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It hurts, is the thing. Some days a dull ache, others so blinding she can hardly breathe and it's a year now - almost two - that they've been left in the lurch waiting and hoping and wanting, and all the time slowly dying trying to adapt to a world that fits like a church shoe two sizes too small.
Lucy buries herself in all the fairytales she can find and cries when next door's cat scratches her (not, of course, because of the wound that barely bleeds but because she's nine and because it wouldn't talk to her). Edmund steals Peter's jumpers, scrapes his hands and skins his knees climbing up and falling out of trees, eyes always searching every detail of what he sees for any hint of a way back. Peter keeps his chin down and his fists up, collects bruises like he's trying to replace the scars he lost after they fell back into England, keeps saying he'll stop then gets off a train with a split lip and blood on his knuckles.
So even while it stings like she's peeled off all her skin and wrapped it around the kettle just off the stove, Susan allows Narnia to fade to a game, a dream, because someone has to keep their head and clearly it's not going to be her siblings. So she stretches the leather, ties up the shoe even when it leaves her blistered and raw. So she plaits her hair, puts on the scratchy dress with its starched collar to sit in a pew, wears the school jumper and blazer whose sleeves need to be folded up twice (it'll make do for a few years, their mother had said - Lucy inherits her old uniform) and tries to forget that her best clothes were once her most comfortable.
Going back somehow hurts more.
(There's a strange echo that comes with the pinch and pull of traveling: a bright and clear resounding. She knows this sound to the marrow of her bones, even as it fades into the rush of wind through branches and the lapping of waves on the shore. When they all stand below the ground surrounded by dusty relics and her horn is missing, she knows they're not here by any accident.
After they save Trumpkin, after they reach the mainland, it's days of tromping through woods. Her skirts keep catching on branches and brambles and she'd never much liked this kind of thing back in their day, let alone now when Peter and Edmund claim to know where they're going only to be proven wrong, or for the landscape to have changed so much it hardly matters anyway.
Then there's a bear, and Susan has an arrow nocked and aimed in a swift second only to hold it because she can't help but think what if? So much of their return to Narnia has been empty hollows, repeated blows of loss upon loss and she just wants something to be good for once. She wants this bear to be a Talking Bear, if only to prove there's something left of their old Narnia past the ruins of their home and Trumpkin and his tales that have yet to prove themselves.
She holds her arrow too long. Thankfully, the Dwarf does not.
Later, when they're at the gorge and Lucy's earnest to the point of desperation that she has seen Aslan, Susan can only think how she was wrong about the bear, how she almost got her little sister killed. No matter how much she wants to believe Lucy, they've almost made it to the How and the other way is certain, and the ugly grieving thing inside her asks: if nothing has come good so far, then why would it now? And so she decides it can't be Aslan, it just can't.
The other way is not so certain, as it turns out. Down the gorge the path is blocked by Telmarines and so it's another night on the cold, hard ground with twigs underneath and soil in her hair, until Lucy wakes them in the dark. Maybe it's because of the strange comfort she's found in the depths of her misery that it takes Susan the longest to see the Lion. When she does, it's with a horrible coiling mass of fear beneath every inch of skin; it's with a quiet apology to Lucy who accepts it, tells her it'll be alright with the grace of someone who has an unshakeable strength of belief. Susan wishes, not for the first time, that she could have faith like her little sister does.
He calls her Susan. Not dearest or dear heart or dear one or daughter. He calls her child, and she's never felt more like one. It's as if he and the world are expanding before her, or perhaps it is she who is shrinking. She could be an ant compared to the Lion, but then again, she has never been that strong.
Aslan breathes on her and for a moment all becomes silent and still; she can't ever remember feeling this peaceful. It doesn't last. The writhings of fear are quick to creep back in, to lurk in the pit of her stomach, though now there's something fluttering in her chest that makes her think she could almost try to be brave. It's somewhere to begin, at least.
For a short time everything is beautiful once more.)
And then... "I am afraid, my children, that your time here is done. You must learn to know me in your own world, in my other forms," Aslan rumbles, and this isn't fair. He can't call them children while telling them they're too old for their home, when once they lived a whole life here, when they only became these caricatures of their grown-up selves, (their true selves) by his will. As for what he calls their world: Susan thinks that if it's going to be anything like it has been, anything like this - all her hopes bookended with pain - then maybe she doesn't want to know him in his other forms. Beside her Peter's gone all stiff, and she grabs his hand, squeezes it firmly, as much for his comfort as her own.
She dares to look into Aslan's tawny eyes, and she's never seen such sorrow in their depths. (This is a lie. There is one occasion she has seen something to match it: when he'd bid she and Lucy goodbye before giving himself up to the Witch, when she'd held his gaze as he lay on that table.)
Susan has never been quick to anger, so perhaps the vitriol that rises in her at this moment is testament to the lurking betrayal that has lasted two years since the loss of a lifetime. And oh, of course she immediately feels guilty for it, (because she loves him, doesn't she?) but the rage persists because how can he dare feel sad when it is she and Peter whom he's sending away to never return? He's not a tame Lion, has never claimed to be nice or kind, but this is the worst cruelty he's dealt them in all their time of knowing him and Susan cannot find a single shred of forgiveness in her heart.
