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Susan Pevensie, late of Finchley, dies on a battlefield at the age of thirteen.
She dies at the hands of Queen Susan the Gentle, who puts away her old life as neatly as she put away the dress she came to Narnia in, folding away the tatters so only the fine pattern of the fabric she picked out with her mother shows as she tucks it into the bottom of a wooden trunk.
She exchanges her War Drobe (and she cannot help but separate the words when she hears them in her head) for finely hand-crafted Narnian clothes and accessories--and weapons, for Queen Susan is as capable in a battle as any of her siblings. She learns tactics and logistics right alongside Pete and Ed, and for once she feels equal to them, even if it's in their absolute noviciacy when it comes to medieval functioning.
Queen Susan the Gentle is effortlessly graceful and courteous, as is her queenly little sister with whom her relationship has never been better, and throws herself into her new life with her whole heart because if she's honest and there's no reason not to be, she bloody loves it.
She loves her gowns and crowns. Her bow and horn given to her by Father Christmas himself. She loves her horses and hounds, she loves the Talking Beasts, and she loves standing beside her siblings that instant before they take their thrones together.
She loves Aslan with her whole heart and soul as only a child orphaned by war can love a powerful male figure that came back from the dead to save her baby brother. She loves him as a daughter does, a woman, a queen.
She loves Cair Paravel, its tall towers and stained glass windows and jewel-like view of the ocean. She loves the evenings spent in their private hall near the fire, while Ed plays chess with himself and Peter oils his own armor even though he has a squire for that. She nearly shrieks in glee when Mr. Tumnus brings her dictionaries in Dwarvish, Taurus, Telmar, and an old Giant dialect, and whirls, skirts swirling about her like wings and flys to the hall and bursts in with her prizes.
"What's that you've got, Su?" Asks Ed, because he's still making up (to himself) by being the most observant and mindful of brothers. She answers by plopping into a chair and opening the first book in her stack. "Lebbelon." (It's the double medial consonant for wedging a spoon excessively consecutively, in the third person masculine. They'll never get it.)
She is met by a chorus of groans and dramatic death scenes and "I'm not even safe from this game HERE??" from Pete, but they eventually all try to guess. Cair Paravel starts to feel more like home than home ever did.
Which is why it hurts so much when it all shatters around her.
Why didn't she tell them to turn around when they saw the lamppost? Who just leaves lampposts lying around in forests where anyone's siblings could stumble across them and ruin a woman's life not once but twice. She was Queen Susan the Gentle, and if she had asked her siblings to just leave, just keep following the stag, they would have done it because her counsel was respected. Her voice was heard in a way her mother never had been.
But she had not turned around.
She had dismounted, and not turned around.
She had pushed through pine needles with Peter, and not turned around.
She had felt fur coats against her fingers and had not turned around and yanked them with her.
She had heard Edmund and Peter's voices tilting back toward boyhood and had not turned around and forced them to get back on their bloody horses and just gone home back to the castle.
Instead, she let the Magic pull her back through the wardrobe, back into childhood and falling out in a heap onto the floor of Spare Oom.
No, the floor of the spare room.
Professor Kirke opened the door with his cup of tea, asked them what it was like, and Susan felt like screaming and sobbing and clawing her way back into the wardrobe because she was just a gangly child again.
But being Queen had taught her the art of subtlety and how to hide her feelings, so the child quietly murders the woman she was and leaves her lying on the floor next to the wardrobe.
When the door closes behind her she flinches at the sound that feels like the slamming of prison bars.
Susan knows exactly what England expects from her daughters, and it's not queenliness.
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For a little while, she humors the other three, plays the "When will Aslan come to get us?" game. But then Pete starts getting into fights. This was easier to handle in Narnia when she could just send him out to spar with Oremis--This was hard for her to navigate because her mother had had a bad war, as they said, and so the Pevensie children were still on their own, as were many. They were luckier than most of course, and Susan had to remember that. She had to be grateful that they still had any family at all and that they could afford nice boarding schools.
Grateful or not, she had one bloody hell of a time keeping Peter's exploits out of her mother's ears, especially after he stopped caring if anyone saw him. Stopped caring if he even won. In the back of her mind, the Queen she couldn't quite keep buried whispered "He used to lead armies. He was the greatest warrior in--" and this was where she clamped her thoughts quiet. It didn't matter what used to be. It only mattered what was now and how she could keep her family safe and together, and Peter was one lost fight from lying about his age and signing up for the war.
