Lucy grows up fast in England.
The neighbours all comment on her. How peculiar, a girl her age sprawled out over the swing bench with a book on her lap. They push their daughters to invite her to play tea and dolls, but she rebukes them gently with a tone of command that is just smouldering within her words.
"I do believe I am fine, thank you." Those words become sharp on her tongues of the years, warped senseless until nothing but wrongness fills such a statement.
She's no stranger to the sudden growth, or the pains of no longer being a child. She had grown once, before stumbling through the woods into the realm of what should no longer be her home. She had grown twice, being ripped away to the beck and call of another war, subtly becoming what she had been as a Queen. Rejected twice, and then again. Suddenly she is landlocked, sealed away until Aslan beckons.
She was becoming quiet in the loud wake of Susan. Peter was immersed in paper and ink, trying to script out passages and words and fighting against the restless edge of the world.
It happens when she is nine, and her mother noticed the neglected dolls gathering dust. Susan scolds her as she paints her lips bright, telling her she is a child and shouldn't she behave like on?
She doesn't feel quite as valiant as she once had, more like pawn of a chessboard. Moved back and forth relentlessly, closed off from her world. A world she discovered and believed in so severely, the one she saved and gave tender love to.
Edmund fixes things, in the way he knows to.
He starts by leaving old school books of Peter's beneath her bed where is she is sure to find it. He wraps one of his pocket knives in felt before slipping it beneath her pillow. He isn't much for lying anymore, now that he's just a King without a kingdom, imprisoned within a child.
They get each other rather well now. He doesn't push at her the way Susan does, the way she tries to remake Lucy again and again into a little girl. Peter allows her to just be what she is, doesn't try to provoke the growing rage just quivering within her hollowed out bones.
She is thirteen when she starts drinking coffee. She watches Peter make it again and again, until she dares to make an attempt when the sun barely breaches the sky. She feels restless against dim walls of the house, and feels cornered in the feeble boxed in yard they own. Her first attempt is thick with grinds, leaving her bent over the sink willing herself not to vomit.
The second try does not better.
It's the third attempt that finally improves, and she drinks it black the way her Father does. Sipping it burns bitterly, and she nearly chokes on it at first. It's like drinking hatred, she muses as she perches herself carefully on the counter. Her hands clutch the mug, lips quirking.
Suddenly she is numb. The pain she carries no longer is so savage.
She drinks three cups before Peter comes down fresh, his book bag heavy.
He startles slightly, hands drifting to his belt where nothing hangs. He looks at her for a moment before settling. "Morning, Lucy. You make the coffee?"
"Yep." She shrugs, taking a sip. Watches him carefully.
"Don't put too much sugar in that. Mum'll kill you." Peter warns her, pouring himself a mug full with a generous amount of milk. His hands are pale in the morning light, soft with the touch of ink and old pages. Home, they'd be strong and heavy. A scar would cut across the knuckles bitterly, and a smoothed scar resentful from a blade against the tanned wrist from a day spent training. They're gentle here, though. He's not a warrior anymore, nor is he a King.
Lucky smirks almost coldly. "She'd kill you if she knew you use that much milk." The world is settling beyond the lace curtains. Sun is rising, moon is sinking. The city is roused with a quiet contentment, and all she can feel is the steady pounding of heart beats of the world.
He looked at the jug, and back at her. "Why, I'd just say you aided me in this milk thievery."
"Ah, but I took no milk."
He stares at her. Suddenly he's really looking at her. No longer seeing the mesh of one world against the other.
Susan emerges from the hall, eyeing the mug in Lucy's tight hands before hissing her on getting of the counter, Peter you will be late and who on Earth gave Lucy coffee?
Peter continues to stare as Lucy slips down, and suddenly she is gone.
…
It's fifteen when things start to happen. Sara Cron, the girl with the fancy heels and the hemmed dresses offers her a cigarette one day after school. She accepts without even daring to hesitate. Sara even uses the beautiful lighter she nicked from her Uncle to light it up, a dragon carved into the metal.
