A Country of a Thousand Doors - for intrikate88
Title: A Country of a Thousand Doors
Author: anachronisma
Recipient: intrikate88
Rating: PG
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: AU for The Last Battle
Summary: Lucy remembers everything, in her way.
Memory is a country of a thousand doors. You open one, and the room inside opens many others. They do not have chronology or order -- they simply open and close as they choose.
This is how Lucy Pevensie explains why she remembers things in the wrong order, why the farther away from Narnia she gets, the clearer it becomes. Why the older she gets, the more she remembers. This is not, books tell her, the usual order of things. You forget things as you grow older. The games of childhood become dim and hard to remember. That is what Susan tells her, late at night, when she asks, do you remember Terebinth and the Lone Islands? Do you remember the campaign against the Frost Giants? Do you remember Archenland, King Lune, Cor and Corin, Lady Aravis?
Susan never says yes or no, she simply says, go to sleep, Lucy, it's a long day tomorrow.
The days are always long, the nights never long enough. In the beginning, there wasn't really a lifetime to remember. There was the Lamp-post, Mr. Tumnus, Aslan, the White Witch, the Stone Table, the Battle of Beruna, and the coronation. There were the Badgers, and Father Christmas, and winter becoming spring. And for a while, when Lucy thought of Narnia, this was what she thought of. Nights were long enough then, to remember her hands in Aslan's mane, the smell of the sea, the music of the dryads at her coronation, the weight of a crown. But as the days stretch forth, so do her memories; Cair Paravel to explore, feasts in the honor of her and her siblings, the first days of the court politics. Archenland in the south. Emmesaries from Calormene. Endless introductions to, it seems, every Narnian to live.
Time stretched, distorting oddly when they return and she met Caspian. She remembered remembering so much more than she did when she came back. She remembers Caspian's Narnia more vividly than her own, for a little while. She remembers Aslan. She remembers the split stone table and the terrible battle. Somehow, she remembers that she had forgotten how terrible battle is. Her skin itches with memory that she cannot recall -- when picking up a knife in the dining hall, it feels shapelessly wrong. When she puts on her school sweater, it hangs off her oddly, strangely limp and lumpen, nothing like a cloak. The music on the wireless is strange noise, sounds from a far-away country, not the music she is accustomed to hearing at all. At night, curled under the scratchy sheets of the third bed in Room 3, her ears itch with memory as she listens to the other girls in her room gossip aboout their schoolmates. Such gossip, she wants to chide them, with a war! But Lucy is tired, and has her secrets, and time never passes for her the way it passes for other girls, and she lets them be. There is a war. They need all the encouragement their hearts can muster.
The long summer of the Dawn Treader does strange things to her mind. Lucy remembers a great many things in Narnia, because it is hard to be ten twice, and by the time you are ten in a country at war, a lot of things have happened to you, one way or the other. She is as gay-hearted and queenly as any ten year old could hope to be, but every day in Narnia, her memory grows, until she is nearly twenty-three again, in a ten-year-old skin, and her heart is wild and fierce and terrible and this time, this time, she does not want to give up her Narnian memory to be a ten year old girl, because she has been a queen, and she would rather keep the battlefields and the betrayals and the intriegue and the bitter sadness, if it means keeping Aslan and the wild sea and her own memory of Cair Paravel before its fall. Edmund wears his familiar looks and old and walks like the king she knew, and her heart breaks every day at the thought they might forget who they are.
She remembers that she has forgotten, when she tugs her short school skirts around her knees and spends hours pouring what she can remember (how small it is, only the first few years in Narnia, only a fraction of her days on the Dawn Treader) into letters to Susan and Peter. But for one warm summer, she has Edmund, and together they tell Eustace the stories of their Narnia and everything their hearts remember, and when her hands itch for her long knife and the old bow, his sword-hand closes over hers and they are, for a moment, a king and queen in exile, and Eustace gives them their grief.
Lucy enters into adolescence confident she knows how it goes. Her classmates comment on it, behind her back, in whispers. She is not frightened or upset by the changes her body undergoes; instead, she counsels the other girls with kindness and a knowingness none of them expect. She takes them out into the woods behind the school to gather leaves and berries for tea to soothe what ails them, as if it is old news to her. It feels like old news, all surprise from the fluctuation of her body lost in the memory that this has happened before, it was bound to happen again.