She's shouting at him in the train station when she starts feeling that now-familiar tug of Deep Magic
in her gut, and she almost panics when everything starts fading before her eyes, frantically grabbing for Lucy and whomever's hands so she doesn't lose them because there's only one thing worse than not being in Narnia and that's being there without them. The train station peels away before her eyes, leaving them in the mouth of a cave, their shite factory-made shoes soaked through instantly and it's warm warm warm like smoggy destroyed England isn't so they run out of their shoes and stockings as they race to the white sand beach that is lovingly familiar and the paranoid ache, the clench in Susan's heart that has lived there ever since she fell out of the wardrobe melts at last. She flings her arms around each of her siblings and pretends the saltwater on her face is from the surf and not tears.
She's home. She's HOME and there's a war to win and Prince to save and people that need their help--help that only they can give!
For a moment, just a moment, she lets the queen preen about that a bit. They used her horn to call them out of story and song to help them...but she's still just 13. Almost 14!
It's been nearly a year. A year of pretending she doesn't understand the geopolitical ramifications of the war for all of Europe, much less the world. A year of pretending she didn't learn all of the salient languages of the subjects she ruled and suddenly didn't need anymore and that was why Latin was Pandora's Mystery to her now.
She spoke Taurus to Glenstorm's wife, Songstone, and burst into unqueenly tears when the woman answered her gently in the same tongue. The stately Centaur gathered Susan to her and murmured soothingly.
Eventually, Queen Susan the Gentle pulled back and took a handkerchief from her sleeve.
"I do apologize." She laughed wetly, self-deprecatingly. "It's just been so long, and I've missed Narnia so much."
"My queen, we know you did not choose to leave." Songstone runs her hands soothingly down Susan's arms. "If speaking in our tongue together brings you happiness and helps to save us, I shall speak until you beg me to cease."
Of course, everything goes to hell almost immediately because Peter is nothing at this point but one raw nerve and Caspian is determined to keep jumping on it and questioning everything Peter says. She likes Caspian, thinks that he has the potential to be a decent leader if he stops thinking of people as columns of losses both acceptable and unacceptable, but she tries to direct him towards administration. How much grain do they have? What if they have to withstand a siege? What are his people like? What are their names and their children's names? Your people, she told him after the disaster with the night raid and Jadis, will trust you, fight harder and longer for you if you know them if they love you. If you love them. To rule Narnia, she says, almost in a whisper, you have to love her people more than you love anything else. More than you fear anything else.
Queen Susan the Gentle of the Radiant Southern Sun, Marksman Queen and Queen Susan of the Horn, dies for the last time in a castle at the hands of an almost-fourteen-year-old girl, who stands listening to a lion she loved more than almost anything tell her she was too old to come home ever again.
"We weren't too old at Archenland." Her voice is utterly neutral and devoid of inflection as she looks her...yes, her deity in the eyes and does not flinch, because he is exiling her. The worst has happened and there is nothing left to be afraid of. "You gave a warm enough welcome to children to fight your battles but once we don't meet your requirements, it's fine to discard us in a life we don't fit into anymore."
"Su--" Pete tries, of course, he tries, High King Peter the Magnificent with the sun coming in the shattered window to make his and Aslan's hair glow and gleam, a matched pair and she sees the future with sudden clarity that she has been too afraid to look at this entire time. She may have the body of a child now, but she was the second eldest Ruler of Narnia once and she was never as simplistic as Peter was. Peter, ever the golden king, would be returning to Narnia. Without her. And he wouldn't even fight for her.
She stops him with a flat palm pushed in his direction. " I want to hear it from Aslan."
The Great Lion looks at her sadly. He has the audacity to be sad. She is the homeless one, the people-less one now, the one in exile, but he has the audacity to be sad. For her. She will never hear the languages she worked so hard to learn ever again. She will never feel the gentle embrace of a Centaur mother, or the bustle of a Talking Animal. She will never, ever draw a bow again. She is being banished to a world that does not want its daughters so thoroughly that they have to carve themselves into history and she already did that once.
"Only innocent and childlike hearts can make their way to Narnia from the world Men, Dear One."
Susan nods once, regally (she's still a queen for these next few moments goddamnit), and did nothing to hide her tears. "The only reason I no longer fit that criteria is that I gave myself to your world, and was abandoned by it."