On the other side of the Doorway her anger fades but the heartbreak clings, stings, lingers like milk spilled on paving stones that has curdled in the hot sun. She says her prayers every morning and night with the other girls in the dorm, sings hymns in assembly in the hall. She watches the colours and patterns of light that shine through an east-facing church window onto Lucy's golden hair a few rows forward and carefully sounds out the words that would otherwise stick in her throat. When Peter writes he says he has found something here in the stained glass and gospels and his letters are neater - for Peter, at least. Edmund confirms in his own message that their brother has taken up his pen, has dropped the fists he used to use in place of his sword.
He's going to study Medicine, Peter tells her when they're home for Christmas, ink-stained fingers and swiftly-fading scars on his knuckles. In this world of war, he wants to save people. (Still, there's something terribly sad behind her brother's eyes that she'd only caught a glimpse of after they'd returned, before the train had arrived. It's lingered, and it's the kind of sorrow Susan doesn't know what to do about other than sit beside him and hold his hand for a while in the still and quiet of early evening.)
Susan doesn't know what she wants to do. The church shoe still doesn't fit but now Peter is finding his calling, Lucy and Edmund are settled in the knowledge that they at least will return to Narnia, and now she doesn't need to manage her siblings, now home is gone, she has to learn to live in this world somehow.
And it's not like she's looking for Aslan here, but sometimes she wonders. Sometimes she thinks maybe the reason she can't find him in England's grey drudgery that is her life now is because Lucy saw Aslan reborn but Susan saw him die, and even after he returned with the dawn, his death was the thing that stuck. Then came the whirl and tumble of the Witch's Palace, the battlefield, Edmund on the ground and Peter kneeling over him and pleading with a voice shredded hoarse and hands dripping red.
Both times they've returned to England, Narnia has faded to a dream she can't fully recall. Now and again she'll grip the handle of an umbrella and remember her fingers wrapped around the smooth wood of a bow, or hear a strain of music on the wind that's almost but not quite a Narnian melody, but she can never quite get the tune right when she tries to hum it beneath her breath in the silence and dark of her bedroom at night. At school, she doesn't dare even try.
All of this to say, it's something like agony the day Susan realises she only has two memories from Narnia imprinted in her mind, that have eclipsed all others and won't leave no matter what. And so over and over she sees the Witch's terrible victory, Aslan's eyes closing and the last heave of breath before he stills, her baby sister sobbing into her shoulder; she sees her little brother almost dead and her older brother breaking, both of them bathed in blood. And if these are the only things she's allowed to carry away from Narnia, then maybe she doesn't want anything from it at all.
(But she does, oh, she does. Down to her bones she wants so badly to see Lucy's grown-up smile and Edmund laughing across a chess board in Cair and Peter sitting outside on a rare empty morning with his face turned up to the sun. She wants all of this and more so much it makes her teeth ache, and she wants to bury her head in her hands and scream because she knows the shape of these things but flashes through figured glass are all her fractured mind will give. It's not enough, never enough, and she bears it the only way she can.)
Susan moves on.
(Susan tries to move on.)
America is a welcome break; she returns with lips painted Victory Red and wearing a new dress to a sister and brother who are quietly pensive, to a cousin changed entirely.
"It's not how I thought it would be," Lucy tells her as they sit out in the garden with their tea.
"No."
Her sister takes a sip, runs it around her mouth, musing silently. "There's this sort of quiet ache," she says eventually. "Soul-deep, you know?"
Susan doesn't. She might know all about aching, but nothing about her loss has been quiet aside from her bearing of it. She makes a "hmm," as if she understands.
"But it's like everything's going to come alright," Lucy looks off into the trees, peaceful in a way Susan is as glad for as she is envious of. She would bear this pain a thousand times greater if necessary, to spare her sister from it.
When Peter is allowed a day off from his studies they meet him and the Professor who takes the four of them and Eustace up to Norfolk to visit his friend Polly, who lives on the coast. Her house is small, full of curios that their mother would call clutter but Polly calls memories, with a fond smile.
It's in Polly's cramped but cosy living room that they drink tea and hot chocolate and eat sandwiches and biscuits and talk and talk and talk about Narnia. (Or, at least, the others talk and Susan keeps a blithe smile, chips in when attention turns to her. For the most part she listens, devours the stories she once was a part of. If she can only have a secondhand version somewhere in her mind, it's still better than shapes and shadows alone.)
Susan finds herself sitting beside Eustace on the train back. He stares out of the window like the countryside is a movie he can't miss a moment of, and so it surprises her when he eventually speaks.
"I sort of miss flying sometimes, you know?" He dares to flick a look at her to see the reaction Susan keeps carefully plain. He breathes a laugh. "It's silly, I know, because most everything that came with being a dragon was terrible - I couldn't talk and we had no clue if I was stuck or not and that bracelet hurt like anything, but," he hesitates for a moment. "There was a time - after Aslan turned me back - where I couldn't quite get my balance. Even though my body was human again, I felt... strange, without wings." He swallows, looks back out the window. "Sort of feels like that again, being back here."
