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“i can see how you loved him and what it did to you.”
—east of eden, john steinbeck
but i want for you this: that you are well. / i want for us this, oh: that we are well.
—“theseus”, the oh hellos
𓍙
The thing is: Susan knew about the fights. About Peter getting into them. Edmund mentioned as much in his letters over the term, but his detail in that respect has been rather sparing, so Susan was not in the slightest prepared for their elder brother’s appearance in the station their first day back for the hols. None of it. Not the bruises, nor the split knuckles, nor the way he will not meet her eye.
“Oh, Peter,” Lucy says beside her, somewhere between sympathetic and distressed, and Susan can see his jaw clench like a reflex before he softens, breathes out something like a sigh.
“I’m fine, Lu,” he says, clipped and quiet, and Susan finds that even now she’s not quite used to the younger timbre of his voice here in England. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Edmund snorts at that as he thumps his suitcase down on the tile, begrudgingly allowing Lucy to wrap him in a hug, but he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. Anyone with eyes can see how Peter winces when Lucy turns to embrace him next, how he’s careful not to flex the fingers on his scabbed right hand too quickly or too much. They spent a lifetime learning all the ways in which their brother tries and fails to hide his pain. That, at least, has not changed from here to Narnia. It’s just that Susan’s not sure it’s a good thing.
“At least let me see about your hand when we’re back,” Lucy wheedles, and predictably, Peter relents. He even smiles, just a bit, as she squeezes his other hand and goes off talking a mile a minute about everything that’s happened while they’ve been away at school.
As they all set off on the walk home, Susan glances at her sister, not yet nine years old by English reckoning, and wonders how it is she managed to convince their mother to let her walk down to the station alone. Knowing Lucy, perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she merely left.
It makes Susan tired to think of.
As they emerge from the station, Lucy skips merrily on ahead of them, and Susan falls into step beside her brother.
“Are you really all right?” she asks him. “You look—”
But something about the set of Peter’s jaw, the glance he cuts her as they walk, makes her words shrivel up in her throat.
He says, “I don’t want to hear it, Susan. I just want to go home.”
(They both know he doesn’t mean their house in Finchley, where their mother who no longer knows them, nor what to do with them, awaits.)
There’s something in his voice, his face, his posture, that Susan almost recognizes but does not understand. Something that catches at her throat and squeezes just enough that she decides perhaps this is a conversation better left for another time.
So she swallows her worry, and she nods, and she says, very quietly, “I missed you, you know.”
Peter doesn’t hear. He’s already two paces ahead of her, calling out to Lucy to slow down. Susan watches him go and wonders why it feels like she’s missing him still.
𓍙
He keeps fighting. It seems like every time she turns around she finds Peter sporting new bruises, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and washing blood from beneath his nails. Talking to him about it feels more like talking to a brick wall, or one of the Witch’s statues. He might as well be made of stone.
It doesn’t make sense to Susan, even when she’s thinking clearly about it instead of picking her own fights with him over the matter. Peter’s never been one for fighting—not even in Narnia. He wasn’t anything like this then. He’s never been like this. He fought when needed, her brother, and sparred for practice and pleasure, but it’s nothing like how he fights in England, tooth and ragged nail. He never relished it before, violence for violence’s sake. Susan doesn’t even think it’s about winning. It seems more like he wants to be hit, somehow. Bruised. Bleeding. Like it’s easier that way.
He seems to forget it’s not exactly easy for the rest of them.
She complains to Edmund about it over Christmas one morning, while Peter’s out letting Lucy drag him about in the snow. Edmund’s twitchier about the cold than usual this winter, and Susan’s inside playing chess with him by the fire as much because she hates the chill herself as she is to keep Edmund company.
“I don’t know what you want me to do about it,” he says after several long and silent moments, during which he expertly captures one of her bishops. She’ll lose this match, Susan decides. She can already see it coming.
“Talk to him?” she suggests, more than a little irritated at her brother’s seeming nonchalance. Peter is burning himself out like a candle or a fuse before their eyes, and yet Edmund steps in time and again to help him out of every mess he throws himself into—but nothing more. It’s upsetting Lucy. It’s frightening Mum.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s frightening Susan, too.
“You think I haven’t tried?” Edmund scoffs, and there’s something terribly resigned about his tone, his posture, the way he looks at her tiredly, then, across the board.
