This post is backdated to the first day of Dark!

The first morning of Dark dawns clouded and cold, a ferocious wind howling past Susan's windows.

But her schedule shan't wait for nicer conditions. She's been inventorying and re-inventorying the supplies she and Tress put away — a surplus even if their population should swell considerably, but there are the individual taste preferences of residents to account for, and little surprises to tuck away in the event that anyone might be having a bad day. She's posted announcements here and there throughout the Mansion about where to find particular resources, including hand-delivering invitations to Lan Wangji and - yes - even the angel, explaining that she's got several varieties of tea stowed away in the parlor that has become part of her suite of rooms, should they run out. Some of the supplies she's lain away were provided by the Mansion; many preserves (fruit, vegetables, cheeses, fish, sausages, and so on) are ones she and Tress prepared across the course of the year, with aid from friends and neighbors. There are general stores available for all, and also pockets specified for particular individuals based off what she knows about their tastes. These latter stockpiles she's edited, again and again, as new people arrive and some individuals leave.

Last Dark, Sagramore and Laertes hadn't even had their little cottage by the lake. Now their home is brim-ful of family - and she's got the sense that their preference is to be able to host any friend who might wander their way in search of a meal, as well. Naturally, she'd like to enable that. At least much of her rejiggering of the size of their allotment was precipitated in early autumn by their visitors, when there was still ample time to easily make adjustments to the variety and volume of the goods earmarked for them. Still, there's more food than she could possibly carry over by herself, even with use of a wagon.

("You'll help me, won't you?" she'd asked Lancelot late last evening, curled up on his lap as they sat on the couch, the throw blanket pulled up over both of them in a facsimile of propriety and as protection from Regina's sharp little claws, the book she'd been reading aloud cast off to the side. His fingers stroking through her hair were gentle, distracting. "Neither of them has approached me about the signs Tress and I posted, and I shouldn't want them to go without just because they've not seen them." And of course he'd agreed to help her take over supplies after his morning training.)

Since she's got a very full day ahead, though, she takes the first bit over herself whilst Lancelot is still out. The wagon, full of what she imagines must be early essentials (coffee, sausages, fruit preserves, canned vegetables, and plenty of flour, sugar, and oil), drags through the snow, wheels catching on some frozen furrows of mud by the Mansion's door and as the path veers closer to the lake and then away again, but she makes it to their door unscathed. Once there, she squares her shoulders, wipes away the tears brought forth by the sharp frigidity of the wind, and knocks.

Susan prevaricates for several days about whether to approach Sagramore. She's a little lost with respect to her feelings about him, particularly after the one-two punch of being charmed by his teenaged self and then having her own eight-year-old self being so thoroughly taken by him. (And isn't that queer, to remember it after the fact? She'd been so convinced he wouldn't remember their encounter in the kitchen, but... what if, like her, he has?)

Sagramore is a good man, which she's known for a while now. He doesn't like her, which is fine, because while she hasn't disliked him for months, she hasn't exactly given him reason to change his mind about her outside of a few awkward conversations. She thinks, perhaps, that there might be a world in which they get along. It isn't this one, clearly, but - the possibility is there, in some alternate dimension; perhaps one day the mansion's nonsense will bring it to bear for a few short hours and in its aftermath they will be none the wiser.

Regardless, she finds that she likes that they've got a truce, and not just because they've got people in common. He's an asset to the community, and Susan likes to keep close inventory of assets.

It's a hot day, and the queerness of the month is in full effect. Perhaps that's why Susan decides, in the midst of a fit of research, that Sagramore - who is ever so well-connected - might make a good co-conspirator for her newest project. (It is also - though Susan doesn't realize it - exactly one Earth-year since their ill-advised assignation. In truth, she's placed that encounter almost fully out of her mind, and while she does make a close study of her days here, she's merely noticed that she's known Lancelot for a year now, and refrained from considering the rest.)

And so she prepares her bribes offerings. She makes coffee the way Sagramore's teenage self taught her: with the grounds and the spices and the sugar and the water, boiled three times and decanted into a thermos. (She's also made tea for herself. She knows better than to pretend she's going to try the coffee again.) The thermos itself is a gift; it's a kitschy little affair that reads If found, return to Dad, and part of a number of queerly-labeled items that she's found populating her parlor (which is now attached to her room by a door next to her closet) since Rainbows began. While savory bakes aren't her forte in the same way sweet ones are, she also prepares hagymás tekercs, with the hopes that they're to his taste. Once she's got everything - coffee, tea, and rolls - packaged up, she places them carefully away in a satchel along with her notebook, a pen, and several samples of the focus of her true agenda. This time she hasn't got a list of conversational topics. She rather thinks she shan't need one.

To her relief, as she makes her way to his cottage, she sees that Sunny is off playing in Crowley's automobile, and Laertes is walking along the forest's edge with Magnus, seemingly deep in conversation. While it wouldn't matter if either were home, their absence shall make this discussion easier.

As before, she squares her shoulders. Then she knocks firmly on the door.

