Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia is the intellectual property of C. S. Lewis and his estate. No money is being made from this story, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Author's Note: This story was inspired by the 9/8/09 word #122 on the 15_minute_fic livejournal community. It can be read as a sideways approach to the Problem of Susan, though it's really more an attempt to use Susan to highlight one of my own problems with canon. *sigh* One day, I will write a Susan-centric story that deals with nothing more serious than a night out with a new boyfriend. Today is not that day.
This story has been revised and slightly expanded from its livejournal form. Book canon, set post-VDT, pre-LB.
Summary: Aslan is a lion, utterly and undeniably. Susan finds this hard to reconcile with an equally undeniable correspondence that Lucy points out.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Form and Function
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Lucy figured it out first, though once she pointed out the correspondences to her siblings, they felt instantly as if they had known all along in the backs of their minds. And at first, knowing was enough.
For Lucy, it remained enough; she had always trusted Aslan absolutely.
Susan wasn't certain about Peter -- he kept himself to himself, reluctant to spread his private burdens, particularly to his sisters -- but she suspected he had foundered in a morass of doubt several months after Lucy's revelation. He had certainly spent a string of restless nights wandering up and down the stairs in their parents' house before he went off to university. His letters home were brisk and nearly impersonal in their determined cheerfulness, and Susan worried about him.
Shortly before Christmas holidays, Susan asked Edmund if Peter had confessed anything to him man to man, as it were.
"Not directly," Edmund said with a shrug, "but he's easy to read once you get the knack. He's stumbled back into a classic soldier's dilemma. It's tricky to reconcile 'love thy neighbor as thyself,' and 'turn the other cheek' with something as inherently violent as a lion, and with an implicit blessing on certain battles and executions. Peter's beating himself up over the ethics of war again."
Susan frowned. It did seem the sort of thing Peter would agonize over; he always accepted every last scrap of responsibility he legitimately should, and then another double handful as well. But if this were a soldier's dilemma... "Why aren't you beating yourself up alongside him?" she asked.
Edmund favored her with a wry glance. "Who says I'm not?" Susan's frown deepened, and Edmund sighed. "Fine, Su. It's different for me. I'm not the one who never fell; I don't need to be the shining example. I know perfectly well there are dark corners in the world. Sometimes love isn't enough. Sometimes you have to cut the rot out with fire. I made my peace with that long ago." He shrugged again, shoving his hands into his pockets and leaning back against the kitchen doorframe. "Peter's still fighting that truth."
Susan murmured absent-minded thanks and went back to the upstairs room she shared with Lucy, dodging her mother with a hollow smile. She curled into the window seat and stared into the winter rain, trying to sort her thoughts into some rational order.
Put simply, the similarity was impossible to deny once it had been made clear, yet she could not wrap her mind and heart around it. Aslan was Aslan, and Aslan was a lion. He was other -- loving, to be sure, and wise and good and comforting -- but he was a creature born to rend and tear, to eat the flesh of his prey and his enemies, to pierce and cow and terrify them into surrender.
All the love in the world could not make a lion human.
Lucy swore Aslan had appeared to her in the shapes of an albatross and a lamb -- and Edmund verified her tales -- but in the depths of her heart, Susan couldn't believe. A lion was a lion, always and forever.
And his love hurt. It pierced like swords, like claws, like fangs. Velvet paws and a soft mane could never equal the simple warmth of human arms wrapped around her in an embrace, human lips against her cheek, human fingers laced through her own.
Susan couldn't deny the similarities. She couldn't reconcile them either.
It was simplest to shut the whole question away.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
AN: Thanks for reading, and please review! I appreciate all comments, but I'm particularly interested in knowing what parts of the story worked for you, what parts didn't, and why.