Every night she remembers a little more, which is not, she knows, how memory is supposed to work; she is supposed to forget more every night, but her Narnian memories are as new and fresh as her memory of her classes. Fresher, in some ways, and newer, for things she has fought to remember for years suddenly come back to her effortlessly. Narnia is not quite the daydream it had seemed when she was eight; these days she remembers endless campaigns of war as often as she remembers feasts and dances and the music of the fauns. It seems now that her beloved friends die as often as they live, and she asks herself, sometimes, if Narnia was always like this, and she had just forgotten. How could she have forgotten? She carries the wounds of the country around inside her chest, and cannot figure out how to get them out.
Sometimes, when the girls in her room cannot sleep, she tells them stories, like fairytales, only darker. Lucy changes the names -- Susan becomes Scarlet, Peter becomes Percival, Edmund becomes Ernest, and she herself calls herself Lunette, because that seems like a name in a fairytale no one will question. She simply tells them things she remembers, her voice like music; Aslan, and the Witch, and the conquest of the sea, and the long and endless wars to win a golden age. Perhaps the girls know it is real, for her room becomes crowded every night and sometimes, even the older girls cry when Lucy talks of the endless battles and the heaviness of death that sits on her heart like a thousand stones. Perhaps it is the magic of Narnia, but they are never caught out of bed after hours, and nobody rats on the secret gatherings to hear the stories.
Boarding school comes to an end, and Lucy knows her parents will not send her to university. If Susan, the smartest of them all, could not go to a women's college, Lucy knows her own chances. Like Susan, she begins to work. The secretarial work is dull, not to her taste; but she lives in London with Edmund and Susan, and that is good enough. Edmund walks her to work every morning before he goes the long way to his classes, and she whispers to him, arm in arm, the secrets of the country they used to know. They walk like they did in the old country, the one that grows inside her like a flower, and it is almost enough to make the two lifetimes inside her head liveable. Almost.
People say that Lucy is quite lovely, and she laughs; she had been lovely, once, when her hair had been long, her arms strong, her shape trim from many hours of riding and running and fighting and dancing. But now, as then, Susan eclipses her, taking time with her perfect dark hair, her dresses and gloves and inherited pearls picture-perfect models of fashion, painting a face on every morning that almost captures the colour and glow that had once come naturally. Lucy goes to the swing clubs and dances, because Susan likes it, because Edmund is thin-lipped and won't let Susan go out alone, because to Edmund, his sisters are still the most eligible women in the world. She dances with Edmund, she dances with strangers, and promises herself that someday her feet will stop stumbling over the steps trying to bring something Narnian into them. She had spent so many years wanting to remember, and now she remembers more than her mind can take in, and her heart hurts when the music isn't as beautiful as the piping of a faun or the voice of a tree. She remembers her life, two lives, lying next to each other, and they don't fit, and her English feet try to find Narnian steps, and only Edmund can set her feet to right again.
Susan won't talk about Narnia. Lucy asks her, or tries to ask, if she remembers more with every passing year, like she and Edmund do, but Susan never answers. Susan complains that her boss, the man she secretaries for, yells at her all the time, that he makes inappropriate remarks and that she hates her work. Don't tell Edmund, Susan says, rolling over so her back faces Lucy at night, and don't write to tell Peter. It'll be fine. I'll be fine. Lucy wants to comfort her, but how can you comfort a woman who has lost the dignity and bearing of a queen? Instead, she wonders, with a sigh, why Aslan doesn't help her sister, and what anyone can do.
Edmund sits down with her one evening, when Susan is out with a boy, and tells her about the terrible maths he has been doing. I've been thinking, he says, his eyes old and familiar, like the brother she remembers. You know that we're going to run out of Narnian years soon? You were twenty-three. I was twenty-five. What do you think will happen when there aren't any more Narnian years for us to catch up to? It's been nearly fifteen years since we first went through that Wardrobe.
Lucy finds, as she files papers and takes notes, that she was rather more grown-up in Narnia than she is in England. Or perhaps she was rather much younger. The last time she had done this paperwork, she thinks ruefully, it had been as the head of state, helping Edmund with the legal code, or copying Susan's painstaking treaties and proofing the language. And now she writes memorandums about paper usage, and reminding people to turn the lights out at the end of the day. Life is chafing, achingly dull, no matter how many cinemas Susan drags her to, or how many nights in a row she goes out dancing with strangers. She cannot get her head to reconcile her two lives.
