Five years have passed, and I still wake up thinking about you every morning. Five years have passed, and every morning is still the same.
University is like secondary: the same girls giggling over the same boys, scolded by the same stuffy marms. My roomies think I am sweet but dull; the uppers think I am another bookish, shy fresher; boys think I am stuck-up and silly. Behind my plain face, underneath my prim button downs (my smart blazers, my respectable hemlines), I am a warrior, an adventurer, Queen Lucy the Valiant. Everything is just the same except for me.
I am Lucy the Studious, Lucy the Quiet Mouse.
Despite my good marks, holidays at home are full of complaints. They are gentle, almost pleas: where has our sunny Lu gone? What happened to your daydreams, to your dancing, to your laughter? Peter looks at me as if I am a stranger. Sometimes he seems afraid of me; sometimes he looks disappointed in me; always, he is confused. After a few awkward starts at the beginning of the hols, he gives up on conversation, and on me. He avoids me for the remainder, and I try not to notice his relief when I am leaving.
Susan, having changed herself, makes her attempts at bonding. Like the girls at school, she reaches out to me with makeup and party clothes, fashion magazines and hairstyles. Brushing out the waves my braid has left in my hair, she tests the waters with vague, sisterly boy advice. I do not take her bait. I wait for her to finish twisting and pinning and spraying and setting. I varnish her nails while she picks up the fallen conversation and carries on about this invitation to that party and these flowers from this gentleman caller. I'm a good listener. You know that about me.
I remember everything you ever told me: the stories of your uncle before it all went wrong, and the dim memories of your mother and father that came alive like photographs developing with your words. At night, when I cannot sleep, I tell myself what you told me after you rescued us from Pug, that you knew from the moment you saw my triumphant face across the Fords of Beruna that all would be well in Narnia again. "You are the beating heart that keeps Narnia breathing, my Queen," and the stars drew close to the mast, leaning in to eavesdrop. I was Lucy the Lifesaver, you were my best friend, and five years later, it is just the same.
Edmund, who can most closely understand how I feel, tries subtly to console me. He comes to visit me at university when we both have afternoons off, ignoring the dewy-eyed stares of my roomies and choosing instead to focus his quiet attention on me. Edmund is also a good listener, and with him I begin to talk. I am almost always talking about you.
I remember your face, so terrible and twisted with grief, when we reached the Silver Sea. I felt weak when you announced that I would have to go, too, but I steadied myself against the railing and tried to look brave. I was a Queen, after all. You knew we would have to go sooner or later, said Lucy the Level-headed, and we replied as one voice: but this is sooner. Any time to leave you was too soon.
I remember lifting a last armful of lilies up to you, my wet forearms sliding through your grasp as you collected them. Reach down, I thought, and gather me up, as well. I wanted you to pull me away from Edmund and Eustace and that world, which was drifting like the little boat further and further away. Anchor me in Narnia, I prayed, pressing my gaze into you. Your eyes said that Aslan wanted it like this.
Fight for me, said mine. But Lucy the Obedient prevailed.
Still the Just after all these years, Edmund cannot muster the resentment I have tried not to feel. "He told us it was time to get closer to him in this world, Lu," Edmund tells me, this dreary Wednesday. We sit in the cafe around the corner from my dormitory, and I watch the cloudy sky through the window. The gloom is comforting; sunny days always seem so smug. "You seem to have gotten farther away."
I don't have the words to tell him that I feel a million miles away from everything and everyone I used to know. Queen Lucy the Valiant, Aslan, the Dawn Treader – they are like dreams that haunt me, like ghosts I cannot touch. In my worst nightmares, you are pearlescent and smiling, reaching out to me, but my hand passes through yours every time.
At thirteen, I was a girl with a Queen inside of me, and you were the boy-king of Narnia just beginning to stretch his legs. Sixteen is not so old, you would tell me, and I would smile: Neither is thirteen. You were my friend, because we both knew what it was like to feel your body was younger than yourself. Edmund wouldn't be made to talk about these things, but when it was you and me and the sea and the sky on the deck, we said what we liked, what we wanted to say, what we needed to say. In some other nightmares, I am chasing the Dawn Treader until morning, trying to catch up and land on the deck, leap into your surprised arms. But she races on, borne away from me by a strong wind, and I cannot catch her. I give up and fall into the ocean to float aimlessly. You are too far away to hear my cries.
"I'm adrift," I say, hardly realizing that I'm speaking out loud. With my eyes in the grey sky, I can almost imagine it's you I'm talking to, and Edmund does not stir to remind me of the truth. He is a very good listener. "I feel like my life has had the volume turned down around me, and I just can't find anyone. I miss Aslan, Ed. I miss Peter, and Mr. Tumnus, and feeling alive, feeling anything! I miss –" Here is where I always find that I cannot say your name. "Oh, Ed, I miss it all and I want it back...I just want to go back..."