Fat tears welled in Aslan's eyes and flowed to match the river of her own, plopping in splashes on the stones of the castle. "I know, Susan. I'm sorry."
Methodically, she retrieves her handkerchief and tidies her face. Nods again, just tiny little bobs of acknowledgment.
"Well. If you're sorry, then."
And turning away to walk out of the castle and into the sun of the crowded square, Susan Pevensie snaps the neck of the queen she used to be once and for all.
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It breaks her fucking heart.
She does that now, swearing. Just to herself, for now, because she might not be a queen but she was still a lady. She turns 14, and starts wearing lipstick, starts dating. Anything to distract her from the constant conversations everyone else has about That Place. It has to be so that she leaves the room when they start talking about it or she'll go mad with grief.
Then, they start going quiet whenever she enters a room. They stop speaking to her at all. Fine. If they only want a Narnian Susan, it was best they realized that she was dead.
Then EUSTACE CLARENCE SCRUBB went to Narnia. Ed and Lucy went to stay for the summer, and they got to go back. And took EUSTACE CLARENCE SCRUBB with them. She was so angry when she found out she put on her shoes and walked as far as she could out of civilization and screamed. She screamed and sobbed until she was doubled over in the road and her throat was raw and she was mindless in her grief as the bear that had attacked Lucy not six months ago. When she has roared out all her rage and wept out her grief and is just sat there numb and unknowing, there eventually comes a soft touch at her shoulder, there for less than a breath and then gone, and when she eventually has the energy to turn and look at the source, there's a girl her own age standing in the other side of the road, wrapped in a warm-looking shawl. "Conas ata-tu?" the girl asks and Susan looks at her mouth like it just spoke the secrets of the universe to her. "Wh...what did you say?" and her accent is very very different from the accent of the girl who could have been her sister in looks.
"My apologies, from your look I thought you had a bit of the Gaeilge. I asked how you were, what's wrong?"
"I'm horrible," Susan says dismissively. It doesn't matter right now because that was almost Dwarf-ish. The words weren't the same, she hadn't understood then, but they had sounded close enough to elicit a response in her and suddenly she needs that language more than she needs to breathe. "What were the words you said? How did they go?" The girl is looking at her now with a mixture of amusement and worry. "Conas, ata, tu." She went through the words slowly and pronounced them for Susan, who hung on them like they were milk to a dying man. "They mean 'How are you?'"
Eventually, she came and sat by Susan, and held her hands, and murmured to her in a fluid language she called Geailge. The only personal thing she asked was "Have a bad war then, love?", stroking a calloused hand over Susan's long black hair. And Su Pevensie threw her head back and laughed herself sick. "Yes. Yes, I have had a terrible war." And she buried her face in the neck of the girl next to her to cry as she stroked Susan's hair.
The long and short of it was that the only way she survived that year was that she got up every morning and dressed in flattering dresses picked with care, did makeup with steady hands. If she was too grown up to be wanted, she would by god be all the way grown-up. She had killed, negotiated, and been a diplomat and she would learn another language because it sounded like a home that no longer wanted her.
She finished school each day and then walked to Anna McBride's house where she was warmly welcomed and slipped easily into the banter of the home. She'd been eyed warily, but Anna had cheerfully announced the first day that Susan was there to learn the Geailge, and suddenly everything was fine. She was handed a bowl of bread to knead while Anna, her mother, and her grandmother argued good-naturedly about how they should go about teaching the English lassie.
"Do you have a dictionary?" She asked, about an hour into the discussion when she'd picked up a handful of vocabulary words from the context. She was met with three pairs of owlish eyes blinking slowly in confusion.
"A...what?" Anna's mother Margret squinted at her.
"It's a book." Susan offered helpfully. "It contains all the words of a language in alphabetical order."
Still squinting, Maggie McBride answered, "That's illegal, love."
Much to Susan's shock and chagrin, the only thing she was currently living for was widely illegal to be spoken or written in books in her land of native birth or any of its provinces. That was not about to stop her, and she threw herself into it.
She told her family she was going on dates. She heard their contemptuous whispers and carefully applier a darker layer of red lipstick.
She attended social functions and knew enough about politics to interest but not intimidate. She was engaging and funny, and she commanded the attention of armies of well-heeled young men. The entire time her mind was in a dim but spotless and warm kitchen and verb tenses around almost familiar consonants.