"It does that," agrees Susan. "And just when you think you've got your legs under you properly, it takes you off balance all over again."
Eustace turns with a searching look. "Is that what happened to you?"
"Yes," she says quietly, thinks about how off-kilter she's felt over the past year despite trying her best to soldier on, standing upright and steady in America only to falter on reuniting with Edmund and Lucy and hearing their news. She glances at her siblings and the Professor, engrossed in a conversation across the aisle and a few rows down from them. "In all honesty, I'm not quite sure I'm back on my feet yet."
He nods. "Well, if you ever need a shoulder and all that."
Susan smiles, reaches out to ruffle his hair even as he bats at her in protest. "Thank you," she says. "And remember the lot of us are only ever at the end of a train ride or a letter, if you'd like." Someone has to be there for him - she knows what his parents are like. (More than that, she heard her aunt whispering to her mother in the kitchen when they visited to pick Edmund and Lucy up. Eustace may have changed for the better, but his parents have not. They don't recognise the boy who came down from the attic that day).
Eustace grins broadly. "I think I'll take you up on that. I might be writing soon, in fact." He tips his head back against the seat with a groan. "I am not looking forward to going back to school."
She grimaces in sympathy. "Can't help you there, I'm afraid, but we will keep in touch, and we'll see you in the holidays too." Susan leans over, bumps her shoulder against his. "Maybe try making some friends?"
"At that place?" He scoffs, then his face scrunches in thought. "I suppose there are a few who aren't so bad. Jury's out on whether they'd want to be friends with me though, after the way I was last year."
Susan levels a look at him, tuts. "Don't start like that. All you can do is apologise for whatever you did then, and more importantly be the person you are now. If they're someone worth being friends with, they'll see that."
Her cousin smiles with the corner of his mouth, nods to himself. "I'll keep that in mind," he says, lets the smile spread. "Thanks awfully, Su."
"Anytime," she replies. Susan may not understand whatever Peter has found or Lucy's solemn optimism, has barely even spoken to Edmund on the matter, but the three of them seem have moved on while Eustace is stuck in the middle of it all. It's something she knows, something she can sympathise with, and she vows silently that she will help her little cousin get through it as best she can.
Eustace writes not long into the school year; she and Lucy hunch over the letter in the library. He's made a friend - a girl called Jill Pole. They went to Narnia. Caspian is dead. There's more to it of course, but those are the salient points, and while Lucy scans the rest Susan sits back and spares a thought for the young king she'd known for hardly a week. She doesn't know his face.
"Poor Peter," Lucy says when she's finished, face all crumpled up. When Susan sends her a questioning glance her sister looks back at her like she's grown a second head.
And so... Peter and Caspian? Susan has always known about Peter of course, the way he's always known about her, but how could she have missed this? Perhaps it had been a quiet thing, she tries to reason, but even so she surely would have seen it - she knows her brother too well. The only remaining explanation is the one that stings the most: that, as with almost everything else, she's forgotten. What almost hurts more is the thought that she's not noticed the signs in the year since (or - no, it's worse than that because she's seen the loss in Peter's eyes and assumed she knew the reason for it, hasn't tried to ask).
"When you were there," she ventures, "did Caspian... was he still...?" Whatever she can or can't remember, she's sure it must have gone both ways. One of the few things she knows is that Caspian had such a big heart, and her brother has always been so easy to love.
Lucy carefully folds Eustace's letter back up, eyes on her hands. "He kept Peter's sword, avoided every mention like it burned. Eustace thought he hated him for a good while."
There's a lump in Susan's throat. She swallows around it. "Does Peter know?"
Her sister bites at a hangnail on her thumb, and Susan winces when the skin pulls back too far in a pink line, when bright beads of red well up. Lucy scrunches her nose, licks away the blood, presses the wound against one of the darker squares on her chequered skirt.
"I wanted to tell him. Ed said not to, said it'd only hurt more, so I didn't." Her lips press together and all of a sudden Susan realises her sister is trying not to cry.
"Lu-" she starts, only for her sister to interrupt.
"-I think people should know, shouldn't they?" Her eyes flash as she looks up at Susan, voice loud enough that some of the girls at a table nearby look up at them. "Wouldn't you want to know?" She asks, quieter, "if someone loved you like that?"
Susan takes a deep breath in and it comes out all shaky. "I don't think I would," she confesses. Her sister frowns. "What would it change, Lucy?" She doesn't quite keep the wobble out of her voice. "Especially now." Now that Caspian's dead and gone, she refuses to say.
Lucy's fingers crumple the corner of the letter before she notices, smooths it out and pins it beneath a heavy book. "That's what Edmund said." Her brows knit deeper, a defiant angle. "I'd want to know," she adds. "It matters." She looks back up at Susan, pleading, now. "Even if it doesn't change anything, the love matters." Her lip trembles and Susan sees this is about more than Peter and Caspian. This is about a ruined castle and too many friends lost to another world and time.