You should write a book, dear Polly (not her aunt, but closer than any of her mother's sisters) says to her one day at tea. Write a book, dear Lucy. You have had such extraordinary experiences. Do not let anyone take Narnia from you. You have been writing it down for years. Gather your letters. Open your journals. Tell your story, from beginning to finish. If Carroll could write such nonsense about wandering between worlds as the Alice stories, you could do far better, my dear. Far better. People need Aslan, and he has been ever such a part of your story.
There is ever so much to write. She feels as if there are too many years crammed into twenty-two, and there is so much to say. Lucy finds herself thinking about Narnia at work, about the last of the great wars of the golden age. The Frost Giant campaign in the north. Archenland in the south. Dear, dear Aravis. Her heart longs with an ache like fire for that old, wonderful company, for the honor guard, for Mr. Tumnus in his old age and for her friends who had survived the wars. There is so much to say. During quiet periods in the office, she types her life and hides it in her bag, page by page.
One morning in the autumn, when the air is crisp and cool, Lucy wakes up with a memory of white deer and red leaves, and the end of everything.
London is like a shock, like seeing it for the first time -- noise and smog and dirt and the sound of the traffic, and the bombed out places that were never repaired, all strike her in the face. She can barely look at Edmund, and she can't stand to see Susan. They look pale, like mere shadows of themselves. The thought of Peter, reduced, no longer the Magnificent, makes her sick to her stomach. She is too ill to go to work. It is the first day of the rest of her life.
A strange thing happens when Edmund comes through the door after work. She sees him, and he is her brother, the Just. He takes his jacket off and it looks like when he used to remove his tunic after a long day in the field. He is twenty-five, and as old as a king and a young man in his prime. She greets him with a kiss that is domestic and regal; his arms enfold her in a hug and it feels like the greetings after battle. He is Narnian, and he is English.
And so is she.
Original Prompt that we sent you:
What I want: Queen Lucy the Valiant as a grownup, twice. (Let's pretend the train crash never happened.)
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: Are pictures alright? Feel free to be inspired by them or not.
or http://www.flickr.com/photos/lainabriedis/5667909401/in/photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/margaretdurow/4788925781/in/photostream
What I definitely don't want in my fic: incest
Author: anachronisma
Recipient: intrikate88
Rating: PG
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: AU for The Last Battle
Summary: Lucy remembers everything, in her way.
Memory is a country of a thousand doors. You open one, and the room inside opens many others. They do not have chronology or order -- they simply open and close as they choose.
This is how Lucy Pevensie explains why she remembers things in the wrong order, why the farther away from Narnia she gets, the clearer it becomes. Why the older she gets, the more she remembers. This is not, books tell her, the usual order of things. You forget things as you grow older. The games of childhood become dim and hard to remember. That is what Susan tells her, late at night, when she asks, do you remember Terebinth and the Lone Islands? Do you remember the campaign against the Frost Giants? Do you remember Archenland, King Lune, Cor and Corin, Lady Aravis?
Susan never says yes or no, she simply says, go to sleep, Lucy, it's a long day tomorrow.
The days are always long, the nights never long enough. In the beginning, there wasn't really a lifetime to remember. There was the Lamp-post, Mr. Tumnus, Aslan, the White Witch, the Stone Table, the Battle of Beruna, and the coronation. There were the Badgers, and Father Christmas, and winter becoming spring. And for a while, when Lucy thought of Narnia, this was what she thought of. Nights were long enough then, to remember her hands in Aslan's mane, the smell of the sea, the music of the dryads at her coronation, the weight of a crown. But as the days stretch forth, so do her memories; Cair Paravel to explore, feasts in the honor of her and her siblings, the first days of the court politics. Archenland in the south. Emmesaries from Calormene. Endless introductions to, it seems, every Narnian to live.
Time stretched, distorting oddly when they return and she met Caspian. She remembered remembering so much more than she did when she came back. She remembers Caspian's Narnia more vividly than her own, for a little while. She remembers Aslan. She remembers the split stone table and the terrible battle. Somehow, she remembers that she had forgotten how terrible battle is. Her skin itches with memory that she cannot recall -- when picking up a knife in the dining hall, it feels shapelessly wrong. When she puts on her school sweater, it hangs off her oddly, strangely limp and lumpen, nothing like a cloak. The music on the wireless is strange noise, sounds from a far-away country, not the music she is accustomed to hearing at all. At night, curled under the scratchy sheets of the third bed in Room 3, her ears itch with memory as she listens to the other girls in her room gossip aboout their schoolmates. Such gossip, she wants to chide them, with a war! But Lucy is tired, and has her secrets, and time never passes for her the way it passes for other girls, and she lets them be. There is a war. They need all the encouragement their hearts can muster.
