Contains spoilers for The Last Battle.
I: 1947
"Lu. Enough." Susan turns from her frowning reflection to her sister's pleading face. "You should be too old for make-believe."
Lucy bites her lip. "Don't you remember at all?
"I do remember. They were lovely games."
"Oh Susan, all the princes in the world were at your feet, and here you are fretting over boys." Lucy dashes from the room, but not before Susan sees a tear creeping from her eye.
Susan sighs. She’ll try to make it up to Lucy later. For now, she meets her reflection's dark gaze once more. She unravels the curlers from her long, chocolate-colored hair. Rouge and frustration color her cheeks. She lowers her chin and pulls an experimental smile. Hers is a bewitching face.
Later that night, Susan is the most captivating sight in the ballroom--or would be, if it were not so dark and hazy. She can hardly hear the music above the din of laughs and chatter, but she and her lanky partner sway in time anyway. She giggles into his shoulder at some half-heard joke, ignoring the tickle of cigarette smoke in her throat.
With his thumb against her cheek, he tilts her face upwards. He searches her expression for something, but he doesn't seem to know what. Susan raises an eyebrow coquettishly. She stands on her toes and leans into him.
The kiss is eager. A limp tongue slides clumsily into her mouth. Her cheeks ignite as a tenuous memory rears. A glade by the ocean, a door to nowhere--a prince with tousled gold hair and sea-green eyes--a kiss both fierce and decorous.
She pulls away and blinks. Before the boy can escape with mumbled apologies, she collects herself and tucks away the dream. With a smile, she wraps his arm around her waist. Together they stumble out into the night.
II: 1949
Susan settles on a sleek, backless evening gown. It hugs her figure alluringly while hinting at her expectations; it is a shade of silver-grey so pale that it is nearly white. She twists and tilts before the full-length mirror, hunting for imperfection. She finds none, except for a flustered face.
Satisfied but exhausted, she turns her back on the faint-hearted beauty. She presses her face against the soft fabrics hanging in her wardrobe. As usual, her stomach flutters at the thought of Roger. A tall, well-off, roguishly dashing young businessman. He had been an easy catch for her, but an excellent one. Now it is just a matter of playing out her role until he makes the obvious decision. The inevitability delights and unnerves her.
She shuts her eyes, and lets herself unwind into a daydream, as she often does these days. The sluggish summer days and being alone in the house—today her siblings and parents have gone to the train station--has loosened her imagination; it is the only way she can remain the poised, collected young woman that Roger loves. Thoughts of wintertime fight the sweltering heat. She thinks of snow crunching under her high-heeled shoes and feels the prickle of frosty pine branches against her arms. Icy wind whips back her hair and she dashes up the castle steps--
The telephone's ring sweeps her back to reality, but she is unwilling to relinquish the fantasy so soon. Susan leaves with her chin uplifted, her bare back straight, and her eyes dreamily unfocused. She descends the stairs slowly, with one hand floating along the banister. The telephone continues its petulant trilling. Too soon, she reaches the bottom.
"Susan Pevensie," she sighs into the mouthpiece. "No."
Her mouth dries, and blood hammers in her ears. Centuries pass. No longer listening, she sinks to the ground as the silver dress pools around her.
A train crash. Peter, Edmund, and Lucy. Mother and Father. Dead.
Her hands fly to her left hip, whether in pain or in search of the horn that had once been there, she never knows.
III: 1960
One by one, they had all left her.
First her siblings and parents, obscenely abrupt. After whispering condolences, her friends had wandered off to have families of their own, while she tried and failed four times to give birth to a live baby. And now, in his own way, Roger is leaving her too. He is still alive, and he still comes back to her at the end the day--eventually. The tacit agreement is that she will ask him no questions and he will cause her no pain.
At least she has her growing belly to keep her company.
She is cautiously optimistic about this fifth--and last, she hopes--pregnancy. It has survived longer than any of the previous ones. Long enough that she dares to contemplate names.
A boy would be Roger, she knew. She also knew that a girl would not be Susan. Nor would a girl be Lucy, as she made clear after Roger's hesitant suggestion. She was partial to the name Elizabeth--a safe, solid name that had been borne by an elusive great-grandmother of hers. Familial, but not close enough to reopen wounds.
