Work Text:
When Susan fell back through the wardrobe she wore black until the end of the war called them back to London. She was in mourning. She was a queen and a woman stuffed into a girl’s body all over again. She was an adult who still needed to reach puberty.
She mourned for her body. The scars she could trace like memories no longer existed because to this body they had never happened. This body was still narrow and lacking. She mourned her curves. She knew her breasts and hips would come in a few years as they had before but for now she mourned them.
She mourned the body that had known both love and lust. She mourned the pleasures she’d discovered in her body. She missed the desires that this body still had to waken. She missed the ache in the middle of her hips that drove her to passions.
She mourned her lover. The beautiful woman who she met at fifteen. The woman who had waken the passions in her body. The woman who stood beside her at court functions. The woman that whispered funny stories in her waiting ear. The woman who as a girl became the queen’s closest friend. The woman who started sharing her bed on her seventeenth birthday. The woman who never left her bed after that.
She mourned being a woman.
She mourned being a queen more.
She’d always been a queen before she had been a woman. She mourned the weight of the responsibility on her shoulders. She didn’t know what to do now that it was gone. She missed the weight that she easily carried for fifteen years. The only weight she did not carry was to produce heirs. There was another queen and two kings who could someday take on that mantle. She was allowed to marry for politics and love for herself.
Susan considered herself a widow. Widowed from her country which was her first marriage, widowed from her lover who expected her home and widowed from her body which she’d spent fifteen years learning and honing to her desires.
At twelve years old Susan was twenty seven and a widow. She wore those years the way none of her siblings did. Peter was the Magnificent and magnificence did not need a throne to shine. Edward was the Just and he saw the return to his childhood as a penance he would never repay in his own eyes. Lucy was the Valiant. She forged her faith in whatever material was available- the sun in the grass and the birds in the sky. They all gave her tools to write her own creed.
But Susan was a Queen first and she mourned this loss.
She resented her prepubescent body and the war she could not fight in because she was Susan the Gentle and sometimes being Gentle meant protecting her own from the battles that raged on.
Susan was no stranger to war whether it was a war between countries or a war within herself. For Susan now was a Queen in a child’s body. It did not matter the love or lust she had once felt for she had lost what was most important to her. She had lost her Kingdom.
Susan spent the next few years with haughty hooded eyes at teacher and professors that said a girl could never lead the word and eyes wide open in delight at professors and teachers that said she could. She knew she had made mistakes as High Queen because everyone did because she was human. She refused to make those mistakes against. She would be a better queen in this new world. This world that was hers by birth and not by choice. She could be a better queen. She would make different mistakes. She read books on policy and politics. When she finished the books in the girl’s library she asked Peter to find her books in the boy’s library.
Peter always found her books because Peter understood the weight of the rule. The weight one kept being High Ruler. There was a responsibility that hung on their shoulders. The responsibility that drove Peter to try to enlist again and again in each Royal division. Because Peter the Magnificent could not stand by as his soldiers fought countless battles. A true King rode with his soldiers. Peter was a true king and Susan was a true Queen.
Susan took up archery again no matter how her soft childish muscles frustrated her at first. She could barely remember a time when she didn’t have the strength to pull a bow. Her forearm once again became busied and calloused from the new hours of holding her bow. She savored those marks. She asked Peter to teach her to shoot and learned to fence.
Because sometimes no matter how gentle you wanted to be being a Queen meant protecting your people.
A Queen put her people before herself.
That is why Susan looked for a Husband in Narnia. Not because Narnia condemned her lover but because she needed to put the good of all before the good of herself.
Because she was a true Queen even in her new/old world Susan put her family, her classmates, her anyone before herself because she at her core was a true Queen.
But she mourned.
She mourned the loss of her womanhood, her kingdom and her love. Although not in that order.
She gave a false name because that was all she was. A false caricature of a girl who used to be a woman. She was a Queen pretending to be a girl. A girl she’d out grown long ago.
Susan was always a Queen.
When she first arrived back in Narnia a small bit of her was relieved to see the changes. If the trees no longer walked and the rivers no longer sang she didn’t have to worry about losing her kingdom a second time. Because it wasn’t her kingdom anymore.
It was a new land.
A land filled with hope and birth but not hers.
Because how could she become a woman, a Queen, again. She couldn’t live in this land again. She couldn’t pour her life, her blood and her hopes in this land to only have her blood, her life and her land ripped away one more time.
She had no desire to be twice widowed.
After all she was only fifteen on Earth.
They were Kings and Queens, and they were children.
She mourned the loss of those she knew. The Beavers, Mr. Tumnus. Upon arriving at Cair Paravel she wept for them. They protected her and they were hers to protect. She wept her failure.
High King Peter.
King Edmond.
Queen Lucy.
High Queen Susan.
She didn’t know how to be a High Queen anymore. She couldn’t bear the loss of her kingdom again. She couldn’t bear to become a Queen again. She couldn’t bear to live or to love again. If it was a different kingdom- one where the Tree’s didn’t dance and the River’s didn’t sing- she couldn’t lose it again.
But it was her kingdom.
And she was Queen.
She’d place her Kingdom above all else.
“We didn’t mean to leave you know.” said Peter.
“It doesn’t make a difference now does it?” asked the Dwarf.
He was right. It didn’t matter if they meant to leave or not. They left and this was the result of their abandonment. Maybe if she had married, maybe if she’d produced an heir before falling back into the wardrobe maybe then she could have saved her kingdom.
Because Susan was always a Queen before she was a Woman.
She was always the responsibility before she was the pleasure.
Before all else she was a High Queen.