The long summer of the Dawn Treader does strange things to her mind. Lucy remembers a great many things in Narnia, because it is hard to be ten twice, and by the time you are ten in a country at war, a lot of things have happened to you, one way or the other. She is as gay-hearted and queenly as any ten year old could hope to be, but every day in Narnia, her memory grows, until she is nearly twenty-three again, in a ten-year-old skin, and her heart is wild and fierce and terrible and this time, this time, she does not want to give up her Narnian memory to be a ten year old girl, because she has been a queen, and she would rather keep the battlefields and the betrayals and the intriegue and the bitter sadness, if it means keeping Aslan and the wild sea and her own memory of Cair Paravel before its fall. Edmund wears his familiar looks and old and walks like the king she knew, and her heart breaks every day at the thought they might forget who they are.
She remembers that she has forgotten, when she tugs her short school skirts around her knees and spends hours pouring what she can remember (how small it is, only the first few years in Narnia, only a fraction of her days on the Dawn Treader) into letters to Susan and Peter. But for one warm summer, she has Edmund, and together they tell Eustace the stories of their Narnia and everything their hearts remember, and when her hands itch for her long knife and the old bow, his sword-hand closes over hers and they are, for a moment, a king and queen in exile, and Eustace gives them their grief.
Lucy enters into adolescence confident she knows how it goes. Her classmates comment on it, behind her back, in whispers. She is not frightened or upset by the changes her body undergoes; instead, she counsels the other girls with kindness and a knowingness none of them expect. She takes them out into the woods behind the school to gather leaves and berries for tea to soothe what ails them, as if it is old news to her. It feels like old news, all surprise from the fluctuation of her body lost in the memory that this has happened before, it was bound to happen again.
Every night she remembers a little more, which is not, she knows, how memory is supposed to work; she is supposed to forget more every night, but her Narnian memories are as new and fresh as her memory of her classes. Fresher, in some ways, and newer, for things she has fought to remember for years suddenly come back to her effortlessly. Narnia is not quite the daydream it had seemed when she was eight; these days she remembers endless campaigns of war as often as she remembers feasts and dances and the music of the fauns. It seems now that her beloved friends die as often as they live, and she asks herself, sometimes, if Narnia was always like this, and she had just forgotten. How could she have forgotten? She carries the wounds of the country around inside her chest, and cannot figure out how to get them out.
Sometimes, when the girls in her room cannot sleep, she tells them stories, like fairytales, only darker. Lucy changes the names -- Susan becomes Scarlet, Peter becomes Percival, Edmund becomes Ernest, and she herself calls herself Lunette, because that seems like a name in a fairytale no one will question. She simply tells them things she remembers, her voice like music; Aslan, and the Witch, and the conquest of the sea, and the long and endless wars to win a golden age. Perhaps the girls know it is real, for her room becomes crowded every night and sometimes, even the older girls cry when Lucy talks of the endless battles and the heaviness of death that sits on her heart like a thousand stones. Perhaps it is the magic of Narnia, but they are never caught out of bed after hours, and nobody rats on the secret gatherings to hear the stories.
Boarding school comes to an end, and Lucy knows her parents will not send her to university. If Susan, the smartest of them all, could not go to a women's college, Lucy knows her own chances. Like Susan, she begins to work. The secretarial work is dull, not to her taste; but she lives in London with Edmund and Susan, and that is good enough. Edmund walks her to work every morning before he goes the long way to his classes, and she whispers to him, arm in arm, the secrets of the country they used to know. They walk like they did in the old country, the one that grows inside her like a flower, and it is almost enough to make the two lifetimes inside her head liveable. Almost.
