Disclaimer: why yes, after forty-one chapters of telling you I don't own this story, I've finally decided to admit Narnia is mine! Along with all the rest of the fictional worlds.

"If you could erase all the mistakes of your past, you would also erase the wisdom of your present."
~ Unknown

Susan debated about going to the rooms upstairs, instead of the graves—it would be warmer—but she needed more than their ghosts right then. She needed to speak to them. The ghosts vanished when she tried; memory made them, and they did not live as much as the gravestones.

Perhaps she should not be a Walker, if the visits tore her open this much.

That was a thought she should discuss with them.

But it was only as she put on her coat that she realised what she was doing. If she looked at the situation squarely—and she had to, for she never wanted to make the same past mistakes that led her to being alone—she intended to speak with, and take advice from—not her siblings, but her memory of them. And memory, she knew from her visits to Narnia, was one of the least reliable parts of the mind.

Enough, she told herself impatiently. Just get there.

A part of her wondered if she should have gone to the painting of the Lion instead, but…she had that thought after six blocks, and she didn't want to turn around. Snow began drifting downwards, touching the pavement and melting; white and cold in the air. A quick thrust of her hands into her coat pockets, and Susan put her head down. She wasn't going to stop.

She needed her family. She needed to get as close to them as she could.

It felt like forever to reach the graveyard, a forever made eternal by the walk through the paths, bleak trees reaching for a clouded sky, and all around, cold stones engraved with names.

Finally, finally, there were the five. Susan shivered. Should she sit by Peter's stone, and pretend he was giving her shelter?

It sounded appealing, but she sat by Lucy's instead. Lucy had always been so warm—

Susan did not touch the cold stone beside her.

"I met a soldier," she began. "It's—hard to remember the heat and desert right now. It was like Tashbaan—hot and cruel. This soldier had lost all his family, and he'd been fighting in the gladiator ring—I forgot to tell you this was ancient Rome. Does it seem funny, that I've been to ancient Rome?" Putting one hand up to her ear, she felt the smooth metal cylinder that was still there. She'd forgotten to give it back to the Doorkeeper. "This right here made it so I could speak to them, and they could speak to me. It's somewhere from the far future. Someday, we are going to invent things like this. And I just used it hundreds and hundreds of years in the past." Edmund's name, black against the grey stone and white flurries, wasn't enough to represent him, or how his eyes would have shone with wonder at this news. Passing from him, she looked to Peter, and then to her father's name. "The soldier—he'd lost all his family." The blank stare at the wall, the faces of the dead—and suddenly Susan found it hard to breathe, air catching in her throat.

"Peter, Edmund, Lucy—Mum, Dad—he'd lost them all. All the things he'd ever believed in, the people he'd loved, the hope he'd had—everything." Each interruption was a gasp; water fell cold and biting on Susan's cheeks. "He was just like me. Just like me. I didn't kill, I didn't have to go to war—but Peter, he'd been a good man. And he was so lost—I can't imagine you lost, but now—now I can." The gasps were fewer, softer, in the stillness of the snowy air. Susan made herself breathe. "I know what it is to lose that much," she whispered. "But I was sent—" and she hadn't considered this yet, hadn't thought of it, but it made sense as she said it—"to give him purpose. He'd been spent till he was hollow, and I was sent so he'd be ready when his next task came, so he would live. And I came back wondering if I should be a Walker—"

Her words fell away.

And there wasn't any response. Her siblings were gone. Her parents were gone. All that was left were the memories in her head, growing blurrier and more indistinct as the days went by. Like the letters of Lucy's name, beginning to fill up with snow.*

"It's just so much pain," Susan whispered to the waiting silence.

Still the air held no answers.

Hatred, thick and hot, curled Susan's fingers and filled her eyes with tears. "If Nancy or Carol were here, they'd care. But you're all stones, nothing but stones, you probably can't even hear me—" another gasp, and the sound made Susan hear herself. "If I can't hear you, have I lost all of you?"

