her still aches, but it's as she told Susan. These feelings are for the living, and to have them is part of being here while she can. She doesn't regret it, and she won't dwell. "I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see you exploring a grand mansion with Arthurian knights, and not sitting around in dreary old England dodging the Scrubbs. Imagine having an adventure in an entirely new world, not even Narnia!”
"It was quite the queer arrival," Susan says, and doesn't admit that she thought it unfair that she could travel to a new world while her family was just dead. "I hardly even know where to begin. Naturally I thought myself asleep and dreaming — I had been in a library in Holborn — until I met a being that could control tiny little machines, each of which flies and contains both lights and cameras. That was harder to explain as a figment of my imagination." She nods to the corner of the room, where she's sussed out SecUnit often keeps one of the machines. "There's one there now, see?"
Lucy peers in the corner Susan indicated, but all she can see is a small metal sphere emitting a soft blue light. “It contains a camera? How can it?” She’s about to stand and investigate more closely, but— “Wait, before you answer. Is there anything you want me to take back to them? To tell them, I mean. Peter and Edmund—and Mother and Father?”
So much. Too much. Susan prevaricates. "What sort of thing might someone in... where you are... want to hear?" she asks, and has to swallow down her uncertainty and fear of the sort of world Lucy has described. She can't ask if they even care how she's doing, over there; she just can't. "If everything is all right there."
In truth, Lucy asked for Susan's benefit. If there's anything to reconcile between Susan and their brothers, the hurt feelings are undoubtedly on Susan's end. Those things don’t matter much in Aslan’s country, but Lucy meant it when she said Susan was loved and remembered. “It's all right—there aren't any problems for you to fix—but you're not there. Honestly, I think they'd like to hear anything that comes from you.”
"Tell Mother and Father that I'm healthy," Susan says. She hasn't really known how to interact with them since the Blitz; at least now she remembers why she'd sometimes look at her mother and think, you're so young and look at her father and think you've never known true responsibility. "And that I love them."
Susan affixes a conspiratorial grin to her face; it's easy, with Lucy right there, even though she doesn't much feel like smiling. "Tell Edmund that Lancelot is everything we thought he might be from the stories, but so much sweeter, as well — thoughtful, and kind. And he's very handsome." This is said in blasé tones — if Lucy does pass the message along, Susan hopes that she, herself, is the one who gets in trouble for it, not Edmund. After all, it's only a suspicion, not a fact, that Edmund might like this sort of information. "And tell him there are other men here who care about politics as much as Ed ever did, and so I've been reading what I can so I can well-represent him in polite debate on the subject. And tell Peter..."
She pauses. Her relationship with Peter was the strangest, at the end; she'd spent so long taking care of him even though he was older, and they'd confided in each other before the arguments and worry began. "Tell Peter that I miss him, I suppose, and that I'm sorry."
Then she screws up her face. Oh, why are apologies so difficult! She doesn't like them. They do not fit easily with her commitment to not feeling regrets, if she can help it. "And I suppose it might be nice for you and Edmund and Peter to know that I know you were right, Lu. I really didn't think Narnia was real, back in England; I wasn't just being a stubborn ass about it. I'd convinced myself you really all were wrong and I really was ever so worried about you all for fixating on it. But something's happened here, and I know we were really there, and I remember everything. So I'm sorry we fought, even though I meant it earnestly and only fought with you because I loved you and I was worried. And I'm sorry you all had to go and die before I could remember it was real. I knew you were all okay (because some of my friends here read about Narnia in books, for children, and told me you were taken back, in the end, and that it didn't hurt you), but I wish I could have remembered with you all." She doesn't add that part of her is still glad she didn't — that she's glad to be alive. She still wants to avoid another fight, especially if Lucy's to be whisked away back to that awful endless place she's so happy about.
“Oh, Susan.” Lucy throws herself back into Susan’s arms. “I’ll tell them everything. And I’m so glad to hear that you’re still thinking of Narnia. Not because it means winning any of those beastly fights. But if you didn’t remember Narnia, it would be like you didn’t really remember me—not all of me, anyway—and not the rest of us, either. And you needn’t apologize, but of course you’re forgiven, and you had better not feel bad about it for a single moment. I’ll be very cross with you if you do.”
