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She meets him entirely by chance. She'd had utterly no intentions of returning to school--books had always held their fascination, but in the days after being turned away from Narnia, it became nearly impossible to find something that settled her soul long enough to get through it. And it's not as though the untimely deaths of everyone she'd ever known had done much to rectify that fact.
But she'd inherited a tidy sum from all those dead relatives of hers, and she'd somehow also received Peter's utter impatience with anyone who did not show her the respect she deserved. If not as a queen, she figured, at least as a person. Her utter pillock of a boss had bellowed at her until he was puce in the face one too many times and Susan had merely turned her back to him, walking out of the building without another word, pausing only long enough to reclaim the creased photograph of the four Pevensie siblings in their schooling attire.
It had taken some maneuvering to land a spot at Oxford--brilliant grades and whip-smart intelligence weren't enough when you were an orphan girl of only twenty-two. She hadn't planned on furthering her education, but once she'd decided to go to Oxford on a particularly rainy afternoon, she wasn't about to let anything get in her way.
Susan recalled the endless areas of study she'd been fascinated with when she was a girl. Refused to pick a single one of them on accounts of them all being too reminiscent of the world that had refused her. She picks architecture and maths at a whim, smiles wanly when the advisor does everything in his power to attempt to convince her to pick a field more well suited to someone like her. She can see her reflection in the window behind his balding head--takes in her perfectly coiffed hair and ruby red lips with not a small degree of personal satisfaction and cuts him off in the middle of round four of his rather impolite tirade.
"This is what I wish to pursue, sir," she says in her no-nonsense queen voice. He blinks, unaware of his subconscious give as he shifts back in his seat a hair's breadth. "I give you my word that I will not allow myself to reflect poorly on a grand establishment such as this one."
Classes are brutal--she is already one of a very small amount of young women on campus, and she is absolutely the only one in any of her male-dominated subject classes. They eye her lipsticks and nylons with something like scorn in their eyes, cruelly mocking when she makes a simple mistake on the blackboard in her second week. It is then that she decides she will not allow another mistake to happen again. She will accept nothing short of utter perfection from herself, and she's going to manage it whilst still appearing as the prettiest girl in all the land.
He'd enrolled in the architecture program two-and-a-half months late. Even if she hadn't immediately recognized his aristo nose and sharp jawline profile from the papers, she would have been able to recognize the presence of another royal from across the great ocean. He'd smiled charmingly at her, asked if she were lost and would she like his assistance in finding the correct classroom? Susan had raised her eyebrow archly, turned her shoulders coquettishly, and allowed a truly wicked smirk twist her painted mouth when the professor praised young Miss Pevensie for the highest score on their most recent exam.
"If you're having trouble catching up," she comments impishly when he struggles with a sheet of work problems two weeks later, "I would be more than happy to assist you in finding the correct chapters of our text."
The classroom full of boys falls silent, disbelieving eyebrows raising as she tilts her head challengingly at the Crown Prince of England.
"My lord," she tacks on sweetly after a suitable amount of time has passed to imply that she thinks of him as nothing of the sort.
She meets him entirely by chance, but she cannot truthfully claim that she had no idea the effect her well-practiced games would have on him.
-
His mother loathes her.
Susan can't say she's surprised (middle class orphan studying architecture and maths of all things), but it never fails to put a quirk in her mouth when she receives that disdainful expression from Her Majesty the Queen.
George, of course, is indignant on her behalf, the way boys with overbearing mums tend to be. She hadn't expected anything different--once they'd managed to get past the whole questioning-of-intelligence issue, his actual princely charms had come out full-force. He's nearly as chivalrous as the knights of her own past court, and much, much handsomer.
Susan soothes when he is riled up, blushes prettily when he angrily declares that no one, much less his mother of all people was going to convince him to toss aside the best thing that's ever happened to him.
Eventually, of course, George's parents are forced to accept that (middle class, orphan, working-woman) Susan is here to stay and, from there it's an entirely new battlefield. Every aspect about her is brought under scrutiny and promptly spurned. She fights back every step of the way because George encourages her to keep her for-the-people job and her red lipsticks aren't going away ever, because if she'd gotten barred from her homeland for wearing them she's damn well not going to stop now.
It appears to shock and continue to cause Her Majesty no small amount of distress that Susan takes to mandatory etiquette lessons and council behavior tutoring like an old pro. Delegating and negotiating and starting up charities and food banks and job prospects for the jobless come as naturally to the Once and Future (except not anymore, in the way that counts) Queen, and every time she manages to find a minute to spend in blessed, blissful privacy with George, her cheeks flushed with excitement and eyes blazing with passion pull him in over and over. George loves her so utterly completely and fully and Susan--
--there will always be a darkened corner of her heart, overwhelmed with grief at how easily Narnia had discarded her, left her here in this world, away from her kingdom and her family--
--Susan loves him back, with everything she's got left.
