A/N: I know post-Last-Battle Susan fics have been done a thousand times, but I find I cannot resist the siren song of angst/redemption plot bunnies.…I hope there's enough of something new here that you enjoy it!

The verb tense changes are intentional; hopefully they're not confusing.

The fantastic C. S. Lewis owns almost everything here.

It isn't despair that drives her to the cliff-top this morning.

Memory has been chasing her down the years, all the time she sought to press it into the shadows of her life, and last night it caught up to her.

It began—as much as she could point to a beginning for this story—with a package.

She first saw it the day of The Crash, sitting on her hall table. She'd just come inside—the telegram had found her on her doorstep, informed her in coldly uniform, unpunctuated type that she was now alone in the world. Numb footsteps carried her into her flat, and for some reason it was then that she noticed the strange bundle of paper sitting where she never left anything. Picking it up, she realized it must have been there at least two days, maybe more; the slapdash wrapping, in plain brown parcel-paper, was undoubtedly Edmund' signature, as was the handwriting on the slip of paper taped to the top:

For you to remember. Just in case of…something. Don't open otherwise.

When she read that note—when she realized that he'd had some kind of inkling, even some marginal premonition that they might not come back from wherever it was they were going, and still had barely given her more than a perfunctory goodbye—she was so suddenly, violently angry that she threw the package across the living room, not even bothering to see where it landed.

Then she locked herself in her room for two days—sleepless, tearless. Thom and Rod and some of the girls had all come by. She hadn't eaten any of the home-baked sweets Jackie had brought (though it was not concern for her figure that had ravaged her appetite this time), or felt any empathy from Sarah's tears (no matter how genuine they might have been), or responded at all to Elinor's knocking (so timid, Susan was sure she was glad to be ignored). Normally the boys made her laugh if anyone could, but there would be no flirting on this occasion, and she had been terrified that somehow the sight of them, their kindnesses too much like her brothers', would bring on the tears that she might otherwise stand a chance of holding in. She could not let out that flood, or she feared she would never stop.

The funeral had been the only sunny day in the whole month. She was not quite sure whether to call it a horrid irony or a fond smile upon her family from some higher power. (Her longstanding disbelief in such things stepped aside just long enough for her to think of it as cruel, in either case.) She'd been terribly pale; she knew it from looking at the faces of everyone else who came, everyone else who had loved her loved ones.

She still felt a little bit sorry that she hadn't made it to Eustace's funeral, but in her fragile state she hadn't thought she could stand more than one obligatory encounter with Alberta in a matter of days, and anyways Eustace had always been a perfect beast to her—first, because he was a beast to everyone, and later, because she wouldn't join in their games about Narnia.

Life blurred meaninglessly for several weeks—she dropped out of university for a term, but found that the loneliness of having nowhere to go was even worse than having to face hundreds of sympathetic faces in class, so she went back and managed to keep up passing marks. She didn't cry very often, until Jack left her, saying he missed the "fun" Susan and couldn't handle the "tragic" Susan.

That wasn't fair, and both of them knew it, but she let him go anyway. if Peter and Ed had still been here they would have thrashed him for his treatment of her. She became rather a waif. She hid her grief well enough, but a fierce paranoia of loss gripped her. She had recurring nightmares that she jinxed everyone who got close to her, that would hug someone and they would melt into a puddle at her feet, or catch fire, or—worst of all—crumple into smashed heap, as if they'd been hit by a train. It was one of the reasons she didn't move out of her flat. It was better if she stayed where she was, so she couldn't hurt anyone.

It was why she never married, even though she eventually realized that a child was what she wanted most from life.

She filled her life with university studies and a spotty job as an advertising model, and sat alone in the opera and stopped reading novels.

She forgot about Edmund's parcel—repressed it, probably, according to that Austrian psychologist everyone raved about, but that wasn't important—and it hid, unseen, wherever it had fallen, for a very long time.

Now it's almost nine years later, and last night when she was cleaning the flat—moved by some alien impulse of restless industriousness to move furniture that hadn't been budged since Mason and Elly lived here ages ago—she found the package again, spotted in the corner where a roach had munched through the paper. Ed's note was patchy with dust, and looking at his achingly familiar scrawl made her want to start crying.