She pulls back, taking a breath to compose herself. “Now, really, don’t make me start blubbing again. I want to see every room in the mansion, and learn about these camera machines, and meet all your friends—especially this handsome Lancelot, if he’s around. And what do you mean, they read about us in children’s books?”
Susan takes a deep breath and nods, as much to herself as she does to Lucy. "Here," she says, leaning over to the bottle of juice that's been abandoned on the table and pouring them both a glass. "Take this, you'll like it; it's like old Mrs. Hedgehog's best. And I'll give you the tour. Perhaps we can track down Thomas or Shen Yuan or the angel—" (She's quite forgotten the angel's name; she wasn't in the best headspace when they met.) "—and they can explain the books; I'm still not sure I understand it fully myself."
Thank you to Kitsch for playing Lucy - Reactions to meeting the two of them together welcome!
Now, the place she's found herself is having quite the opposite effect. Lucy has lived for some time in Aslan’s country, and her life in England (or rather, the place she once called England, which is like a shadow of its mirror twin in Aslan's country) feels like quite a distant dream. But as she has been sitting here, her mind has started to remember what it was to be the living Lucy Pevensie. She notices, marveling at the novelty, that the back of her shoe has rubbed a sore onto her ankle and left a gray mark on her stocking. It occurs to her that it's quite chilly. Oughtn't she have brought a coat? Susan does fuss so if she rushes out without one.
And when she takes from her pocket the apple she brought for the journey, it is quite an ordinary apple, not one of the mouthwatering fruits from the trees in Aslan's country. Biting into it gives her such a queer feeling, like hearing an old favorite song that never comes on the radio these days, and suddenly Lucy very much feels like crying.
Susan has been (dare she say it?), against all odds, settling in to life at the Mansion. It helps that she's created a rigorous schedule: mornings, with a strong cup of tea and a light breakfast, spent in the nook in her room, while she reads voraciously all of the nonfiction that captures her attention in the library. Ethology, of course, and political science for Edmund, and psychoanalysis, but also traditions that followed her time in London: newer sciences and psychologies. Neuroanatomy, human factors engineering, even the first of Freud's essays on homosexuality.
Lunch she usually takes with Lancelot or Thomas, sometimes Janet. Afternoons are for busier work: continuing to inventory what she can of the Mansion's resources twice a week in her search for the bow, mapping the shifting grounds as best she can... essentially, the work of a Queen surveying her nation to know what is there. Occasionally Susan will interview residents who are more familiar with little pockets of the area than she: Mothwing, for example, has a good accounting of the fish in the lake.
Today, she is tramping through the verge where the forest meets the lawn in a light tangle of underbrush, wearing her favorite fashionable, yet sensible boots and a bright red coat over her mourning dress. Her pencil is once more tucked into her hair; her notebook is held loosely in one hand. There are gardens she has not yet visited, further-off than the ones Claudius seems to keep tidily handled. She thinks, perhaps, that they can be more usefully employed.
For a split second, Susan does not recognize the girl underneath the tree, and thinks to introduce herself. But then she takes one step closer. Her fingers flex. Her notebook falls. Her hands fly to her mouth, but they cannot contain the queer yelp she makes: it is all at once hopeful, and longing, and anguished.
On seeing her, Lucy scrambles to her feet, tossing the apple core to the ground, and rushes to embrace her. “Susan! Dear Susan, I’ve come to see you—has it been awful? No, of course it has, I’m being silly—“ The sight of Susan is like the apple, something familiar that she remembers to yearn for only at the point of having it before her again. It is strange, this business of coming out of Aslan’s country. Lucy did not miss anything while she was there, and yet the ability to want things, and to miss them, is coming back to her with the air. She suddenly feels that she must have missed Susan terribly—only, just hours ago, it didn’t matter half so much as it does now. “I’m glad to see you,” she says fiercely, “terribly glad. Oh, Susan.”
"Lucy?" Susan pulls her sister to her — hugging her, but also running her hands over Lucy's arms, her shoulders, her face, to make sure that there is a solid and intact body in front of her and not just a figment of a wish, or a dream. "Is it really you? Are you really here? Lucy," she cries, and kisses Lucy's cheeks: first one, and then the other, and then her forehead too, for good measure.
Then she stops, and grips Lucy's shoulders tight in each hand, and leans back, frowning. "Whatever are you doing here?"