She bites her lip, looks away. “We can’t let him keep doing this, Ed. He’s—”
Going to get hurt, she means to say, but he already has. Both of them have. She’s patched up more than enough cuts and bruises and torn-off fingernails to know. And it hurts Susan to watch it happen, as surely as any blow might. Sometimes she lies awake at night and presses her fingers into her stomach, her forearms, the meat of her shoulders, and feels the ghosts of her brothers’ bruises there.
“We’re not letting him do anything,” Edmund says. “It’s Pete. You know that.”
Which he is, and she does. But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that being the eldest, being High King, would mean being responsible enough not to get into these messes. Not to start fights you can’t win. Peter’s not much of a king, though, these days. But then, Susan herself hardly feels like a queen.
She doesn’t know what she is anymore. Who she’s supposed to be.
“Well, he shouldn’t,” she gripes, sliding her one remaining knight across the board, both because it’s true and because she’s sick of worrying and wondering and wrapping up wounds he doesn’t need to have in the bathroom every night. “He’s being an ass.”
The glance Edmund gives her then is more than a little knowing. “He’s doing the same things you are, you know, in his own way. Don’t try to deny it.”
She opens her mouth, ready to snap back, ready to say she has no idea what he means—and then Edmund slides his rook across three squares and says, “Checkmate,” very calmly. Susan blinks, absorbing this, and before she can reply, her brother fixes her with an uncomfortably steady look. He raises one brow, then the other, not entirely unlike a challenge, one Susan doesn’t know how to answer.
All at once, he pushes back from the table and stands, leaving Susan alone by the fire, watching their brother out the window where he stands, squinting, in the snow. She can just see the bruises not covered with her makeup peeking lividly from beneath his scarf.
Susan wonders if maybe, just maybe, Peter feels as wrong as she does. If he isn’t trying to beat his body back into a shape he can recognize, the same way Susan tucks herself away and away and away, until she fits, however painfully, the hole she left behind.
𓍙
It takes her a long time to put her finger on it—that thing that runs through Peter now like sunlight over water, salt in the sea. Longer than it should, perhaps, but then, Susan’s still relearning the shape of him here, now. How to read it.
It’s anger. In the way he moves, speaks; holds himself on the balls of his feet, shoulders tensed and jaw set. It’s all anger.
Susan’s never seen him so angry before.
Sometimes, he almost doesn’t look like her brother at all.
𓍙
Going back doesn’t fix anything, though a quiet part of Susan, one she doesn’t like to think about, has perhaps always had an inkling that it wouldn’t.
If anything, being in Narnia again makes everything worse. Their home is in ruins, their friends all gone, and Peter can’t go five minutes without getting into it with the prince who is meant to be their ally. She’s so busy trying to train inexperienced archers and keep everyone’s head on straight that she doesn’t realize there’s more than anger between the two of them. That maybe it’s not really anger at all.
Then she catches sight of Caspian’s expression in the moonlight outside the castle, the naked relief on his face as Peter clears the rising drawbridge almost a twin to Susan’s own. Then she makes her way back to the heart of the How, bandages in hand, after the Witch is banished and Lucy seen to, only to find Caspian sitting quietly while her brother tends to his wounds, talking softly, both of them pretending they aren’t stealing surreptitious glances at the other. How close they stand before the battle, Peter half-armored and so very afraid, turning sharply away when she prods at him after with Caspian’s name. Then the challenge, the duel, the sword passed from Peter’s hand to Caspian’s, and after—the way they look at one another beside the river. The knighting. Her brother’s lips lingering upon his brow.
It’s impossible to miss once you’ve noticed it. And Susan, well, Susan’s always watching. So notice it she does.
She still doesn’t know how she feels about being in Narnia again most days, past the hollowed feeling in her chest when she thinks too long about how much has changed, how much they’ve lost—but she knows this: she is glad to see Peter happy again, however slightly, in whatever way.
She just doesn’t know if that’s something Peter will allow himself to be for very long.
𓍙
It’s not too much of a surprise when Caspian approaches her at the bonfire. She hasn’t seen Peter in hours, and earlier, she glanced across the clearing to see Edmund with Caspian looking altogether rather lost at his side. The face her brother gave her made it perfectly clear (at least to Susan) what Caspian, should she see him, is planning to ask her long before he does.