-
When they marry, a beautiful spring wedding adorned with every flower imaginable and thousands of spectators, Susan is denied the title of princess. She accepts Duchess of Somerset with the grace and dignity of a true royal.
George swears to her, late at night in their chambers, that he'll make her his queen. And it's not quite the same, but when he's looking at her with such complete adoration in those blue, brilliant blue eyes of his, she thinks it's well good enough.
They life in fairytale bliss, and it is odd but mostly welcomed when it is learned that Susan is quite handy with archery. She and George oft wile away long afternoons competing with one another out on the ranges, and when they return inside, he sits at the piano and plays long, lovely tunes, simply to hear her sing along.
His father dies, and George is a complete wreck in private and a stoic statue in public, and Susan lingers at his side every moment of the day she can manage, touching two fingers to the nape of his neck or the inside of his wrist and drawing out as much of his stress as she can manage for those few seconds of contact.
For the first time since they met, nearly four years prior, the Queen does not have a disdainful expression to spare during a wretchedly silent family supper.
After the last of the plates are cleared away, Susan leads George into his favored tiny, private garden. She sits at the side of the fountain and allows him to rest his head in her lap and, as she runs her fingers through his hair, describes in a quiet, melodious voice where she thinks the good king is now.
And if her description of heaven sounds anything like the beautiful and bold land of Narnia, with it's crystal-blue seas and it's rolling verdant hills, well. That's no one's business but her own.
They stay in the garden until the sun is almost entirely below the horizon, George's breathing peaceful and steady for the first time in two weeks, his eyes nearly closed tight as he valiantly attempts to stave off his clear exhaustion. Susan waits until she can see the first few stars open their glow into the night and quietly points out the ones she'd always privately imagined were her siblings and parents. There's a new star nearby that night, and she doesn't have to say it for George to understand.
As they make their way inside, she pretends she doesn't notice the queen at the window overlooking the garden, her expression glazed and incomprehensible, her eyes fixed on the star-speckled night sky.
When they make it back to their chambers, George tilts her head back and kisses her as though he's leaving for war.
-
Little baby Charlotte-Lucy, Princess of Wales, is born on a truly, horrifically boiling day. Susan pushes and cries for hours on end until the dark-haired ocean-eyed babe finally enters the world, screaming her displeasure at this new environment she's been thrust into.
George cries when he holds her for the first time, and Susan falls asleep to the soft noises of him whispering promises of the world and beyond to their beautiful daughter.
The queen is understandably offended that no part of Charlotte-Lucy's extensive name includes that of her grandmother's, but once little baby Charlie opens those big blue eyes and giggles cutely at Her Majesty, all is forgiven.
The public goes utterly mad, papers and rags dedicating entire issues to grainy photographs of the newest member of the royal family. When it's somehow discovered that she's in-part named after the young Duchess' dead kid sister, people accost Susan on the street to burst into tears about how strong and inspirational she is.
"Figures that naming the future princess after my deceased sister is what makes me an inspiration," Susan comments idly to George as the pair of them lay on lush carpet to join Charlie for tummy time. "Since all of my charity work and my college degree obviously didn't do it."
George laughs at her, eyes bright and so, so happy, and she leans over and kisses him, endless I-love-you's passing between them, nought but breaths shared between their lips as Charlotte-Lucy coos and claps her hands gleefully, satin pink bow sat lopsided in her mess of dark curls.
-
When Susan hears the news--that the queen is dead--she actually swears out loud. The young castle squire who'd been tasked with finding her and baby Charlie in the maze behind the castle gapes at her, and she just gapes back at him, her toddler squirming on her hip.
"She's gone and died?" Susan demands rather impolitely after some more disbelieving silence, her free hand going up to cover her mouth automatically before it falls a little lower to curve around the near-invisible bump of the unannounced royal baby number two.
"My Lady Susan--" the squire begins uncertainly, deciding against responding to her absurd question. She states at him for a moment more before shifting Charlotte-Lucy to her other hip and pushing past him.
She makes it out of the maze in truly record-breaking time, and then runs entirely inappropriately across the field and through the garden until she's back inside Buckingham Palace, where she pauses to catch her breath and rather waspishly decline the offer of a passing maid to take Charlotte-Lucy to a nanny.
