Susan: Alone
by Sinope
Title:
Susan: Alone
Author: Sinope at (no spam!) gmail dot com
Rating:
PG
Pairing:
Susan (gen)
Summary:
Those were children's stories, she tells herself firmly.
Author's notes:
A drabble for stupidtrucks on the prompts in the title.
Disclaimer: This is an unofficial fan work. No profit was made; no ownership is implied.
The young man who sits down beside Susan on the bus has the face of Rabadash. The thought is not a conscious one; Susan crosses her legs and straightens her skirt, telling herself that it's an illogical reaction to the man's brown skin. Except that once, somebody who looked like that told her that her wrists were so slender, he could trap them between a finger and thumb -
Susan stands abruptly and gets off at the next stop. Those were children's stories, she tells herself firmly. Of course they included racist caricatures and helpless damsels. Winter has finally caught up with London; as she walks the rest of the way to the shop, wind cuts through her clothing like a chill hand brushing past her thighs. Always winter and never Christmas. The shop windows have begun sporting sprigs of holly and mistletoe.
Apples. That's why she's here; Mark will be visiting this evening, and she's promised to bake him an apple tart. When Susan reaches the greengrocer's, she surveys the fruits with dismay; the apples look wrinkled and tasteless, grown far away and withered in an impersonal cellar. She used to love walking through the orchard - no. That was in the stories. Mum's garden never had enough space for apple trees, though Lucy always begged her so. Herbs and peas were more practical.
"May I help you, Miss?" the shop owner inquires. His curly hair looks almost as if it's sprouting horns; his eyes twinkle with suppressed regret, just like Mr. Tumnus's. Susan decides she's going mad.
It's not that Susan has always been so practical, or that she's forgotten the promises of storytelling. She still remembers the fairy-tales they told each other as children; "Queen Susan the Gentle," she called herself, giving herself suitors from a thousand lands, hair that cascaded in raven ripples down to her feet. Then the storytelling ended, and the process of putting on her dull school uniform before the mirror felt all the more painful. Thousands of suitors didn't matter if none of them were real. So where Lucy had charmed her schoolteachers with fanciful stories about fairies and mermaids, Susan had won prizes in swimming and archery, then gotten herself a job as a chemist's assistant. Mother always praised her for being so practical.
Perhaps it's something in the air currents, the way that winter's approach tastes like dusty snow in her mouth. A woman walks by, slender as a dryad and as fancifully clad, and Susan half-expects to watch her fade into a cloud of flower petals. Everything today seems significant and interconnected. Nobody in the ordinary London will remember Susan as gentle.
The visions stop when Susan arrives back home. There's a telegram waiting for her; they're dead, all of them, Peter and Edmund and Lucy together. The stories are finished, and Susan feels horribly alone.
finis.
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