But Susan has something to ask him first, even if she doesn’t quite know how to ask it. What to say.
“Dance with me,” she invites instead, because she feels a need (now that there are no imminent threats of battle and death looming over them all) to take his measure, and because she has missed dancing, Narnian dancing, more than she’d’ve thought. The Nymphs and Fauns have just started up a new song, an old one, and it thrums deep in Susan’s chest. “Do you know this one?”
“Yes,” says Caspian, seeming rather startled at her request, but acquiescing to it easily enough, “I think so. Your sister has been teaching me the steps.”
So they dance.
It takes Caspian the entire song to ask her if she’s seen Peter, if she knows where he is, and Susan can’t tell if that’s because he’s working himself up to it, or because he wishes to be polite. She has an inkling it might be both. It warms her to him either way—that he would stop to dance with her, unhesitating, when she asks; how fondly he already says her sister’s name; how he reached to support Peter when he staggered, exhausted and spent, there beside the river, even though it was Susan who got there first, like always.
She thinks she might like this new King of Narnia, uncrowned and unfamiliar though he may yet be. She thinks they might one day be friends.
(Here is a secret: she is both more and less right than she knows, just then.)
“Have you seen your brother?” Caspian finally spits out, once the dance is ended and all bows and curtseys exchanged. “Peter, that is. I— I have not seen him for some time. I...was looking.”
It’s difficult to tell in the firelight, but she thinks he flushes as he says this, and he certainly flushes when Susan, unable to help herself, offers him both raised brows and a smile.
“I haven’t seen him either,” she tells him, and Caspian looks so crestfallen that any reservations she might have fall to the wayside of Susan’s mind. “He’s probably off hiding somewhere nobody would think to look. He’s not one for these sorts of things. That is—he prefers breaks from them, every once in a while, when he can manage it. To rest. Not all of us are like Lucy, you know.”
“And where, may I ask,” Caspian ventures, rather cautiously, “might you suggest I look?”
Susan shrugs. She really doesn’t know where Peter is, and she hadn’t planned on going looking, at least not for a while yet. Usually, he finds his way back to them before the night is at its end. “Not far, I’d wager. Maybe somewhere a bit less crowded, though. He probably wanted to be alone.”
Caspian looks at her, then, brow just slightly furrowed, as though he cannot decide if that’s meant to be a warning of some sort. Even Susan’s not quite sure what she means it to be. But he nods anyway, and thanks her, and turns away into the swirling crowd.
He disappears, Caspian, for a long time after that. Long enough that Susan’s certain he must have found Peter, wherever her brother’s got off to. But when they finally reappear, one and then the other, she finds herself surprised that nothing between them seems to have changed, as (judging by Caspian’s seeming determination) she had thought it might. She still sees Caspian watching her brother, sees Peter catching him and determinedly looking away. She still sits with Peter’s sleeping head on her shoulder and glimpses Caspian gazing at him from across the fire, more emotions than Susan can read at once written plainly upon his face.
𓍙
She tries to talk to Peter about it, just once. It’s the morning of Caspian’s coronation, warm and clear and promising, and the bruises are just beginning to fade on her brother’s brow. They’ve made about as many preparations as must be made, though Caspian himself has been rather conspicuously absent from it all. Susan remembers all too well the pit of nerves nesting like snakes in her stomach before they matched Aslan stride for stride down the center of the Great Hall in Cair Paravel for their own coronation, so she’s let him be as long as she can. Still, someone’s going to have to fetch him soon enough, and when she mentions as much to Edmund, all Susan gets in return is a sigh and a suggestion that maybe she ought to kill two birds with one stone already and send Peter to see to that.
“Ed,” she chides, and Edmund merely shrugs.
“I’ve got eyes, haven’t I?” he says. “You know he won’t do anything about it himself. And I’m beginning to think Caspian’s as bad as he is.”
The thing is: he’s not wrong.
Still, Edmund’s never had quite as many inhibitions, one might say, as Peter does about these sorts of things. It’s never mattered to him—or at least, not the same way.
Edmund shakes his head at her reticence, wandering away to speak to a few of the Fauns, leaving Susan alone with the knowledge that her brother is at least halfway right, and someone’s still got to find Caspian.