Drifting from room to room like a restless ghost, Susan beings to think that she had left before any of them.
IV: 1968
"Why can't he do anything?"
"He's sleeping, Lizzie."
Susan and her daughter stare down at the lion on the rock. Their vantage point is the walkway atop the concrete wall surrounding his enclosure.
"Is he always sleeping?"
"I'd imagine not! He eats and plays and does other things--just like we do."
"He could sleep some other time, then."
"You wouldn't like it if someone made you walk around when you wanted to sleep.”
“But he’s an animal.” Lizzie sighs impatiently, concluding the conversation.
Susan glances sideways. Lizzie is small, even for her age, but she has grown an assertiveness that Susan never had.
Just a few days after the girl was born, Susan realized that the name had been a mistake. No one seemed inclined to say "Elizabeth". Still reeling with pain and drugs, Susan had begun calling her "Lizzie". The nickname stuck, even when she tried to replace it. Lizzie, Lizzie, Lucy. It was all too close, and Susan could never stop comparing the living girl to the dead one.
“Do you want to hear a story about a lion?” she asks her daughter after a moment.
Lizzie looks up. In her red coat, pink beret, and pink mittens, she looks softer than usual, but her expression is ambivalent.
“Okay.”
Susan kneels so that their eyes are level. “There was once a lion who watched over the whole world, but an evil witch crept into his kingdom and made winter last a hundred years...” Her voice trails off. She chides herself for making it sound so ridiculous. But then, she had spent years convincing herself that it was, and she had no reason to start believing otherwise.
"Hmm." Lizzie waits for a few seconds, and then shuffles towards the next exhibit.
Susan bites her lip and gets to her feet stiffly. She has an overwhelming urge to bawl in a manner that a forty-one-year-old woman would reserve for absolute privacy.
The lion has not moved. She wills him to do something--to stand, to look around, to twitch a paw--to show that he's still alive, however reluctantly.
He refuses to comply.
"Something on your mind, love?"
Susan looks up. Roger is beaming down at her. Her heart lifts at the sight of his face; he is still a handsome man, despite the laugh-lines and thinning hair. His sapphire eyes are bright against the overcast sky.
"Nothing at all." Susan gives him a placid smile. "We should catch up with Lizzie."
Wordlessly, he squeezes her waist. He bends down and kisses her cheekbone, the bristly moustache prickling her eyelid.
She sighs. This is, after all, her savior. The one who had captivated her so completely that she had refused to join her family at the train station. When had a lion ever saved a life?
V: 1989
Susan holds the dog in a headlock against her chest. She coos wordlessly as Dr. Williams--a tall young woman with square glasses--presses a needle to the mastiff's thick thigh. He lets out a snarl tinged with an infantile whine.
"Hush." She kneads the folds of skin on his neck, never relaxing her grip on his squirming body.
Dr. Williams withdraws the needle, and Susan holds the dog's face up.
"See? You survived." She drops a bone-shaped cookie into his jaws, which snap with more than the requisite amount of enthusiasm.
"Have a good day." She grins at the dog's wide-eyed owner-- a bald, corpulent fellow who had backed into a corner of the small room.
She wipes a smudge of slobber as she goes to the next patient. Part of her still cries out in horror at such a defacement of clothing, but it is the same part that had cried out at her outfit in the first place--a set of purple scrubs. Her sturdier frame and serviceably bobbed white hair had affronted it as well.
When she leaves the one-story brick building at the end of the day, she realizes with satisfaction that, most of all, it loathes the unglamorous career of a veterinary assistant.
It is a career that had begun four year earlier, as she left Roger's funeral. With no one left to care for--Lizzie had already left home--she had known that another stage of life was beginning. The grief had not been as searing as when her siblings died--she still feels guilty over this--but the certainty had been equal.
Life had given her a respite, but the habits of a lifetime had not. Whether she had been playing mother to Edmund and Lucy, raising Lizzie, or watching over Roger in his last months, she had always needed to take of someone.
