this is a disclaimer.
AN: It seems fitting that I give to my own 'Problem of Susan' fic a line from Gaiman as a title. (And a summary.) There's a crossover here, too.
a wall you never saw before
"Darling," says Jim. "Cry if you need to. Please."
It's strange to hear him pleading. The fear in his face is naked, raw: fear of her as much as for her, fear of the sharpness, the blank looks, the refuge in propriety, the ease with which she goes through the motions.
All the motions but one: she will not grieve.
"I don't," says Susan.
Grieving means He's won.
The blank looks leave eventually; Jim has the patience of a saint, to wait with her so long for them to flee, to help her chase them away, smile by smile. The sharpness stays with her, and she'll carry it for the rest of her life. It is different: it is other.
None of them were ever sharp before.
Susan is about ten years too old to listen to The Beatles, but she does it anyway. Jim laughs at her when she sings along and proclaims it scandalous that his wife would stoop to singing such filth in the privacy of their kitchen.
He asks her once what she would have done with her life had they not married, and Susan pauses, thoughtful. It is not a question she's ever asked herself.
"Cookery," she says at last. "Hostessing. I would have opened a glamorous hotel and been known far and wide as the best hostess in the British Isles, and royalty would have killed for invitations to my parties."
He laughs aloud and kisses her. "I would have gatecrashed them all," he says, "just to get a glimpse of you... all in red silk, and a smile like summer."
"Are you teasing?"
"Yes and no."
She knows what he means.
Kisses him back.
She names her son John because it's not a name that's ever been in the family before. She says to Jim: let's travel, the three of us, and he, darling man that he is, smiles at her. It's about time they did something with all that money of his.
Cunard is not the Splendour Hyaline any more than Cairo is Tashbaan, but the sea, Susan finds, does not change from world to world: the noise of it, the smell, the roll of the waves, the briny wind. Sunlight glints on the metal railings and glitters on the waves, and Johnny claps his little hands in glee.
The pyramids are beautiful, but they are not what she is looking for.
She does not will not take her son to church.
There are other stories. She tells them all, one by one, spins fairy-lands out of air and magic out of words. They have wolves and hobbits and Elves and Psammeads and earthmaster's children under the mountain and djinn and princes in amber and prisoners in Zenda and riddles in the dark; they have kings in armour and ladies in towers and trolls under bridges and souldrinking princes and islands of treasure that oxen and wainrope couldn't drag you to and outlaws in the Norfolk Broads and detectives in the London fog and dragons on the other wind. She goes on telling them long after she should stop, but John does not stop listening.
He brings home a Bible once from school and reads it in a week.
"It's full of contradictions," he complains.
"Life sometimes is," she says.
"Science isn't," he says. "Where are we going this year in the hols? Somewhere we've never been before? I want to explore."
They go to Switzerland and hike in the mountains. Jim groans comically and mutters complaints in tones that make him sound like Aunt Alberta. John is ecstatic. Susan breathes the pine-wood smell and keeps seeing lamp posts out of the corner of her eye.
John joins the army when he's grown. Jim goes pale with old bad memories: the telegram that came to his mother, the bloodstains on his father's last letter, unsealed, unsent.
Susan kisses her son's cheek and wishes she had a gift to give him.
She dies - they both do, thank the Fates for small mercies - in a car crash on the way home from John and Elaine's engagement party. Jim's at the wheel, and the lorry comes out of nowhere.
"Are you ready, Susan Parry?" He asks.
"No," she says and crosses her arms, defiant. "I'll wait right here, thank you."
"You will wait a long time, Daughter of Eve," He says sadly.
Susan gives him a look that has quelled garden-parties overflowing with William Browns born fifty years too late more times than he has bitten the face off witches - a look that can silence Aunt Alberta at twenty paces and cow a vicar's platitude-spouting wife at fifty and drop her pranking miscreant of a son, prostrate with guilt and shame, at a hundred.
"My mother's name was Helen," she says.