Susan has devised another activity to occupy her days. By the calendar's reckoning, the start of spring is roughly a week away. Between her and Tress, they've got the outline of a plan for the next Dark, and Susan is happy to rely on people who've got greater interest in and skill for growing things insofar as agriculture goes. But the growing season here shall be longer than usual, and Susan should like to have some idea about what that might mean for the ecosystem,

This is her flimsy excuse to pardon the latest stack of books she's currently carrying out of the library. There is a marginal off-chance that preparatory reading on soil biota could, potentially, be useful. Perhaps she might even talk someone else into reading on the subject as well, so that they might discuss it.

Although she realizes almost immediately what's going on (she has, after all, been fearing it, and has the greatest measure of the general contents of each room in this place), the full weight of the situation takes a day or so to hit Susan, as she flits from closet to cupboard to store-room and finds them empty save for the items she's specifically handled in the past. Her emergency closets - the ones she's been appointing - are intact; the rest seem relatively barren.

And so, she thinks, grimly, the other shoe has dropped.

Certain residents would be forgiven for imagining that Susan Pevensie might gloat, to have her worst fears proven right. A Cassandra, vindicated, smugly telling others left and right that she told them so, and they ought to have been more interested in preparations. But they would have been wrong about this, too. Distracted and panicked enough to forget entirely about her standing lunch date with Lancelot, she instead walks steadily, smoothly to her room, where she shuts the door firmly (she means to latch it, but she's so caught up in her frenzy that it slips her mind) and paces, pulling at her hair until it's half-snarled, tugged partially free from its usual crown of braids. Her other hand she keeps firmly in her pocket, clutched tight around the very last cruel new thing the Mansion had given her, right before it stopped cooperating entirely.

Water, she thinks, abruptly, mid-step. Will the water run out? But there's a lake out there, and there are trees to boil it; it might be significantly less convenient but they shan't run out of water. The taps are still flowing, but will that last? And so she fills some of the vases she's been accumulating with whatever will come from the tap, just in case she needs it later.

Then, with the wind fully out of her sails, she sinks into a seat on the edge of her bed, despondent, with her head in her hands for a spell. It might be a good twenty minutes, it might be several hours - she couldn't say. She'd been ever so worried about this - she ought to have pushed harder. She ought to have been more organized, to have really impressed upon people that they oughtn't assume that just because they've got a good thing now, it'll be there forever. But she let herself get distracted. There were other, more pressing things - things that seem ridiculous now, in retrospect. Sorting through junk papers? Getting caught up with a man to the extent where she forsook her self-appointed responsibilities for days on end? Love - if that is indeed what she feels for him - is no excuse. She should have - she could have - she ought to have -

I mustn't fall into this trap again, she tells herself, firmly, springing from her bed as swiftly as she'd sat down and striding over to the desk she'd moved into her room when she started writing her letters. (She's now missed dinner, too. The light outside is already dwindling, and the electricity doesn't seem altogether forgiving - it's working, but it's dimmer. But she oughtn't waste the few candles she'd set aside. What if they're needed more later?) It is far too easy to get caught blaming oneself until all that's left is blame. I really mustn't go back there.

But that tiny knot of cold in the center of her - the one that she'd very nearly unpicked over the past few months - tightens and grows. Grimly, she takes out paper and a pen. Her mood is dire. It's only appropriate to start the next one:

Dear Peter, she writes. I hardly know what to say to you.

She sticks the end of her pen in her mouth and chews.

Susan has been having the dreams with greater frequency, lately¹: Narnia ablaze as the dying stars sink into the sea, giant lizards and dragons ripping every tree and rock from the earth and rending the last of Cair Paravel's ruins into so much rubble, laying all that devastation onto the blaze and then dying themselves as the mountains crumble and the seas rise and leave nothing behind but an empty, starless black.

Nothing, that is, save an open door, and her family standing before it, watching the devastation, and then the door swinging shut.

I've been doing better she tells herself firmly, rising from her bed before the sun has even started to think about peeking over the horizon. The waning moon is hanging low in the sky; the waxing one has already set. She turns on all her lights against the lingering dark and watches them blaze merrily in her vision until she has to glance away, dark spots dancing in their aftermath. She still feels cold as a lifeless, dark world, but at least there's no denying that she isn't in one.

Then, even more firmly, she makes herself get up. She dresses warmly - those thick woolen stockings that join up at the waist (she has since learned they are called tights; the Mansion has been supplying ones lined in a thick, fuzzy material remarkably suitable for winter), a dress similarly appropriate for winter, her woolen coat and leather gloves. Her hair she braids down, not up, so that it's easier to wear a hat against the chill that is resting both deep in her chest and sharp in the morning air outside.

She grabs her longbow and her quiver in addition to the latest of her pile of books - it's good to have contingency plans - but instead of heading toward the range or the woods to seek out a place to sport with Little John, she goes to where she knows Lancelot practices in the morning, stopping only to fill a thermos up with tea. It is, she thinks high time to make good on her threat to watch him.


¹Thanks, Aornis!