Fanmix: [Narnia] Valiance Like a Burning Coal: A Lucy Pevensie EP
Nothing Called Home || Girlyman
You sit and watch the ocean blue • The colors stare right back at you • There's love pulsing underneath that sea • There's salt dusting painted benches • Planks of deck and rusted wrenches • Nature wants to taste this life • The one you spit out every time • Do you think there's nowhere to go • Nothing called home • Nowhere that you'd rather be • Let it go, oh let it alone
Someday you'll find what you need • You kept the light inside you bright • But shielded it as careful as a candle on a cold and rainy night • You pushed away the ones who loved you • But held them high, right above you • Caring more what we would think • Offering us the first drink • Most of all your sweaters packed away moved with you • Though none of them got worn anyway • You think you're leaving everything behind • But no matter where you are • You are there, you're the star • Snow covers every corner • Every fountain, every border • Paving ancient roads and antique signs • Most of what I know about you are memories, now far from truth • We melt away our circumstance • We all deserve a second chance
She isn’t sure how obvious it is to her siblings, but it is as apparent to her as the bruises on her knees from when she fell out of the wardrobe: she is a bridge. The living metaphor is not a comfortable one: she can see in her mind’s eye the way the bridge was so utterly destroyed at Beruna, and she sometimes finds herself frightened that by trying to hold to two worlds she is chaining some god in place and will be rightfully smashed to bits. But for all that, she is the subject of both lands, held close by neither, and she is a bridge that stays holding onto lonely crags, with people walking on her. She will never be a home to shelter and stay in place.
Some days she doesn’t think she’ll ever find the supports and girders she needs to be of both worlds. Some days Lucy is as homeless as the children of London whose homes were demolished whilst they were away. But she looks at Susan, and Edmund, and Peter (who really should be much taller) and she things that maybe, if she has nothing called home inside her, she can find one in them. In the others, who are weathered and not still settling bridges, as she is.
World Traveller || Miss Emily Brown
I’m a world traveller, there’s nowhere I’ve been • I’ve seen brothers and sisters and kites in the wind • I’ve seen mittens on strings - what a good thing to do • because things can go missing, I’ve heard of a few. • So please never lose me like you lose your cool, • never leave me stranded up high on a telephone wire • from London is calling, a button is desperately hanging on • By a thread of a dream my great-grandmother wove • when she dreamed me and you up. She dreamed up our souls. • She went hard through the night against men with machines • against living and dying, what all of it means. •
She taught us to travel, she taught us to dream • and here we are in great cities attempting great things • and all that we have is our will and our thoughts • when the strangest of feelings come up we feel crazy, we feel lost. • Never lose me like you lose your cool, • never leave me stranded up high on a telephone wire • from London is calling, my brother is desperately hanging on. • It’s like I said, I have travelled the world • and there’s no place that I’ve been that I never heard • the sound of my heart beating and seen my own face • like the face of a child hangs above a staircase. • Oh, please never hang me up like shoes on a wire • but wire me all of your fears and desires. • Mittens on strings are such fortunate things • like babies need mothers, like people need their friends to ring them up. • So please never lose me like you lose your cool, • never leave me stranded up high on a telephone wire • from London is calling, a button is desperately hanging on.
Susan is on the shortlist to the diplomacy corps with the Foreign Office before the War is over, and of course, after. Edmund and Peter have their travels too; Edmund takes a special interest in Russia, and Peter stays with the RAF for some time after the War while he figures out his studies. They have their places. But Lucy is young, too young she feels, and there isn’t a place for a girl like her. She belongs in school and ought to be growing up, while they take their places in the world they now inhabit. It’s frustrating and she feels oddly out of touch with everything--- not because she belongs back in Narnia, but simply because her role there doesn’t transfer over well here, and she is losing something while her sisters and brothers keep it. (Edmund keeps finding ways to be the Just. Susan learns that a coat of lipstick can work in a similar way to being as attractive as a queen.)
Lucy knows she’s a queen in Narnia, always a queen. But she has to figure out the logistics, and it’s something she feels like she has to do herself.