Her breaking point came in '45, well after VE Day when Peter met Jill Pole for the first time. She hadn't meant to be there, she was on her way out to Anna's with her hand on the doorknob and everything and then she hears in Peter's golden-throated voice, "My sister Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia." Her back goes erect like someone yanked her straight by her hair. She can see him in her mind as he likely was, surrounded by the fading light of the sun in the parlor all shining and kingly.
She steps back.
She closes the door gently.
She turns around, and calmly walks up the stairs into the room she still shares with Lucy, and calmly packs what fits into one battered suitcase--yes, that same faithful suitcase that bore her from Finchley--and calmly walks back down the stairs and out of the house.
She says nothing to anyone, not even when Edmund, sweet, loving, faithful Edmund makes one last overture. "Su, wait!"
She doesn't wait. The door clicks behind her almost soundlessly, and then she's in the street walking downwards.
She hears the door being flung open behind her, and the clatter of shoes on the stair. Edmund is racing past her to halt her. She stops, saying nothing. She stands perfectly. Queenly. Only she's not a queen anymore, she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She's been exiled as surely as any convict sent away for deportation.
She waits for Edmund to try to convince her to come back, that they were just playing, any of the peacekeeping he'd been doing for the last 4 years.
He doesn't.
He extends his hand, and for a baffled moment she thinks he wants to shake. Then she sees the wad of pound notes in his hand.
Wordlessly, she takes it and walks past him into the night.
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Susan Pevensie dies at her own hands once more when she accepts the wedding band Arthur McBride (the best of Anna's brothers, always a smile and a posy for her) has been pushing at her for the past few years and solidifies her relationship with Anna even deeper. She spends more time in Anna's bed than she does in her marriage bed because while Arthur is a good lad with a song in heart and loves her dearly, he's got a touch of what they had called battle fatigue in That Place and was called shell-shock here. He was gentle enough when awake and aware, and Susan could certainly handle herself against a 19-year-old boy that was tired of fighting, but it made for disruptive sleep. So she prepared for bed, laid herself down with Arthur each night and sang to him, gently brushing a hand over the soft black curls that simply begged for petting, and when he had fallen asleep, she took herself into Anna's room, where she received very similar treatment from the low-voiced young woman she'd gotten so attached to.
It only took about a month of this before Susan took her life in her own hands and kissed Anna.
Bloody buggering hell, she was so scared.
And Anna had just slipped her hand into Susans' long hair and deepened the little peck that had taken all of Susan's courage.
And just like that, she was with two of the McBride brood. And that was fine with everyone somehow. She moved through the following week or so in a hazy mixture of joy, fear, and shock, but no-one batted an eyelash when Anna kissed Susan the next morning handing her a cup of chicory coffee after Arthur had come clattering down the stairs and dropped a kiss on her head before taking a seat at the table.
It was the best summer of Susan McBride's life. She rarely left the hostler's where the McBride's lived and so saw very few other people that were not accompanied by horses. There was warmth and comfort, and the people around her were teaching her a wonderful new language and she was teaching Anna Dwarvish (heavily edited, of course), she had a husband who loved her and work hard enough to keep her in dark red lipstick-- which she had not stopped wearing.
She loved her new family, and they loved and accepted her as well, even though her signs of shell shock were very very different than any they were used to. She was fine around most things that set Arthur off, like the steelworks and planes, explosions, and such. But when screaming horses came into the hostelry, she was taken back to battle after battle and she came back to herself on the top of the church steeple and holding a bundle of sticks in her hands. Anna was watching from the door to the church tower, quiet and waiting.
She got gin-drunk that night and told Anna everything, sobbing when she came to the bit about being exiled, repeating Aslan's words over and over as she had in her mind every day since that horrible moment.
And Anna believes her.
Holds her.
And when she whispers "My queen" as they fall asleep that night, Su flinches and is comforted all at once.
And then, of course, because this is Susan's life and nothing can be easy, in the autumn of '47, Arthur is kicked in the head by a spooked horse he's trying to calm. He isn't killed on impact, he doesn't even notice for a few hours. But when he starts blurring his words, when he reaches for and misses a glass of water right in front of him, Susan feels a cold winter begin to bloom in her heart because she's seen those signs before. She sits her husband down and passes a candle in front of his eyes, watches the pupil reaction that confirms her suspicions, and gently, so gently, removes Arthur's hat and headscarf. The dark garments are soaked through and there's--there's--
"We need to get to get him to a hospital now!"
