Title: The Wastelands: The Burial of the Dead
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia (Books)
Pairing: None, with Susan as the main character.
Rating: PG, for some talk of death and cremation.
Summary: She's called in to identify what's left of the bodies. She's the only one left who can. Susan, post-The Last Battle
Word Count: 648
Disclaimer: I own nothing. I make no money. I write out of love only, and I hope I don't make Lewis roll over too many times in his of the series and individual stories are taken from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. And yes. I added an "s" and made it one word.
Notes: This is the first of what is either a five part story or a collection of five stories. I originally wrote it for Penmage about three years ago, and at the time I formatted it all on one page. Each story is a study on one of the Pevensies. Given that each story can be read on its own, I've decided to list them as five separate stories here on instead of five chapters in one story.
Win a Ficlet: I frequently use quotes to start a story or a chapter of a story. Sometimes I write a fic after finding a quote, and sometimes I hunt down quotes that are right to open the fic. But I enjoy them, and so here's a game: if you submit a quote and I use it, I'll write you a (short) fic with characters of your choice. The fandom is same as the story I use the quote in. Quotes do not have to be on any one topic, and you can send more than one. Only rule: you can't just review with a quote. Some feedback on the story is just courtesy.
***
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many
T. S. Eliot
***
I. The Burial of the Dead
She's called in to identify what's left of the bodies.
Mother and Father she can manage by their wedding rings. The fire wasn't quite hot enough to melt them, and the inscriptions are visible yet.
Edmund she finds by the tattoo on his right bicep. It had been of a lion, upright and mouth open and roaring, and he'd been proud that their mother hadn't ever realized he had it. Once it had been made of beautiful scarlets and golds, but now it's burned and brown, the color of leaves so long dead that they crumple to dust under a foot. Susan can still make it out.
Peter she had been uncertain of, at first; she has to force herself to focus right now, to think and not feel, but her stomach still feels sick when she realizes how hard it is to tell her brother from a dozen strangers. In the end she identifies him by height--he had been a tall man, and none of the men who had been on the platform besides Edmund came close enough.
Susan spends three days staring at corpses, looking at every inch of each body she can see, and still she can't find which body might belong to her sister. When she admits to the rail agent who has been working with her that she can't find Lucy, she's told that it's possible, especially given where her sister was sitting, that the body was burned beyond recognition and already cremated.
Susan is led to a the room that holds the belongings of the cremated, the dead that left the living behind even more quickly than the others. The ones who didn't leave anything even approaching a face to say goodbye to. The agent pulls out two boxes first and sets them before Susan; she shifts through the jewelry, the cuff links and necklaces and earrings, aware that even the cheapest of bracelets was treasure to someone somewhere.
And, of course, there's Lu's cross—Susan knows it, even though the heat melted it so as one of the arms of the cross is bent, because Susan was the one who bought it for Lucy—and she flatly informs the agent that she's found it.
She's told she'll have to wait to collect the necklace and the rings both, and Susan nods with dry eyes. It takes her a while to finish out all of the paperwork, and it's gone from afternoon to evening when she steps outside again. The night is beautiful, she thinks as she walks towards a restaurant, and thinks part of it is that you can't see all of the dirt and grime and wretched things the way you can during the day.
She'll have to speak with her uncle and aunt about the arrangements, Susan thinks, walking towards the hotel she'd been put up in by the rail company. With Eustace—with Eustace gone, too, it simply makes sense to handle it all at once. She doesn't trust Alberta's taste in flowers, though, and she's musing on that as she enters the hotel. She's certain that Lu would want roses, and probably lilies with it, and the boys wouldn't care. Perhaps for Mother and Father she'll see about a wreath being made.
Susan thinks about it all very clinically and distantly, because she's the only one left to handle everything that must be done, just like she has been ever since she received the telephone call.
It's only when she's reached her room, hat removed, and is reaching to gently take off her own cross, as she doesn't like to wear it when she bathes, that she realizes her palms are bleeding from her nails digging into them for so long.