I guess I'm crying now, Lucy the Leaky-eyed. For a second, I think it's the rain that's making the view from the window warp and tremble, but it's not raining, after all. Edmund shifts in his seat across from me; he hates to see Susan and I cry. In a moment, he's beside me, letting me cry into his coat and promising me that we'll get it all back. He says what he has to because he is my big brother, I know, but for a second I almost believe him. Oh, how I want to believe him.
I won't let him walk me back to campus. He tries to insist, but I force my puffy face into a smile that he says is "almost Lucy." I start to tell him that I'm faking it, but I think he might be right. We walk together to the corner, and then he turns right and I watch him go, until his back is just another set of shoulders hunched beneath a raincoat, waiting for the storm to come to a head.
The campus entrance closest to my dorm is blocked for construction. Odd, I think, that they didn't start earlier in the day, but I trudge the extra few blocks to the south side of campus. There, a parade of housing vans block the path. "You'll 'ave to go 'round the other way, doll," one of the drivers calls out to me. "S'blocked up the whole way down."
The thunder rumbles promisingly overhead as I turn back the way I came. I feel it vibrating against my feet, up through me, like shivers in the cold. It feels familiar, and a little frightening. I walk quickly to the west entrance.
Just as I duck through the west gates, the thunder cracks loudly, making me jump. The rain drops down like an instant flood, fully drenching me in a matter of seconds. My dormitory is too far across campus for a run to even be worth it, so I scramble for the first available shelter. Shouldering the upperclassmen dormitory nearest the west gates proves useless; the door is shut fast and no one responds to my knocking. I dash to the next building, another dorm, which is also barred. Five doors and two very sore shoulders later, soaked through and shivering, I stumble gratefully into the library.
The building is blissfully deserted, though draftier than I would prefer in my sodden state. The desk attendant does not even glance up as I squish and slide my way inside, intending to secure a private study room in which I can remove some wet layers and attempt to dry off. Despite the building's apparent emptiness, however, every study room door is locked against my entry. As I trudge on down the line, trying each door with less and less hope, it's a wonder I don't see it yet.
The very last door is in the most remote corner of the first floor, nestled deep in the stacks and obscured by a maze of shelves. It looks like it has never been touched, and I think with a mixture of hope and anxiety that if it is locked, I could easily break down the rotten wood. In my desperate, saturated condition, I am Lucy the Library Vandal. Why it never occurs to me to take advantage of the concealed corner, I don't know.
The doorknob turns, but the elation ballooning inside of me is quickly punctured by the door's resistance to my shoulder. And yet...I shove again, and feel a slight give, as if the door has swollen in the frame. It wants to open, I think, and throw myself against the wood once more, pressing with the length of my entire body. My shoulder is numb by this point, tough like a callous and able to take it when I drive again at the door. Frustrated, I grab the knob with both hands and throttle the door, shaking it in its frame. Water cascades off of me, joining the contents of the pool already formed at my feet. "Oh, come on!" I cry, a shadow of Lucy the Valiant rearing up inside of me as I crash down against the door and feel it give. The door opens with the sound of a relieved sigh, and I swear I feel a breath of wind caress my cheek. Instead of chilling me, the air feels warm, like moving sunshine, and it brings with it a familiar smell. I raise my head, flinging my wet hair off of my forehead, and look up into your face.
You are reaching out to me, your hands beckoning, your arms open, and you are not the pearly ghost of my dreams. You are solid and vibrant as the green grass on which you stand, the solid tree trunks at your back. Suddenly, the volume is at full blast, and all I can hear is my heart beating loud enough to shake the books off their shelves behind me, to shake the leaves off their trees before me.
"Where have you been?" you ask me, half-laughing. There is so much joy in you and it fills me, it swallows me whole.
"I've been drifting," I call back to you in a voice I remember but do not recognize as my own. It belongs to Lucy the Mirthful, the gay and golden-haired.
"I will anchor you." Your arms are outstretched to me, still, and I am tired of waiting. My oxfords push off from the dusty tile of the library floor and sink into the lush carpet of grass; my hand finds yours and holds. You pull me in, anchor me firmly, and we are laughing and crying because I am back.
"I am back," I say, so that I can believe it. And all I can hear is our hearts beating, just the same.
12-27-06: edited! made some slight changes that will only matter to me (changed that awful second to last line, finally). thank you to all of my wonderful reviewers!
06-06-06 notes: ages based on a forum thread in the Narnia forums, Sons of Adam section, particularly Wiltshireman's post, so this is probably AU, because it likely does not fit into the timeline of events for The Last Battle – lucy here is 18, making her 13 during The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; this is just a oneshot that's been stuck in my head for ages, because if there were ever a couple who i would consider a one true pairing, it's lucy and caspian – come on, "a dim, purple kind of smell"? hello, soulmates!