When Lucy bursts into tears, Susan is there to hold her.
"They loved you," she whispers. "They all loved you so much. I promise, Lu."
Peter's smile is a too-bright, too-sharp sword that Christmas. It's forced through gritted teeth and so fragile that Susan wonders at every moment it doesn't snap. She worries so much over what she should say to him, over if she should say anything at all, and in the end only ends up biting her lip raw. (She barely knew Caspian, and these days she can hardly remember him as more than a silhouette in the back of her mind. What use would it be to try and help, only to say the wrong thing and open up the wound again by accident?)
Edmund doesn't climb so many trees these days. Still, when she looks out of the kitchen window and sees a pair of legs hanging out of the aged apple in the back garden she knows it's her brother in his old spot.
"Aren't you cold?" She asks, once she's tied up her skirt and hoisted herself onto the branch beside him. Susan takes the extra jumper she'd tied around her shoulders and passes it over.
"Not really," he says, even as he takes it and pulls it on over his shirt with bone-white fingers. She raises a skeptical eyebrow and he shakes his head in return. "Honest. Haven't felt it much in- oh, years now."
Susan frowns. "What about all of Peter's jumpers?"
He shrugs. "I suppose I wanted things to feel more normal back then, wanted to feel the cold so pretended I did."
It's not what she expected. (In truth, she's not sure what she expected.) She wants to ask what's changed? But that's the thing - she knows what's changed, just not why it's changed him in this way.
"How's school?" She asks, for something to say.
Edmund looks at her, amusement glimmering in his eyes. They know each other too well for this - he knows what she means to say, the words she can't get out. Lucy's always been eager to share with little to no prompting needed while Peter requires prodding, but with Edmund it's a dance, a ritual: steps known and repaced every time they have to talk about something difficult.
And so, Susan asks about school and Edmund looks at her and says "it's not been as bad as I thought it would," and he's not talking about school.
"I've missed it, of course, more than anything, but there are pieces of home here too, if you look hard enough."
"Hmm," she replies, and it sounds hollow even to her.
"I think it's different for everyone though," he adds. "Lucy said it's more a presence for her."
"But you're alright?" She says.
His lips purse. "For the most part. Eustace's news was hard. Peter was... well," he jerks his head back toward the house. "Considering it's been almost three months, and this is how he is now..."
Susan has to know. "Did you say anything to him, in the end? After your trip, I mean."
He hangs his head, shakes it minutely. "Couldn't bear to, then. And now I half wish I had, but can't decide whether saying it then would have made things now worse or not."
"Ed." He won't look at her. She reaches out, places a hand on his shoulder, has to dig her fingers into the thick wool to find it. "Look, I can't pretend to know what's going on in Peter's head these days, whether he'd rather have known or not, but for what it's worth I agree with you. It would have been cruel, knowing there's no way back."
"Of course you do," he says miserably. "And it would have been, but... Lucy was right too."
Susan sighs, lets her hand fall to her side. "I know."
"And it's too late now," he says.
"I know."
For a while, they sit in silence. The chill slowly seeps through her cardigan. Her toes are numb inside her shoes. When she looks back at Edmund, he's shivering. Not feeling something doesn't mean not reacting to it, she supposes.
"Ed," she says gently.
"Just - give me a minute, will you?"
She does, tips her head back to look through the lattice of branches to the clear blue sky above.
At last, she hears him take a deep breath in through his nose, blow it out hard. It blooms in front of them.
"I know Aslan said we were meant to be here, but does it ever feel wrong to you?" His voice is quiet, cuts cleanly through the still air.
Her mouth opens and winter jumps down her throat, freezes up her vocal chords.
"Feels like my skin is too tight sometimes," her brother says. She stretches a hand out, grabs one of his. It's dry like sandpaper, knuckles split and bleeding from the cold.
Her voice cracks when she replies. "All the time." She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, breathes in deep, holds it, (wishes she could take the ache from her brother's voice, lock it up next to her heartbreak and do some good with the empty space where half her life should be). Finally, she lets it go, lets white mist cloud her vision. "Let's go back inside."
"One more minute," he says.
"Alright."
They stay in the old apple tree for a while.
Between Christmas and the New Year they all go up to Polly's. Jill rounds their little group out to eight and for the most part is welcomed with open arms. Susan can hardly look at her. Later, the girl corners her as she's exiting the little upstairs bathroom, stands with her legs planted and arms crossed.
"Why won't you talk to me?" Her frown is thunderous, and while it should look ridiculous on a ten year old, she wears it as one would a familiar jumper.
"Jill," Susan tries, only to be cut off.
"Is it because I'm not part of your family? Because I'll have you know Aslan called me into Narnia just like he did the rest of you! And Professor Kirke and Aunt Polly!"
She attempts to interject again but the girl keeps going.
"And what's more, even if I did muff the signs and we got ourselves in trouble, we got out of it just as well, and saved Rilian and got rid of that awful Witch, too!"
"Jill!" Susan raises her voice a little and the girl finally falls silent. "It's not any of that, I promise. You might as well be family now you're wrapped up in all this, and it's nothing you did in Narnia."
