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Lucy Pevensie is eight years old. Her hands tremble and her cheeks are rosy red with cold. Peter’s hand is steady around her own and Edmund’s hand grips Peter’s coat despite the sneer on his lips. Susan’s face shines with tears and one hand clutches their mother’s and the other Peter’s.
Lucy is eight years old. Peter’s voice shakes and shudders despite the stillness of his hand on hers as he gently leads his siblings into the train. Edmund pulls himself as far away from them as he dares and Susan snaps, pulling him back roughly.
The professor is strange and his housekeeper is mean and Peter presses his hands to his face and his shoulders droop, impossibly weary when he thinks no one is looking.
Lucy is eight years old and the wardrobe is a passage to an entirely different world. A world with talking animals and everlasting winters and trees that rustle and whisper and betray.
Lucy’s hair barely brushes across her jaw and her hands are smeared with blood. Her teeth are pearly white and the Lion’s mane is shorn short in a crude fashion.
Her faith is rooted deep into the earth, her hands are showered with dirt, her fingers quiver lightly over the stopper. The chalice is fragile in her grasp, the liquid inside more precious than gold and Lucy is eight years old.
Susan’s hands are gentle as they pull Lucy close, her eyes reflect the setting sun and Edmund has all but collapsed into Peter’s arms. The witch is dead and spring has come.
Lucy raises her chin and she fights valiantly to balance her crown atop her head. The Lion’s mane glimmers under the sun, the sea is raging at the sand under His paws. Lucy shakes, Narnia’s watchful eye is all that keeps her upright.
Lucy can’t bring herself to meet their eyes for the first year, so she doesn’t, she watches their smiles. Peter’s smile is strained, Susan’s is soft and curved at the edges, Edmund’s is jagged and warm.
As for Lucy, her own smile is young, missing teeth and crooked and just like their’s stained red with blood.
Lucy is ten and the bow string is familiar under calloused fingertips. Her arrows fly straight and true. Peter sings her bedtime stories and tucks her in, wakes her in the mornings, sits with her in the dead of night when she wakes with nightmares of glimmering teeth and sharp blades.
When she’s twelve she realizes she can’t remember the color of her mother’s hair or the shape of her father’s face, the timbre of his voice. Later, as she shakes and quivers in her room Peter brushes her hair, and braids it in the manner their mother never got the chance to.
His hands tremor as they weave flowers into the careful twists. Lucy sighs softly, presses her hand to her mouth and sobs.
Lucy is fifteen, her teeth are crooked and misaligned, she’s about as tall as she’ll get and her head aches whenever she tries to remember Spare Oom.
Edmund presses a shaking hand to hers whenever her gaze goes suspiciously blank.
Lucy heaves breath after breath and the trees sway in easy rhythm around her, their spirits tangling her in their dances.
She’s eighteen and Lazuli is ethereal. Their skin is the color of their bark and their eyes as green as their leaves. Lazuli leads Lucy in dance after dance, their dress of leaves and cotton swirling around them as they giggle and stumble around the clearing together.
Lucy is nineteen and this is her most golden year. Lazuli is everything and Narnia sings under her feet, and there’s a warning in there somewhere.
Lucy is twenty and screaming over her partner’s body, blood is streaked across her forehead. Somewhere deep in the Narnian woods an oak tree is withered and dead, rot crawling across their bark.
Peter mumbles reassurance after reassurance, curls his arms around her protectively. Rhindon is glittering in the sunlight, blood of a traitor spattered across her blade.
The traitor’s body is still warm under Lucy’s fingertips. Lazuli’s knife is still hilt-deep in Lucy’s thigh.
Peter fumbles, pulls Lucy’s cordial from her belt, tilts just a drop into her mouth and then yanks the knife out of her thigh before the wound can heal around it.
Susan sweeps her into a warm embrace and lets her sob when they return to Cair Paravel, Peter’s expression steely and Lucy’s devastated.
She’s twenty-two and Lucy has long come to terms with Lazuli’s betrayal. But, Lucy’s leg still hurts and her bones ache sometimes with the cold of Narnian winters.
There are certain days where she can’t haul herself out of bed, where old wounds from battles where she had begged to be allowed flare up.
Sometimes, Peter has to come and fetch her for important meetings. Pull her out of bed and force her to dress herself. There are days where Peter hefts her up into his arms and with all the solemnity of an eldest brother carries her to her throne or to her seat at whichever meeting or luncheon she must attend.
Lucy is eight ( twenty-three) and her bones and her aches have been stuffed into a child-body, flesh stretching over damaged joints and hair streaked with silver.
On the second day after their return Susan pulls her out into the grounds and coats her hair in dyes, covers the silver and the ivory white. When she’s done Lucy looks exactly as she did two days (fifteen years) ago.
Lucy whispers to trees and dances with the breeze, she tilts her face to the sun and murmurs prayer after prayer. She faithfully wears a Rosary. Recites the Mysteries easily, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and the Apostles’ Creed. She chants the Fatima Prayer, and reels off Hail, Holy Queen.
Lucy is nine (twenty-four) and Peter is clutching her hand when they’re sent hurtling into Narnia and Her eerie silence.
Lucy rolls prayers across her tongue in heavy trepidation. Her voice catches for a moment at the way Narnia rises up to meet their bare skin, to brush across their calves, to tangle around their feet.
She looks Caspian in the eyes and judges him, presses her palm to Peter’s and whispers to the man that raised her about the heir to their nation, to their domain.
Lucy is ten (twenty-five) and Edmund raises Rhindon in his shaking grip. She skates her tongue across her teeth and utters prayer after prayer. Eustace is a dragon made of a boy, teeth too sharp, smile too heavy. Lucy wraps her arm through his and whispers fable after fable about the dragons of Old Narnia.
Her smile is jagged, sharp and accepting as she leaves Narnia for the last time, a scream rattling around her lungs.
Lucy grins up at the sky and falls into Peter’s arms, leans into his side as he tucks her close like he has since she was four. Lucy rests her forehead against her brother’s shoulder and slumbers peacefully, prayers dripping round her neck like a string of pearls, faith etched into her easy breathes.
Lucy sleeps, peaceful, immortal in all but one sense of the word.
Lucy does not know how old she is, but Lucy is at peace.