Work Text:
Looking for apartments with a coworker (much too poor, this ex-queen, this twenty-something fledgling reporter, to afford her own), Susan finds herself stared down by a nice realtor and her pink eyeshadow.
"You have to see the walk-in closet,” the realtor says. “It’s to die for.”
"I’m sure it is," says Susan. "If you would excuse me?"
Susan locks herself in the bathroom and laughs until she cramps, trying to come up with every pun Edmund would have rattled off at that prompt.
They don’t get the apartment.
--
Let’s talk about Susan looking at the trees across the street, hearing them rustle in the windy night and thinking of Lucy, because of course. What else can a murmuring tree mean on a night like tonight, except this: her little sister calling out to the forest, on their second trip to Narnia, and believing in them until they came back to life?
Susan doesn’t always think of Lucy at the sight of waving tree limbs, no; after all, it’s been years. Susan can walk down a blustery, tree-lined street most days and not think once of her sister or dryads or dancing in storms. But this is a night of changes, the first night in a new place, so her brain is putting all her old meanings onto these unknown shapes.
Susan unzips her stuffed suitcase and thinks about Edmund refusing to unpack fully at Professor Diggory’s house in the country, after they’d been evacuated from London, because they’d be called back any day, right, this wasn’t home, Su, just a temporary thing, why should I?
(When they get back from Narnia, the responsibility of a kingdom at their heels, their adolescent limbs gawky and newly remembered—Edmund doesn’t unpack then, either, but this time it’s because he is used to emergencies, to war, to sudden midnight trips to their borders).
That night, that first night, Susan thinks about Ed, about Peter, about Lucy and their parents, sees them in the knick-knacks and framed photographs she is scattering on her wobbly desk, but she also thinks about how to keep the water bill down. She has a few pictures of them as children, as young adults—Ed’s graduation, Christmas the year Lucy turned sixteen—but Susan’s also got pictures of her, in the years after, grinning with her first reporter’s badge, at a friend’s wedding, and a water color sketch of a fishing boat on a still, pine-tree-hemmed bay that she’d picked up on a trip to Acadia. She has come so far without them.
And that’s the worst part, some days, that she’s five eight in her favorite heels and Lucy never grew past five two. Lucy died at seventeen and Susan has years on her, now, gets a new one every fifty two weeks. Susan can feel the planet spinning, dragging her further and further from the moments when she and her siblings had been growing together, not apart.
Yes, let’s talk about the bright edge of her smile as she urges her friends out the door. “No, you go, I’m fine. I really have to unpack.” Even now she’s still startled that friends fold under than easy, smiling face as quickly as greedy Telemarine diplomats.
Susan memorizes homes when she has them. Susan walks the edges of the empty apartment now, runs her hand along the cracking paint, leans out her window to try to fix the smell of the night air and the shape of the skyline into her memory.
Homes are steps—temporary, transient, fading from the moment you enter them. But they are steps—they take you where you’re going. You leave your footprints arrayed behind you. You leave fingerprints on cracking paint and your initials carved in the bottom of a bed frame somewhere out in the English countryside.
Susan found an old chess piece in an overgrown Cair Paravel, once, centuries after she had left that world for the first time with a chess game unfinished in her parlor room.
Her friends are out dancing, so Susan puts on a record and makes her bed with the windows flung wide open, the music pouring out into the night.
She straightens the knick-knacks on her desk and thinks about Peter, who tried so hard to be organized, and Edmund, who couldn’t be anything else. The quills on Ed’s desk (and then the pens, once they’d got back home), were always laid out parallel, the stacks of paper perfectly square. Ed got twitchy if Lucy nudged them awry, not that she noticed.
Lucy and Peter were so much more comfortable in their own skin that it was hard for them to imagine the way things bubbled up in Edmund: panic and rage, the way neat stacks of paperwork were a gift to a soul that was so desperate for a sense of control.
Lucy kept faith. Peter kept steady. Edmund chose, again and again, to earn his title every day of his short/long life, trying to make up for a sin that everyone but himself had forgiven him for.
Susan lives.
Now, in a little apartment just outside the good part of town, Susan sings along to the music as she lays out knick knacks and sorts through old notes. Her toes tap, her fingers play out the beat of the song. Finally, it is too much; Susan drops her work and dances in her empty apartment.
Her butt wiggling, her socked feet sliding, her pinned-up dark hair coming down around her face in unruly strands, Susan fills her home with song.
She knows this room is temporary—a six month lease and then she’s on to other dingy flats, maybe less-dingy ones someday, maybe even a little house in some suburb (though she doubts it), maybe a country house like Professor Diggory’s, so big she can get lost if she needs to. Susan knows this home and its cracked-paint walls are temporary, doomed to end, but for tonight, for this first night, they are filled with song and that’s enough.