George is not in his own private office, but she finds him in his father's, staring idly out the window with an odd expression on his handsome face. Susan pants in an undignified manner for an embarrassingly long time, before she manages to pull herself together and set Charlie in a sunny spot on the floor with her favorite hand puppet. Susan takes one last deep breath, in an attempt to steady her irrationally thumping heart, and steps up to her husband, the new King of England.
He allows her to hug him from behind, clutches at her hands with his own in a near-desperate manner, the same odd expression still twisting his features.
An eternity or a handful of seconds later, he turns to face her, his eyes cutting across her face briefly before they drift behind her to where Charlie is quietly babbling and whacking her hand puppet against the side of a bookshelf. Susan watches as his expression falters and then crumples, and then he lurches forward to tuck his face in the soft skin of the crook between her neck and shoulder.
Charlie eventually notices them not paying any attention to her and abruptly pulls herself up and toddles over to her parents who stare at her in complete surprise, tears still fresh on their cheeks. George let's a tiny near-hysterical laugh escape from his lips and he swoops down to scoop the toddler up and hug her close in between them.
"My beautiful girls," he says, over and over, rocking Charlie absently as she puts her head down on his shoulder. He touched Susan's belly with two fingers and smiles oddly once more. "My beautiful, beautiful girls."
They stand there in his father's great office, rocking together in front of a window, until everyone has mostly collected themselves.
"Are you ready for this?" George asks her quietly, mindful of the sleeping toddler in his arms.
"I'll follow you anywhere, my lord," she says, and it is perhaps the first time she's used his title since she'd done so so scathingly back in uni lifetimes ago, and George swallows hard and bends down to plant three firm kisses to her mouth before he takes her hand.
-
Princess Margaret Elizabeth is born six months after Susan is named queen of a nation once more. She's got light features, like her father and her deceased Uncle Peter, but she's got Edmund's dark eyes and too-serious pout of her lips, even at a handful of months old. Susan had surprised George when she'd decided to honor the late queen and obstinately refused any other names he suggested throughout the entire pregnancy, but when she'd instructed the midwife to write it down on the birth certificate, he'd kissed her so hard the lingering nurses blushed and hastily made their exits.
Much of the public had reacted favorably when George's first and foremost order of business after his coronation was to promote Susan's title from King's consort to Queen of England--many people found their story very romantic, and the more practical folk had appreciated having a people's' queen in power once more.
Being Queen instead of Duchess meant that Susan could offer aid to more people in a wider range of places, and she threw herself into her charity work, urging the council and treasury to come up with the funds for a shelter that she'd designed, visiting nearby countries and distant countries alike to offer England's hand to them as well. She settles into the role with the sort of easy grace of someone coming home after a long time away, much of the tension bleeding out from her shoulders with every day.
And Her Majesty Susan, Queen of England cut quite the impressive image, toting along the baby and holding the hand of her eldest, taking her daughters with her on as many jobs and trips as she could manage. One night, after they'd made up for not seeing each other awake in more than two weeks, George rolled over and stared at her with the same sort of impressed admiration that he'd had for her when she continuously beat out every one of their classmates on test scores.
"I think you were born to be queen," he tells her abruptly. "No matter where you could've ended up, you would have become a great queen."
And she kisses him so enthusiastically that they end up making their third child that night. But when he's fallen asleep in the wee hours of the morning, Susan slips out of bed and goes to the nursery. She dismisses the night nanny and spends the rest of the night watching her princesses sleep soundly and swears to herself that she is not going to cry.
She does, but no one's there to bare witness, so she pretends it doesn't count.
-
She doesn't know why it takes her by such surprise when it happens. When she'd been queen of a different nation in a different world, there had been countless assassination attempts.
Granted, it was oft a combination of Edmund's unrelenting drive for justice and Lucy's more radical equality views that kept her younger siblings in the line of fire much more frequently than herself, but there had been plenty of people who'd wanted to off Queen--
--Queen Susan the Gentle of Narnia.
And certainly, there were plenty of plots against her and her husband's lives here in England, but they were always foiled by the guard and secret service before they could become anything more than a fly on the windshield of their lives.
Nevertheless, she's completely at a loss as to why a successful attempt shocks her so fully to her core.
There is a bullet in her chest and her three beautiful children are screaming and crying as the guard yank them away to safety, more men still rushing up to surround the fallen queen as she bleeds out on the pavement.
She sucks in a wet breath and recognizes one of the guards kneeling beside her and he's so obviously trying not to cry even as he attempts fruitlessly to stopper the blood flow. Susan gets a hand to listen to her screaming brain, reaches up and fumbles at his sleeve until she's gripping it right and strong.
"It's going to be okay, Arthur," she tells him as steadily as she can, aware that she's got blood on her lips. "We're all going to be just fine."