Susan's battle voice whips out, expectant and obeyed and they pull the truck around, with Arthur strapped to a flat board so they don't damage his neck. Lucy was always the healer, not her, but Susan can do decent triage. Not for the first time, Su wishes desperately, despairingly, for her baby sister. And she pushes the thought away because her desperation will not help Arthur, only her clear head. So she and Anna climb into the back of the truck with him, murmurs in the Geailge as any of them would to the horses, holding his hands when her clutches for her, eyes wild with fear.
They drive as fast as they safely can with the bumps and ruts in the road but even still when they reach the doors of the hospital, Anna is sobbing into Arthur's chest, and Susan, pale white and silent, is holding the bloody hands of a corpse.
They go home.
Susan McBride cannot die, not even metaphorically, because she's not the only person suffering now. There's Anna with her thousand questions--"Would he have survived if we noticed sooner? Would he have died in Narnia?" (she couldn't help but hear "If you weren't quarreling with your family we could have asked for their help" but she pushes that away because Lucy's cordial got left in Narnia and even her miracle worker sister was too far away to help)--and Mother McBride who takes to the gin at the death of her youngest lad and needs a good deal of minding just now. There is work to be done, and Susan's hands are too busy to snap necks.
They remain too busy for almost a year while the family grieves.
Susan grieves by clinging all the harder to Anna. She lost one partner, a person she liked, even loved in her admittedly prickly way. He hadn't ever minded her prickles, though. More than once he had been known to get absolutely cornswaggled at the pub and loudly (proudly) proclaim "my WIFE. Mmmmmy wife. Scary. She could take any man here, and some of yi's with a hand behind 'er back!"
She imitated this voice one late summer evening to Anna, and both her and Mother McBride were startled into harsh little barks of laughter, and suddenly the room was laughing and crying at once, and telling silly Arthur stories. Some she had known, and some not, but the point was that he was being remembered to his family and that there was catharsis in this.
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Susan McBride lives.
The pretty young widow and her spinster sister-in-law stand on the deck of a ship approaching a hulk of land and a giant green statue and Susan whispers about what it was like standing in the prow of a Narnian battleship and feeling the spray on your face. What it feels like to perch in the rigging with a bow during a pirate raid and the exhilaration of a hundred empty feet beneath you and death in your hands. Anna grips her hand tightly and squeezes three times, their code for a kiss in public as they get closer to land.
It's the summer of 1948 and the world is easing out of war times and trying to heal. Of course, for some, this means going back to oppressing the people that work for them, and Susan has always had a one-offense policy with bullying so she walks out of a lot of jobs. There are only so many times she can be called "Little lady" or offered a higher paying position for sexual favors from disgusting men with unwashed bodies and unstarched shirts when she has a perfectly good wife at home so no. No. Not Susan McBride, no sir. There's only so much pride a woman can stand to lose.
Then she walks into the library, just to rest for a moment, just to get off her feet in these ridiculous pumps that she feels guilty for loving exactly as much as her hand-tooled and -stitched leather Narnian boots.
Obviously, she gets lost among the stacks. Sue has never been apologetic about her love of books, not when she was a teenager and not now. She's just thinking she should get a library card while she's here when a voice pipes from behind her.
"'scuze me miss. C'n you help me find books on horses?" She turns around with a refusal on her lips, but the little girl...isn't Lucy. Lucy was nigh a woman when last Susan saw her, but this tiny child has the same hair she used to and it sends her head spinning. "Ehm. Yes, of course. Just this way." She used to know the decimal system backward and forwards, so she followed what she remembered and hoped it would dump her out in horse things. Which it did, to the joy of one and the relief of the other. She caught the eye of the desk clerk who beckoned her over. She was a dark-skinned amazon of a woman, tall and broad in a man's jumper and trousers, maybe 5 or six years older than Sue. She wore the same dark shade of Susan's lipstick as her only adornment, and there's a whirl of kinship here with a person physically different from her in every way but one.
"We need an extra hand." The woman said. "You'll do."
"I will," Susan agreed. Following an instinct, she stuck out a hand and said "Sue McBride."
The Amazon took it and shook. "Mike Malone."
