A/N: And here is the second chapter of Unrequited. Enjoy.
We were walking along the promenade in Blackpool, she and I, arm in arm. She does not look at me. Her face is turned out to the rushing sea, and the salted breeze tosses to perfume of her hair back into my face. Anyone would have thought that we were just another happy young couple. But she is somewhere else.
He becomes her only friend, and stays only her friend.
They live in a kind of limbo. She cannot move forward, she cannot go back. And because she cannot, he will not. Their lives become like the rain in autumn-steady, monotonous, dismal and unchanging.
He has known people lose what is precious to them before, but none of them did it the way she did. She is no fountain of tears, she is no flood of memories. She does not walk past things or people or hear strains of music that cause her to turn to him with sorrowful, over-bright eyes and tell him that it reminds her of them. She does not surround herself with photographs of them to keep them in her mind, nor does she hide the traces of them to protect herself from the agony of remembrance. She does not forge herself a new life. She sits contentedly in the cooling ashes of her old one, and because he was always devoted to her, he sits with her. She does not welcome him; she does not turn him away. She does not grasp desperately at this human contact; she does not throw him out with anguished declarations of needing to be alone. She simply is, and he is with her.
And yet no one can deny that she is grieving. The colour has bled out of her life, and nothing on earth seems to give her joy.
He finds her tolerance of him strange. In the days before the crash, when she was glamorous and popular, she always had someone else to be with. She had sneered at him along with the rest of them. She had other men, ones with muscle and without glasses. He was allowed into their parties to provide them with amusement, but he had loved her just as all the other men did. He had written her a poem once, and she had laughed at him.
But when all that was over, and it seemed that popular, glamorous Susan Pevensie had also died on the day of the train crash, the fourth week after he had started calling on her, he found her sitting at the kitchen table, reading his poem. She had handed it back to him and told him sincerely, but without expression, that it was a good poem.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Reviews are much appreciated.