Let’s Make a Scene || Thea Gilmore
Got all my fortunes working up the road • Waking up the neighbours, loosening the load • There’ll be no rehearsal, this is not a dream • There are no stations to choose between • Let’s make a scene, let’s make a scene •Let’s burst some hearts, let’s catch the steam • Come out of your houses, turn the radio on • There’s a ghost dancing through the airwaves, she’s not staying long • Let’s make a scene, let’s make a scene • Let’s burst some hearts, let’s catch the steam
Raise your glass, raise your hand • Though it’s in your own excuse • You know I’ll bet on anything •
With nothing left to lose • There’s some rules, there’s a lot • There’s some words to be arranged • There’s a tune that is dying to be chained • To you who walks through thunder • To you who travel light • To you who travel under cover of night • Lay down your wet things • Come back to the start • Lay down your anger • And lay down your heart
Lucy sometimes wonders if there was more to the healing cordial that Father Christmas gave her-a coal in her heart, cutting her like a dagger, to go along with the title of valiant she was given. There are a million wrongs to right after Jadis-so much fear and reluctance to build a country that they must overcome, and for all that she was so young when the newspapers were only beginning to report on the atrocities of Hitler’s regime, she can feel the same wrongness igniting the burning cordial in her as she looks around. The sense that she must do something or explode in despair, and the latter is literally unfathomable.
She’s lucky, she knows. She’s the youngest. She is the least dignified, and if she does something less royal than her siblings, her people will forgive her for her youthful passion. She is not the diplomat like Susan, not the judicial leader like Edmund, not the leader of all like Peter. She is the instigator. Lucy makes scenes, she shouts and rages and glows and for some reason people follow her, which is good, because she wants to heal everyone in this chilled land, cordial or not.
And then back to that other world outside the wardrobe. She is young again, which is odd, to live in a body not one’s own. But the cordial and dagger still burn and cut so sharply within her and she can only see the icicles of the White Witch’s reign when she looks at the world around her. Thank Aslan for Aunt Polly; Polly has the same coal burning a hole in her ribcage and she can provide guidance of how Queen Lucy should navigate a country she’s nearly forgotten. The two of them know the best places to make a scene; Lucy once awoke trees, for the Lion’s sake, a few Londoners should be nothing.
The first time Lucy gets arrested, at 16, it’s in the company of Aunt Polly. It may very well be one of the best nights of her life.
Our Deliverance || The Indigo Girls
Now we can say that nothing's lost and only change brings round the prophecy • Where now it's melting, the solid frost was once a veil on greener landscapes we would see • Beneath my surface the water's heating • And steam comes up and out the tears you see me shine • For every strange and bitter moment there was never a better time • For every pleasure exacts its pain • How you hurt me how you were good to me • Beneath my window a mournful train that makes me smile at my bad poetry • Beneath my surface a song is rising • It may be simple while it hides its true intent • We may be looking for our deliverance but it has already been sent • It's in the night fall when the light falls • And what you've seen isn't there anymore • It's in our blind trust that love will find us • Just like it has before • They're sending soldiers to distant places • X's and O's on someone's drawing board • Like green and plastic but with human faces • And they want to tell you it's a merciful sword • But with all the blood newly dried in the desert • Can we not fertilize the land with something else • There is no nation by god exempted • Lay down your weapons and love your neighbor as yourself • In the night fall when the light falls • And what you've seen isn't there anymore • It's through our blind trust that love will find us • Just like it has before
There is so much to protest, so much to work for. England is withdrawing her empire from all the places that felt its crushing boots and if Lucy gets her way it will be happening a damn sight faster. Capital punishment still exists, and the process does not seem just, is not the clean executions that were so very rarely performed in her own kingdom, and if it is not just, it should be abolished. The communities that came from the Caribbean after the War to help rebuild England are hardly treated with the respect their labor deserves. And there are a million other things: she wants to confront them all.
Lucy and Polly go to protest an execution because they believe the man is innocent and the system that condemned him is guilty. They are not the only ones, and Lucy is surrounded with the comforting presence of those fighting a good fight, holding hands with them in the solidarity of a shared effort. Her spirits soar and it feels like they can’t lose, so when she finds out the next day that he was executed anyway, it does not seem possible. She worked for this. She tried. She has not missed being a queen of a country this much in a long time: she could have said no, and it would have been enough, there. And it all comes crashing in, how very small she is, how powerless she is and how large and unjust the world is, and she goes blindly for a walk to try to get her lungs to re-inflate the way they should. Aslan, she whispers, send something to fix this. Fix everything. Just send help.
She has always been able to feel him. Dear heart, she has the sudden memory of him just having said to her, I already have.
And there, in the London park, she smells the scent of the trees she awoke, that morning Aslan called her a lioness. She lays a hand on the trunk of the nearest tree.
Remaking a country does not happen overnight, she remembers. The ice takes some time to melt, the trees take some time to reawaken, and solutions do not always look like one expects them to. But Lucy can almost feel the sap stirring beneath her hand, and she knows: the trees are glad she’s back.
+.zip and artwork.
NOTE: This fic and mix is set in the AU where The Last Battle never happened, where the Pevensies and Edmund and Jill and Polly and Digory grow old in the world outside the wardrobe and are able to actually use the skills they learned in Narnia.