Disclaimer: C.S. Lewis owns these characters, even though he's dead.
A/N: This is the sixth installment in my series of fics inspired by misheard song lyrics. The real lyric in this case is "You're sailing from another world" from the song "Wolves without Teeth" by Of Monsters and Men. This is my first-ever Narnia fic, but I've got a couple ideas for other Narnia fics within this series. Also, it's been over a decade since I read a Narnia book, so please don't flame me if I've misremembered a few details.
We met at a dance hall, Charles and I, after the war. After both wars. Not that he knew about the Narnian one. The one I'd fought in. The one that had truly stolen my childhood. I suppose in some ways I was lucky that the two had coincided, that our world had gone to war just when Narnia had. It made the slips when I mentioned "the war" easier to cover. It made it easier to explain when I was up half the night with night terrors, and when Edmund turned taciturn, and when Peter was too much like an adult and Lucy was far too little like a child. Everyone had grown up, our entire generation, all across England. All across Europe. All across the world. In some ways, it was comforting that it wasn't just us.
In any event, we met at a dance hall. I much preferred our orderly English dances to the raucous parties I'd known in Narnia, and pantyhose and makeup were much more enjoyable to wear than Narnian floor-length gowns. I knew how small these details were, of course; both Narnia and England had achieved peace, and that was what really mattered. But I'd had my youth stolen from me once on the battlefield, and if I was going to be spat back into England by a blasted wardrobe and forced once again into the body of a teenager, I was going to make the most of my second shot at being young.
"May I have this dance?" Charles had asked when he approached me, overly formal.
"You may," I replied, matching his tone and taking his outstretched hand. It was strong and lean but uncalloused; clearly he'd never held a bow or a sword. I was gladder than ever to be missing the calluses on my fingers that I'd built up from years of training with a bow and arrow, as well as the scars on my hands from knife fights. Narnia had spat me back with an unblemished body and an endlessly battered mind, and for once, the way Charles was looking at me, I almost didn't resent the tradeoff.
So we danced: lindy hop and swing and jive and all those dances our parents thought would send us straight to hell. (I'd killed people. If hell existed, I was pretty sure I was already on my way there. Then again, I knew hell existed because I'd lived it on the battlefield.) Charles was a good dancer, comfortable in his body in a way that warriors had to be and non-fighters sometimes were too. I knew I matched him; I'd never been one for modesty. I could dance and so could Charles. We simply fit.
He asked me to get soda with him, to get ice cream, to accompany him to another dance, to go to the movies. We'd been on five dates before he asked if I'd like to go steady, and only then did I kiss him. He tasted like the root beer he'd been drinking and my foot popped behind me as I opened my mouth and allowed his tongue to graze mine. I'd become an adult before, it was true, but I'd never had this. I wanted more.
We kept going steady and I spent less time with my siblings. They all wanted to talk about Narnia, as if we hadn't been through enough by living that experience once. I started pretending I'd forgotten everything just to stop them from bothering me about it all. I could tell this hurt all of them, especially Lucy, but the alternative would have hurt me. At some point, I needed to protect myself.
I was seventeen for the second time when Charles proposed. I'd stayed behind when my siblings had taken a trip to visit the professor whose house we'd stayed at during the war. Charles took me to dinner and then got down on one knee outside the restaurant. The moment I said yes, something inside me shook and terrible knowledge slammed into my mind and my bones: my siblings had died. Yet I suddenly knew they were not dissipated into nothingness, but rather in Narnia. I would never see them again, perhaps, but they were where they wanted to be. We were all where we wanted to be.
I began crying as Charles stood. He may have suspected the tears were tears of happiness at first, but quickly I began sobbing inconsolably. Charles wrapped me in a hug and stood with me there on the sidewalk while I wept.
"Shh, shh, Susan, what is it?" he murmured into my hair.
"You've saved me from another world," I gasped back, half-hoping I was crying too hard for him to understand me.
"Shh, shh, you're all right. We're all right," Charles kept murmuring.
Five days later, he stood by me at the funeral. Three years after that, we welcomed our first child into the world, and we named her Lucy.