A/N: Just realized that it was Christmas Eve and I hadn't yet written a Christmas fic. *face falls* It really is an awful feeling to get, especially on Christmas Eve. I really will try to write an actual separate fic for Christmas (maybe tonight or later tomorrow?) but until then, this is going to have to do.
Enjoy. If you dare.
12.
She shivers all the way down to her icy cold paws as she stares out the window at the falling snow. It is piling up all around them, all around their little dam. And yet, had it ever done anything but? Had there ever been a time when there was not snow coming at them from all sides, veritably choking them; swallowing the slightest hint of heat and light and joy?
She'd been born a good sixty years after the beginning of the Long Winter in a warm little dam, not much different from this one. All but one of her siblings died that year, because how do you feed six kits when nothing has grown from the frozen ground in decades? Somehow she and her younger sister scraped through the thin months. Their mother fed them fish until they knew no other taste. And then her family had been caught by the wolves and slaughtered, and she was alone.
There was a reason she and her husband were referred to as "Beaver and Mrs. Beaver". They were the only Beavers left—the only talking beavers—in all of Narnia, perhaps in all the world. Beaver had saved her from the same wolves that had taken her family, as they hunted her mercilessly in the days that followed the slaughter. They found nooks in the land and friends who took them in to hide them until the beasts had given up chase and all was well. And then they began to build.
Their dam would one day become the site of a town which would become a city which would be ruled by lords as its own Royal Province. Two battles were fought there, one that took place just before the beginning of the Long Winter (it was, ironically, the same battle in which their dear friend Tumnus' father had died) and one many years later against marauders from the west. Yet in the day that snow covered the ground and the She-Beaver looked out the window and felt its heaviness pile in drifts upon her heart, the days of glory were still buried in the folds of Future's cloak.
Because she and Beaver had never known the days before the Winter, they did well enough at surviving. He learned to cut holes in the stream to fish for food, and the envoys from Calormen who traveled to the Witch's Court often brought supplies of food that could be scavenged from their packs when all of them lay dead, slaughtered by the hungry flesh-eating wolves. So it was that they had marmalade and potatoes and the beer that Beaver learned to like.
However, even though there was nothing to distinguish this day from any other, when the snow came falling, falling, falling from the grey, winter sky, Mrs. Beaver had been taught to keep record of the days; and this day was Christmas Eve.
Father Christmas would not come tomorrow. He had never come in all her days, and might yet never come, for she and Beaver had lived half the span of their lives, and might not even reach next year's age of forty-one. However, even though it was just a legend from her mother, from her neighbors and friends, she believed in Father Christmas as firmly as she believed in Aslan himself. And where would she be without her belief in Aslan?
One Hundred Years. One Hundred Years of Winter, of believing-without-seeing about hope and joy and this thing they called the sun, and this thing they called spring. Always winter, and never Christmas. And yet in the roughly furnished dam over the frozen river, something warmer than just a fire glows from within. It might be always winter and never Christmas, but always at the front of Mrs. Beaver's mind, as she waits by her sewing machine for her husband to return from his errand (by the Lion, poor Tumnus!) is the thought that someday, somehow, the spring that she has never known is coming.
And when it does, Winter will be no more.
Merry Christmas, everyone!