“Well, we all died—you know that, of course. Only it isn’t like you’d think, Susan, it’s all right, really. But I think of you often—it isn’t like worry, exactly, you can’t be worried in Aslan’s country even if you try to be, it’s the queerest feeling, actually. You just sort of know that things will turn out right in the end. But I do think about you, all alone in England. And I wish we could hurry up and be all together again, but I don’t want you to die—even if death seems like such a little thing, on the other side of it—but it seems momentous from your side of it. I’m always saying, ‘Dear Aslan, what news of Susan?’ but you know how he is—if he doesn’t want to say, then there’s no point in asking. Only I kept asking anyway. And we aren’t to know anything about what’s happening in England, in the Shadow-Lands—that is, the places that aren’t Aslan’s country—but then he said that you weren’t in England, and not really in the Shadow-Lands either. Because even in the Shadow-Lands, one can know Aslan—but not where you are. Aslan can’t even reach this place. When he told me that, I didn’t know what to think. I think I was quite worried, even though you aren’t meant to be. I just thought it meant you were even more alone than before. So I begged to be allowed to send you a message, or to see you, and Aslan would only look at me—you know how he can look so terribly sad sometimes, sadder than you would think a lion’s face could manage. I didn’t know if he was sad because he couldn’t reach you himself, or because he was disappointed in me—and Peter kept saying, ‘Lu, you know Susan, she’ll work it out’—but I kept asking. And eventually Aslan said there was some change, and he could reach this place, but only today. So I came.” Lucy has no idea if what she’s just said makes sense, or sounds like utter rot—it has been far too long since she’s spoken to anyone living.
Susan is frowning by the end of Lucy's speech. "Lucy," she says — to her chagrin; her voice sounds a little sharp even though her heart is beating against the very walls of her chest. "Lucy, you're not making any sense." She puts her hand on Lucy's forehead, as if checking for a temperature.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter—I’m just so glad to see you.” She throws her arms around Susan again, tears overflowing. “Are you still cross with me about our fight? From before the train?”
"No, Lu, of course not," Susan says. Ever the little mother, she reaches in her pocket for a handkerchief (managing even with the force of Lucy's hug) and pulls free enough that she can wipe busily at Lucy's eyes. It gives her something to distract herself, something to do with her hands, as she says, "I've been feeling ever so guilty about that fight, Lucy. I shouldn't have said the things I did. I was terribly worried about you but that's no excuse."
“Oh Susan, don't feel bad—it’s too awful, I can't bear it. We were always fighting back then, and now I can hardly remember why.” She lets out a laugh that might well be a sob. “I say, it's jolly cold here, isn't it? Can't we go inside?”
"You always were terrible at remembering your coat," Susan says, fond, and then stills at her own use of past tense. It takes her a moment to rouse herself back into movement. With no small amount of forced cheer: "Yes, yes of course. She links her arm with Lucy's. "Come. There's a parlor with a nice fireplace. And no rationing here!"
It's really just that Lucy never needs a coat in Aslan's country. But it feels strange to remind Susan of how they are different, now. Aslan did warn her, anyway, that it would be hard for Susan to understand. Likewise, rationing is hardly a concern of Lucy's these days, but once Susan mentions food, she realizes that the empty feeling in her stomach is hunger. She follows along with Susan, putting aside the queer sadness that's come over her. "That's wonderful, how lucky for you! I'm famished. I have a million questions. Where are we?"
"I haven't the foggiest," Susan says. She's slipping back into the no-nonsense tone she uses to distance herself from the depths of her feelings, and she knows it, but she doesn't try to course-correct. If Lucy is here — for only today, whatever that means — she doesn't want to get overwhelmed. "I don't believe anyone has. It's the queerest place, Lu. All sorts of people are here. Do you remember the books I used to read you and Edmund when you were small? Fillory, and King Arthur's knights, and all that?"
“Why, of course I do.”
"There's a Queen here from Fillory. She's not in the books; she knew of Fillory from the books, too, before she went." This is important to emphasize, since, according to Thomas (and Shen Yuan, and the angel...), Susan and Lucy and their brothers are in the books about Narnia. "And there are several knights here. Sagramore, who you mightn't remember, but also Galahad. And Lancelot." She pauses there, caught up in the thought of Lancelot's heavy, warm gaze fixed on her — in her room; over the table at lunch; from across the increasingly-bustling cafe.
