OMG! Narnia fic!
So...spoilers for nearly every book but especially, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle. Dialogue shamelessly stolen from The Last Battle. Probably PG. Shades of Peter/Susan, if you squint. Weird, trippy writing. And (as always), I don't own.
i. “Oh Susan, she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”
After the telegrams have been sent and the bodies have been identified, Susan finds herself at Aunt Alberta’s and Uncle Harold’s.
They’re childless now. She’s an orphan.
The three of them have never had much to say to one another, and now they have only death in common.
Aunt Alberta’s cleared out the back bedroom for Susan, and Susan spent her first night in Cambridge glaring at the oil of the Dawntreader.
Oh yes, she knows the ship’s name.
Susan doesn’t bother with Aunt Alberta’s permission, she just takes down the picture and slides it under the bureau and hopes that one day soon she can sneak it out of the house and burn it. Watch the paint ooze back into liquid form, watch the frame grow black, and watch the whole of it go up in flames. She can bear the ship itself. She just can’t bear the image of him on the sail.
Susan puts up a large picture of Peter - the last one ever taken of him - on the oil’s old hook. Peter looks strangely adult in the picture. He’s in his smart new RAF uniform, the one he never actually got to wear. Besides in the picture, of course. His mother was so proud of her little boy joining up to defend the world against the evils of communism that she had to commemorate it with full-length, professional photograph.
In the second drawer of Susan’s bureau she has - hidden behind practical slacks and sweaters - what old-fashioned types might refer to as “ a set,” still wrapped in its tissue paper from Harrod’s.
She bought it the same day Peter had had his picture taken.
It’s white lace, not the garish red her then-best friend Elinor had wanted her to buy. Susan had chosen the white instead, and Elinor had laughed and said Susan would always be an innocent, despite her desperate wish to be a tart.
Susan had bristled and vowed to wear the set (white or not it was still risqué, and Elinor knew it) the first chance she got, and the devil take the consequences.
“Saint Peter,” Susan says one night to the picture with a brittle laugh, smoking cheap cigarettes and sitting cross-legged on the bed where her dead sister slept for the span of a summer holiday. “Always trying so god-damn hard.”
ii. “Grown-up, indeed! I wish she would grow up.”
Years pass, as they often do, and she wakes up one morning to find herself thirty, with a job at the local school and a small circle of friends that come round for tea.
She was a pretty girl once - everyone made much of her looks and nothing of her brains. And she had been (would’ve been, might’ve been) a beautiful woman.
After all (if you believe such fairy-stories), there was Queen Susan the Gentle with her black, black hair that swept the floor and those big blue eyes.
Susan Pevensie is a drab spinster, her hair fading away to white. She wears shapeless suits with dark hose, and the girls she teaches gossip about her behind her back.
“Mother says she lost her family at eighteen,” one says early in the term. “Her mother, father, and all her brothers and sisters. Cousin, too.”
And the rest make fake little gasps, and Susan wonders why the little beasts don’t learn some new gossip.
Of course, the children are positively kind with their ignorance when compared to Susan’s fellow teachers with their patronizing suggestions. Of course Susan ought to start dyeing her hair, there’s no shame in it. And wasn’t Susan just dying (ever so sorry, dear, forgive that expression!) to meet Mrs. Turner’s young brother? He was a solid, dependable man, and Susan’s health was rather frail, wasn’t it? And shouldn’t Susan put some rouge on her cheeks or at least buy a new skirt?
Uncle Harold’s been lying next to the rest of the Pevensies these past few years, and Aunt Alberta’s had to go into a home. Her memory began to fail, and Susan eventually realized she couldn’t take one more minute of Aunt Alberta asking when Eustace would be home from grammar school.
She lays flowers on Eustace’s grave sometimes, even though she thought him a downright sneak and never had any reason (unlike Edmund and Lucy) to change her opinion.
Susan never puts flowers on her siblings’ graves. She can barely stand to look at them. But, but sometimes she looks at the grey stones and then touches her hair and thinks of the sameness of colour.