She had decided that she would try taking care of many little someones.
It was then that the memories had burst to life.
She finds that she can now recall every detail about Reepicheep; the shrillness of his voice, the flourish of his sword, the twirl of his tail. She dreams of the warm, snug solace of Beaver's Dam, filled with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver's chattering. Goosebumps rise on her arms at the thought of the lion's face, and the grief and love and mystery that it held.
No game could have left such radiance.
She has found the courage to visit the graves more often. She does not think of their bodies lying burnt and broken under the shrubs she has planted; she thinks of the names on the headstones being carried by the most magnificent, just, valiant people that any world had ever seen.
VI: 2005
"This latest string of attacks have left eighteen dead and thirty wounded..."
Once again, the world is clawing itself open and gorging on its own entrails. Susan remembers a previous war, and the days in Professor Kirke’s house during the bombing raids.
If only everyone could escape so easily.
"Mum, how can you still use that thing? I have to get you a plasma TV someday."
"What?"
"So much brighter and crisper."
Susan looks back to the grainy screen to hide her incredulity. Who would want brighter, crisper images of this?
Lizzie putters around Susan's kitchen, scrubbing dishes and stowing packages into the refrigerator. She is a small, lithe woman with quick movements. The light catches on her close-cropped chestnut hair.
Their ritual Sunday dinner is almost at an end. Susan already plots what she'll do next weekend to show her daughter that there still are some things that she can do better.
She flips off the TV as Lizzie prepares to leave.
"I'll call you later," Lizzie announces briskly as she stuffs her arms into a gray coat.
"Thanks." Susan extends her arms in the same way she has for forty-five years. Lizzie darts in briefly, and then is out the door. From a window, Susan watches the sleek white car pull away.
She returns to the kitchen, intending to clean up, but as usual, Lizzie has been inhumanly tidy. The spotless order in which she leaves Susan's kitchen almost atones for the quality of her cooking. Today's spice-laden zucchini was, however, irredeemable. Susan chugs a glass of water, attempting to extinguish the heartburn radiating through her ribcage. She pounds her chest when it only burns hotter.
On unsteady feet, she makes her way back to the door, thirsty for fresh air. After a moment's relief, the burn swells to a crushing pain. She gasps for breath. She turns again, this time intending to reach her telephone, but she trips and topples into a flowerbed. Agony explodes through her arm. Rose thorns jab her skin.
A weight against her thigh reminds her of Lizzie's prudent forethought. With her good hand, she fumbles in the pocket of her jeans and finds the sleek, silver cell phone. As she flips it open and her fingers stumble across the keys--she never had mastered speed dial--she decides that this is really not a bad position to die in. Lying under a bruised crimson sky, surrounded by sweet-smelling roses, and about to answer the question that had plagued her for years. The blackness pulls her under.
The odd, clinical smells still pester her nose. To distract herself, she stares at the thin green line and the feeble peaks of her heartbeat, each one accompanied by a beep. Half-hypnotized by the cardiogram, she doesn't notice her visitor until he says her name.
Her head rolls on the lumpy pillow. A doctor is watching her from the doorway; a different one from the timid little man who had carefully avoided telling her why she's connected to all these machines. This one is tall and broad-shouldered; he looks out of place in the small white cube of a room. His face is handsome, with an aquiline nose and high forehead. Unruly auburn hair curls over his head; it reminds her of Lucy.
"How are you?" He sounds more conversational than diagnostic.
She sighs. "I've been better."
Smiling, he pulls a chair close to her bedside. He sits down, elbows on knees and chin on knuckles. His expression is kind, but his dark eyes are probing. "I don't doubt that you have."
"I've also been worse," she informs him irrationally. "When you've been alive this long, it's hard to avoid."
He laughs softly. "Long lives are fascinating things. You must learn so much."
She raises a withered eyebrow at him. "Yes, but by the time I realized it, I was losing my memory."
"I'm sure you remember the important things." He picks a clipboard off her bedside table and flips through it.
She watches him for a moment. He's focused and businesslike, riding on the crest of youth and promise--and she knew where that wave had taken her, and the things it had left behind.