Then she realizes she's also paused in walking, and shakes herself, forging onward once more. "And an unpleasant angel, and some perfectly pleasant demons, and some magicians from the future. A horrid sword that sings and flies about. And —" She pauses again. This is a more fraught topic, but if anyone should know, it's Lucy. Lucy, who delights in such things; Lucy, whose wonderment is remarkable to behold. "I think perhaps a dryad, but she's like no dryad you've ever heard of, Lu. She's older, for one, and dresses in the queerest fashion. Not queer for a human, mind, but certainly not what one might expect of a dryad."
“Lancelot and magicians and a dryad! It sounds like quite an adventure. Do tell me everything, won’t you?” Lucy clings to her arm, happily settling into the role of being fussed over by Susan and told stories. “What do you like best about it?”
"I—" Susan hesitates. She does not think she can bring herself to say It has made me remember Narnia. "I don't know."
“But you do like it here? Oh—“ Approaching the mansion distracts Lucy. “I say, it’s big! Susan, doesn’t it remind you a bit of where the dear old Professor lived, that summer when we stayed with him? He’s back there too, you know, in Aslan’s country—they call him Lord Digory, very dignified and everything.”
Susan had known the old professor died in the accident, too; she'd paid keen attention to the list of names when it was printed in the papers. At the time, she'd thought Oh, of course, and then wondered why it would seem so natural for the old professor and his friend Polly to have died alongside her family.
She says, "Yes, it does, but we haven't a stream through the gardens here, or any housekeeper to bring strangers on tours to see what's inside. And it's ever so much more full of people."
“You'll have to give the tour, then, and all those people will hide in a wardrobe from you,” Lucy says merrily. She tugs Susan up the steps to the mansion, aware of how little time they have and how much she wants from it.
Just inside, she spies a sign at a small table and pauses to read. It all sounds like some thrilling mystery to Lucy. An enchanted house one can never leave is the kind of magical puzzle that she (and Edmund and Eustace and Caspian) might have encountered while traveling on the Dawn Treader. Yet the additional literature makes it seem all too real—the explanations of strange worlds Lucy cannot imagine, the scrawled personal notes, and—is this a sign-up sheet for a talent show? It shows that there are people really living here, not only waiting for a hero from another world to break the trap. Lucy wants more than anything to know that Susan is well, even without her, and she doesn't know quite what to make of everything.
Susan watches Lucy as she starts to thumb through the Welcome Table materials, aching, and then (every single fiber in her body protesting the move) slips off. The cafe is convenient, close and well-stocked with food that's reliably easier to produce than any of the kitchens. Surely Enjolras won't mind if she liberates a few items. So she slips a large glass bottle of apple juice from the drinks cabinet — the kind that looks almost like it could come from the larder at Cair Paravel — and caps it with a couple of glasses, tucking it under her arm and swiping a platter of the food that's laid out today. With a nod at the few souls in the corner (Enjolras and Grantaire and some men she hasn't met), but ignoring their greetings beyond that since she doesn't want to be apart from Lucy for one second more, she rushes back to the Welcome Table.
Lucy has clearly finished her survey of the materials. "This way," Susan says, a little breathless from her scramble, and leads Lucy to her favorite of the parlors. There's a fire roaring in the fireplace, and a few books scattered cozily about. She sets the platter and the bottle of juice on the table, shrugs off her coat, and sits, reaching out to implore Lucy to sit next to her.
Lucy does so. She always feels younger around Susan, because Susan treats her like a child, even though she was nearly a grown woman before she died. It’s hard to say if she is still seventeen now, or older, or something else entirely. But Susan fussing over her makes her feel quite like a girl again. She takes a pastry from the platter. “Su, it’s so lovely to see you, lovelier than you can imagine. But there are things we really ought to talk about. Don’t you have any questions for me?”
"Too many," Susan says. She's straightening Lucy's collar. It wasn't askew, but Susan still isn't fully convinced that she's not dreaming. Lucy is solid under her touch, though. She forces herself to settle down. "You're alright? You're not — are you warm enough now? Do you... Edmund and Peter? Do you know if they're well?"
