Chapter One
"It never would have worked out between us."
It was the stupidest thing Susan had ever said, or could have said.
It seemed that around him, Susan's default setting was "arrogant idiotic quip", and even though it was the last time she would ever see him again and they really would have been great together and he was so beautiful and all she could think about was going back and having to look at boring old boys who wore only grey, she still managed to word-vomit all over the marble courtyard.
Then again, she had said plenty of stupid things to him-'maybe you'll need to call me again' was up there, as Lu frequently reminded her, but this one topped the list.
Because first and foremost, it was a lie.
Susan told a lot of lies- like telling her stalker that she was named Phyllis and convincing her mother that really, she felt fine, and no, she wasn't going to cut her hair short and start smoking due to depression (the haircutting/smoking part wasn't a lie, but the feeling fine was).
But those were the lies that Susan felt didn't matter; the lies that were small and necessary and obligatory to scare off an admirer or put her mother's nerves at rest. Little lies were acceptable, for they had nothing to with her. They were detached from her emotions and needs.
Susan never lied to herself. She liked her mind to be a clean, orderly place.
He changed all that, of course he did. His existence screwed everyone with even the slightest hint of malice in their bodies over royally (heh), from Miraz to Peter's pride to her own horrendous vanity.
She felt the bile chase up her throat whenever she thought about it, which was quite often. She would lean over the toilet and heave until Edmund came and put his (always cold) hand on her forehead and told her none of it mattered.
Easy for him to say. He was going back to Narnia someday, and he knew it.
She tucked him away in the back of her mind as best she could, but the thoughts kept coming, and at the most inconvenient of times.
For example, when Richard had been about to ask her out.
She had wanted to go on a date; he was Short and Blond and Cute, and was the exact opposite of everything she was trying to forget. He had a good sense of self, absolutely no testosterone, had a handle on his temper and looked like a white jelly bean. He was perfect, the Caspian-antithesis.
Lucy had looked at her with horror when she had commented (another lie) that he was cute, and Susan didn't blame her for it. Lucy even got out a "what about Caspian?"(because in Lu's innocent mind, since they had kissed they were clearly in love, and should therefore live happily ever after no matter what) before Susan put a hand over her mouth. Susan shrugged and told her that she preferred men who actually bathed(another lie....er, wait, actually, maybe not) and Lucy had started to cry.
Peter and Edmund had cackled like goons when he went to ask her out, because surely he had no chance, but she smiled sweetly and wondered what he would be like to kiss, because maybe his baby powder and soap smell would chase away the luscious smell of leather and pine needles and sweat that had seeped into her skin and refused to come out, no matter how hard she scrubbed.
And just as he had closed a very long winded speech about her beauty, and she was about to go and kiss him anyway, just to shut him up, she had remembered Him, in all His glory, and she lost it.
The dark hair that she had very badly wanted to yank at and run her fingers through, and the absurdly wide shoulders, the way he danced around her with interested, cautious eyes but never came out and said much to her. The way his brow puckered when he concentrated, and how he gave his heart to the fight, the rage and the Telmarine coming through and how afterward, he would go and bless and pray over as many soldiers as he could touch as he regained control and the remorse took hold and he fought back tears.
Poor Richard never had a chance.
Susan blurted out something about how he reminded her of a jelly baby and that she really did have a boyfriend, and 'he had a sword!' when Lucy had dragged her away with a pained glance at Poor Old Pasty Richard.
Susan had cried the whole way home.
Peter told their mother that she fell, which was blatantly and obviously untrue in many ways and that was that.
"I wish we had more time together"
Had she even agreed with him? Had she kissed him harder, not caring what anyone thought because it was the last time she would see him again?
No, no.
She had smiled like the cold, aloof ice queen that she was and told him that really, she wasn't that invested in him and they didn't really get along that well.
She had lied.
Susan dreamed about him sometimes, actually, most of the time. Her family pretended that they didn't hear and that she wasn't being obscene, just like they had all pretended when Peter was being a Pubescent Boy (both times around). Which was really rather sweet of them, considering how awkward it was. Considering that girls weren't supposed to think about Things Like That, much less have loud fantasies about aforementioned Things.
He was golden and sweat streaked and she had rubbed her lips from his forehead to his stomach before she woke up, feeling disturbingly disappointed that she hadn't gotten further.
Dream Caspian had enjoyed it, Susan was fairly sure.
She prided herself on being able to be rational and firm about everything, and lying to herself was the one thing she couldn't stand. Susan loved control.
It seemed as if the only way that she could see to become herself again was to lie some more.
She told herself that she didn't see the way he stared at her until the very last second, that when she kept telling Aslan that really, she was at peace with the idea of leaving, his picture didn't keep popping up inside her head.