She somehow frowns harder. "Then what? Something I said? Something I did here?"
Susan sighs. "It's nothing you've said or done at all." She shakes her head. "Look, Jill, there's something you have to understand that none of them down there will tell you. You will never leave Narnia behind." Jill opens her mouth and Susan holds up a hand. "Let me finish. You will never leave Narnia behind, and that might sound good to you right now, might sound like the best news you've ever heard, but what it really means is that you leave and you spend all your time here missing it and searching for a way back rather than living. What it means is that when you finally get to go back there, chances are any friends you made will be long dead. And then you'll come back here and repeat the whole thing again who knows how many times until you're finally here for good and have to carry on like nothing ever happened."
Jill's eyes narrow almost piercingly. "Just because you want to leave Narnia behind doesn't mean I will," she says.
It hits Susan like an arrow to the chest. There's a moment where she can hardly breathe, before she gets out "I don't want to leave Narnia behind." Her uncertainty carries too clearly. Jill raises an eyebrow.
"Well perhaps you should hold off on the advice until you're sure," she jabs, whirls around and clomps down the stairs leaving Susan standing outside the little upstairs bathroom with her world crashing down around her.
Susan sits on her own on the train back, looks in the window and sees the reflections of her siblings across the aisle. She wonders if they'd forgive her for it: for letting their home lie in the past, for burying the little that remains to her, for no longer clinging to every tiny fragment of fable to try and piece together how she was once Gentle, how she was once a Queen.
A few rows behind she hears sharp words swiftly followed by laughter from Eustace and Jill. Would she be abandoning Eustace if she were to try to move on from Narnia? Would Jill ever accept her attempts of help if she decided not to?
Susan thinks of Professor Kirke, of Polly Plummer, the isolated lives they've led, continually holding onto some small sliver of hope they might one day return to hours of their youth. She doesn't begrudge them that hope, knows how hard it was to hang onto for not even two years, let alone over forty.
The truth is, Susan knows that if she tries to search out pieces of home here, attempts to find whatever Lucy feels and Edmund sees and Peter prays to, she might succeed one day. The truth is this terrifies her, because if she finds any trace of Narnia, of Aslan, her treacherous heart will start to hope again. The truth is, every day waiting and hoping and wanting will only coalesce all her agonies, with no balm of memory to soothe and no possibility of returning.
The truth is, Susan knows if she doesn't decide to leave her home behind now, one day she will try to find it again.
The truth is, if she tries to move on now she must kill any last remnant of the Gentle Queen. The truth is, if she tries to stay close to Narnia in this world she thinks it might eat her alive.
Returning to school gives her time and space to think, to mull it over. By the end of the year she's made two decisions.
Susan leaves school at the end of the year, circles ads in the paper with red ink. The hiring manager at Selfridges calls her a pretty young thing and her red-lipped smile gets her a job in the Beauty Hall.
A few weeks into the summer Lucy knocks on her bedroom door to tell her they're all going up to Polly's on the weekend. Susan makes her face fall. "Sorry Lu, I've got a shift."
Lucy frowns, starts to try and sort things in her head. "Maybe we could rearrange. Peter and Professor Kirke can take a different day off tutoring easily enough, and I don't think Eustace and Jill are too busy."
"It's alright," she says. "Don't worry about it. You lot have fun. I'll come to the next one."
The next time, she's already promised to meet a friend for coffee. The time after that it's the Christmas holidays for the younger two and Susan is coming down with a cold.
"The seaside will do you some good," Lucy tells her.
"Maybe," she replies, but by the weekend she wakes and tells her sister she's feeling too terrible to travel.
The next time it's summer again and Susan's hardly got out "I'm sorry" before Lucy's sighing heavily.
"Let me guess, you're washing your hair?" It's a level of snark she'd expect from Edmund. "Look, Susan, if you don't want to come you can just say so."
"Lucy, I've been busy." It's true, she's been working long hours and she had gone for coffee with Betty from work even if she'd arranged it after hearing about the weekend plans. The cold may have been a flat out lie, but she'd spent the day helping their mother clean the house to make up for it.
Her sister folds her arms. "Too busy for Narnia?"
Susan takes a measured breath, turns to her makeup table and starts picking up the few little jars and pots and brushes she's collected, reordering them. "Yes, Lucy. I'm too busy for Narnia."
She thinks it might be the longest silence of her life.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Lucy double over.
"Honestly Su, you almost had me there!" She wipes at her eye with the sleeve of her jumper. "Too busy for Narnia," she shakes her head, laughs again.
Something quite like a cavernous pit seems to have opened up in Susan's stomach. She stays silent, keeps her eyes on her hands and the busywork she's given them.
Lucy's laughter fades. Susan can't bear to look at the expressions she knows must be on her sister's face - the slow fading of her smile, the corners of her lips turning down, the brows angling.
"You will come this weekend, won't you Su?"
There's a tremor in her little sister's voice that cuts deep and raw. Susan's hands still. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath in. It comes out shaky.