“They are, of course they are. Didn’t you hear me? We’re all in Aslan’s land now, it’s impossible not to be well.”
"Narnia." Despite herself, even though she knows it's real, now, Susan's tone conveys this, again? more than she'd like. Habit, perhaps. "So I've heard."
“No, no—“ Lucy takes her hand, clasping it with both of hers. It’s terrible to be the one to give Susan this news, but how could she know? “Narnia is gone. We all watched it end. The seas rose, and the sun went dark, and every man and woman and creature passed through a doorway to Aslan’s country. It’s not like Narnia—well, it’s quite like it, but it’s different. We’re all well—but, you know. We’re not living there. We just—are there.”
Susan exhales sharply. This puts paid to — many of the questions she's been grappling with. She files the information away. We are meant to understand things in pieces, Lancelot had said, the day that she remembered Narnia. So she doesn't try to wrap her mind around what Lucy is saying. She will let herself understand it in pieces. "And now you're here."
“Yes, briefly.” Lucy frowns at her, worried. Susan is listening to her, but she still doesn’t seem to understand. “I needed to see that you were all right. It must feel terribly unfair.” Lucy is too kind to say that she told Susan that Narnia was in danger, and to come quickly. Susan could have been on the train platform with them.
Briefly. That's right; Lucy had said she was just here for the day. Susan frowns. That old urge to dig her teeth in and fight is welling up inside of her. She's glad Lucy is here, so terribly glad, but the habit of arguing heatedly about Narnia has worn a footpath in the open field of their relationship, and it's easier to tread there.
She takes Lucy's hands in her own. It is terribly unfair: while objectively it has only been a few months, Lucy looks so young, frozen forever at seventeen. When Susan looks at her, she sees Queen Lucy the Valiant's face superimposed on this soft one: older, but with the expression — the underlying gravity and earnestness — much the same. Lucy had an entire life in front of her, snuffed short by the train. But were they all called to Narnia, or wherever Aslan's country is, first, or just brought there because of the train?
Either way, it reeks. Especially if Narnia is gone... Susan's entire family, pointlessly dead. She looks earnestly at Lucy, trying to tamp down her myriad feelings and gut-instinctual reactions. "You died," she says, voice breaking on the words. "Nearly six months ago now, for me. Lucy, you died."
“Yes,” Lucy says gently. Of course Susan couldn’t have known all the details—about Narnia and Aslan’s country and their parents being there too. She was left behind. And Lucy knows that they’ll be together again someday. It’s only about waiting, and time is so different where she is that waiting might feel like nothing at all. But it’s not only waiting, for Susan. She still has to live in the Shadow-Lands for the rest of her life.
The moment Aslan told them about the train crash was a joyous one. Lucy knew they were dead, but at that time she was so grateful to be permitted to stay—and with nearly all her family! A life didn’t seem like such a great loss. But some other perspective is creeping into Lucy’s mind along with the taste of apples and the cold and the hunger. She wants to reassure Susan again that death isn’t so bad, but she can hear the thought in two voices—one hers, and one how it might sound to Susan: ghoulish and macabre. She squeezes Susan’s hands, suddenly uncertain.
Reproachfully, Susan adds, "I had to plan your funeral with Harold and Alberta Scrubb."
Lucy covers her mouth with both hands, letting out an undignified snort. “Oh Susan, that’s awful—oh, I don’t mean to laugh. I don’t quite know how to feel. I think it sounds far easier dying than doing that.”
Susan might miss her friends back home, and the life she'd created for herself, but — "I'm glad to be rid of them," she confesses. "They came calling a few times, after, and it was rotten every time. Oh, Susan, you must have some of this vegetarian cottage pie, you're looking so thin! this — and you know how dreadful their cottage pie is. Susan, dear, is that liquor on your worktop? You know how dreadful that stuff is that. I say, Susan, if it hadn't been for those tiresome little stories your siblings kept nattering on about, Eustace Clarence would never have got on that train." She rolls her eyes, even though at the time she had agreed with that last. "I think perhaps they were terribly sad, too, but they're so odious, don't you think? Oh, it's terrible of me to say this. But you asked what I like about this place and that's one thing. No more surprise visits from the Scrubbs."
