Title: The Dying Winter
Author: Lora Perry
Fandom: C.S. Lewis, the Chronicles of Narnia
Rating: T
Archive: Sure, just ask first
Disclaimer: I don't own, don't sue.
Summary: She was a humpty dumpty. Her heart was breaking. Her heart was broken. And the pieces didn't fit back together again. An inspired look into the heart of Susan, the dethroned queen of Narnia
Author's Note: I know. I know. I'm obsessed with Susan. And her heart breaking into thousands of little pieces and suffering in silence. And as I gazed at Forgotten, Loved, and Forgotten, I couldn't get it out of my head how much more I could have explored the angst. So I put on the credits to Alexander (the one with Colin Farrell), cause it has a really good instrumental piece, and I just wrote. Some of it may seem a little random, but I tried to get inside this girl/woman, and I imagined her thoughts would be scrambled and pained at most.
Note: I know I mentioned Forgotten, Loved and Forgotten, but there is no need to read that before you read this. This mentions (though never by name) a past lover, but if you want more details, it's accessible through my page.
Lastly, I need a beta. Or, at least, someone to throw ideas up against and see what sticks. If you have a good eye for grammar and spelling misusages, that would be even better. Just message me if you have any interest. Be it known that it doesn't always surround Narnia, or even fanfiction.
When Susan returned, I mean really returned to the world, she spent her first night in tears. They flew down her face quicker than the fastest horses in all of Narnia. Her sobs were louder than the roar of the great Lion before battle. She clutched the bed clothes, sobbing hard into a pillow not made of the softest goose feathers, but of rough and ill fitted cotton. Her heart broke over and over again for a world that she would never return to; a world that she would never have the chance to see, or smell or touch again.
She was a humpty dumpty. Her heart was breaking. Her heart was broken. And the pieces didn't fit back together again.
Susan remembers the elegant wears of court; the delicate positioning of rose on lips and high cheekbones to illuminate fair graces and a witty figure on a spring young damsel. Susan tries so hard now, to do the same, to apply the same grace and coordination to a face just now slowly turning into the women that Susan has already been, has already grown to be. Her face is all the pudgy fat of a childhood she has already had, already experienced. Her body is not her, filled with awkward moments and over exertion and deep seated aches in her heart.
Susan will never be queen again. Her dainty figure and lovable smile will no longer woo over couriers from distant lands. She will never have her friends, her ladies-in-waiting to gossip with about the true young love that always blossomed in the spring court sessions. Susan will never laugh with the fauns and the nymphs; she shall never swim with the merpeople. Her bow and arrow are gone, left in a place where the strings will grow fragile, even more fragile than the glass that she set aside for court dinners with dignitaries from the far lands, and the strings, a gift from a nearing monarch will break, like her belief in a world in which she was a peoples' queen and a peoples' mother, daughter, sister and closest confidant.
Susan wants to believe like her sister; wants to see the Narnia that is left in the world, of bombs and death, oh so much death. Dear, naive Lucy, who swears that Aslan, the great lion, the great protector and provider of Narnia, is here too, in this earth of machines and smoke and oh, the bombs; Lucy who still believes that they will all return to Narnia, and rule until the end.
Susan cannot see Aslan. She cannot even remember to breathe some days, finding herself sucking for air, looking foolishly around for Sophia, her favorite of all her ladies-in-waiting. Susan always feels like such a child when it happens, when she finds herself believing once more in that place where Susan was not the Susan that all the girls know of now. Her eyes tear up, as the pain of so much that has been lost to her makes itself known. She scolds herself for believing that she could be a queen. That she could have been a person that people loved. She lets herself believe that it was a thoughtless and meaningless way to pass the harsh and cruel days of war (she does not realize how much she sounds like the Edmund of old, these days).
Susan is a queen in some sense. It is that that comforts her late at night. She holds her place in the school hierarchy, reining above all the petty girls as she pretends to obsess over boys and make-up and the movies. Susan does not understand the movies, for it has been so long. Her heart only yearns for the songs of the trees and the meadows, the swaying beat of the Narnian lullaby that used to lull her, and her siblings to sleep when ruling became stressful and not so carefree.
Susan fears believing; she fears that she will wake up one day, and the ghosts of all those she has left behind will haunt her, like a great error that will not leave the mind. She trembles at the thought of seeing an old lover, a man she has left in the wake of curiosity over a long forgotten memory, of a "spare oom".
Susan cannot go back. Susan cannot forget. And no matter how hard she tries, no matter how many layers of foundation she apply, or how many beau she brings home, it will not leave her. Her heart will continue to break, like those fragile pieces of glass now locked away, never used. Her tears will never stop their races down her face.
Susan is not the queen of nursery rhymes, or lullabies. She is not the queen of lore that has been passed down. She is a broken, fractured reflection of a woman that men would do anything for; they would swim over ocean, through fiery pits.
Susan is not the women; does not have its grace.
Susan is a shattered queen.
A humpty dumpty of Narnia.