She supposes it may as well be Peter who does.
Peter’s in the stables when she finds him, which is hardly a surprise. Peter was always the best horseman out of the four of them, and perhaps anyone Susan ever met. They used to tease him that he spent more time astride a horse than his throne. So much of Narnia has changed and died and left them, but finding her brother amongst straw and hay and sawdust, chuckling quietly as a bay mare shoves its head against his chest so he might better rub its poll, feels more than a little like coming home.
Heedless of the stray straws on the flagged stable floor that catch in the hem of her skirt, Susan finds herself smiling at the scene as she approaches and leans one shoulder against the beams between stalls. Peter glances over at her as she does and offers that old sideways smile of his in return, a proper one, crinkled eyes and all. Susan can’t remember the last time she saw him smile like that.
Maybe the familiarity of it all, the sense of ease and rightness like they used to have (back when Peter would look at her head-on and answer her questions, really, when she asked) is why Susan opens her mouth just then and says, “About Caspian,” and nothing else, instead of asking Peter to help her track him down.
Something goes closed off in her brother’s expression, so quickly and quietly that anyone else might’ve missed it. But Susan knows him too well for that, even now.
“What about him?” Peter asks, saying the words like he expects them to hurt. Like if he isn’t careful, they’ll cut. It ruins any chance he might have had of dodging this particular conversation, and they both know it.
“Peter.”
He’s not looking at her now, turning back to the horse before him, cupping one velveted ear gently in his palm. The mare whickers, sensing his unease, but settles quickly under his touch. Susan wishes handling Peter were as simple.
He says, sounding altogether rather strained, “Please don’t.” And that—the underlying brittleness in his tone, the sudden tightness in his posture, the quiet please—might have been enough to end it all then and there, with no more talk of Caspian after, but then he adds, lower, “There’s nothing to talk about, anyway.”
Which is one of the more obvious lies her brother’s ever told, and it needles Susan that he even tried to tell it.
“I’m not stupid, Peter,” she half-snaps before she can think better of it. Then, more calmly, “And neither are you. I can see how he looks at you.”
Probably everyone can—Caspian the Tenth is not exactly what one might call subtle—but it’s like as not most of them have dismissed it as simple awe for the legends that time has fashioned Susan’s family into. What they likely don’t see (but Susan does, always) is Peter looking back.
Peter, who flinches, just barely, at her words. He closes his eyes, runs his fingertips down the curve of the bay’s jaw. “He doesn’t know what he wants.”
If he’s trying for dismissive, it’s not working. There’s a certain forced quality to his words that has Susan wondering if he’s trying to convince himself as much as her.
She says, crisply, though not unkindly, “On the contrary, I think it’s pretty well obvious what he wants.”
And who.
But Peter is shaking his head. “That’s— it’s not me, Susan. Not anymore. I can’t…”
He trails away, thought unfinished, but isn’t that the crux of it? Peter and the things he can’t have. Won’t let himself.
“Peter—” she begins, but now he’s stepping back and away from the stall, from her, hands dropping back to the sword belted at his side, curling around the hilt like a lifeline.
“I’m not,” says her brother, rather fiercely, “leading him on, or anything, you know.”
It’s about then that Susan realizes he must be taking what she’s saying wrong, must think she’s blaming him, somehow, not merely asking or coaxing or maybe even begging him to so much as consider talking about something he wants, much less having it. He’s always been like this, really—if there is no blame to take, Peter will invent it, will spin it up inside of himself until he chokes. Her too-caring, too-guilty martyr of a brother.
“I’m not going to— to break his heart,” Peter tells the ceiling more than Susan, head tipped back and knuckles white, and the choked way he says it has Susan’s own heart dropping right down to the floor. “So you needn’t bother. All right?”
“It’s not Caspian’s heart I’m worried about,” she says, or tries to, but he’s already going, already gone.
𓍙
They don’t talk about Caspian again, but perhaps they don’t need to. The coronation goes off without a hitch, and that evening amidst the celebrations and feasting and dancing, Susan sees her brother smile again. Something about Peter lightens all at once that night, as though in placing the crown atop Caspian’s head, he has released the last year of grief and anger that has shrouded him like a sodden, dragging cloak. When, late into the night, Lucy drags Caspian over to where Peter stands sharing a cup of wine and a quiet moment with Susan at the edge of the hall and its merriment, demanding Peter teach Caspian the Dance of Renewal, Peter’s smile comes easy. When Caspian looks at him, Peter looks back.