"No," she whispers. "I'm afraid not, Lu."
She feels more than hears her sister leave. It's a lack of presence - Lucy's there and then she's not, and Susan is alone with the crushing weights of her guilt and her grief.
It's strange having Peter at home over the summer when he's been studying with Professor Kirke for the previous two. He's visited here and there, been home at the starts and ends of the summers and they've all been home for the Christmas and Easter holidays, but when she adds it all up Susan realises quite how little she's actually seen her brother in the past two years.
It's an early morning when she pauses in the shade of the kitchen doorway. Peter's sitting at the battered old wooden table, both hands wrapped around a steaming mug. The sun streaming through mottled glass dapples him with gold. His eyes are closed. When they open, he sees her (and perhaps this is why she's been avoiding her big brother, the single person who knows her better than she knows herself).
"Morning. Sleep well?"
She drags herself from the doorway, pulls out the chair opposite him, shrugs as she sits.
"I slept," she replies. He offers a sympathetic smile.
"I'm supposed to convince you to come with us on Saturday," he tells her, watches her over the rim of his mug as he sips.
"She thinks I'll come around eventually?"
Peter nods.
"I won't." She says it quietly, but so definitely that it echoes, rings in her ears. "I just..." she shakes her head a little, squeezes her eyes shut so she doesn't have to look at her brother as she confesses this. "I can't bear it any longer - being on the fringes for Eustace and Jill, talking about it like a past-time when it's never going to happen again. Not to us."
"Once a King or Queen, always a King or Queen," he tries.
Susan flinches, looks down at the scarred surface of the table, digs her thumbnail into a soft groove. "I don't really remember being a Queen," she confesses. "All I remember is being a scared little girl."
Peter's hand reaches into her view, wraps around her own, warm from his mug of tea. "Sometimes," he says carefully, "I think we two had it worst, with what we returned to and the way we left, not knowing it was our last time - or that there'd even be a last time - until we were told it was over."
"And Caspian?" Susan says gently. She hasn't said his name to Peter in years, along with Edmund and Lucy has tip-toed around this great unspoken thing like it's a sword their brother might impale himself on if he becomes too aware of its keen edge. But, she realises, that assumes too little of him. This blade has been Peter's constant companion; he has been holding himself at arm's length from it with gritted teeth and bloodstained palms all this time.
Despite it all, if she doesn't broach the subject now she thinks she never will. All the same, it feels like carving into her brother's chest to take a look at his beating heart. Peter's hand spasms around hers like a reflex. For a moment she's not sure if he's breathing.
"And Caspian." The words come out stilted, soft.
"I'm sorry," she says quietly, takes his other hand in hers. He grips it firmly, like she is the only thing tethering him in this moment. Susan holds just as firm.
His lips press together thinly. "It is what it is," he says, dull and monotone and practiced. Her eyes glance over the knives in the rack. If she could, she would split open her ribs here and now, pull out her heart with a steady hand and offer to exchange it for his, spare him this. The fondness in his eyes tells her he already knows this. In any case she thinks he'd refuse: her brother, with his purpled bruises and silvered scars.
"Whatever it is, it isn't easy."
He swallows. "No," he says. "It isn't."
She squeezes his hands and he squeezes back and by the time they let go, Peter's tea is cold. He drinks the dregs, rinses the mug. Susan goes back upstairs to get ready for work.
Peter starts university in September but as his course is in London he stays at home. The younger two are both alone at their boarding schools now and the house is quieter than Susan has ever known it. More often than not their father is off at some conference or other and most of the time their mother goes along with him. Susan remembers how much she'd loved visiting the States and is glad she's getting the chance to travel more, even if it's only within England.
One evening in early May, Susan is darning some of Lucy's old clothes with the wireless on and Peter is studying when there's an interruption to the broadcast. The war is finally over, and the next day they both dress up and join the hordes in the streets. It's a day of joy, though tainted by sorrow for many, and Susan can only be grateful that their family had been lucky enough to not lose anyone.
They meet up with some of Peter's new friends from university who have pulled together a party remarkably quickly. Their student house blares with light and sound and for once, she's told by someone, the neighbours haven't complained yet. Drink after drink is pressed into Susan's hand and she sips at a few, abandons most when the coast is clear. Peter always remains in sight and for this she is glad - at one point they exchange a long-suffering glance, silently commiserating over the boys flocked around her and the girls clustered around him. Even if she's not interested, it's still fun to flirt and dance until she's crashed on a squashy sofa beside a bright blonde girl.
"Exhausting, these things, aren't they?" Almost all the women in London are wearing red on their lips today and hers spread in a wide smile. She extends a hand. "Alice, by the way."
"Susan," she replies, shakes the proffered hand. "Can't say I've ever been to one of these things before, but exhausting is definitely one word for it."
It's funny, though, the way her tiredness seems to fade as they get to talking. It's past midnight when she and Peter finally leave. Alice kisses her on the cheek in farewell and there's a spring in her step and a small smile playing around Susan's mouth all the way back home.
