Chapter Text
She is Queen Lucy the Valiant, the ever-faithful, the lionhearted, the radiant light. This is the way she ruled her country, by being the light, the glimmer of hope when her people felt no hope at all. You’ve made me feel warmer than I’ve felt in a hundred years, Mr. Tumnus had told her, on her very first day in Narnia. It was this radiant light that had boosted the morale of the soldiers during countless battles fought over her and her siblings’ twenty-year reign. But Queen Lucy was far more complex than she allowed any of her people to see. Only her wife had known how deep she truly was.
The radiant light had come easily for her when she was the age her physical form now reflected. Without question, she would always smile and say It’s going to be all right. Aslan will help us. But the Great Lion had only appeared once or twice during those twenty years. And as those years went by, young Lucy Pevensie began to grasp the responsibility that rested on her shoulders. Everyone, including her three older siblings and fellow rulers, looked to their youngest Queen—and sister—for moral support, for moral leadership. They depended on her for that hope, that strength of heart and soul, not Aslan. For as she grew, Queen Lucy the Valiant realized that for them Aslan was more of a mythical being; a concept; an abstract presence. She was a real, living, breathing person, sitting right there beside them.
And so she learned to be that concept, that hope called Aslan. She learned to rely on herself, and her faith became her most powerful tool. She learned to use that tool to awaken the hope and strength in her people’s hearts, to keep them motivated, to inspire them never to give up fighting. And that, Peter had told her once, was far more powerful than even his sword.
As her awareness and maturity increased, Queen Lucy’s childlike innocence faded. The radiant light became less rooted in blind faith as it did by its bearer’s sense of duty to, and love for, her people. The blind faith eventually ceased to exist, replaced instead by self-reliance. Since Aslan was hardly ever there, he could not be expected to simply glide in and save them. It did not do for Lucy to bank her entire morale-boosting plan on him; such a plan was nothing short of foolish.
Now, she sat in this colorless train compartment with her three older siblings, in a world that had become utterly alien. The train reeked of the most unnatural chemical any of them could remember smelling. Lucy’s legs were now so short that her feet did not touch the ground—a most uncomfortable position, making her squirm and shift far too often for her liking. She had already seen the flat chest, the baby face, the sickeningly cute hairstyle that she had been forced back into, and did not wish to see them again.
She could see how this England place had de-aged her siblings as well. It had shrunk Peter sixteen inches, made him far too skinny, and kidnapped his beard without so much as a ransom note. It had sliced Susan’s hair off at its midpoint, flattened her chest, and drained the color from her lips by wiping off the ruby red lipstick she always wore. It had puffed up Edmund’s face with baby fat, grew his eyes and ears too big for his head, and squeezed his Adam’s Apple dry, leaving a boyishly high voice that made the poor man cry the first time he used it.
And as if that were not enough, they all had to deal with the culture shock of being in this England place; the grief of losing so many of their nearest and dearest; and a near overwhelming sense of homesickness. Lucy missed her bed, her throne, her crown, the beauty of her halls. More importantly, she missed the Beavers and Mr. Tumnus, her niece and nephews, her in-laws, and especially her wife. Her beloved Veronica, who she had to stop imagining was with her in bed at night, for the reality that in England, Veronica was just a dream, was too upsetting for her to bear.
Her grief made her ask why? WHY? Why did they leave? What happened? If they were never meant to leave, why did they leave in the first place? If it was a mistake, why didn’t the wardrobe open back up when they tried to go back? If that gateway was somehow broken, or closed up by enemies, why didn’t Aslan appear to them and simply open up a new gateway? Everything suggested that this may have been intentional, and that they weren’t meant to go home, not now, perhaps not ever.
Faced with this…this…well, she could only think of one phrase to describe it: existential crisis, Lucy finally accepted, within herself, that this crisis extended deep into her heart and soul, into her faith. The faith that had become even more meaningful to her than her precious healing cordial; the faith that was part of why Veronica fell in love with her. She had to accept that her hope of going home had begun to fade, to drain away like water in a sink, only this time, the tap had been suddenly and quite cruelly turned off. She could feel her faith in Aslan—both the lion and the concept—become increasingly drowned out by her acquired skepticism. The lion had seemingly abandoned them, and that possibility hurt Lucy just as deeply as the loss of her wife.
But, Queen Lucy the Valiant knew that the hope of going home one day was all that was keeping her family grounded; all that was keeping them from falling apart at the seams. If her siblings lost hope, that would be the end of it. They would give up on everything, and their differing ways of coping with the realization that they were stranded here forever would tear them apart. They could not be torn apart, when all each had left was every other. They needed to be there for each other, to face this obstacle together.
Now, more than ever, they needed Lucy to be that radiant light, and that radiant light needed to show no sign of going out. Lucy could not, and would not, let one crack appear in the wall she built around her true feelings. And thus, she returned her siblings’ small, halfhearted smiles, with her trademark reassuring one.