The Hollow Girl
For weeks after the whole experience, they are all very quiet. It is still raining down heavily, but the thunder and lightning doesn't startle them like it used to. Edmund insists upon having the radio on at all times, listening to war broadcasts. He thinks about the war as much as possible, tries to cringe at loud booms in the storm, but he's lost his fear of war in all those years that he's been away. He's not afraid of bombers and death. Life isn't as scary, he finds, when one has already lived through a lot of it.
Peter loses interest in keeping the lot of them together with organized games. For once, in fact, he ignores them almost completely, preferring his charcoals and pencils. None of the children—if they still are that—can bear to look at the wardrobe, with the exception of Lucy, who develops a habit of shutting herself in it, buried in the furs and pressed tightly against the solid back. Much to her continual dismay, it remains firm and unrelenting. Still, every spare second she has, she goes back to it. She can't seem to give up that hope.
Susan acts considerably stranger than the rest. While they have all become listless and subdued, she seems almost vacant, haunted. Her once-healthy appetite seems to have evaporated, and any trace of her charming smile has vanished. Lucy brushes her lovely golden hair every night, a habit she picked up from—well, just a habit she picked up—and she has the sinking feeling every time she runs her fingers through her sister's (once revered) golden locks, that if she didn't persist with this simple maintenance, then there would be none at all.
Peter, one day, puts stained black fingertips on the back of Susan's hand as it rests on a windowsill. He watches carefully, maybe for the first time in days, his sister as she gazes out at the Professor's lush green yard, emerald from the droughts of rain. It reminds him a little too harshly of the camp at Cair Paraval, but he hardens his resolve. "Susan," he says in a growl so low and commanding that she is almost whisked back right away. Frustrated with her own emotional reaction, she jerks her hand back and looks more fixedly beyond the thick windowpane.
"Susan," he repeats softly, trying as rationally and quickly as he can to understand what makes her situation so much different from his. "You know, we all…" He has to clear his throat her, stand up straighter. He doesn't even notice his fists clenching. "We all miss…Narnia." There, he's said it. Edmund across the room turns the radio up higher and Lucy drops her dolls.
Susan doesn't move. Peter takes this as, at the very least, an allowance to continue and mutters, desperately trying to explain to her that she should open up to them, realize they are all hurting. "We are all upset, you know. But we're trying. Sometimes things like this, they just…I don't know what to tell you! I'll tell you we were all there and we all know how horrible this feeling is, so please, please try to—Susan!"
And somewhere along the way of his stuttered speech—so unlike any of the others, which were so poised and regal, that she's heard from him recently (or is it in the past, for it happened prior to now? or the future, for they were older?)—Susan just tunes him out. She closes her eyes and tries to remember someone else's voice. A man's baritone, sweet and smooth. She remembers someone she knows she will never find again, never see again, and she remembers loving him, and she remembers and remembers and wishes she could forget, because this hole is too big and too old for her to understand. She thinks bitterly, if only Peter had found someone he wanted to make his High Queen, as she herself had found someone she so, so wished to make her own King.
An idea occurs to her that almost makes her stop breathing. And it is so greatly, terribly devastating that it embeds itself in her mind, and she knows, deep down with a greater sense of loss than ever before, that she will never be able to remove it. If he isn't real, if doesn't exist, her man with the caramel voice, then did any of it? It makes her eyes burn and her head pound and she decides without any hesitation that she hates imaginary games. They make everything hurt. They make her heart ache.
She doesn't realize, that when she finally looks at her brother in the eyes with a brilliant, gorgeous smile, and says quietly "I'm perfectly fine", how much it breaks the hearts of her siblings. Peter withdraws a step and Edmund shakes his head slowly. Lucy gives her older sister (once so revered) a distressed look before walking out of the room, heading for the wardrobe, where for the first time tears will hit the silky coats.
After the abrupt transformation, which is so blinding and shocking that it creates a rift almost immediately, they all take a distorted sense of solace in the fact that Susan finds it hard still, to swallow food. They can read between the lines when she tries to play it off with her brilliant, gorgeous (tight) smile and tell them that she's watching her figure.
Except a day comes, when they find there isn't anything between the lines to be read anymore.
A/N: Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this little repost of mine. I especially hope to have pleased any of my readership of The Quieter Kingdom! As when I originally posted this piece, I find my ending to be lacking, but I haven't found the right way to tweak it. Maybe you'll have some ideas for me! Please review with any comments or suggestions.
The title is a small homage to "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot.