Disclaimer: I do not own the Chronicles of Narnia or any of it's characters, nor do I own the plot and events taking place in the Canon series. Only the deviations from the original stories are mine.
a/n/: Only one chapter of this story is written so far, so uploads will be slow and periodic as I am prioritizing other works at the moment, but I hope you can enjoy the first chapter!
Chapter One
Dreams like Memories
At seventeen, Susan felt herself an old woman. In many ways, she was. She lived too many years—fourteen, which had been snatched too suddenly away. Four more provided no solace in a world that continuously patronized her for being smarter, wiser, yet somehow quieter than the others.
Of course, no one saw Susan. Not really.
Except for him…
He was three years older then, surely much older now, and lacked the wisdom of the woman (girl) who'd lived 1300 years prior. Yet he harnessed the youth and innocence stolen from her, despite the grief fate caused him. She loved him, like she never loved anyone before. And he loved her, as he would never love another.
And Susan felt cheated.
It hardly mattered how excitedly Lucy told of adventures aboard the Dawn Treader, the ship Susan had sketched with a spare, charred flint and tucked into the pocket of the new king's waistcoat with chaste kiss to his chest. She cared little of Edmund's philosophical rants comparing the brokenness of England and the utopia of their favorite home. Peter's quieter demeanor could be appreciated, but it only served to break her further
See, Susan was different from the others. She was older than Lucy, more skeptical than Edmund, and certainly less arrogant than Peter—and so it was hard for her to believe. Still harder it was for her to move on. And so easier it became to forget. Because how could it be fair that her siblings should benefit from such a marvelous place called Narnia, while she only broke a little more each day?
Because of him.
"Do you suppose she hates him?"
"What's that, Lu? Who do you mean?"
"I mean Susan, Ed. Do you suppose she hates Aslan for what he told her?"
"Let's not get too optimistic. To hate something, you'd have the believe in it."
"What's that supposed mean?"
"I mean Susan doesn't hate Aslan. She's forgotten him altogether."
Edmund was wrong, in a way. She no longer believed in Aslan, no longer held any faith in the lion who for so long claimed to have nothing but her best intentions in mind. But she did hate him. In the crevices of her mind, between homework and dinners and obligatory slow dances with men who couldn't resemble the man in her heart, when the euphoria wore off and she could no longer prevent herself from remembering, she hated him. All of it. Aslan. Narnia. Her siblings every time tutted at her with disappointed frowns for "forgetting who she is."
Susan loved them, her siblings. She reminded herself that they didn't know, that she never shared, the extent of her heartbreak. Then again, for a heart to break she would need a heart, and she left hers in the world she tried so desperately to forget.
Sometimes she'd see glimpses of it, her heart. In the farmers market, where they sold the blue azaleas. In the countryside forests, where the scent of earth and sun tugged at her lips. At the stream, where the gentle brook laughed. There was her heart.
"She's too quiet these days. Her teachers think she's losing it."
"What can be done, Lewis? She's a teenage girl. It's just a stage, probably."
"It's unacceptable, Helen. People think she's odd—depressed, even."
"Perhaps she is! The war's barely ended, after all!"
She forgot on her eighteenth birthday. It was the most conscious decision she made. She didn't feel lighter by any means, but she felt somehow better blaming the heaviness on hormones.
And when she dreamed of a deep, gentle voice begging her to come back, she pretended it didn't bother her in the morning.
"Do you remember what happened, Susan?"
"I—yes—the train…."
"Yes, sweetheart."
"Peter! Where is Peter?"
"I'm so sorry, love…."
Peter had covered her body with his, rescued her from the impact of the train against the station wall. He saved her life, but bled out on top of her.
She was glad she never saw the other bodies.
Susan looked forward to the nights when she dreamed of the gentle voice and the soft caresses on her face. Even in her dreams, she closed her eyes, but it felt like the sun was shining on her face. She preferred these nights; they were a welcome reprieve from the nightmare's of Peter's panicked yet determined gaze, his strong arms fastening her beneath him, his broken, cold body crushing her as his blood spilled over her.
Susan was always different from her siblings. She wished she was as brave as them. Perhaps then she wouldn't have been cowering under her brother's protective hold.
Perhaps then she wouldn't be alone.
"My sister Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia."
"Narnia? You mean those silly games we used play as children?"
"Do you supposed she hates him?"
"Surely you know…"
"You are never alone, Daughter of Eve."
These new dreams left her mind wandering far into consciousness. Even as she attended the school house where she taught, helped her students sound out the complicated words in their new books, she struggled to push back the intruding voices. Some of them were memories, distant but just as bitter, yet others she could never recall hearing—except they were so familiar.
She moved to the country-side because London was too painful. Not Finchley, since that, too, was far too close to her heart. She taught in the local school house, small and quaint, but it kept her busy and she loved the children.
In every one of them, she saw Lucy and Edmund and Eustace.
The children loved her stories, made her read through all of them—Lucy's books of fairytales she could not let go of—until they could tell them better than her. They demanded new stories.
"Why don't you make some up?"
"We don't tell them as good—"
"Well."
"—as well as you, Ms. Pevensie!"
"Alright then, I'll check in town for new books tomorrow."
She didn't check for new books, because she knew she exhausted all of them. Instead, she dreamed of the voices again, voices without faces but she knew some of them. Some of them she knew and also did not.
But she opened her eyes this time. For the first time, she noticed the trees around her—a forest. The forest glistened like emeralds, with specks of warm, white sun peeking through the canopied leaves. The marsh was warm and comfortable beneath her bare toes.
"Surely you know…" came the familiar deep timbre, a whisper like a warm caress over her shoulders.
Know what? she wondered.
Then another voice, deeper, stronger, gentler still, "I have not forgotten you, Daughter of Eve."
"This is a story of a magical land called Narnia."
"What kind of a name is that?"
"What kind of name is England, when you think about it?"
"What's in Narnia, Ms. Pevensie?"
"Anything. Everything."
Sometimes she swore she awoke somewhere else. She would open her eyes in what she knew was the morning, in her single room in the cottage she rented, and realize she had never awoken at all, just fell into a dream that was—very obviously now—just a dream.
Except it didn't feel like one. Not when she was dreaming, and she supposed that's how most dreams tended to elapse—but not this one.
Dreams faded in out of slumber, swirled as the subconscious broke through into the mind's unguarded thoughts and became visible. No one knew when a dream started, but certainly they knew when they ended.
These dreams, Susan swore, were different. She quite literally awoke into them, consciously fell asleep in her bed in England and then woke up somewhere else. Somewhere familiar. Somewhere she could name as she saw it before her. But when the morning came and the emerald flourish turned to white walls and moss beneath her feet became tangled, cold sheets, and the joy and warmth and comfort left empty, hallow bitterness and melancholy, her tongue could no longer form the word. Unable to pronounce the name fighting to form on her lips.
Tonight differed, if only slightly.
The same forest. The same warm, damp ground under her toes. The same platinum sunlight peering through the shapes in the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of the girl.
And she knew, as always, she was not alone here. The presence of another, not at all ominous, but looming—hesitant.
Wait. Different.
Susan breathed in, inhaled a familiar coastal breeze. Strange. Had she ever smelled a dream before?
Something was before her. Blurred and not at all together. Scattered, like a flock of butterflies and leaves carried by the wind, until they began to swirl together. Somehow, she knew the image about to be born before she could recognize it. But she knew.
No.
She remembered.
When she awoke, again, having kicked the scratchy tan bedcovers past her knees, where they curled around her ankles and grabbed at her feet, pulled her to painful reality, she was crying.
Forgetting.
Couldn't remember what she had remembered.
But she could remember the feel of broad shoulders beneath her palms, a steady heartbeat warming her cheek, long, calloused fingers stroking her hair.
Sea-chapped lips on her hairline. The voice, different than the usual one that accompanied her nights, a little breathless, a little urgent as it murmured against her tangled hair—
"Just come back to me."
And as Susan remembered the dream, she weeped for the man who's face she forgot.
"What was the prince's name?"
"The prince?"
"The one the Queen of Old helped fight his uncle?"
"Oh. I'm not sure. I don't know if I remember."
"I think he loves the queen."
"I think he does, too."
She did not see him again. Not for many nights.
During the days, Susan busied herself with her students. She'd be denying by not admitted she enjoyed the way they looked up to her, followed her and learned from her. She loved sharing with them knowledge and tools, but more than that she loved watching the children use what she taught them to become more themselves. More…different from each other.
She taught gently, thought not without authority, and loved every smile secretly shared between classmates.
At night, she tried to convince herself this was enough.
But she dreamed of a forest and could smell the sea and taste the salt and soil. And she heard a deep, throaty voice that kept telling her she was not forgotten.
It was months later, after falling asleep with the December chill nipping at her cheeks, that she saw the face she knew she would not remember in the morning.
It was the first time she spoke in her dreams.
She hardly recognized her own voice as she mustered a small, weepy sound. "I'm sorry I can't remember."
The man, the one she couldn't turn her eyes from yet at the same time couldn't see, shook his head—disappointed. "You can. You won't." His voice was hard, angry almost, but then softened. "I understand. I know it hurts. I don't want that for you. None of us do."
"Us?"
"The people who love you."
She woke up too soon. And she remembered his name. And she wept as she spoke it aloud.
"Caspian…."
She missed her siblings every day. But every day she found herself missing one more than the other.
Some days she missed Lucy for the joy she brought into a room. Lucy was like a light. Susan envied her, when she was alive. Now she only missed her. Lucy challenged her to be better, made her more compassionate and softened the hard edges of their too broken home.
She missed Peter for his safety. He angered her, while he was here, for what Susan thought was him being too involved, too nosy, and too protective.
Except he wasn't any of those things.
He just cared for her and loved her and wanted to keep her safe.
Susan could not accept that until his body bled out over her.
Today, in particular, she missed Edmund.
He was the most like her, she supposed; bored with the world around them; unable to immerse himself into school and friends and things that seemed so trivial. Her siblings were always so upset by her inability—or, rather, refusal—to entertain their imaginations.