She hadn't thought anything would come of it, but a few days later Alice shows up while she's at work, makes loud conversation over the counter about lipstick shades while Susan's supervisor eyes them suspiciously, and once the woman finally wanders off to the other side of the hall, asks when she's got a break.
In August Susan turns eighteen and with the small amount of money she's saved up from working she gets a decent deal for rent on a one-bed flat in Southwark. The bathroom is almost in the kitchen and the kitchen is almost in the bedroom and the space that's meant to be the living room is taken up entirely by the sofa, coffee table and side cabinet. When they visit, her family can hardly fit in the place. It feels like freedom.
Alice takes her to a little bookshop after they get coffee one afternoon. She likes fantasy and fairytales and old stories of myth and legend, anything with wonder in it - and tragedies - the sadder the better. Susan's had enough tragedies for this lifetime, she tells her, and picks out a copy of Little Women along with a collection of some of Shakespeare's comedies. Alice insists on buying her books and Susan says she has to come see her new place anyway and so Susan may as well cook her dinner. Back in the flat, Alice sits at the rickety kitchen table with a glass of wine, talking about all sorts of things while Susan listens and cooks and chips in here and there.
She tastes the sauce adds a little more salt, then dips a spoon into the pan and turns to offer it across the table. She means for Alice to take the spoon but instead she wraps her hand around Susan's, meets her eyes as she leans forward to taste it. Susan feels her cheeks heat.
"Gorgeous," Alice murmurs as she sits back, and when she releases her grip on Susan's hand the spoon clatters on the table between them. There's a single moment where they remain frozen like this and then Alice's eyes dip from Susan's, move back up. Her lips curve up at the corners. Susan's heart is racing when she moves around the table in two quick strides and Alice has half-risen from her chair when they crash together.
The sauce burns, in the end.
The distance the flat provides helps. It's a place to make new memories rather than be reminded of old echoes, and it becomes easier to let the realities of this life settle in the forefront, focus on her day at work and seeing Alice in the evenings and Peter or their parents when they stop by or when she visits home.
Soon Edmund's off at University too and not long after that Peter is graduating from medical school. There's a small gathering of family and friends at the house after the ceremony, and later still they all sit out in the back garden with champagne. The sun shines down butter yellow, and it's quiet and peaceful and lovely and Susan absently hopes the future will hold many more days like this.
That summer is drawing to a close when one afternoon there's a knock at Susan's door. Checking through the peephole reveals the familiar shapes of her brothers standing outside.
"I thought you all went up to Norfolk for the week?" It's the closest she gets these days to talking about the thing she's left behind that they all still share.
"We did," Edmund says, "but..." they exchange a glance, same tightness in their faces.
"Something happened, and there's something we need to do, so Ed and I came back," Peter brushes over the details. "But we thought we'd stop in and say hello while we were here."
She doesn't ask any more, and they don't say any more. They tell her they'll go home to sleep but agree to stay for dinner. Their shared worry persists, pervades, but Susan smiles wide and tops up food and glasses and eventually it mellows a little. She asks after Lucy and the others and is told they should be on their way down too within a couple of days, assuming everything goes well the next morning.
"Well," Edmund says eventually as he stands. "I'm beat, and we do need to be up early."
Susan hugs her brothers tightly, they put their shoes on, grab their jackets, and then Peter turns with his hand on the doorknob.
"Take care, will you, Su?"
There's something more there, a strain in his voice. She and Edmund trade a practiced glance at Peter's worrying (though, she notes, Edmund's smile is a little too thin).
"I will," she assures him (both of them, really). "You two as well. I'll come by the house and see you all when Lucy's back. Mum and Dad should be back then, too. It'll be nice to have everyone together again."
Another tight hug each, and then her brothers are out the door and Susan is alone with the dishes and a steadily mounting sense of unease twisting in her stomach.
Two days later she gets back from work to find a telegram's been slipped through her door. She's needed at the police station. There's been an accident.
That night she dreams a familiar sight skewed: a spread of gold atop a table of stone. The setting sun casts Aslan's fur orange and beside her Lucy is too still and Susan has just got to thinking that this isn't right when the weight of her sister pressed against her vanishes. When she looks back at the table three bodies lie there, bloody and mangled and still. Aslan stands behind them, meets her gaze with his own, heavy with sorrow and something more he is trying to impart but Susan cannot understand. When she opens her mouth to ask, no words will emerge. In the distance the sun sets and all of a sudden the scene changes.
Up on top of a hill there's a wooden Doorway standing alone. This Doorway is different to the one she once left Narnia by, for a rickety Door hangs from it like the whole thing once belonged to a building. She doesn't recognise this place she stands in but it's dark, and even in her dream she's bitterly cold. Susan is closer to the Doorway now and past the frame lies a different world entirely - she catches a glimpse of blue sky and verdant grass, a congregation of people and animals and creatures and there just on the inside stands Aslan, and "Peter!"
