A/N: This is 100% angst. I'm sorry.
Twenty-three, the newspapers say, and it is so much crueler when the twenty-three are named.
Of course, there are only five (to Susan) that matter.
This, Susan thinks, is the most foolish thing about heroism: it is so rarely practical. They didn't all need to take the train to meet Peter and Edmund; Lucy could have stayed here, could have watered her plants and finished her knitting.
(She is standing in the doorway of Lucy's room.)
Flats must be cleared out; houses emptied. She has started here, at the family house, as if there is anything else but an ending. Her brothers have flats in London and Oxford. Susan will travel later; for now she was only trying to come back home.
Susan has known loneliness. Susan knew war in two lives, and found that one was enough to remember. Susan knows fear.
She would curse Aslan from every rooftop in London if she still believed he was real.
Lucy has bookmarks folded into three different novels. There is a scarf of Susan's in Lucy's vanity drawer; Susan had thought it lost.
Susan had thought that this would be the simplest place to start.
Unfinished letters on the kneehole desk. Three, with Susan's name at the top, all criss-crossed with corrections in Lucy's still-childlike hand.
Lucy is everywhere; the bright curtains, the framed print of kittens, the incongruous, enormous painting of a ship.
Lucy is past tense.
Lucy was.
.
The house belongs to her now. She packs up all of Lucy's things, as though she cannot bear to leave the room in any state that looks like waiting, but she leaves all the rest of the furniture alone.
What, after all, did she think she was doing? It is only a house.
Her friends call and send telegrams, the neighbors visit and Susan sends them away with food from the icebox and pantry, which is all the wrong way round. But she doesn't want their covered dishes.
I don't live here, she says, over and over again. And Lucy used to say that, Lucy used to cry over England, and only smile when spring had turned the fields Narnian green.
There is only here, Susan wanted to say, the first day back, because it hurt so much, and in later years she did say that. There is only here.
She goes to Oxford. It seems simplest.
.
In a way, it is. Edmund's flat is all boxes of clothes, suit jackets draped over the few hard-back chairs, books upon books upon books. There is a bundle of letters in a girl's fine script, wrapped in a girl's hair-ribbon. Quiet Edmund, dark-eyed and steady, always with his heart's secrets.
The girl, Susan thinks, almost cruelly, can find out from the papers.
Any greater kindness is too much to ask of the living.
He has an old flat cap on a peg. It is not the one they used as a fish-basket.
Susan crumples it in her hands, smooths it out, takes a breath.
Edmund would have been a barrister. Edmund might have been a professor. Edmund might have had grave, dark-eyed children with smiles like the summer.
She thinks that she may miss him most, when the time finally comes that she can even think of missing, and she knows that that is selfish but it is also all that she has.
.
Peter was staying with Professor Kirke. Susan hates Professor Kirke so desperately, utterly, that she waits to go to London for quite some time.
He was the one who got them into this mess, who built the silly wardrobe and let them dream their silly dreams. Susan never quite understood him, and then she could not trust him, and now she hates him, now and forever.
Forever is going to be such a long time. A long time without Peter, or her parents, or Edmund who loved her best, or Lucy who loved her as much as she could.
.
Susan's flat is thick with the sickly-sweet scent of flowers. Susan's flat is funereal because it is where she must sleep and eat and be, sharply in relief and unrelieved in living, day in and day out. She takes some weeks from work; she is only a secretary, but they understand. She could take a whole sabbatical, if secretaries took sabbaticals.
It would not make a speck of difference.
Once, she dreamed of being more than a secretary. A writer, but not like the kind of writings scribbled in Lucy's notebooks, the stuff of memories and dreams. Susan wanted to write about the world she knew, this world—she could have been a journalist, perhaps. No doubt she will be. No doubt these things will happen, as lines deepen between her eyes, no doubt it will all pass as time passes now, permanent and pointless.
Susan throws away the flowers.
Once, she thought she would marry. Tell the story of Narnia to her children, bring it back in a way that felt safe and possible.
Once.
It doesn't matter now. It is all past tense; Susan is past tense.
Susan was.