Disclaimer: Not C.S. Lewis, 'nuff said.
Note: Big thank-yous to previous reviewers. This takes place just after Prince Caspian.
—viennacantabile
meditations
two - the fairest one of all
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Lately, Mrs. Pevensie has discovered Susan's obsession with mirrors.
Susan spends hours at her dressing table, brushing her long hair with long, fluid strokes, repeating them a hundred times and more. But she is reaching much farther than she needs to—and eventually, she must glance down in surprise when the comb slips from her fingertips and clatters to the floor. And Susan's face flushes a bright, terrible color as she stares into the silvered glass, a strangely yearning, strangely longing look on her young face. It is as if she is seeing something beyond the mirror's depths.
She is searching for herself, Mrs. Pevensie thinks, but cannot imagine where Susan might have gone. It is an odd thought, she knows, but Mrs. Pevensie has come to recognize that her children are an odd lot, made even more peculiar by their stay at the Professor's country house during the war. Susan, she realizes now, has never quite come back.
When Mrs. Pevensie knocks at the door to her daughters' room, Susan starts as she once again returns to the world. The face in the mirror crumples for a fraction of a second, as if it has been cruelly deceived. Then she pastes on a brilliant smile and faces her mother.
"Yes, Mother?" she says, in a voice entirely too brittle for her lightness of tone.
For her daughter's sake, Mrs. Pevensie ignores the scattered tissues and the ever-increasing number of powders and bottles at her hands. She too, once believed a mask could transform her. She, too, understands—or so she thinks.
"Susan," says Mrs. Pevensie uncertainly. "There's—there's a young man at the door. For you."
Her eldest daughter's face lights up. "Thank you, Mother," she says, giving Mrs. Pevensie a light kiss on the cheek before leaving the room. "I won't be back late."
When she is gone, Mrs. Pevensie stares at the mirror and she wonders what it is that holds her daughter's rapt eyes to its empty surface. Susan is perfectly lovely, but somehow Mrs. Pevensie knows that it is not Susan Pevensie's face that her daughter is searching for.
With this uneasiness in mind, Mrs. Pevensie's eyes flit toward the bedside drawer that holds Susan's diary. Long moments pass as she deliberates.
But in the end, she stops, because she knows that some things need to be held sacred. And as she quietly leaves, silently closing the door behind her, she wonders, regretfully, where all of her children have gone.
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.end.