A/N: I've seen a lot of Susan redemption fics in which Susan finds out about her family's death, cries a lot, and then repents. This is not one of those stories.
Black Gloves
It was a bright, cheerful day—obscenely bright. No solemn grey clouds veiled the sun's impudent smile, no cold tear rained from the brilliant blue sky. The universe, Susan decided, simply did not care.
Susan folded her black-gloved hands demurely in front of her, her eyes lowered. The minister was speaking, but his words ran right over her ears, as incomprehensible to her as the buzzing of bees. They did not, could not pierce the heart cold beneath the layers of expensive black fabric, the heart as dead as her family lying in those boxes.
She was aware of Harold and Alberta huddled together beside her; she heard their stifled sobs, saw the despair in their eyes as they stared at the coffin that held their only child. It was a measure of how deeply they had been shaken that they had tamely submitted to the Anglican funeral Susan had planned, though Susan could remember years of snide remarks about her parents' faith. Perhaps now they wondered where their smug intellectual theories had gotten them.
The same place her parents' faith had gotten them, Susan thought bitterly, and the same place her siblings' childish games had gotten them. Perhaps believing in Heaven made it a little easier to watch your loved ones being packed into the ground, but Susan wasn't one to cling to false hope. Her mother, her father, her brothers, Peter and Edmund, her sister, Lucy…oh, Lucy… were dead. They lay in those horrible, horrible boxes, cold, pale, lifeless, and awfully not-themselves. They were dead.
Susan blinked away the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks and spoil her makeup. Displays of emotion were not going to bring her family back. Her tears could no more resurrect them than Lucy had ever cured hurts with a magic bottle. They were gone and she would simply have to cope. It was senseless, pointless, and manifestly unfair, but it was true. They were dead. And it just went to show how utterly ridiculous it was to believe in Heaven, or Narnia, or Aslan, or God.
It was perhaps the bitterest of ironies that the fatal train ride had something to do with it—Narnia. They had not said so, but Susan had known, of course. It was patently obvious in the breathless whispers and enthralled glances they threw about each other, in all the secret calls and meetings which Susan had tolerated with patient amusement. It was screamed in the way the conversations had stopped short when she walked into the room or in the pleading looks Lucy gave her just before…anyway, why else would they all be on the same train: Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, and Jill Pole—even Professor Kirke and Aunt Polly. Narnia was the only thing they had in common.
Narnia was what had led them to their deaths.
The minister's words droned on, punctuated by the crowd's occasional sigh or Alberta's incessant sniffling. Susan hated the sound of it, hated the smell of white roses, and the feel of black satin on her fingers. She just wanted the funeral to be over and done with. The whole thing was positively morbid, really. She hated to think of them—Lucy's bright eyes glassy and dull under the lids the morticians had closed, Edmund's body so limp and clammy, Peter's genial smile replaced by a pain-filled grimace even the morticians could not ease away.
She closed her eyes and tried to picture them as they had been alive: Peter bent over his books, ever the conscientious student, but never too busy to push them aside in favor of the company of his siblings. Edmund, ever the clever one, always debating his mates in his quick, serious tone, Lucy, artless and open, completely unaware of her budding beauty. She remembered the year they'd gone to the seaside, when they were young, before they'd quarreled, before Narnia had even cast its shadow over their lives. She remembered Peter braving the waves even though it had been horribly cold that day, Edmund building sandcastles—and making a terrible fuss when Lu'd accidentally knocked into one—and Lucy delighting over every seashell she found. Sweet, sweet Lucy. As she'd grown, she'd lost none of her sweetness, only added to it a reckless bravery, just as Peter's bossiness had grown into nobility and Ed had grown out of being a brat and his cleverness became something you admired about him instead of wanting to beat it out of him. She remembered him and Peter in council, heads bent gravely together as they discussed battles and treaties. Peter was always the warrior, always the High King, but Edmund could hold his own in war if need be, and Lucy would go among the archers no matter what anyone said to her. You couldn't say she knew nothing of war's horrors, because after every battle, there she'd be, tending to the wounded with her cordial, yet no matter what horrible manglings of bone and flesh she saw, the laughter in her eyes never wholly dimmed. She was valiant, the Valiant Queen.
Except that she wasn't, was she? Susan shook her head. It was just a game, just childish daydreams. She couldn't remember Lucy notching an arrow to her bow or the sunlight glinting off Peter's armor, because it had never happened. There were no such things as talking animals. There were never four thrones at Cair Paravel. There was no Cair Paravel. There never had been King Peter the Magnificent, or King Edmund the Just, or Queen Lucy the Valiant. And there certainly had never been a Queen Susan the Gentle.
The idea was ridiculous.
It would have pleasant if there had been, of course. It would be nice if she could imagine that Peter, Lucy, and Edmond, and even Eustace and the others were happy and well in some beautiful fairyland now. But they weren't. They were dead. It was tragic, it was horrible, it was obscene, but it was the world. She was an adult and she knew perfectly well that things did not work themselves out into tidy happily-ever-afters. After all, this wasn't Narnia.
Narnia didn't exist.