But in the land that wasn’t her land she was no longer a Queen she was a legend. A legend was allowed to break away. A legend reborn was allowed to live again. She was a Daughter of Eve and a Queen and a Legend and a Woman. She did not know how to unite them all to become Susan—the woman in the woman/child’s body.
Susan saw herself in Caspian- another caught between two selves. Instead of being caught between the man he could be and the almost man he was she was caught between the woman, the Queen she had been and the girl/woman she was now.
Before the battle they had fallen into the passions of hope night after night. The Old Queen and the New King. The past and the present intertwining in ways that reminded Susan’s body of long ago stirrings that longed to be awakened once again. Stirrings that had awakened again if she allowed herself to feel them. They spent nights entwined in the could have and should have beens. The world where Susan had chosen a husband for the politics and kept her lover in her bed- both of them happy. The world where Peter had married for love and for politics and created heir after heir. Where Edmond had never married but instead found his joy in being the Just- finally repaying the pence of childhood errors to himself. In that life he died happy. Lucy lived as she always lived in Narnia and in England with blinding faith she worked tirelessly to build and maintain.
Susan always admired Lucy- her faith that she built brick by brick.
She admired the diplomacy that Edmond trained himself to excel in. His just and silver tongue stopped more wars than she could count.
She admired Peter in his role as High King- the Magnificent, the one who knew the final choice.
She didn’t see her own strength. The one who forgave Edmond, believed in Lucy while maintaining her practicality and the one who counseled Peter. She was Susan of the Horn. Susan the Magnificent. Susan the Markswoman Queen.
She was also Susan the damned.
Damned to be a Queen ripped from her country again.
She knew this long before Aslan took her and Peter aside to tell them. She’d been taken from her throne once before- she wouldn’t be allowed to stay now. Part of her was relieved when Aslan told her they would not return. If she never came back she could never loose Narnia again. She promised Aslan that she would live (and love) in her world. She would find her place there. She had no other choice.
He promised though when he sent her back he wouldn’t take everything. After he talked with her and Peter the pair walked alone for a while. He’d leave the child that started to grow in her belly. The child that would be born of two worlds. The child that would find their way back to Narnia one day.
Susan the Gentle and the Damned was both thirty and fifteen and going to be a mother.
When they walked through the archway to return to England this time Susan didn’t wear black.
She was fifteen and she was thirty and she was twice widowed.
She had found her lovers grave at Cair Paravel. She picked wild flowers and cried tears that hadn’t fell for years. She mourned her lover again.
She mourned her country a second time. Quiet tears that slid down her face when she let them escape at night.
She promised she’d live in this world and she’d keep that promise.
After all she was a Queen and she was becoming a Mother. Her child deserved a mother who lived in this world. Her child deserved a mother who lived. When she began to show the school sent her home in disgrace. She held her head high because she was a Queen.
Peter, Edmond and Lucy came home quickly and the four of them sat on Susan’s bed saying nothing for a long time.
“Caspian?” Peter asked.
“Yes, Aslan said I could keep this one thing, even if we’d never return.” Susan said as she held her hands close over her growing belly. She was almost sixteen and she was almost thirty one.
“Well there are worse things to take home- we could have brought the Telmarines to England.” Edmond said.
“Genetically we kind of did Ed.” Susan reminded him.
Her siblings became her champions because they knew that if a woman could be queen of a land she could be queen of her own body. Susan continued to read of politics and business and ruling. She was a Queen and her shoulders were meant to take on the responsibility. When her daughter was born Susan clutched her close. She was terrified that if she let her child go she’d never see the baby again.
She lost her womanhood once, her kingdom and her lovers twice. She would not lose her daughter too. She wouldn’t have her daughter waiting for a land that might be decades in coming. Narnia would be a children’s game, a fairy tale until the day her daughter traveled there. When her daughter came home Susan would make a pot of tea and sit with her and tell her the stories of when she was High Queen. Until that day Narnia was just a tale that children played during the war.
Susan was twenty one and thirty six, her daughter was six.
Susan worked as an aid to a Parliament member. She took the sexist jokes and statements and did her work and did it well. She learned the government of her birth land inside and out. She learned how the people were taxed, how the laws were created and who benefited from them. She made suggestions, she spoke up and she demanded she be heard.
She wore her lipstick like armor. Just as she donned court dresses and jewels in Narnia she carefully painted her lips every morning and slid on her nylons in England. Armor wasn’t always made of metal. Peter was studying to teach, Edmond to practice law and Lucy to be a nurse. Susan put on her lipstick and learned how her country was run. She held her daughter close and whispered her stories of talking trees and dancing rivers.
Susan never forgot. She always remembered. She remembered her promise to live in this world.
“You’re going back someday.” She whispered to Lucy one night.
“I know, I’m so sorry.” Lucy whispered back lying on her side in her sister’s bed with the new baby between them.
“It’s ok. I promised to live here. But when you go, if he’s still alive. Don’t tell him please.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has to live in his world and I have to live in mine. It’d be cruel to show him what he can’t have.”
“Ok.” Lucy promised.
Susan never forgot.
She was twenty one and she was thirty six and she kept her promise. She held her daughter tight and whispered stories of beavers who talked and fauns that advised and trees and rivers that danced. She did not speak of the Lion who took it all away- that was for Lucy to do. She did not speak of battles that raged on to protect their land- that was for Peter to do. She did not speak of Justice and Laws and Right and Wrong- that was for Edmond to do.
She kept her promise. She told stories of living. Of finding love in stolen moments. She told stories of riding her horse through the woods to dance with the trees under the stars. She told stories of meeting beavers for afternoon tea and star gazing with centaurs.
She told stories of living.
Susan was twenty one and thirty six. She waved as her daughter climbed aboard a train with all of her aunts and uncles.