Peter Pevensie. Beloved Brother.
“I wish she were prettier,” says another of her students - well outside her hearing, of course. “Then she’d be a true tragic heroine.”
iii. “My sister Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia.”
She dreams of the wind in her hair and skirts swirling round her feet. She dreams of Edmund and Lucy just around the corner, laughing as they did that summer the dryads gifted Cair Paravel with a garden maze.
Susan wakes with tears on her cheeks and terror in her heart.
She picks the chapel because it has lions in the stained glass windows. And she doesn’t want to admit she’s scared, so she walks in, when she’d rather run and face a hundred thousand copies of that damn Dawntreader picture. She isn’t quite sure who she’s praying to. Not him, of course, never to him. (Or is she?)
During the Blitz, Susan’s mother had stopped taking them to church, and the family had never really returned to it. And so, Susan Pevensie knows nothing about the Church of England, nothing of the forms, not even the Lord’s Prayer.
(But Queen Susan the Gentle was - among other things - a priestess of Aslan, and she knew all the dances, all the songs and chants, the correct order of the Stations of the Lion, and what foods ought to be served for Manemas.)
It’s this time - between sleeping and full awakening, here in the quiet of a liminal space, that Susan can’t quite bring herself to ignore the call of Narnia in her blood. She isn’t as bad as she was when she was a teen, when she took great delight in disbelieving Narnia. And, of course, this had made Lucy cry and Edmund follow her around the house with that heavy glare.
Peter had nodded and smiled and told her it was her right to believe or disbelieve as she saw fit. And even she couldn’t keep herself from thinking him kingly when he did it.
Now, now, she’s through with being spiteful. Through with fits and sulks. Now, she knows true anger, and the injustices she used to harbour in her teenage breast are too stupid to be mentioned. And still, still, she can’t make herself believe because how could Aslan - how could Aslan - if he well and truly existed, do this?
(And then, of course, the deepest part of herself - the Daughter of Eve that she always was and always will be - whispers an answer, and Susan shudders.)
coda >>
i. “Oh Susan, she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”
After the telegrams have been sent and the bodies have been identified, Susan finds herself at Aunt Alberta’s and Uncle Harold’s.
They’re childless now. She’s an orphan.
The three of them have never had much to say to one another, and now they have only death in common.
Aunt Alberta’s cleared out the back bedroom for Susan, and Susan spent her first night in Cambridge glaring at the oil of the Dawntreader.
Oh yes, she knows the ship’s name.
Susan doesn’t bother with Aunt Alberta’s permission, she just takes down the picture and slides it under the bureau and hopes that one day soon she can sneak it out of the house and burn it. Watch the paint ooze back into liquid form, watch the frame grow black, and watch the whole of it go up in flames. She can bear the ship itself. She just can’t bear the image of him on the sail.
Susan puts up a large picture of Peter - the last one ever taken of him - on the oil’s old hook. Peter looks strangely adult in the picture. He’s in his smart new RAF uniform, the one he never actually got to wear. Besides in the picture, of course. His mother was so proud of her little boy joining up to defend the world against the evils of communism that she had to commemorate it with full-length, professional photograph.
In the second drawer of Susan’s bureau she has - hidden behind practical slacks and sweaters - what old-fashioned types might refer to as “ a set,” still wrapped in its tissue paper from Harrod’s.
She bought it the same day Peter had had his picture taken.
It’s white lace, not the garish red her then-best friend Elinor had wanted her to buy. Susan had chosen the white instead, and Elinor had laughed and said Susan would always be an innocent, despite her desperate wish to be a tart.
Susan had bristled and vowed to wear the set (white or not it was still risqué, and Elinor knew it) the first chance she got, and the devil take the consequences.
“Saint Peter,” Susan says one night to the picture with a brittle laugh, smoking cheap cigarettes and sitting cross-legged on the bed where her dead sister slept for the span of a summer holiday. “Always trying so god-damn hard.”
ii. “Grown-up, indeed! I wish she would grow up.”