“They are, they are—surely saying it isn’t as terrible a crime as being odious in the first place. If they were better, they shouldn’t have people saying it.” But it’s awful to think of Susan after the train crash growing thin and drinking liquor, perhaps just as awful as it is for Susan to think of Lucy dying. If only Susan hadn’t been so stubborn about Narnia!
“You are remembered, you know,” Lucy says. “As a Queen of Narnia. Peter was still sore with you at first—he can be fairly beastly when he thinks someone’s done wrong, can’t he? But those things matter less, when—in the place where we are. I know we fought terribly. It makes me ill to think of it. But you’re our sister, and—and you should be with us. I don’t mean you should die—I just—you know what I mean—or I hope you do, anyway.”
"What on earth did Peter think I did wrong?" Susan wonders, affronted, even though she thinks she knows. It occurs to her, then, that underneath her mourning dress she's taken to wearing nylons again. Ever since Lancelot, really, and wouldn't Peter just hate that! Peter and all the others, really, except perhaps Edmund, who she thinks understood her better than the rest did. It's not just the nylons, either: she's been regularly wearing lipstick again, and for all that the population here is limited, her social calendar is quite full.
She hasn't let herself think about this, yet — she's been trying to process the reality of Narnia carefully, never looking at it too directly so that she doesn't get overwhelmed by it again — but she wonders if perhaps Peter never forgave her for leaving Narnia behind after Aslan told her that they could never go back. Peter, hadn't, after all; he had loved Narnia until the day he died. Susan hadn't intended to forget, she thinks, but she did intend to accept her exclusion and make the best of a life without. Perhaps that's why her family's death felt so punishing to her, as well: for the crime of refusing to dwell within the past, she lost all possible ties to it.
But Lucy is here now, even if it's only for a short while. The ties are, at least for now, not lost. "Never mind," she says; she can try to be glad for what she has.
“Yes, please don’t mind it—what I mean to say is that we love you.”
Lucy bites her lip, her eyes growing wet again. To forestall the tears, she reaches for another pastry: brie and walnut, savory and salty and a little sweet. The flavor explodes on her tongue. Of course, everything tastes wonderful in Aslan’s country, more wonderful than anything possibly could here. (For even if this is not like any world Lucy has heard of, it’s clear that it is a living world.) The pastry is not perfectly done—it’s a little denser and chewier than it ought to be, and it could use more walnut. Someone made those mistakes, because someone made it—a living person worked with their hands to make it—and it strikes Lucy as so beautiful that she does begin to cry. She puts her hands over her face.
"Lucy?!" Alarmed, Susan takes her handkerchief back out of her pocket. She tugs Lucy's hands away from her face, and presses the handkerchief to her tears. "Lucy, whatever is wrong? I love you too, you silly girl, you needn't cry."
“I don’t know—everything seems perfectly fine and so perfectly horrid at once.” She’s seeing everything in two ways again. Aslan’s country is the most wonderful place she’s ever known, but she had wanted to be a nurse. If they had stayed alive, she would have become one, or found something else to do—and Peter and Edmund would have made up with Susan eventually—and they’d all be gearing up to go home for Christmas. She wouldn’t be so sad to miss it all if Susan were with them, but Susan is here watching everything go on without them, and it seems so terribly unfair to everyone.
"Yes, that's life," says Susan, with a wry twist to her mouth. She wraps an arm around Lucy's shoulders and tugs her in close. She misses their first time in Narnia, when there was a clear-cut evil to defeat and the most complicated thing they'd felt was their concern after the White Witch had shaved Aslan's mane and tied him down. They'd known they needed to go on and fight the Witch, but it felt so impossible because they'd thought Aslan dead. It had been dreadful, but it was a magical sort of dreadful, and simpler with their childish morality.
Every time she'd felt the shakes of grief coming on, after the railway incident, Susan had thought of the look of wonder dawning on little Lucy's face, when the snow started to melt and the dryads came from their trees. The simple joy she'd had, looking at the beauty that came after the long, dark cold of a Christmas-less winter. Susan has been as cold as Jadis's Narnia; she has been waiting for the thaw, hoping desperately that it might come more quickly than the hundred years of the Long Winter. And it has been. Remembering Narnia was like the arrival of Father Christmas. Finding a purpose after the zombies was like the first crocus peeping through the snow; Lancelot and Janet are like icicles falling from the trees. Winter isn't over yet — not by a long shot — but now she thinks she might one day know spring again.
