Title: Loss
Day/Theme: 15. Grunt.
Series: Chronicles of Narnia
Character/Pairing: Susan Pevensie
Rating: PG13



The bears are sleepy.

She can smell the quiet musk and honey of winter on them. Not quite, not yet, but they've been stirred from their burrows, or from the seeking of their burrows, by this battle; they came to Peter's aid sleepy-eyed and sluggish. She worries that a sword will slip too easily past their heavy coats and layers of fat and muscle, she holds her hands so hard her knuckles are white as she thinks about the battlefield.

One of them grunts, a sleepy inquisitive sound, and the other might answer, maybe is asleep. The stone is cold on Susan's thighs, a sharp chill that prickles through her bones, and she cannot see the sky. Does it matter? It makes the space feel small and cramped; the air is too still, with the smell of beasts and hot metal, and soon the weapon-smell becomes blood-smell in her mind, her own nose adding in the remembered scent of copper to the tang of iron.

Am I happy to be in Narnia?

Her long hair feels heavy; her quiver lays across her lap, she strokes the red fletchings of the arrows and watches the dance of the fire. She never liked battles; she still remembers the too-bright sunlight of that first one, the way Edmund laid sprawled, limbs awkward as an abandoned doll, the White Witch with her swords raised over Peter and a howl of protest choking in Susan's throat.

For a long time in Narnia she dreamed of that, and Lucy came and woke her up--Susan never knew how she knew--and they whispered stories of nightmares, from the howling frost-black horde that terrible night of Aslan's death to the bright-hot song of adrenaline and victory and fear--who have we lost? what lives have bought triumph?.

She closes her eyes and remembers Aslan's strength between her legs, the rhythm of that long run, the way they seemed to soar over the ground. It brought peace to her before, but now leaves her fiercely filled with loss. Why do you think I didn't see him?

Maybe you didn't want to.

While it lasts. She'd lose Narnia again, it was inevitable, and with it Aslan, and back to cold England it would be, brutal and grimy with indifference, choked with human faces that did not understand. And now she'll lose something else, she knows she will, something terribly new and terribly hurtful for all of its possibilities.

She could weep. There is a bitter softness in her now that will not abate, but she does not cry.

And when Prince Caspian raises his head and looks at her across the flicker-lit hollow of the cave, she returns her gaze again to the bears, and watches them sleep.