When Sorrowing All We Have Is Truth
1.
It is every grown-up's fate to one day realize, very suddenly and unexpectedly, that they are grown up. Like waking up in a bed they'd slept in for months, and abruptly comprehending that their bed was located somewhere in England and not in South America or India or the Caribbean or some other place they'd sworn as children they'd live.
Or having someone ask them what they were going to school for and having to say Accounting instead of Science or Adventuring. They've answered the question a hundred times the same way, but they only understand just then that they were not, are not, and never will be what they once believed they could be.
She says "I'm Susan Pevensie" and for one blindingly agonizing instant in time she is saying or hearing someone else say "Susan the Gentle, Queen of Narnia" and for a moment she remembers all she's forgotten.
But "I'm Susan Pevensie" is what she says now and keeps saying, and the smile on her face hides the tiny break in her heart every time she does.
2.
She avoids her siblings.
It is because they are juvenile and beneath her and an embarrassment to her when she is trying to make an impression on her friends.
This is what she believes, and really, she is now so used to lying to herself that accepting one more falsehood is not difficult.
She is, after all, the smartest, prettiest, brightest Pevensie, and she will not be dragged down by three idiots who can't let go of a childhood game.
Then she steps off a curb and breaks the (ridiculously high) heel of her shoe, and it's Edmund who grasps her elbow and helps her keep her balance and asks if she's alright and she remembers him lying on the ground head in her lap gasping for breath and bleeding and dying—
She pushes him away and limps onward, so that no one will see the tears on her cheeks.
3.
Edmund and Lucy get to go back.
They get to go back, and it was their last time, and Susan can see it in their faces but she vows not to say a word because she'll never let on how much it still hurts that He sent them—her—back here.
She listens to none of their stories, and the cracks in her heart begin to turn to stone.
4.
It's Christmas, and she's at a friend's home enjoying a rather lavish party full of laughter and song. Christmas was the Narnian's favorite feast, a time to celebrate the end of a rule so bleak it had yet to release the land completely—Christmas was the hardest holiday the Pevensie children had to relearn.
The others had made their peace somewhere between mourning and rejoicing, but Susan Pevensie could not, and she escapes her siblings' attempts at awkward conversation every chance she gets and for awhile it works, and she is able to forget.
Then someone flounces by in a swirl of scarlet skirts and she's catapulted back to standing in a field-turned-encampment and the blood-red curtains billow and He is standing there, golden eyes meeting hers, welcoming her.
But then she remembers that Father Christmas was there, too, all robes and beard, and she thinks that it can't have possibly been true after all.
5.
They all ask her to come—Peter pleads with his eyes, if not his mouth, and Lucy outright begs; but Susan shakes her head. Edmund, of the three of them, comes closest to breaking her. The sadness she sees in his eyes might have convinced her, but she also sees pity, and suddenly she is angry at all of them and snaps her refusal.
When they tell her of the train wreck, Susan Pevensie does not cry; somehow she had known, and her heart was already lead in her chest.
and 1.
She finds the Bible weeks after the funeral.
It says Digory Kirke on the inside and it had apparently been shared between the three of her siblings, for here and there she could see Lucy's fine script written in the edges alongside Peter's heavy and somewhat awkward hand. Edmund has written no notes, but a few scraps of paper fall from the tattered and yellowed pages; sketches of places no one but the four Sovereigns of Narnia would recognize.
She finds, underlined with Edmund's unmistakably precise pencil, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends, and tears begin to blur her eyes for the first time in years.
She reads on, for hours, touching verses that had meant something to each of the people she loved so dearly, and they begin to mean something to her.
She hopes she will have the chance to make amends not only with her family but with the One she has so terribly forgotten.
She thinks of Aslan's eyes on her, and the way he said My child, and she is sure that she will.