She doesn't bother with declarations of love--is confident in one thing only of her time on earth and that is that her children and husband know how thoroughly and completely she loved them, with every fibre of her being.
Susan makes her fingers find the young guardsman's hand and she holds onto it as tightly as she can manage, her vision clouding around the edges.
"I'm going to be just fine," she tells him, forcing her throat and mouth to make the words. "You can stop your crying, because I'm going to be fine now."
Her fingers won't bend around his anymore, but the young man grips her hand so hard she thinks he's trying to keep her here through sheer force of will. He tells her that Charlie, Margaret-Elle, and Richard are safe and secure, that the shooter has been detained, that King George is coming so if she could just hold on a few more minutes--
--Susan can't make anymore words come from her mouth. Can't hardly breathe, there's so much blood in her throat. In between blinks, she can see a blurry vision of rolling fields edged with magnificent forests behind her eyelids, and the effort to keep her bleary vision on Arthur becomes too much.
-
The field is real, she discovers. In the distance is a river and across the river is a simple bridge.
On the other side of the bridge are her siblings. Shouting, though she can't quite make out the words. Distantly, she realizes they're speaking Narnian, and that she doesn't understand any longer.
That realization is overpowered by the realization that she is in the same thirteen year old body and clothing she'd been in when they'd first entered Narnia. She is shorter and she's certain her cheeks have regained that baby roundness, and when she lifts the hem of her blouse, the evidence of three pregnancies carried to term is erased from her skin.
As though none of it had happened.
Aslan is in front of her suddenly, and she lopes to her feet, unsteady in this unfamiliar body and stupid oversized winter coat. The taste of bile rises in her throat as the great lion surveys her and she swallows hard, steeling herself.
"Why am I a child once more?" She asks in a steady voice borne of two lifetimes of being queen.
"It is time for you to return to Narnia, Daughter of Eve, should you desire it."
Susan blinks, furrows her brows, tries in vain to quash down the years of resentment that are now rising within. "What of my children? And my husband?" She demands. She almost adds the third and final question: and my country?
"It would appear your loyalties have changed," Aslan says, his great voice ringing with stinging disapproval and disappointment. And suddenly Susan can't breathe. She laughs, because if she doesn't she's afraid she'll start screaming.
"I have earned better than that, from you," she tells him, her voice now trembling with rage and something infinitely more painful. There is a lump in her throat, but she does her best to speak around it. "Narnia was my home for nearly two decades, and I returned a thousand years later to help resurrect it. It was not I who made the decision to never return."
She swallows hard, sniffs harder, digs her fingernails into her fists, can feel an odd sort of tingling throughout her whole body that she writes off as adrenaline.
"I took what I learned in this world and I used it to heal the broken parts and move on in my own as best as I could manage, and then suddenly everyone I had ever known had been taken back--everyone had been allowed to return home but myself."
Susan takes a deep breath, does not mind the hitch. Aslan is watching her with his hooded eyes, and she gets the feeling she should stop, but she suddenly cannot.
"And so I had to heal and move on as best I could again! And I managed it--I succeeded where any of the rest would have failed, and I do not say that out of scorn or pride, but out of the truest of knowledge that I have always been the only one who could exist in either world. I built a new life for myself after I was shunned from my home and my destiny."
Susan's face is hot and wet with tears, but her voice is not shaking anymore. "I was born to be a queen, Aslan. And if Narnia would not have me, I found some place that would."
"I have earned better than that, from you, but I no longer need it to keep going." She has to pause here, has to swallow tightly and shake out her hair. There's an odd feeling in her chest now, and Aslan still has not said anything. "And I ask again: what of my children? And my husband?" She takes a deep breath and looks at the great lion dead on. "And what of my country?"
Suddenly Susan realizes that, somehow, while she'd been speaking, her body had been aging. Only, she wasn't the beautiful and gentle queen of old, but the headstrong and passionate mother of three teenagers and wife to George and Queen of England.
Many years previously, the disappointment rolling off of Aslan in waves would have sent Susan to her knees. She regards him with impassive eyes and a heavy heart, but she cannot find it in herself to take back any part of what she'd said.
"You have made your choice," Aslan says at last, and Susan spares a brief moment to look across the field at her three siblings, who look less cheerful and more worried and frantic by now. Any words she may have been able to recognize are utterly incomprehensible. She hopes they know she loves them with all her heart.
Susan looks back at Aslan and bows low, and when she's risen, he lets out a great roar, more powerful than any she's ever heard him make before.
She closes her eyes at the intensity and the sudden wind whips her hair painfully against her face. And then all is still and everything is silent.
And Susan lived no more.