Fine and horrid is right, but it's more than that. Lucy, and her wonder and faith, used to be the biggest proponents of life being marvelous that Susan knew. She doesn't point this out, though, just tugs her closer still. "Has it been just six months for you too, there or does time move faster still?"
Lucy makes no effort to move back. “It’s different. It’s more like time doesn’t move at all, because nothing changes—but you wouldn’t like anything to change, because it’s already as good as it can be. And you have infinite time to explore everything, and meet everyone you’d like, and learn all the ways that it’s wonderful.”
Susan gives Lucy a look of muted horror — that sounds miserable, actually; half of the joy of life is in the way things change! — but she lets it lie. "Tell me about our brothers?" she asks. "I'd like to know how they fare."
“They’re well, as are our parents. But—it’s difficult to explain. I can’t give any news of them, because it’s not as though I can say ‘Edmund has got a new hobby’ or ‘Peter’s found a girl he likes’. It’s not like the difference between England and Narnia. When you’re there, you just know that everything is all right, and will go on being all right.” She sighs. “I know it must all sound very odd. I suppose there’s a reason one can’t understand dying until one does it.”
Susan's horror grows. "Some of the people here have died," she says, carefully. "But it sounds like they've had a different experience of death than you."
"Well, I'd imagine—they're not in Aslan's country if they're here." Lucy presses a little closer to Susan. "You're thinking of it like being alive there, but it's quite different. The best that I can explain it is that every country you can think of, England and Narnia and every other country in any other world, has its counterpart in Aslan's country. And every place has all the things and people in it that it ought to have, but it's all more, somehow, like everything is just as it really ought to be. And you don't even know what that looks like until you see it and think, Yes, that's exactly right. And it's like everyone has spent their lives practicing and practicing to be the versions of themselves there, and trying so hard, but after you die you don't have to anymore. You can just rest."
Susan is so used to looking at people and seeing Lucy in them that she's shocked to look at Lucy and see a shadow of Enjolras in her. She presses her lips together and wraps her arm more firmly around Lucy's shoulders. She doesn't like the things Lucy is saying, but if she only gets Lucy for the day... Don't let's fight, she thinks: the same plea Lucy gave her the day before Lucy died, when Lucy was trying to compel Susan to remember and care about Narnia again.
It seems that Lucy cannot satisfy Susan's desire to know of her family, with whatever strangeness is going on in this Aslan's country. Susan will not belabor the point. This, too, she will file away, to understand in pieces later. For now she will accept that they do not feel the pain of their own deaths, and try to take comfort in this knowledge.
"Let's see, then," she says. It's her little-mother voice again. "If you're all well and have no news, what can I tell you about? To take back to them, if they would like to hear it?"
"Well, I want to know everything." Lucy pulls back from Susan's embrace, but takes her hands again, pressing them fervently. The fit of sadness that overcame her still aches, but it's as she told Susan. These feelings are for the living, and to have them is part of being here while she can. She doesn't regret it, and she won't dwell. "I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see you exploring a grand mansion with Arthurian knights, and not sitting around in dreary old England dodging the Scrubbs. Imagine having an adventure in an entirely new world, not even Narnia!”
"It was quite the queer arrival," Susan says, and doesn't admit that she thought it unfair that she could travel to a new world while her family was just dead. "I hardly even know where to begin. Naturally I thought myself asleep and dreaming — I had been in a library in Holborn — until I met a being that could control tiny little machines, each of which flies and contains both lights and cameras. That was harder to explain as a figment of my imagination." She nods to the corner of the room, where she's sussed out SecUnit often keeps one of the machines. "There's one there now, see?"
Lucy peers in the corner Susan indicated, but all she can see is a small metal sphere emitting a soft blue light. “It contains a camera? How can it?” She’s about to stand and investigate more closely, but— “Wait, before you answer. Is there anything you want me to take back to them? To tell them, I mean. Peter and Edmund—and Mother and Father?”
So much. Too much. Susan prevaricates. "What sort of thing might someone in... where you are... want to hear?" she asks, and has to swallow down her uncertainty and fear of the sort of world Lucy has described. She can't ask if they even care how she's doing, over there; she just can't. "If everything is all right there."
