AN: This came to me all of a sudden and then I wrote it and now I'm posting it. I've not much more to say than that. Please enjoy. -Sable

That Which Was Lost

Susan Pevensie arranges for the funerals of her brothers, sister, and parents with a detached practicality that earns her strange stares from the funeral director. Her eyes are dry, her breathing it steady, and her bearing is one of sedated nobility.

She lays them to rest in one long row: Father, Mother, Peter, Edmund, Lucy.

There is a gap between Peter and Edmund, an empty lot she considers with the faintest of longings. The headstone she places there will be inscribed at a later date. The words not yet written on that heavy stone haunt her unceasingly. They hold her down to Earth when she wants nothing more than to float away.

She agrees with Alberta and Harold that Eustace must lay alongside his favorite cousin and secures Lucy's other side for him. When the girl Jill's parents come tearfully to her to ask for a similar honor for their daughter, Susan secures the lot on Eustace's other side as well.

In their wills, the Professor and his old friend Ms. Plummer both made it clear that they should be buried together and, if possible, near friends. The managers of their estates concede when Susan suggests that the two be placed at the end of what she has come to refer to as her row in the Willowgate Cemetery.

She looks at them after all the funerals are over and done.

The Seven Friends of Narnia, as they called themselves, are arranged in death as she imagined they would arrange themselves in life: High King Peter at the head of their line, followed by Edmund the Just, then Lucy the Valiant, quickly after by their dear friends and loyal subjects Eustace and Jill, and then capped off by the impossible to rank Digory and Polly, who were neither regents nor subjects but more of historians.

And there, separate but ever connected, are Mr. and Mrs. Pevensie.

The parents who had raised her, loved her, kept her, and clothed her are gone so abruptly that it still doesn't seem real to her. She wakes in the middle of the night thinking that if she walks downstairs she'll overhear her father's rumbling snore or interrupt her mother's midnight snack.

And there, beneath sex feet of dirt, lay the brothers who protected and annoyed her and the sister who looked up to her. She regrets the distance she put between them now and would give anything for Peter to be threatening one of her boyfriends or Edmund to be putting her king in checkmate or Lucy to be beating a hasty retreat with her sister's favorite blue sweater in hand.

She remembers Narnia now, in the dead of night when she sits on the grass at the foot of their graves. It was beautiful to her, she remembers, beautiful and wonderful and all the shining, glorious things that Earth no longer is. Narnia was lost to her the day she lost her faith in the Lion. Earth was lost to her the day she lost everything else.

She stares long and hard at the empty space between her brothers. Even as she goes about her daily life, doggedly continuing through the endless years that stretch ahead of her, the blank stone and the empty earth are a weighty promise at the back of her mind.

She doesn't mourn. She doesn't loose herself in her anguish, not for a second. She lives decades more towards a single goal, letting her time on Earth progress steadily forwards without making herself a hindrance to it. She never marries, never loves, for that would be like loving in a dream.

Susan considers her grave and waits for the day when, upon closing her eyes, she will wake.

That which was lost in a dream will be found right where you left it upon going to sleep.

-end-