Susan finally finds her voice when she sees her brother. He stands tall and crowned, wearing rich garments, and this is the High King Peter, the person he's been trying to return to all these years since they landed back on the floor of the spare room in that house in the country. When he reaches through the Doorway into the frozen wasteland she stands in he sees her and stills, hope and joy clear and plain on his face. They lock eyes and in this moment he is only her big brother and she his little sister and his mouth forms her name into silence as his hand wraps around the knob of the Door. He clutches it, white-knuckled like it's the only thing keeping him on his feet, sways forward a little towards her. She smiles.
There's salt in her mouth and her vision blurs just as a gust of wind wips her hair up and across her face. A booming noise echoes out into the nothingness and when she swipes away the hair, the tears, there is only darkness. Peter is gone and the Door is closed.
Susan wakes all at once and her pillow is damp. The sun glows through the thin drapes over her bedroom window. Goosebumps cover her whole body and her feet are like ice. Yesterday morning there was a train crash and today Susan Pevensie wakes for the first time into a world without her brothers and sister, her parents, her cousin and her friends.
She wonders if this would have happened if they'd all let Narnia fade as she did, or would they have always ended up on that train one way or another? Somewhere there must be a world where she was sat with them, laughing and reminiscing and wishing and hoping.
She hopes they died happy. She hopes they went quickly, hopes they never knew it was the end. This thought is the one to bring it all crashing down again, that they are gone and never coming back, the sight of the pieces of their bodies carefully arranged at the coroner's office. Tears stream hot and wet down her face and she realises that was the last terrible sight she'd had of them all.
(Later, she remembers her dream, the love in her brother's face. She pulls this image to the forefront of her mind, does her best to hold back the tears that pool in her eyes whenever she hears any sound like the slam of that door.)
Many years later Susan wakes to blue skies above, soft grass below. When she sits up she sees a large wooden Doorway.
Before her stands the Lion.
"I dreamt of that Doorway, once," she tells him (though, somehow, she suspects he already knows this).
She tries to remember what happened before she woke up here. It's faint, but they had gone to bed at the usual hour, she's sure. They had sat and read for a while in bed, then turned out the light and fallen asleep to the familiar sounds of the ocean crashing on the Norfolk coastline. Susan pushes her hair back from her face and- oh, her hair is black, not grey. For years she has had a scar across her finger from where her knife once slipped while chopping vegetables; there's not even a hint of it when she looks at her hands.
Aslan bows his shaggy head. "Some time ago I invited you to witness the end of Narnia."
"That wasn't a dream?"
"You saw it through a dream. That does not mean it wasn't real," he says gravely.
"Then, is this a dream?"
He looks at her sorrowfully and everything he'd been trying to tell her that night suddenly falls into place.
"Oh," she says. "I see."
Slowly she gets to her feet, and it's only now she notices the clothes she's wearing. Susan reaches up and, "I don't think I deserve this crown."
"As I told you long ago: once a Queen of Narnia, always a Queen of Narnia," he rumbles.
Suddenly she can't bear to look at him. "I tried to forget, Aslan. I left it all behind because it was easier that way. Was that wrong of me?"
The familiar warmth of his breath surrounds her.
"Dearest, it is not my place to judge your choices in this world or in that one. I am only glad to see you now."
"I am glad too, Aslan, but..."
"Ask, Daughter of Eve," he says gently. It's this note in his voice that gives Susan the strength to lift her head again. His eyes are kind.
"Where are my brothers and my sister? And what of Alice, and my friends in the other place?"
He turns his head and she follows his gaze into the distance, to the hills and mountains. "You will find your kin further up and further in. Do not worry for your friends - they will join you. This is a place where all good things eventually come to dwell."
"And... this is forever?" Her heart rises through her chest, into her throat.
He turns back to her, looks deep into her eyes with the answer she has been waiting to hear all her life. "This is forever."
It's quicker than she expects - even walking at a comfortable pace the scenery flies by, as if the land knows where she wants to be and is doing its best to help her get there. Susan follows the pull of her heart across fields and valleys and lakes and mountains until finally she reaches the largest hill of all. At the top, there is a Garden, and a set of gold gates.
For a moment she stands still before the gates, and then a familiar resounding rings out bright and clear. It's a sound she could never forget and it brings everything back with it. The gates swing open and there's a tugging deep within her and she cannot help but step forward, past the threshold.
And then there are arms around her and Lucy's voice exclaiming "oh Su, you're home!" And the four of them are a tangle of limbs and laughter and tears, too.
"I'm so sorry Su," Peter says. "There was this terrible wind and the Door was so heavy and it wouldn't open back up."
His face is the picture of anguish and she lays a hand on his cheek. "It's alright, Peter. It's not your fault, and I'm here now. We're all here now."
And they are all here, because when she stands it's to greet Eustace and Jill and Professor Kirke and Polly, and then all the faces she knows again - Caspian and Reepicheep and the Beavers and Tumnus. Her family introduce her to all their new friends, and it feels like hardly a moment has passed when a familiar pair of arms wrap around her from behind.
Later, she will tell her family and her friends about the rest of her life. Later, she will tell Alice all about her years in Narnia. For now, she is content to be with all the people she loves, wearing her most comfortable clothes, with all her memories and no need to wait or hope or want for anything again.