“I suppose it’s appropriate, given the occasion,” he says, handing Susan back the wine and turning to Narnia’s new King. Behind his back, Lucy makes a triumphant face at Susan, who bites her lip to keep from laughing.
“I suppose,” Caspian echoes, sounding as though he’s trying not to laugh himself.
That night is perhaps the happiest Susan has seen her brother in a year. In a lifetime.
It doesn’t last.
𓍙
She sees them on the ramparts once, silhouetted against the evening sky. They aren’t doing anything (she’s still not certain they are anything, even) but something about it—the tilt of Peter’s head, their quiet companionship, the way every line of Caspian’s form seems to lean just so towards her brother as new leaves to the sun—makes Susan turn quickly away.
None of them know it, but it’s her last night in Narnia. Peter’s, too.
𓍙
Your brother will be alright, Aslan told her not so long ago, after telling them they cannot stay but before they leave Narnia behind, and Susan wants to believe him. She wants it more than anything—almost, anyway.
But she doesn’t. And here’s why:
The Telmarines are waiting, and Aslan has gone ahead, Caspian at his side, casting a look full of something akin to dread over his shoulder as he went. But they hang back a moment, they two, standing silently in the courtyard where Susan thought they might die not so long ago. Where she was afraid Peter wanted to.
Perhaps they have, in a way. Perhaps they are.
“Susan,” says Peter, and then nothing else. Susan doesn’t say anything, just steps into the circle of his arms when he opens them, closing her eyes tight and pressing her forehead against his shoulder—the good one, not the one he’s still pretending doesn’t hurt.
“I’m going to miss it,” she says, muffled into the fabric of his borrowed tunic, so he won’t have to. She can feel him swallow, shudder, steel himself against the ache. She can feel the tears he’s trying to hide from her, too, trickling hotly into her hair.
“I think,” Peter admits distantly, “I already do.”
She doesn’t know how they’re meant to survive this.
And that’s before the garden.
𓍙
She ought to have known, Susan thinks, if only by the stiltedness of Caspian’s stride as he led them away from the crowded square to change, by the way he looked first to Peter, always Peter, when Susan steeled herself and said, But we’re not coming back.
She’d guessed, of course, because she knows her brother as well as she knows herself. Better, sometimes. Because she’d heard him more than once slipping into his rooms late into the night; seen the way they sat with heads bent together over maps and books; watched from across a field as Peter offered Caspian his uncle’s sword and fate, and Caspian held his gaze as he took it. To be honest, she’d encouraged it. They all had. They wanted Peter to be happy, after all, and Caspian, too. But she hadn’t known, not for certain—had even hoped she was wrong, for both their sakes, once Aslan brought the news down upon them like lightning, or a hammer, or the axe. Not until now, in a garden, in her starchy, rumpled uniform with the tie on too tight because her hands were shaking and she tugged too hard when she tied it, does she know. Not until Susan rounds the corner of the hedges and sees it: her brother’s hands cradling Caspian’s jaw as he leans forward to kiss him; the tears on both their cheeks; the hitch in Peter’s breathing and the awful tenderness in the way Caspian’s thumb sweeps across the back of his wrist.
She just manages to stifle her gasp and fling herself backwards into the cover of the foliage where they won’t be able to notice. Before she can think about it, she’s hurrying back down the path to intercept Lucy, who is making her own reluctant way out to the front of the garden.
Loud enough that she’s certain she’ll be overheard, Susan calls, “Hang on, Lu. Let me fix your hair. It’s a mess.”
So Susan braids her sister’s hair with shaking hands and tries not to think about her brother’s heart breaking on the other side of the hedge.
She’d thought she could see what was coming, but she never wanted it to be like this.
𓍙
Peter does not look back as they leave Narnia for the second and final time. Neither does Susan. It doesn’t make it easier.
What a pair they must make, she thinks, Orpheus and Lot’s wife, chasing ghosts and leaving homelands. Salt and sand and sorrow.
She wonders if she’d be able to manage this journey on her own if she didn’t have her brother to follow, his steady, too-tight grip to lead her through the tree.