People say that Lucy is quite lovely, and she laughs; she had been lovely, once, when her hair had been long, her arms strong, her shape trim from many hours of riding and running and fighting and dancing. But now, as then, Susan eclipses her, taking time with her perfect dark hair, her dresses and gloves and inherited pearls picture-perfect models of fashion, painting a face on every morning that almost captures the colour and glow that had once come naturally. Lucy goes to the swing clubs and dances, because Susan likes it, because Edmund is thin-lipped and won't let Susan go out alone, because to Edmund, his sisters are still the most eligible women in the world. She dances with Edmund, she dances with strangers, and promises herself that someday her feet will stop stumbling over the steps trying to bring something Narnian into them. She had spent so many years wanting to remember, and now she remembers more than her mind can take in, and her heart hurts when the music isn't as beautiful as the piping of a faun or the voice of a tree. She remembers her life, two lives, lying next to each other, and they don't fit, and her English feet try to find Narnian steps, and only Edmund can set her feet to right again.
Susan won't talk about Narnia. Lucy asks her, or tries to ask, if she remembers more with every passing year, like she and Edmund do, but Susan never answers. Susan complains that her boss, the man she secretaries for, yells at her all the time, that he makes inappropriate remarks and that she hates her work. Don't tell Edmund, Susan says, rolling over so her back faces Lucy at night, and don't write to tell Peter. It'll be fine. I'll be fine. Lucy wants to comfort her, but how can you comfort a woman who has lost the dignity and bearing of a queen? Instead, she wonders, with a sigh, why Aslan doesn't help her sister, and what anyone can do.
Edmund sits down with her one evening, when Susan is out with a boy, and tells her about the terrible maths he has been doing. I've been thinking, he says, his eyes old and familiar, like the brother she remembers. You know that we're going to run out of Narnian years soon? You were twenty-three. I was twenty-five. What do you think will happen when there aren't any more Narnian years for us to catch up to? It's been nearly fifteen years since we first went through that Wardrobe.
Lucy finds, as she files papers and takes notes, that she was rather more grown-up in Narnia than she is in England. Or perhaps she was rather much younger. The last time she had done this paperwork, she thinks ruefully, it had been as the head of state, helping Edmund with the legal code, or copying Susan's painstaking treaties and proofing the language. And now she writes memorandums about paper usage, and reminding people to turn the lights out at the end of the day. Life is chafing, achingly dull, no matter how many cinemas Susan drags her to, or how many nights in a row she goes out dancing with strangers. She cannot get her head to reconcile her two lives.
You should write a book, dear Polly (not her aunt, but closer than any of her mother's sisters) says to her one day at tea. Write a book, dear Lucy. You have had such extraordinary experiences. Do not let anyone take Narnia from you. You have been writing it down for years. Gather your letters. Open your journals. Tell your story, from beginning to finish. If Carroll could write such nonsense about wandering between worlds as the Alice stories, you could do far better, my dear. Far better. People need Aslan, and he has been ever such a part of your story.
There is ever so much to write. She feels as if there are too many years crammed into twenty-two, and there is so much to say. Lucy finds herself thinking about Narnia at work, about the last of the great wars of the golden age. The Frost Giant campaign in the north. Archenland in the south. Dear, dear Aravis. Her heart longs with an ache like fire for that old, wonderful company, for the honor guard, for Mr. Tumnus in his old age and for her friends who had survived the wars. There is so much to say. During quiet periods in the office, she types her life and hides it in her bag, page by page.
One morning in the autumn, when the air is crisp and cool, Lucy wakes up with a memory of white deer and red leaves, and the end of everything.
London is like a shock, like seeing it for the first time -- noise and smog and dirt and the sound of the traffic, and the bombed out places that were never repaired, all strike her in the face. She can barely look at Edmund, and she can't stand to see Susan. They look pale, like mere shadows of themselves. The thought of Peter, reduced, no longer the Magnificent, makes her sick to her stomach. She is too ill to go to work. It is the first day of the rest of her life.
A strange thing happens when Edmund comes through the door after work. She sees him, and he is her brother, the Just. He takes his jacket off and it looks like when he used to remove his tunic after a long day in the field. He is twenty-five, and as old as a king and a young man in his prime. She greets him with a kiss that is domestic and regal; his arms enfold her in a hug and it feels like the greetings after battle. He is Narnian, and he is English.
And so is she.
Original Prompt that we sent you:
What I want: Queen Lucy the Valiant as a grownup, twice. (Let's pretend the train crash never happened.)
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: Are pictures alright? Feel free to be inspired by them or not.
or http://www.flickr.com/photos/lainabriedis/5667909401/in/photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/margaretdurow/4788925781/in/photostream
What I definitely don't want in my fic: incest