She uses all of her pocket money to buy the pack from the silly little school girl, and it's the next hour when Sara wanders into a store with a loose group of friends that Lucy moves in and steals the lighter from her purse before anyone can see.
She goes on a bus, riding until she is somewhere she doesn't even understand. The roads have a grime on them, the buildings slant back and forth like they're falling inwards by grieving. Men walk from house to house, necks red against the hot sky. They look like they are crumbling into ash, weak against the awful touch of strength.
She had coughed harshly on the first cigarette. The smoke had settled in her lungs hotly, and she had tasted the trace of death against the smoky embrace. It's an exhilarating taste. The type she only knows from battle, a sword light against her heavy grip. The horse riding smooth against the rough hoards, swaying through the dust and the dying.
She wanders through the streets, feeling the maps of ancient cities engraved upon her lungs.
.
She returns home at three in the morning, confused and lost.
Peter greets her franticly, jostling her as he checks her over the way he used to. She isn't bleeding or bruised, but she looks detached from his stubborn touch, as if she is seeing past the barrier of the worlds that divide them. "Where have you been?" He whispers as he presses his lips to her forehead.
She looks straight at him with suddenly focused eyes.
"I've been searching for a way out."
He finally realizes that all this time she's been mourning the loss of Narnia, and she's been struggling beneath the crushing weight of dismal and this reality. Peter imagines rolling forests encased with magic and beauty; castles perched up on cliffs and oceans of possibilities.
She's been dying here, and he'd never realized.
.
Susan refuses to accept Narnia for what it is. (was)
She pushed at Lucy, grabbing at her wrists and talking her into dresses that were just an inch above appropriate and painting her lips so red they looked bloody. "You should come to the party, Luce." She tells her, looking at her sister as she slowly applies mascara. Lucy looks shadowy behind her, paper thin and translucent.
"I don't think I really belong there."
Susan laughs sharply, spinning around so her skirt flares out dangerously. "Then make yourself belong. Simple."
Lucy mouths those words to herself and tasted the sourness.
.
"Fine."
.
She talks a sip from the bottle of beer in her hand and smiles thinly at the boy standing in front of her. He's smart looking with his dark eyes and smooth words but he's poisonous. The way his hand innocently takes her hand but slowly takes her by the waist and suddenly he's trying to engulf her and that for some reason makes her imagine Caspian and thrones and God know she deserves more than a shady party in a sketchy apartment.
She draws back quietly. "I think I should be going now."
"We're just having fun though," he smiled at her with an eager smile. "Anyways, your sister is still having fun."
Turning, she saw that he was right. Susan was pressed against a wall with her fingers knotted in some boy's hair. Her tights had a slight rip in the thigh and her older sister was looking like a hurricane plastered against the cheap wallpaper.
"Good for her." She informs him before turning and slipping free of his grasp. Lucy disappeared into the throng of moving bodies feeling larger than giants.
Her heart made the sound rock did when it broke in half, and somewhere from within she heard a lion roar.
"King and lion heart." She smiles reassuringly to herself.
.
Edmund meets Lucy a block from the train station looking worn. His eyes are rimmed with insomnia and he looks like he is ready.
"You know, don't you?" He whispers as she slips her hand into his and squeezes it tight.
"Not really. But I suspect that it's time."
He shivered into the muggy summer, feeling so dead amongst the pulse of the living. "We've been here too long. It's sickening to be a child again and again."
Lucy smiled at him sadly. "Susan won't be coming."
His heart clenches. "But she's already at the station, waiting for us."
Lucy remembers the ripped tights and the unbuttoned blouse, the smudged crimson lipstick. How fierce her words were; denial and painful.
"She's there, but she's shut the gates on herself."
"Peter?"
"Once a king, always a king."
.
The train began to blur.
.