"Mike?" She asked, tilting her head. She wondered if it was a nickname or if it was--
"Mike." He confirmed. Guess it wasn't a nickname. "Problem?"
"Not at all." Susan had been following whims and wandering down better-left-alone paths all day, might as well keep blundering around in the dark and hope someone turned on the lights soon. "My wife's name is Anna."
Both of them physically relaxed, and then laughed together when they noticed that they were mirroring each other, and just like that, any tension was gone.
"When can you start?" Mike asked. "We're short-staffed, so soon as you want it you have it."
"Now." Susan smiled, wide and genuine. "I can start right now."
Mike and Sue said nothing more to each other out loud about the forbidden natures of their identities. Sometimes, Mike would slip her a note inviting her and Anna to a dance hall for people like them. He'd always warn her not to come if there might be a police raid, and there was more and more since Truman signed the order ending segregation in schools.
She split her time between the library and home with Anna and was happy. Anna got work in one of the big Catholic churches, cleaning and maintaining the simple items used for every day in the church, and she was well pleased with it. And so they pass the greater part of the year so, getting comfortable in Buffalo, New York.
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She was dying. She was actually dying this time, she was sure of it. She had heard the roar of Deep Magic in her ears, and what sounded like a train underneath the percussion of the Great Lion's thunder. She heard the crash, felt it with her body, the blinding white light blocking out all other vision. She fell to the stone floor of the library covering her head and sobbing uncontrollably. She didn't stop when Mike pulled her up into his arms and carried her to the staff room. She didn't stop when Anna appeared there to gather her into her arms.
Her family was dead. Her family was dead, and she never said goodbye. She hadn't said a single word to any of them when she left and now they were gone. She had made the choice to cut them off, cut them out. She had been hurt and jealous and she hadn't said goodbye and now they were gone.
Anna got her home, but she didn't cognate any of the journey.
She was helped into a nightdress and into bed and didn't feel anything at all but the pouring out of grief and guilt (and hate because she had heard Aslan's voice. Her siblings and cousins were safe in Narnia and she never would be) and she couldn't move except to sob with declining strength until she just lay there limply, the tears streaming from her eyes.
Later that day, Sue heard Anna taking a call.
"No, I'm sorry, she's indisposed and cannot come to the phone. This is her sister-in-law."
"Earlier today, you said? The whole family?"
"Thank you for calling. We appreciate knowing. Yes, good day to you as well."
Anna came back into the bedroom they shared. "That was the police from England, mo ghra. They wanted to notify you, but I think you already know."
Minutely, Susan nodded.
"Oh, a stor. I'm so sorry."
If she said anything else, Susan didn't hear her. She just closed her eyes and waited hopefully for oblivion.
The next months followed in a grey haze. She got up the next morning, dressed, and went to work. She didn't say a single word to anyone. At the end of her shift, she got her bag, and walked home, undressed, and went back to bed.
And did it again.
And again
And again.
Ad nauseam.
Anna and Mike were the best and most faithful of humans. They tried so hard to bring her out of the colorless and lifeless wasteland her life had become in her grief. Anna brought home new dictionaries as often as she could find them. Spanish and Portuguese, a stray Japanese dictionary she rescued from a trash heap, and each time she'd thank her wife politely, and place the new dictionary on her bookshelf, unopened. Mike brought her fragrant oranges, a tiny bottle of cedar nutmeg perfume that made her eyes fill again. She wore it to work anyway. He brought her a silk nightdress and a soft woolen shawl that smelled of campsmoke and she spent a week sobbing into it.
But beyond yes, no, and thank you, she couldn't make words leave her mouth.
She looked at Anna and Mike, saw the desperation in their eyes, and tried, screaming from her mind "I love you, wait for me." but she couldn't make the words come.
Back and forth, day after day they tried to engage her, and day after day, she was either a mute blank slate or sobbing into one of them.
She saw Mike and Anna getting closer together as well, as they took comfort in each other over the impossible problem that was Susan Peven-...McBride.
Sue McBride.
Sue McBride didn't have any siblings. She could go to work and support her family and was never a queen in a far-off land and had no higher aspirations than to work her shift well. Sue McBride was intelligent but non-threatening, helpful. She was kind to her spinster sister-in-law and was hard working.
Sue McBride was Safe.
But...
Susan Pevensie had heard the roar of the Great Lion, and she wanted to wake up. The Queen of the Horn wanted an enemy to fight, to sink her teeth into and remember that she was forged in battle.
