She Had Loved Him
She wasn't always right, not like people seemed to think. She always said that she was his dark half. But that wasn't true, not really; he was as dark as she, in ways she did not notice. In fact, it was he who had pushed her into their relationship in the first place, he who had taken the initiative to forget whatever taboos society placed on them and just love because they loved each other.
She thought, of course, that she didn't love him like that, that it was just a thing for lust's sake. But he had seen the way she looked at him when they were lying next to each other in bed, both spent and exhausted after lovemaking, when she thought that he was asleep.
No, there was very little she was wrong about, but on those two counts she was as mistaken as she could be. She gained darkness from he as surely as he from her, and, try as she might to deny it, she loved him in all the same ways he loved her, all lustful cravings aside.
They had had many years together the first time the Pevensie children entered Narnia and reigned for many, many years in what would later be known as the Golden Age. Time passes differently in Narnia, they always knew. They spent hundreds of years together, slowly aging, before the Pevensies had to return to England. It was a shock for both of them to experience such an abrupt age difference in the midst of what was a passionate, smoldering relationship- everything changed then, the depth of the feelings they'd had hardly capable within an adolescent body. It was difficult for him to find a way to grasp just what sort of love he had fallen into while a King in Narnia.
But it was, in the end, he who tried to rekindle the slowly dying embers once he had left to boarding school with his brother, checking all the closets for ways he could get back to Narnia and meet with her. But, alas, the closets were just closets.
There had been a time she had denied the existence of such a relationship at all, reviled at the thought that such a tabooed commingling could take place. She denied, at that time, much of the truths she had once accepted about Narnia, the place that was home to her.
That was the last time he managed to meet with her in private to talk about such a thing- it was always awkward to even think about in England, though the shadow of desire never really left the back of his mind. After all, Aslan had been right; the elder two Pevensie children would not enter Narnia again until the end of all things.
And now, it was the end of all things. He understood now, a little, what she had been doing when she had denied the relationship between the two of them. But it still was heartbreaking that such a denial had occurred, for that was what separated them now. He would go on to the Narnia that lies beyond; and she would not. Aslan would not allow her. She had twisted her once dearly-held beliefs about Narnia, and about what they had once had. She had denied him, and so denied all her belief in what Narnia was supposed to be, refusing to believe in Aslan's vision of the Narnia that lies beyond. She denied him, and so denied what made up the emotional part of herself.
She always had been wrong about that, after all; he was as dark as she. And now that she was denying that, she found it difficult to see properly, like the contrast had been removed from her vision. She couldn't taste. What good is the sweet when there is no musky, bitterness with which to compare it? Saccharin delights only go so far before they seem too sweet, lacking the sharper edge he had given to the hedonist in her. They were torn from each other.
The other Pevensie children, at least those that had gone with him to the Narnia beyond, did not quite understand the depth of his loss. They couldn't fathom on what level their eldest brother missed Susan, only that it was a dark longing that they did not want to look at too closely. If they had asked, Peter would only have said that, no matter what people thought, Susan wasn't always right. She had loved him.