Edmund, at least, understood. Even if it angered him to do so.
Perhaps that's what made them so close, Susan pondered, until the end. They were both so angry.
Tonight, when she dreamed, she didn't wake up in a forest, but in an ongoing scene—like from a play.
A woman whose face she couldn't see.
A man whose face she wanted to forget.
"My darling, my dessert flower, if only you'd obey and we wouldn't be here—"
The words made Susan feel physically ill. The voice made her want to flee.
"You are a fool, Rabbadash, to think you can achieve what you wish through control and belittlement."
The woman spoke, her face slowly forming, and her voice striking an eery chord in hard-to-reach corners of Susan's mind, like a melody she couldn't place or a word she couldn't recall.
Then, suddenly, she remembered.
Remembered where she was.
Who she was.
What happened next.
She woke up screaming, except she was in the forest again, and her brother was there.
"Edmund," she wept, reached for his tall, lanky frame without a thought. Didn't consider it strange to see him. Didn't question how he was here.
But she couldn't. Couldn't feel him, couldn't touch. He was right there, yet seemed to move farther from her reach with every step she took towards him.
His brown eyes, deep as mahogany, aged too much for the sixteen year old boy who left her behind, filled with his tears. "You won't reach me here, sister," he admitted, visibly upset as she became more irritable attempting to touch him. "But I swear I won't let him touch you again."
"No—" An ugly soprano sob broke through Susan's rebuttal, an outpouring of tears blurring the image of her brother. "Please—no—don't leave me."
Edmund, fading away, murmured to her, "I never have."
Susan woke up, for the first time wishing to forget.
She rarely went to town anymore. Tonight, though, she didn't want to sleep.
The club attacked her senses with orange lights and poor jazz and she let a man dressed like a sailor buy her a drink. And then kept accepting drinks.
They walked to the pier in the snow in the middle of the night. The ice pricked at her bare feet like knives, but she reveled in the feeling, then wondered where and when she lost her shoes. The water fled to the shore, skipping over the rocks, then retreated back to the sea.
The sailor started to kiss her, but she couldn't feel it.
When his hands wandered beneath her dress, she tried to push them down.
When he grabbed her breast too roughly, she heard herself whimper but couldn't tell if it came from her mouth.
When he slapped her, she only felt the heat from his hand but not the pain that should have accompanied.
When she fell into the water, she wondered why she didn't feel cold.
And when her lungs forced her to take an unwilling breath, she thought breathing in water felt just like breathing in air.
When she closed her eyes, she thought dying felt a lot like falling asleep. And death, she thought, sounded much like her dreams.
"I have not forgotten you, Daughter of Eve."
The last thing she saw was the moon. She watched it float away, even as she supposed she was the one sinking. The water became colder. She felt at peace. And then her eyes opened—unwillingly, even. And she felt warmer. And the moon was gone, and in its place the sun beckoned her to him.
Wake up, girl! Swim!
Susan's heart began to race, and she commanded her limbs to climb upwards to the sun.
But she was hurting. And tired. And she felt so nice when she was asleep before.
I'm sorry, she thought to the sun. To the voice. To life. For death felt so pleasant. And she was so tired. I can't.
But then the sun came closer, and something was propelling—no—pulling her to the surface. Arms wrapping around her, hoisting her. A hard chest against her back. Water swimming past her ears and then her head breaking the surface—
And Susan breathed.
"That's it! Just hold onto me!"
She raised her chin above the waves, relying on the arms around her to hold her up, and choked against the seawater lapping at her face.
"Hang on! Hang on!"
The salt stung her eyes and she felt herself being pulled out of the water, up, up, up, her feet on something solid and wooden.
She fell to her knees, choked on water and blood and saliva, felt her heart race and body seize in a panic as boots crowded her tear-blurred vision.
"Move outta the way!" came an authoritative voice, ringing in her ears and making her head ache. "Give the girl some space!"
Gentle hands held her shoulders firmly, grasping her wet hair from her face. "That's it," a voice above her urged. "You're alright. You're safe now."
Susan sobbed as the water finished escaping her system, leaning back on her heels and struggling to process her surroundings. Her vision, intercepted by salt and tears and water and sunshine, slowly adjusted to the several figures—men—standing around her.
Reflexively, she turned to the individual beside her, whose hands still held her by her shoulders.
She gasped.
And wept.
And watched as his brown eyes, deep and warm, widened, swirled with recognition, then disbelief, and finally relief.
"Aslan," he uttered, his beard-stippled jaw falling. Tears leaked from his eyes and mixed with the water dripping from his air and down his sun-seared cheeks.
"This is a dream," Susan whispered. She felt her shoulders shake—with adrenaline and the fear that she would blink in wake up in England, in her bed or under the sailor and—God, she would rather die—
"No!" He held her shoulders tighter, smiled through his tears. "No, Aslan, Susan—you're here."
Susan sobbed. Happy. Afraid. Relieved. Afraid. "Here?"
"Yes, love. Welcome to the Dawn Treader."