The two sides came to a balance on May 9th, 1950.
She'd been in mourning for about 8 months when she came home in her usual fog. Mike and Anna were both there waiting for her, and through her haze of dim awareness, she sees that they are both vibrating with excitement.
"What is it?" she asked dully, knowing it's expected. Without a word, the two whip back a cloth over the table that Sue had not noticed there before.
And then.
And then.
And then the world is suddenly, finally, back in color and not horrible layers of greyscale because laying there on the table in three fittable pieces is a longbow in her size, gloves and guards, several bowstrings in wax paper, a full quiver, and the bow. The bow is a gorgeous thing of chestnut and leather, and as she comes forward to fit the pieces together, she is dimly aware of Anna saying smugly to Mike "I told you, didn't I?" but it matters much less than the fact that the grip fits her hand perfectly. Expertly, she sets the end of the bow in her instep and strings it in one fluid motion. She selects an arrow from the beautiful red leather quiver and draws, aims for the newel post of their bed, fires, in another smooth motion with her breath. In, and out, and suddenly she was her again. Susan Pevensie lowers the bow that Sue McBride picked up and exhales what feels like all the tension, sorrow, and guilt she's been holding for the last 8 years.
She looks back at her wife, and Anna has tears in her eyes. "There's my girl." She says. "I missed you so much."
"Me too," Susan says.
It isn't simple or easy. She carries the disassembled bow in a canvas messenger bag she starts carrying, disguising it with books atop it. Sometimes she can just take the bow, doesn't need the whole kit, can get the comfort and security she needs just from the three sticks at the bottom of her bag. Some days it's not, and she's really glad she's having one of those days when the chum hits the ocean as they used to say.
She's in the back towards the end of the day, cradling her quiver when she hears Mike's voice come from the information desk.
"Miss Sue? Could you come to the front to answer a question?"
There's fear in Mike's voice and Queen Susan of the Horn and the Bow stepped to the front of Su's mind and covered her like a cloak. Mike had never in two years called her "Miss Sue", and he for sure never sounded scared. she was buckling the quiver and nocking an arrow to the bow she had assembled without a thought. She swept out of the backroom arrow-point first and sized up the situation immediately.
There was a heavy-set white man pointing a shaking gun at Mike, who stood absolutely still, his hands in the air. She didn't know sod-all about guns before Arthur took her out behind the hostelry and taught her. At this time, it seemed like the priority was disabling the other weapon. So with less than a thought, she sends the arrow at enough of an angle that it will knock away the gun and sting the hand of the intruder. He's shocked and appalled enough that he's been disarmed that he's just stood there staring at his hands when Susan whips a spare bowstring around them and secures them and kicks his knees out from under him so his forehead hits the counter with enough force to knock him out or at least concuss him. Threat disabled she whips back around to Mike. "Run!" She barks in her battlefield voice. "Get to the house, tell Anna. Anna will know what to do. I will call you when I am on my way home. I will be there soon--I promise." Her voice hardened on the last word when it looked like he'd protest, but he nodded and went out the back. Giving him a moment to run, herself a moment to fix her story in her head and slip out of the cloak of her former queenship and back into the tremulous voice of Sue McBride. And then she called the police, and when they got there, spun them a yarn about this crazy man who burst into the library while she was practicing with the bow for their upcoming Robin Hood children's event and she'd just reacted, officer, honestly, was he hurt? Was the man going to be alright? She hadn't meant to hurt him, she just hadn't wanted to risk a child wandering in and something terrible happening. She wasn't even good with a bow it was just a really lucky shot.
She thought maybe she was overdoing the tears and hand wringing, but the two men who had arrived on the scene were eating every word like shortcake.
"Don't you even worry, Miss Sue, just close up and go home now, okay? We got this for you, you're not in trouble."
She thanked them profusely and refused a ride, saying a walk would calm her nerves. She made a big show of the usual night routine, then called home and said everything seemed quiet and that she was on her way back. She got two huge sighs of relief from the other end.
"I'll see you both soon. I love you."
She hung up, locked the doors, and walked home, where two anxious faces watched for her.
She caught them both up while she changed into the nightshirt Mike had given her.
"I don't know about the two of you but I'm exhausted."
She pulled the two people she loved most in the world into bed and turned out the lights.
Susan Pevensie was alive.
Everything else could wait til tomorrow.