A/N: If you look closely, you can still see the bit of Edmund-centric drabble that this was supposed to be when I sat down to write. I don't know where this schizophrenic Susan-muse keeps popping up from, since I never consciously intend to write about her, but this is her work. Review please, goodly readers, or she might smother my writer's inspiration altogether until you've satisfied her.
All intellectual property rights to the Chronicles of Narnia belong to C. S. Lewis and his estate, which I believe is currently under the running of the esteemed Douglas Gresham.
(Narnia is a tiny hole pricked precariously in my chest, a bullet wound in a crack-webbed pane of glass—if you touch it, the entirety of the thing will fall to the floor in a waterfall of shards, and all the king's horses and all the king's men will never put Susan together again.)
Susan Pevensie soldiers on.
Lucy's written a postcard from her wing of the boarding school—Lucy enjoys the old-fashioned excitement of the hand-penned correspondence, even though she could just as easily walk fifteen minutes across the grounds and talk to her face-to-face—asking how she is. She doesn't mention Narnia openly, of course, on such an easily-compromised mode of communication, but Susan can hear her little sister missing it in every word. Lucy asks her how she is holding up with all the changes—but really she is asking forgiveness for her own grief—and Susan writes dutifully back to her, offering comfort in roundabout ways, the same sororal code Lucy offered to her.
(But it isn't fair, I think as I look at my sister's haphazard penmanship, its owner's sunny disposition shining from every flourish. It isn't fair, because I am alone.)
Lucy is too young. She might have been a prophesied Queen; she might have been a heroine of legend; but now her valor dwells in the body of a nine-year-old and no matter how much her heart and soul have aged, like good satyr-made wine, Susan cannot burden her tiny puberty-riddled body with her own darkness, toss another worry onto the bonfire of concerns that Lucy must be experiencing at her time of life. She is plagued by doubts that Lucy's fierce heart has never even seen the shadows of. She is wracked with a grief whose existence Lucy's boundless faith has never imagined. Lucy is too far from her in every way.
(Even if she were so like me as to come and sit beside me and share a cup of cocoa as I long to do, as no one ever does because I am always busy at my schoolwork, I could not encumber her too-tiny shoulders with my breaking heart.)
Peter and Edmund are of no help either: the same gap does not exist between brothers as it does between sisters. The brothers Magnificent and Just have latched onto one another and onto Narnia for life; they will stand like the rock and the protector that they are for the rest of their lives. They are brothers bonded forever, almost as intimately familiar with one another's minds as any soulmate shall ever hope to be. They have known one another as men and they will never cease to think of each other as such, because that's how boys are. They see what they want to see.
(Don't I know that well: boys see the pretty face, not the heart of an old woman; they see the figure of a fine lady, not the mind of a Queen.)
They do not imagine how their sister dies. They see only how their youngest sister—outwardly the most vulnerable, the most volatile—copes, and never dream that Susan the maternal and pragmatic and ever-composed might be brittle as Christmas candy, ready to shatter at the snap of a finger. They would leap to defend her name, her honor, her life—in Narnia or England—but it never occurs to them that her heart might be going wrong in the healing.
There is no one to forgive Susan for her own festering grief, for the winter that sets into her heart like a bee into a flower and sucks her dry of sweetness.
(Susan means "courage". Aslan, or God, or anyone who might take a hand in these sorts of things—must have forgotten to whisper in my parents' ears and tell them I would end up far too fragile for such a lofty epithet.)
Queen Susan the Gentle knew courage: courage beyond her years, because there was someone to demand it of her. She watched her brothers ride into war, her sister brave hurricanes at sea, her nation founder upon countless crises of one sort or another as she sat at Cair Paravel in throne. Courage was asked of her by the bucketful, and she strove—successfully— to live up to it, to radiate the serenity her subject required and loved. Narnia's air lent its Gentle Queen strength even as all who breathed it demanded it back.
But Susan Pevensie is alone. There is no one to ask her to be brave anymore.
Aslan has shut her out of Narnia. No one will ever ask her to be brave again. No one imagines now that she needs to.
(But still—I must.)
The Gentle Queen never fought in a battle—ugly affairs and all that—but Susan Pevensie, the lost and lonely thirteen-year-old who remembers what it was like to speak to the stars and have others see them reflected in her eyes? Susan Pevensie, the girl who moves like silk but feels like stone? Susan Pevensie, the girl who is slowly forgetting how to laugh because, when it rises, the London sun looks like a pneumatic vagrant's scowl beside even the memory of the beaming child's face that was Narnia's sun? Susan Pevensie, who can barely sleep at night because she aches for friends who asked questions and expected true answers? Susan Pevensie, who has only a slowly splintering memory of perfect glory to sustain the next seventy years of her life?
Oh yes, she always soldiers on.