In truth, Lucy asked for Susan's benefit. If there's anything to reconcile between Susan and their brothers, the hurt feelings are undoubtedly on Susan's end. Those things don’t matter much in Aslan’s country, but Lucy meant it when she said Susan was loved and remembered. “It's all right—there aren't any problems for you to fix—but you're not there. Honestly, I think they'd like to hear anything that comes from you.”
"Tell Mother and Father that I'm healthy," Susan says. She hasn't really known how to interact with them since the Blitz; at least now she remembers why she'd sometimes look at her mother and think, you're so young and look at her father and think you've never known true responsibility. "And that I love them."
Susan affixes a conspiratorial grin to her face; it's easy, with Lucy right there, even though she doesn't much feel like smiling. "Tell Edmund that Lancelot is everything we thought he might be from the stories, but so much sweeter, as well — thoughtful, and kind. And he's very handsome." This is said in blasé tones — if Lucy does pass the message along, Susan hopes that she, herself, is the one who gets in trouble for it, not Edmund. After all, it's only a suspicion, not a fact, that Edmund might like this sort of information. "And tell him there are other men here who care about politics as much as Ed ever did, and so I've been reading what I can so I can well-represent him in polite debate on the subject. And tell Peter..."
She pauses. Her relationship with Peter was the strangest, at the end; she'd spent so long taking care of him even though he was older, and they'd confided in each other before the arguments and worry began. "Tell Peter that I miss him, I suppose, and that I'm sorry."
Then she screws up her face. Oh, why are apologies so difficult! She doesn't like them. They do not fit easily with her commitment to not feeling regrets, if she can help it. "And I suppose it might be nice for you and Edmund and Peter to know that I know you were right, Lu. I really didn't think Narnia was real, back in England; I wasn't just being a stubborn ass about it. I'd convinced myself you really all were wrong and I really was ever so worried about you all for fixating on it. But something's happened here, and I know we were really there, and I remember everything. So I'm sorry we fought, even though I meant it earnestly and only fought with you because I loved you and I was worried. And I'm sorry you all had to go and die before I could remember it was real. I knew you were all okay (because some of my friends here read about Narnia in books, for children, and told me you were taken back, in the end, and that it didn't hurt you), but I wish I could have remembered with you all." She doesn't add that part of her is still glad she didn't — that she's glad to be alive. She still wants to avoid another fight, especially if Lucy's to be whisked away back to that awful endless place she's so happy about.
“Oh, Susan.” Lucy throws herself back into Susan’s arms. “I’ll tell them everything. And I’m so glad to hear that you’re still thinking of Narnia. Not because it means winning any of those beastly fights. But if you didn’t remember Narnia, it would be like you didn’t really remember me—not all of me, anyway—and not the rest of us, either. And you needn’t apologize, but of course you’re forgiven, and you had better not feel bad about it for a single moment. I’ll be very cross with you if you do.”
She pulls back, taking a breath to compose herself. “Now, really, don’t make me start blubbing again. I want to see every room in the mansion, and learn about these camera machines, and meet all your friends—especially this handsome Lancelot, if he’s around. And what do you mean, they read about us in children’s books?”
Susan takes a deep breath and nods, as much to herself as she does to Lucy. "Here," she says, leaning over to the bottle of juice that's been abandoned on the table and pouring them both a glass. "Take this, you'll like it; it's like old Mrs. Hedgehog's best. And I'll give you the tour. Perhaps we can track down Thomas or Shen Yuan or the angel—" (She's quite forgotten the angel's name; she wasn't in the best headspace when they met.) "—and they can explain the books; I'm still not sure I understand it fully myself."
Thank you to Kitsch for playing Lucy - Reactions to meeting the two of them together welcome!
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It takes a little effort to detangle him, but Ragnelle manages it by plucking him off the ground entirely and sitting him squarely back on her hip, where he wriggles with displeasure as she carts him off.
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When they enter, Lancelot turns, smiling brightly to see Susan, clearly enamored of her. Upon his introduction to Lucy, he bows deeply, a grand display of chivalry, and greets her with a warm and sincere, "Well met, my lady."
He lets them continue on their whirlwind tour, glad to have met Lucy, and hopeful that he made the right impression.
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