Is anything lost, when Aslan remembers it, Su?

A memory of—she thought it had been Peter.

"So I'll just live a life separately from all of you, then," she told his stone. The same biting tone she'd used at her most angry—she hadn't wanted to bring that tone to him, ever again. Not even his gravestone.

The silence said nothing, but she knew Peter—knew what he'd be waiting for her to realise.

"I know it was my choice to live separately. And I…I've had this conversation before. But I went to Rome and all the grief came back—oh, Peter, what am I to do? It's like all my wounds opened again, and I learned nothing in this last trip."

Sometimes it isn't about us, Lucy said. Another memory; they'd been hosting…someone, at Cair Paravel, and it had made all the Four's hours long and unpleasant. But it had done a world of good for a relative of the people being hosted.

"All right," Susan admitted, reaching a gloved hand up to wipe her cheeks, then her nose. "Maybe this last trip wasn't about me; maybe it was just about the man I was sent to. The Doorkeeper did say I was growing as a Walker. I am meant to be Walking for others. But…it hurts so much."

Silence. There was too much silence in Susan's life. Bringing her knees up to her face, wrapping her arms around them, she let her head fall forward. She wished she could ask Nancy for advice.

Oddly enough, when her thoughts grew quieter, it was not Nancy, nor her own pain, that came to mind. It was the soldier, with his empty gaze.

His empty gaze at the beginning. When she'd walked away, walked back towards the door to her own world, he had been more aware. He'd glanced at the other gladiators. He'd seen her vanish.

There had been some comfort for him, too, in her presence.

Susan craved comfort now. She knew what it was to need it, to beg for it with every atom, because to continue to endure this heart-rending pain—

Was harder than dying.

"Walking has always been worth doing. Even—even if it reopens my own pain." She'd been like that in Narnia, too, she remembered. The Queen she had been had been the first to reach for the hurting. Lucy healed the wounded, Susan struggled to look at them; but it had been the Gentle Queen the hurting hearts turned towards. And Susan had reached back to every one of them.

That hadn't happened much in England. But then, Susan had not been very gentle.

She was gentler now.

Gentler, but more broken than Narnia. She could not be that Queen anymore. She'd known that for a while. But her heart still reached for the hurting, when she saw them.

If she did not see them, she would close herself off. She knew that, from what she had done in the past. Walking the worlds let her see them; and when she saw them, she could and would help them.

Because she was no longer the shallow girl she had been, nor the queen she once was, but a broken woman who would still reach out to the hurting, in any world.

She was a Walker. No matter how much it hurt. Because of the hurts of others, she would be a Walker.

Looking over at the gravestones, she tried to smile. "I can't see your names very clearly." Trying to brush off the snow still left white streaks in the curving letters. "But I think I just found mine. Again. Even though I couldn't really hear you." A cramp ran through her index finger; she'd gotten cold, in the time she'd spent thinking. "If you can hear me, I promise, here before your graves, to be a Walker. To give all I am to it. Not because it keeps you close, or because it lets me be useful, and more like I was—but because there are hurting people to be loved, and helped. Because I've been called. And for those other reasons—but not only for them." A promise in front of the graves felt heavier than one spoken to the living, Perhaps because the dead could no longer break their promises.

Perhaps because they knew eternity, and how long promises should last.

"I'll be back. I—I miss you." Clearing her throat did not help, and another tear ran down her face as Susan got to her feet. "I'm going to go rest."

It was another night where Susan cried herself to sleep.

*Take from Lewis' A Grief Observed, when he talks about how memories grow more indistinct, like a person being covered in snow; if the person lives, he corrects memory by how he acts and speaks, but without the living person, memories grow indistinct.

A/N: a shorter chapter than usual, but I'm hoping to wrap up the story in the next few days. Since this is just part I, I don't know how much of Nancy or Carol's story I will resolve - I know what happens with them, but I think it's too complicated for a few chapters. So I'll try to leave those at a satisfactorily open ending. Is there anything you particularly want to see before I finish?