"Yes," she says abruptly. "Around the time that I could no longer find my car keys, I began to remember things that I'd forgotten before I was fifteen. Those were the important ones."
"I'll remember that," he chuckles.
When he takes her good hand and holds it between both of his, she feels his warmth flood her arm and chest. Unable to hold her eyes open any longer, they flutter shut. She sighs. His thumb strokes her wrist.
Half-asleep, she begins to wish she'd met more people like this in her long life. Why hadn't any of her young men been so kind? The dark years might have been different.
"It's time we moved you," he says, far too soon.
"Moved?"
"Just down the hall." He returns her hand.
She prepares for the gurney to be wheeled away, but he surprises her. In one swift motion, he slides an arm under her back and the other behind her knees. He gently pulls her into a sitting position.
"But you have to promise me one thing." Those serious eyes, now so close to her own, are full of such gravity that she feels a thrill of fear. But she hadn't lived seventy-seven years to be intimidated by a boy young enough to be her grandson.
"If I live, I'd promise you my firstborn, but I'm not sure she'd approve."
His mouth twitches, but he hardly looks less severe. "Don't look back."
Before she can say a word, she's up in the air, cradled against his chest. In a single bound they're through the door, and in another they nearly collide with a harassed-looking nurse who ignores them completely. He's careening through the hall now, barely avoiding the mill of people in white coats and green scrubs and the occasional wobbling gurney. They all seem utterly unconcerned.
"Oh!" Susan gasps as he slings her over his shoulder. He is becoming entirely too cavalier. She catches a glimpse of sunlight pouring through a door that had certainly not been there a moment earlier. She is vaguely aware of a hubbub in her former room, but it is not loud enough to drown out the sound of an uninterrupted beep.
VII: Once and always.
"Oh!" she cries again as the breath is knocked out of her. She is splayed across a curved, warm surface covered in tawny fur. Something thick and dark hangs over her eyes. She tries to push it aside, and is surprised to feel a tug on her scalp.
It had been white for so long.
As if guided by some long-forgotten instinct, her arms reach to the side until they find the thick, rough texture of a lion's mane. She clings to it and pulls herself upright as the powerful muscles bunch under her. Aslan leaps forward.
"It's so bright!" Her eyes begin to stream as they are flooded with light and color.
"So think all who have lived in shadows," says the voice that she had loved and missed all her life without realizing it.
She buries her face in his mane and takes a deep breath. His warmth fills her chest again. The smells of trees and rain and wood smoke replace the strange scents of the hospital. Her eyes still stream.
She lifts her head. She can see for miles. Craggy mountains, glassy lakes, whimsical clouds flitting across the sky. Five-petaled scarlet flowers. Enormous bees. A figure sprinting towards them.
"Caspian?" she whispers.
In answer, Aslan swerves and pounces on the young man. The three of them tumble together over the cushiony grass. She grabs Caspian's green velvet sleeve.
"It's you," she says simply.
In answer, he leans forward on his elbows and gives her the kiss she remembers so well.
"Come." Aslan sounds as if he's barely hiding a laugh. "There are others who would see you."
She springs onto his back. She feels younger and stronger than she ever has before. Caspian is behind her, one arm loosely wound around her waist.
They don't speak.
Between two hills ahead of them is a pergola whose stones are almost invisible under white-blossomed vines. Three figures sit on thrones under its shade; a fourth throne is empty.
In her ecstasy, Susan jumps off the lion and tumbles across the grass once more. The lion reaches the pergola while she is still scrambling to her feet, but a familiar pair of arms help her up.
She sobs into Peter's shoulder. He nudges her chin upwards; for a moment she is breathless at the sight of the long, noble face moving and smiling once more.
Edmund pries her away from Peter with a half-smug grin. He embraces her the way she had embraced him after his own return.
Lucy is last, eyes shining with eagerness but hands folded patiently. As Susan falls onto her little sister and clutches her tightly, she thinks she has never seen anyone so beautiful. She grapples for an apology that could express how much she regrets the way she behaved, but words crumble away, meaningless. If anyone understands, it is Lucy.
Aslan looks on, humming the softest of purrs.
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