Here is a secret: Susan’s afraid she could. Worse, she’s afraid it wouldn’t be this hard.
𓍙
There is a leaf in her brother’s hair, still. Susan plucks it out gently, careful not to crush it, and holds it between finger and thumb for a moment, then another, as the train picks up speed and the other passengers chatter around them. It’s from the garden, she knows. The hedge. Those final stolen moments she wasn’t meant to witness.
Somehow it passed through to England with them, when nothing else has before. She gazes at it, small and green and hopeful, and then at Peter, who looks back at her with something hollowed in his eyes.
When he holds out his hand, she almost doesn’t want to let it go, this tiny shard of Narnia. This last thing they’ll ever have of it, besides themselves and their memories and their doubly aching hearts. But it’s not Susan’s to keep, is it? No part of Narnia clung to her tight enough to walk between worlds, not even her own body. Not like this.
She places the leaf gently into his palm, now unmarked by his recent days once more wielding a sword, and watches him fold his fist around it. Watches as he doesn’t let it go the entire trip to school.
That’s how it goes ever after, with them: clenched fist to open palm. Peter holding on to everything Susan must let go.
There’s so much to let go.
She never manages all of it.
𓍙
They get by, some days better than others. They’re meant to be living in England now, Susan knows, but some days she’s afraid they’re not living at all.
It’s harder when they’re home from school, surprisingly. Maybe because there’s nothing to distract them, no places to be. Being alone in her bedroom has begun to feel like having her chest split open, ribs flung wide. Probably, for Peter, it’s the same.
Susan passes the cracked-open door to his and Edmund’s room more than once on her way down the hall and can’t help catching sight of him, sitting silently against the headboard of his bed, picking absently at the seam of his trousers as he stares, blank and unseeing, at the wall. Once, she stopped and called his name, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
It shames her to admit it, but sometimes Susan watches Peter sink inside himself and thinks the fights were almost better. Most times, she thinks she’s sinking, too.
𓍙
(She never mentions what she saw in the garden that day. There are times when Susan thinks he must know anyway, the way he’s always known her, the way only a brother could. But he never brings it up, so neither does she. And Susan can tell, just a little, that Peter is grateful, because she knows him just the same.)
𓍙
Long after she thinks he’s finally fallen asleep, Peter asks, into the darkness of Susan’s room, “How do you do it?”
It’s October. Eustace and his friend have come to stay with them for the weekend while the authorities sort out the mess at their school. The news they brought was not intended for Susan, but she heard it anyway, or the most important bits of it, and even if she hadn’t, she’d’ve guessed by the way Peter sat through dinner pale and silent as a corpse, by the looks the others have given him all evening, by the jagged tilt to his voice when he stood in her doorway and said, Hello, and nothing else, as though he’d forgotten there was anything else to say, or words with which to say it.
Susan knows what’s happened. What he’s lost. Even if the details are escaping her like water through her fingers, down her open palm—she knows. It’s Peter, after all.
She feels as much as hears the shuddering breath he draws in. He’s hoarse with weeping as he adds, “How do you bear it?”
“I try not to remember,” Susan answers, which is a lie.
She doesn’t have to try. Not anymore.
At her back, Peter laughs brokenly.
He says, despairing, “I don’t know how to stop.”
𓍙
They do live, eventually, in their own ways. They’re happy, more or less, she often thinks. Even Peter. Their father comes home, and Peter does not go to war, and sometimes she sees him smiling and thinks it’s a real one, truly.
She moves to her own flat in London, finds a typing job in one office, then another when it suits her better. They visit her, sometimes, Peter most often of all, and they don’t talk about it. They haven’t for years, not any of it—Peter doesn’t talk about Caspian, and Susan doesn’t talk about Narnia, and it’s an imperfect, clumsy thing, the way they go about it, tripping over all the things held between them that they cannot either of them bear to let go, but then, isn’t everything? Isn’t life?
It’s theirs, anyway.
Until it isn’t.
𓍙
It takes Susan three months after the accident before she can bring herself to go through her family’s things. It’s another two weeks before she makes her way through Peter’s, already half-packed from where he was supposed to move into Ms. Plummer’s spare room for the rest of his degree, on account of the shorter commute.