Years pass, as they often do, and she wakes up one morning to find herself thirty, with a job at the local school and a small circle of friends that come round for tea.
She was a pretty girl once - everyone made much of her looks and nothing of her brains. And she had been (would’ve been, might’ve been) a beautiful woman.
After all (if you believe such fairy-stories), there was Queen Susan the Gentle with her black, black hair that swept the floor and those big blue eyes.
Susan Pevensie is a drab spinster, her hair fading away to white. She wears shapeless suits with dark hose, and the girls she teaches gossip about her behind her back.
“Mother says she lost her family at eighteen,” one says early in the term. “Her mother, father, and all her brothers and sisters. Cousin, too.”
And the rest make fake little gasps, and Susan wonders why the little beasts don’t learn some new gossip.
Of course, the children are positively kind with their ignorance when compared to Susan’s fellow teachers with their patronizing suggestions. Of course Susan ought to start dyeing her hair, there’s no shame in it. And wasn’t Susan just dying (ever so sorry, dear, forgive that expression!) to meet Mrs. Turner’s young brother? He was a solid, dependable man, and Susan’s health was rather frail, wasn’t it? And shouldn’t Susan put some rouge on her cheeks or at least buy a new skirt?
Uncle Harold’s been lying next to the rest of the Pevensies these past few years, and Aunt Alberta’s had to go into a home. Her memory began to fail, and Susan eventually realized she couldn’t take one more minute of Aunt Alberta asking when Eustace would be home from grammar school.
She lays flowers on Eustace’s grave sometimes, even though she thought him a downright sneak and never had any reason (unlike Edmund and Lucy) to change her opinion.
Susan never puts flowers on her siblings’ graves. She can barely stand to look at them. But, but sometimes she looks at the grey stones and then touches her hair and thinks of the sameness of colour.
Peter Pevensie. Beloved Brother.
“I wish she were prettier,” says another of her students - well outside her hearing, of course. “Then she’d be a true tragic heroine.”
iii. “My sister Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia.”
She dreams of the wind in her hair and skirts swirling round her feet. She dreams of Edmund and Lucy just around the corner, laughing as they did that summer the dryads gifted Cair Paravel with a garden maze.
Susan wakes with tears on her cheeks and terror in her heart.
She picks the chapel because it has lions in the stained glass windows. And she doesn’t want to admit she’s scared, so she walks in, when she’d rather run and face a hundred thousand copies of that damn Dawntreader picture. She isn’t quite sure who she’s praying to. Not him, of course, never to him. (Or is she?)
During the Blitz, Susan’s mother had stopped taking them to church, and the family had never really returned to it. And so, Susan Pevensie knows nothing about the Church of England, nothing of the forms, not even the Lord’s Prayer.
(But Queen Susan the Gentle was - among other things - a priestess of Aslan, and she knew all the dances, all the songs and chants, the correct order of the Stations of the Lion, and what foods ought to be served for Manemas.)
It’s this time - between sleeping and full awakening, here in the quiet of a liminal space, that Susan can’t quite bring herself to ignore the call of Narnia in her blood. She isn’t as bad as she was when she was a teen, when she took great delight in disbelieving Narnia. And, of course, this had made Lucy cry and Edmund follow her around the house with that heavy glare.
Peter had nodded and smiled and told her it was her right to believe or disbelieve as she saw fit. And even she couldn’t keep herself from thinking him kingly when he did it.
Now, now, she’s through with being spiteful. Through with fits and sulks. Now, she knows true anger, and the injustices she used to harbour in her teenage breast are too stupid to be mentioned. And still, still, she can’t make herself believe because how could Aslan - how could Aslan - if he well and truly existed, do this?
(And then, of course, the deepest part of herself - the Daughter of Eve that she always was and always will be - whispers an answer, and Susan shudders.)
coda >>