Title: After-time
Rating: PG13ish? I honestly have no idea. No sex or bad words
Disclaimer: Belongs to someone, who is not me.
Summary: Her face in the mirror is flushed and unfamiliar- cheeks still plump with baby fat and eyes far too old for a child. Lucy post LWW
Note: This grew out of speculation that the Pevensie kids would prolly have suffered severe braintrauma from going from Kings and Queens in their twentysomethings back to being wee chitlins, and how they'd have a slew of experiences they're not supposed to have. There's, um, nothing graphic but just as a warning, some readers may find it disturbing.
The first time, she wakes in the night, thrashing in her bed. It's an unfamiliar bed, not as grand as she's used to. Orientation blurs for a moment and she wonders if she's been captured or imprisoned somewhere, but then she knocks over the candleholder, and remembers. They are back home, or what's supposed to be home for the duration of the war. She rises from her bed, not as gracefully as she would like (how high up it is) and slips to the washroom, trembling. Her face in the mirror is flushed and unfamiliar- cheeks still plump with baby fat and eyes far too old for a child. The reach for the tap is too far and her body is not her own. She washes her face, trying to scrub the afterimages of the dream off her eyes (familiar hands slipping over a body she remembers and has never had). Goes back to bed, because there is nothing else to do, and does not speak of it to anyone.
The next time, she wakes slowly, tugs her nightgown back into place. Susan, across the room, is asleep, but dreaming. She hears a tiny gasp from her sister's pillow, and what sounds like a name. A name that meant something once. She pads quietly into the hall on little-girl feet, pretending the oak panelling is tapestry-hung stone. It's soothing, and the cool floor leaches the unwelcome heat out of her body. The words of a poem float to the top of her mind, and she says them to herself, quietly in the darkness. It lacks completeness, and half the words are gone, slipping away to be swallowed by the here and the now.
The songs and the poems are the easiest to forget, the first to go. Just the other day, she caught Edmund struggling to remember the words to a song. It doesn't matter- his voice can't carry the tune anymore.
The dream stays, ground into the furthest corner of her subconscious, or her memory. She doesn't know which.
The dream stops coming by night, or she stops waking from it. It becomes more haphazard now, and she is losing the her that makes sense of this thing she doesn't know. Reality is starting to creep sideways into her dreamworld- or perhaps it's the other way around.
She gazes out the window at the gathering dusk, her attention flickering back and forth between the checkers game, the sunset and the slow heave of something insidious under her skin. Peter rubs his beardless chin, considering his next move. It's not a mannerism she remembers from Before. That is how time is to her, now- the grey flatness of Before, the grand, swirling colour of Narnia, and then the confused brown muddiness of After, as if paints in a paint box had all run together.
She can feel the dream flickering at the edges of her eyes- the slip of familiar hands over ghost limbs, and it feels far too real to be only a dream.
"Luce?" Peter looks worried, and more than that, old.
"Yeah?" She tries to grin, with some success. Makes the mistake of biting her lip (Familiar teeth worrying her lip, and a smile-)
"Your move."
She wonders what would happen if she tried to crawl out of her skin- it feels like she's done that once already, shucked off an old life, and old body, and left it behind. She wonders if she is the only one who remembers. The memories-dreams- make less sense, have less narrative and more art.
"Susan" She asks one day, when it is just the two of them alone in the study "Do you remember anything? From Narnia, I mean."
Susan looks at her with the dark eyes of one who does not sleep, and says very quietly "Yes."
They do not speak of it again.
After-time passes, and the memories fade, and become no more than dreams with a narrative. Except for one, but it rarely troubles her.
Sometimes they even speak of it, of Narnia-time, as when Susan tells of Edmund's first attempt at riding a horse, or the boys re-enact the battle against the giants from the northTheir laughter is easy, and they all stand a little straighter afterwards. But time marches on, and Peter becomes less the High King, and more just Peter. She wonders if this will happen to her too, or if it already has. If Queen Lucy the Valiant has been replaced by Lucy Pevensie who goes to school and plays hide-and-go-seek on rainy afternoons. And dreams of a castle and a lion's gold mane, and hands and lips not her own.