A Dangerous Light
This fic started life in the Dreamerverse Drabble Tag, with a pairing and prompt given by Drishti3693.
Dreamerverse, the world created by PrincessPearl, where the worlds of Harry Potter and Narnia mingle. If you like the crossover, join us on the forum. Most fics there feature HP characters in Narnia. This one is different.
Sometimes, it's easier to forget than to remember. Sometimes, magic is not not the stuff of dreams, but of nightmares.
She was once a Queen of Narnia...
d~v
They're back again.
Back to England and school and the war and food rationing and air raids and always carrying a gas mask. And this time, she knows that she will never return to Narnia and although she pretends she doesn't mind, it hurts. As the months go by, Narnia grows ever brighter in her mind, and this world - the world that is supposed to be hers - feels like the dream; the unreal part.
She was a queen once.
She remembers that, when she's trying to do her algebra, or shivering under a train seat because the siren's sounded again and they're stuck between Peterborough and Stevenage, or chewing her way through a slice of 'cake' made without butter, eggs or sugar.
She remembers it too when she bumps into the boy in the village. She's walked down from school with some other girls, because it's a sunny Saturday, their school has just been relocated out here to the countryside to escape the bombs, and it's a good day to explore.
Her friends are in the Post Office, being slow over purchasing stamps, and Susan wanders off down the street by herself. She literally bumps into him, because he's not looking where he's going, and he looks sharply at her and tells her to move, in an extremely rude way. And that's when Susan remembers that she is a Queen of Narnia and draws herself up and tells him that he should look where he's going, using her haughtiest voice; the one that makes her friends look at each other and giggle nervously, and usually do what she says.
He doesn't react the same way. He looks at her and there is contempt in his face, and something else; something that makes her recoil with horror. Exhilaration is mingled with triumph and cruelty and coldness, and she has seen that expression once before.
It comes back to her clearly; the memory of crouching in the darkness with Lucy, and watching with fear and horror and grief as the White Witch held up a bloody knife above the freshly-killed body of Aslan. The expression Susan saw on the witch's face then, as the torchlight caught it, is the same one she is looking at now. Seeing it on the face of a boy a little older than herself, in an English village, makes her blood run cold.
He smiles at the fear he sees in her face, and his eyes are almost feral.
"Do you believe in magic, Muggle?" he asks.
She doesn't know what he means by the last word, but she is Queen Susan and she lifts her chin despite the dangerous light she hears in his voice, and says, "Yes, I do."
He reaches out and touches her then and she doesn't know why she doesn't stop him, but when he touches her her mind explodes. He is there, invading her brain, invading her soul, and she struggles but it is too late. Images flash before her, and some of them are hers - and they are private – but others must be his... Faces twisted with pain and fear... A tall, handsome man crumpling to the ground, flashes of green light, and bodies, dead bodies on the ground...
He lets her go and she staggers back, white and shaken and feeling sick. And he laughs, and then he is gone.
That is the day that Susan stops trying to remember and begins to forget. Because magic is not beautiful, it is ugly and dangerous and frightening and it has the pale face of a good-looking, dark-haired boy who haunts her dreams like a ghost.
The following day, the newspaper reports that the Riddle family have been found dead in their house on the edge of the village. Susan Pevensie knows then what the boy's triumph meant, and she knows too that his ghost will never leave her.
She will try to forget forever.