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She tumbles out of a wardrobe and the first thing she feels is too light - her hunting gear has vanished. Susan stands on too-short legs, feels her shoe bite into her heel. There's a boy with blond hair getting to his feet in front of her and, when she turns, a pair of children behind them - one dark-haired, one fair-haired - and she hasn't seen these faces in fifteen years, and never so solemn. The four blink at each other, eyes adjusting to a different sun streaming through the window, then as one they rush back to the Wardrobe (wardrobe, now). They never find anything more than fur coats and mothballs.
Later, when they've bandaged up bleeding fingers and splintered nails, when they've dragged themselves away from the wardrobe and into the girls' room, when Peter paces and when Edmund sits and mutters under his breath and when Lucy curls up beneath her duvet, Susan stands in front of the mirror in a daze, unmoving but for her eyes, which flick back and forth over the girl in the glass. Her hair is shorter. Her face is rounder. Her freckles are just beginning to bloom. At first Susan thinks it's simply that she's not seen this face in years, but as she looks and looks she realises the truth, that she's never seen this face at all. Susan Pevensie has been many things: a younger sister, an older sister, a student, a girl, a warrior, a lawmaker, a queen, but she has never been this - years of growing all bundled up and stuffed into a twelve-year-old.
I look into the waters and see a face I don't understand
The Professor finds them like that hours later, when they don't come down for dinner. ("Yes, of course you'll get back to Narnia someday," he says.)("Did you?" Susan asks, eyes piercing into his through the mirror. Her voice comes out too high.)(Peter, pacing, Edmund, muttering, Lucy, hiding, do not see him falter.)(In the end, they are not like the Professor, they only have to wait a year.)(In the end, after that year, Susan Pevensie is not like Digory Kirke, Susan knows she won't be going back so there is no point in hoping.)
A year is a long time to be young, let alone when you used to be grown up, especially when you're surrounded by war but this time you can't do anything again. (Especially when you don't know it will only be a year.) Peter spends a year with bared teeth and bloody knuckles, looking for any new avenue to release his rage. Edmund spends a year with his nose in books and ink on his fingers, researching, planning, looking for any way back home. Lucy spends a year with tears on her face and her head in the clouds, reading fairy tales and stories and fables, looking for any escape to take her mind off home, yet still remind her of it in this grim, war-torn world. Susan spends a year looking into mirrors, trying desperately to reconcile the girl in the glass with the queen she used to be, with the girl she was long before that, and failing on all accounts. (Eventually, the mirrors simply become habit. The girls at school call her vain, and she laughs, because what else can she do?)
I look into the waters and see a face I don't recognize
A year is a long time to have a broken heart, and it's a long time to have hope, when you're this young, and for a while Susan swings violently between the two. She sits with her elder brother as they listen to the wireless and ruminate in their anger at the news of more bombings. She sits opposite her younger brother in the Professor's library as they pore over old texts and fuel each other's desperation. She sits beside her younger sister curled up in bed and reads aloud as they lose themselves in the story and forget the truth for a while. (Susan sits and sits and sits, and there is something inside her that won't stop screaming, and when she looks in the mirror she only looks bored.)
A year is too long. Susan doesn't know exactly when she stops grieving, when she stops hoping, but there's a day in March when she looks into the mirror to try on her first lipstick, and doesn't realise until much later that she didn't stop to search for someone else in her reflection.
In the waters, I see a face I don't want to look back
A year later they sit on a bench at the railway station. Peter's leg bounces beside hers, Edmund is scribbling in a notebook on her other side, and on the end Lucy is bent over a paperback with a spine so cracked its hard to read the title. Susan looks into her silver compact and refreshes her lipstick.
A second later Lucy shouts.
A minute later they're standing in a wood.
An hour later they know. (Not for certain, not yet, but deep down inside, they know.)
A day later they know the full truth. (Their home is a crumbling ruin. Everything they knew is long gone.)
(A thousand years later - and two hundred and eighty years more, if you want to be picky, not that it matters now - they stand in an ancient treasure chamber by light of an electric torch. Susan looks around at coins and gems and jewellery, and sees a pale face across the room. It's hers (or was, once,) in a tapestry of the four of them a year into their reign, tattered now. She looks away, pulls a drop-cloth off something beside her and finds an engraved mirror. It's on the ground, lent up against the wall, and at this angle her reflection distorts.)(Susan looks away and closes her eyes.)