(He’d admitted to her, rather sheepishly, sitting beside her in the open windowsill of her flat two weeks ago while she smoked a cigarette out of it, sharing hits off it with him from time to time, that he wasn’t sure he even wanted to be in medical school anymore. If it wasn’t just the only thing he could think to do after everything, with the war, their father, with— and then he cut himself off, swallowing, and Susan knew what he was going to say, but was awfully glad he didn’t.
What do you want to do? she asked instead.
Don’t know, Peter told her, and shrugged. Still figuring that out, I s’pose.
And now he never will.)
She finds the box beneath his mattress, a little lower than the head, smooth wood meeting her questing fingertips in the very first place she looks for the parts of her brother she knew he did his best to keep tucked away. When they were younger, he used to hide sweets here, to share them with her when she was sad, or angry, or came rabbiting into his room when thunder crashed loudly overhead. Now there’s no Peter, no sweets, and no storm to hide from, except the one that rages in Susan’s own chest.
She sits on the mattress and slides open the box with trembling hands.
The first thing Susan finds is a leaf, pressed and fragile and nestled in the lid off an old tin of mints to keep it from being crushed amidst everything else. She touches her fingertip to one crumbling edge and remembers the station, the train; the leaf, still green, clutched tight in Peter’s fist. Leaf-tipped arrows, leaf-topped crowns. Trees that sang and danced the same as she had, once.
Heat prickles behind her eyes so that Susan closes them for a moment, then two, breathing deeply, failing monumentally to steady herself. It’s not that she hadn’t thought he’d kept it, that she wouldn’t see it again. It’s more that she hadn’t thought about it at all.
Very gently, she draws the tin lid and its fragile contents out of the box, setting it atop the nightstand, and delves once more into what remains of her brother’s heart.
The next item, freed from its newspaper wrapping, is a battered copy of The Well of Loneliness. Susan’s seen Peter reading it before, on Sunday mornings, hidden inside another book even though no one else was home. She’d thought about asking to borrow it, but never quite got up the courage.
It’s hers now, she supposes, and wishes bitterly it wasn’t.
When she opens the cover, she finds a note scrawled inside it in spidery hand: This brought me comfort for many years. Perhaps it may bring you a little now. It’s unsigned, of course, but she knows Professor Kirke’s handwriting well enough by now.
Beneath that are the paintings, watercolors the size of postcards and playing cards and everything in between. These, she knows, are from Lucy. Susan’s not quite ready to look at those, so she lifts them out in a heap and sets them, too, aside upon the bed. But it’s not all of them. Tucked down deeper, beneath sheafs of maps and papers marked with names she’s spent years forgetting, below stacks of letters from Lucy, from the Professor, from Susan herself, all tied neatly together with twine, Susan finds one last painting, this one fondled to the point of fraying at every edge.
It’s been a long time since Susan thought about Caspian. Longer still since she’s been able to recall with any accuracy his face. This isn’t, she thinks, the one she remembers, or used to. He looks older, sadder, a beard shadowing his cheeks, hair salt-crimped from the sea behind him. Susan wonders why Lucy hadn’t painted him smiling.
She can guess, is the thing.
At the very bottom of the box lies a single sheet of paper, mostly blank, slightly crumpled. Caspian, reads the top left corner in Peter’s hand, and then nothing more. She leaves that one in the box, untouched.
Maybe they’re together now, she thinks, and then hates that she wishes they weren’t. Is it awful of her to wish more of this separation on her brother if it meant he were still here? Is it worse that she wishes she could have been beside him at the station that day, torn to unrecognizable pieces in a storm of sound and fury and screaming rails?
She has to set the box aside to keep her tears from spotting the page still tucked within it. Probably Peter wouldn’t mind, but now she’ll never know.
𓍙
(In the end, she wraps the leaf in a scrap of tissue, slipping it into one of their mum’s old lockets, and wears it warm around her throat. The rest of the box’s contents remain as they were, though she reads The Well of Loneliness at last, and sometimes fishes out something or other to run her fingertips over on her darker, lonelier days. She adds a few other things to it, once the packing is done and the house sold—more of Lucy’s paintings; Edmund’s letters; photographs once framed on the walls—and keeps it safe beneath her own mattress after that, like a coffin or a secret or her own sort of pressed leaf, tucked deep for all her life.
She never takes the locket off if she can help it.
In fact, though Susan will never know this, she takes it with her to the grave.)
