A/N - The next chapter. Which has Susan in it :)

Disclaimer - applies from the first chapter to every chapter. Or do you have to put one in every chapter?

The dusty morning sunlight of a London day fell softly through an upstairs window into a neat town house, gracing the pretty yet worn face of a young woman, gently waking her. Her name was Susan Merritt, formerly Pevensie and her face was worn because the course of her life had had her bearing more than the norm for her tender years.

Her years were perhaps not quite as tender as they seemed either, though she wouldn't have known it any more than anybody else would.

The woman, Susan, had six years ago almost to the day lost her entire family – everyone she loved – to a devastating train crash. Since then she had visited their graves, daily whenever she could, but she knew that wouldn't bring them back. Nothing would bring them back.

She may or may not have borne other hardships, other adventures, generally perceived as impossible for years so tender – but had anyone asked her she would have told them that that was absurd.

In fact, said family had asked Susan to be on that train, to travel with them in their fairytale feats of imagination; she had naturally declined, imagination being a luxury reserved mainly for children and the sophisticated flow of adult life in London leaving no break for such things. It was afterwards that she sometimes wished she hadn't, that she had allowed the absurdity in. At least then, she had reasoned, she would be with her family, with their unfailing love, stoic protection, with their odd quirks and magical lands. Nothing would bring them back, but she could have gone with them to meet... whatever lies beyond death. Susan would remind herself now that she had her own family to love, to look after. Not to replace her old family, but something different: her own beautiful daughter. But that didn't stop her face from being worn in the mornings, with grief and regret and hurt.

Anna was getting older now, starting to notice the odd reminders scattered through their house, queer little gifts or additions from her brothers and sister that they had given her before – before the train crash. It wouldn't be long until she started seeing her mother's mannerisms too, the worn face in the morning, the disappearance to the cemetery and all the rest. It wouldn't be long until Susan would have to truly explain to her about her Uncles Peter and Edmund and her Aunt Lucy.

They had often looked almost sombre as they had given her the gifts, had told her they wanted her to remember, but she hadn't a clue what they had meant.

Her two favourites were hanging above the bed, close enough to reach out and touch with her fingers. When she looked at them now her heart would explode with sorrow, yes, but mostly with love for the lost, though years ago, when she had been able to take their love for granted, they had stayed hidden in her cupboards most of the year, coming out only when they visited, so they could see she cared.

The first was a bow. Not a hair bow – which, when she had been given it, she probably would have preferred – but a slender, wooden bow for firing arrows from. There was a quiver too, full of arrows with hard wooden tips and together they rested on the mantle above her headboard.

When she had first seen the bow, when Lucy had dashed into her room, eyes bright and with Edmund waiting in the doorway, Susan had been horror-struck. Yes, she had practiced archery at school, and had been rather good at it, she remembered, but that didn't mean a young woman needed anything to do with a bow.

Lucy, it turned out, had had the idea that they could practice shooting it together, and had commissioned Edmund's enthusiastic help in crafting it. It would, she had claimed in excitement, be 'just like old times', at which point the older sister had sighed, wondering what there was about school that merited its being recreated by use of a bow and arrows. And, she had reflected then, a poorly constructed bow. Lucy and Edmund still being kids, or nearly kids, it was probably OK for them to go around cutting crude bows and pretending they were great Knights or Kings or whatever it was, but not Susan, as she had firmly told them.

She could still see Lucy's crestfallen face, the hope seeping from it, and Edmund's retreating back, shoulders sagging as he glanced over them, deep-set worry clouding his features. They would haunt her, those expressions, and those overreactions that she would never understand, so that she wished she had just gone out and played at their silly archery game with them.

When Susan looked at the bow now, she would wonder why she had ever thought the craftsmanship was poor. For a couple of kids, Lucy and Edmund's bow-making skills were extraordinary. Not anything to the kind of pictures she'd seen before, but they had never been by any means professional, and hadn't had all of the equipment they needed. They hadn't even had Peter helping them, who was the oldest and would probably have known more of that kind of thing than they did, for he – very understandably – had been otherwise occupied.

Peter had still managed to find time to add to the collection of quirks in her home though. Indeed, hanging above the bow on the wall was an exquisite painting of a lion, his mane blowing gaily in a warm wind. His face though – Susan had never been sure about his face. It certainly wasn't gay and free like the mane, but something else. She had never been able to pinpoint the exact expression, but she had always said something between sympathetic and disapproving. He was looking sad now, almost like her, she thought.

That lion had come from Peter. He hadn't actually painted it himself, of course, not having the time and probably lacking the artistic skill too. Suddenly, her milk-white hand was brushing the corner of the canvas, shocked that she couldn't tell for sure what her brother's skill was... had been. No, Peter had seen it at a small art display – not the fashionable kind that she was partial to – and had, apparently, known that he should buy it for her.

The next day she had found him giving it to her, and had wondered vaguely why none of her siblings could have her own taste in art. That picture had been doomed to the cupboards until the night she had heard the news, when she had flung her heart open and seen the lion's eyes fixed on her in sorrow.

"Susan?" Presently, a voice appeared in the doorway, and the woman glanced up, very conscious of the tears threatening to flow from her tired eyes, to meet eyes with the man to whom she had pledged eternal love, but who understood that there would always be others held in that same position in her heart, that her family merited love unfailing and undying, whether they themselves lived or died.

He husband's name was Dylan, the name she shared with him Merritt, and she had met him first at the parties. Oh! what parties they had been, the kind she had loved, filled with wonderful new clothes and beautiful make-up. She knew now, though, that those parties, for all their grandeur, would never replace the people she had loved... still did love.

Even most the people she had met there, even the courteous men and exquisite women, her great friends, fell into blurred memories when their sympathies stopped after the superficial social requirements. Dylan had been one of many people then, a grand man whom she had liked for his strong jaw, his bright eyes and yellow hair, just as before she had liked William for his dark, styled hair, or Lucas for the red glints that speckled his.

Dylan, though, had been the first to comfort her and the last to leave; he had stayed with her through dark nights and days without hope until he had become her hope. Not having known her siblings, he still managed to heal her wounds somewhat, so that she knew, or at least hoped that one day she would be with them again. When the young Mr Merritt had asked the once again whole – or nearly whole – woman to be his bride, it had been for his loyalty and devotion, his kindness and his strength that she had agreed, not for his jaw, or his eyes, or even the shining yellow of his hair.

"Good morning," she murmured softly, meeting his eyes with her own tears.

And from behind him came their daughter, a beautiful thing, with wide, bright eyes and flowing hair, darker than her father's, jumping onto her parents' bed to embrace her mother, the tears expelled for now.

It seemed many minutes until the girl pulled herself away from the embrace to lie back against her mother's chest while Susan played idly with her daughter's hair, and many more until she spoke again, in her high, piping voice "I dreamed I saw a lion, Mother,"

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