He was everywhere through her eyes. It appeared to Susan that only once she had told herself that she couldn't have him had her body started aching for him and remembering him.
Her traitorous mind refused to forget that she had abandoned Caspian. In school, her social studies teacher droned on about how in most societies hugs were considered taboo because you were pressing your body to someone else's, and Susan chewed her lip bloody to try and forget how he had clung to her, pressing his face into her white neck, as if she was his lifeline and he wanted to absorb her into his skin and mind for those last few seconds. She also remembered how she had shrugged him off demurely (because she really was kind of a bitch) and went to stand calmly (calmly, her foot) beside Peter.
He had seemed so very vulnerable, so very confused as to why she was doing this (as a matter of fact, Susan was rather confused herself), and she never hated herself more.
Everyone knew that it was her fault. Her fault that she wouldn't return and see him again. Aslan would never have sent them away if they had something anchoring them there; something they needed to become whole. If she had insisted, she would have never had to leave.
It just so happened that Susan's necessary thing, her reason for becoming whole had found her just a tad too late.
Her family was confused. They were worried, but she was worried more.
Lucy asked her why she wasn't in love with anyone else yet, since she liked blond boys, and Susan told her love was overrated.
Yet she had never really been in love with him, had she? He was more like a whisper of love, the potential of it, and her 'love' for him had only developed once she couldn't have him(apparently she was now bitchy AND masochistic).
How does one become in love with a memory? She hadn't been in love with him when they had left, otherwise Aslan would have never let her leave, she was sure.
Peter took her to the woods, Lucy took her to see the lions and Edmund dragged her to Renaissance fairs to enter in archery contests. She stumbled behind and looked at her nails in 'boredom' so that they wouldn't see her expression. She didn't want to remember.
There was no going back to Narnia, and torturing herself with wishes would do no good.
Her mother told her that she would find True Love with a capital T. Susan replied her she didn't want a True Love (but she didn't say that she had abandoned her old one, and it hadn't worked out so well, or even that she already had one). She said that she'd prefer someone rich and ignorant to provide for her and leave her in peace, thankyouverymuch.
Her parents wondered at her change, and where this New Susan was coming from. It was only when Edmund and Lu went back to Narnia (for the third time now) and they saw Him, they saw Caspian, that she told her parents (to their faces) to bugger off.
Lucy tried to tell her all about him. Susan covered her ears with her hands and ran away in that Quite Mature manner of hers.
Why would she want to hear about his perfect children and new wife and stoic, enlightened rule? She was over him, she told herself and her siblings. Over. Because, please, they had only seen each other for barely a month, and they'd only kissed once, and good God, there wasn't even anything to be 'over' about (more, many more lies).
Edmund looked at her like she was a fool, and she was one.
"I don't suppose there's another way to get back, is there? I've left my new torch in Narnia!"
Yes, well, Susan had left behind something a little more important that a flashlight, and there certainly wasn't a way back.
Now, whenever a boy looked at her, all Susan could do was compare how His hand had felt on her calf as He tightened Destrier's stirrup and the way He looked at her. no one else could ever look at her like that, she was fairly sure. He had the blackest eyes she had ever seen. They searched for anything she would give him, anything at all. It had made her uncomfortable, and she would look away. Always.
Susan wasn't a giving person.
But then again, she had left, and he was never as special in real life as he was in her memories. Or was he? She was so confused at that point as to what she had felt then and what she felt now that anything could be possible.
It wasn't as if she was all-consumed by him, or that she wrote his name on her books and became depressed and cried all the time and stopped eating because she couldn't have him.
He simply held her back.
Always there, never touchable. The one part to Narnia she couldn't seem to shake.
Many times, she had gone back in her mind and tried to determine at what point Caspian became the only one she seemed to want. Shallow as it was, she thought that he hadn't really been all that important, she was capable of keeping herself away from Narnia and him until she kissed him. Or rather, after she kissed him, when she finally (finally) looked him directly in his eyes.
She knew what she saw there. And it was probably that moment when she realized her mistake. But then Peter was taking her wrist and she couldn't really be feeling that, could she, and Aslan was bidding them goodbye and she was led through the tree before she even could say stop, wait, I need a second.
Besides, Susan was always good at being a realist, and she saw no point in deluding herself into silly thoughts of True Love and Happy Endings (at least, until she looked at him).
Her resistance to her fate in England was very unlike her. She was sensible, sensible, damn sensible. She wasn't supposed to keep dreaming after things like Princes with black eyes who (truly, sensibly, there was no other way) she would never see again.
For sanity's sake, she decided that her imagination was hyperactive ( even though imagination was highly unsensible) and that his lips hadn't felt that good (then why was she having dreams about them, hmm?)
She mused, over a year later that maybe if she kept lying, she could lie her own mind into forgetting.
*rattles tin cup, adjusts tattered shawl*
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