𓍙
It’s quite some time before she separates herself from her siblings’ embrace there in Aslan’s country, and even longer before the following great swirl of reunions dies down enough for Susan to catch her breath again. Part of her still feels, just a little, as though something else will happen, some other shoe that has yet to drop. That this can’t possibly be real. But what else can it be? Not even in dreams has Susan felt this much herself. Not even the best of them was as sweet.
“It’s good to see you again,” says someone at her elbow, and Susan turns to see Caspian standing there, looking just like Lucy’s portrait, but without the well of sorrow in his eyes. He’s smiling, now, and at her brother, no less, where Peter’s gotten distracted with some animated discussion between Lucy and Corin of Archenland, who’s fully grown and hugged Susan so tightly he lifted her clean off her feet when he saw her. When Caspian catches her watching this, he shrugs, a little sheepishly, and offers Susan a bow. She returns it with a curtsey, the easy Narnian style coming back to her like she never forgot it, and perhaps she didn’t. Not really. Not all.
“Caspian,” she says, and takes the hand he offers, squeezes it gently in hers. It’s nice, having something to hold onto. Someone to steady her.
“It gets easier,” he tells her, somehow able to read what she’s thinking in the lines of her face, “the longer you’re here. You get used to it.”
She nods. Sometimes it hits her again, all of it, like a great and terrible wave, and Susan thinks she’ll be swept away with the force of it, Aslan’s country or no. But maybe not.
For a moment, they stand quietly, watching the others talk. And then:
“You gave him back his sword,” Susan says, just to have something to say. She’d noticed the familiar blade hung at Peter’s side again not long after arriving, the very same he’d once wielded against the Wolf to save her, and handed to Caspian upon a dais: one final parting gift. For years after that, Susan watched him reach for the hilt and meet empty air. She can’t quite remember when he stopped doing it, but now he smiles and laughs and his hand rests steady on the pommel, and she doesn’t hate the sight of it as much as she might’ve imagined.
He smiles. “I said I would look after it until he returned.”
She hums. “And have you been looking after him, now, too?”
This draws a startled sort of laugh out of him, which snags at Peter’s attention—Susan can see the glance he throws their way, the softening of his smile into another, quieter sort, when he meets Caspian’s gaze, even for a moment. It’s been a long time since she saw such softness on her brother. Such a lack of grief.
Caspian says, fondly, “As well I can.”
And Susan is glad.
They fall silent again, but not for long.
“I saw you,” Susan says at last, perhaps because secrets are not so pressing in Aslan’s country, or perhaps because someone is finally here to tell, without the grief that salted the telling like an open wound, “in the garden, that day. Before we left. The two of you.”
Caspian’s hand twitches, then, in her grasp. When she glances up she can see that even in Aslan’s country, there is a flash of well-worn and familiar sorrow darting across his face at the memory.
“I thought it would be easier not to say anything,” she continues, pressing his hand between both of hers.
“I thought the same,” says Caspian, voice altogether rather brittle. “For many years.”
Was it? Susan does not ask, because it’s not the sort of question that can be easily answered, or even answered at all. Looking at Caspian, she thinks that he knows this. That he understands, as Peter did. Only a brother, and all that.
“It is good to see you again, Susan,” Caspian repeats, after a moment and a steadying breath both. The smile he offers her is small but genuine and warm. “We have missed you here. Greatly.”
“I missed you all, too,” Susan tells him, and for the first time in a long time, makes no attempt to disguise her tears. The burden of grief is lighter, here, and anyway, they’re only halfway sad. She releases a long and shallow breath, and squeezes Caspian’s hand again, watching her siblings laughing and talking and living once more upon the grass. “I’m glad they were here with you. That he got to be. Even when I— well. There was that, at least.”
“And now there’s this,” Caspian says, and squeezes her hand back. It’s terribly comforting.
“Now there’s this,” she agrees, and laughs rather wetly, but no less glad.
Maybe, she finds herself thinking, as her sister romps and drags Edmund along with her, as Peter throws back his head and laughs brighter than she’s heard in decades, as Susan feels herself settle warmly into her bones, they’ll have that chance to be friends now, properly, they two. Now that there’s time.
In Aslan’s country, Susan is finding, there is an abundance of time.
And Susan is happy.
This time, it lasts.