Arming herself with a pot of heavily honeyed tea, she faced her find. She pulled apart the messy packaging, fingers trembling ever so slightly. The paper slipped apart easily, revealing bundled letter-paper, each sheet clutching its neighbor as if they were as lonely as she.

Letters. Almost a hundred of them. Mostly from Edmund, though she found a couple from Lucy and one very perfunctorily heartrending note from Peter, and even a dozen from Eustace. All addressed—by name only—to her.

For a moment, there was only amazement. If she had found them earlier, she might have burned them. Instead of anger, though, she found a cool melancholy slipping over her, an ache that brought up long-forgotten tears.

She read almost every one of them, late into the night, not caring that she was using up almost all her Earl Grey, or that if anyone looked into her window and watched her laughing and sobbing over old letters they'd think her a masochistic romantic or else plain loony.

Do you remember Narnia, Su?

It was one of the main topics of Ed's letters. Though he often sounded angry or vaguely regretful, it was sheer sorrow that she could hear bleeding through the years-old ink of all his letters. He'd missed her as much then as she missed him, all of them, now.

Lucy talked about Narnia in glowing terms, not directly addressing the heart of her hurt, trying to reignite the joy that she had once shared with her sister. She spoke the most of Aslan, even sketching a picture of His face at the bottoms of some of her letters, like a royal seal.

Peter was cold. She knew he'd been worried sick about her—furious, and worried, and therefore very cold. There was only the one note from him, no more than a paragraph, but she wept over it as if it were a book full of everything he didn't say.

She was surprised to find missives from Eustace, and even more surprised to find that they were warmly cordial. Eustace was kinder, but that was only because he was so much more matter-of-fact, blunt, unobjectionably curious. The sense of betrayal didn't permeate his words. His letters were the most bearable, and she wondered if he had really changed more than she'd seen. She'd never heard the full story of either of his journeys to Narnia.

Do you remember Narnia, Su?

She's never, not for one day, forgotten Narnia. It had simply become too painful, the sense of rejection overwhelming. Aslan no longer wanted her; there were other kings and queens more fitted to Narnia than she. Reminiscing about her loss was not a salve, as it had been for her siblings; it was only a knife tearing at her insides.

So she cast it off, like an outgrown sloughed skin, pretending she no longer wanted or recalled it.

The first time she denied Narnia was in response to a passing comment by Edmund, three years after her last trip to Narnia.

"There's something particularly nasty about winter here in London. It's positively gloomy, even by post-Jadis Narnian standards."

"…By whose standards?"

Her voice was so casual.

His face had gone bone-white with realization—he knew very well what she meant, that she hadn't failed to hear him or misheard him. He understood at once her deliberate denial, as he had once done it himself.

But for her, there was no chance of going back through the wardrobe to earn redemption.

He must have told Peter—of course he told Peter, the two had been thick as thieves as they grew into men—because she received a telephone call not a day later from her older brother, very calmly demanding to know what she meant by pretending not to remember Narnia.

She told him, in an equally cool tone, matching his masquer nuance by nuance, that she had no idea what he was referring to. They had some kind of row—she could hear Mother on Peter's end, demanding to know what had got him into such a state—but neither of them raised their voice for a second. Any stranger who overheard them might have thought them deadly nemeses instead of brother and sister. She didn't talk to Peter for weeks after that.

Her third denial had been to Lucy, a month later when they were dressing for a party that Susan had cajoled Lucy into attending with her. Lucy…her impassioned shock and grief, with no attempt made to veil them, had been the hardest of all to bear.

"Doesn't dressing up like this remind you of Narnia, Susan? We're just like the Queens of Cair again!"

"Don't be silly, Lucy. This is far more fun than any make-believe we played at when we were children."

Lucy had paused in her twirling to stare at her, looking utterly bemused.

"Susan! What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking sense, Lu! I'm sure I haven't the slightest what you're about, however."

"Oh, Susan—!"

"Oh, do grow up, Lucy. Tell me how these pearl earrings look?"

In that moment, when she turned her back—garnishing her final defection with a smirk, even—Susan's heart was hard as ungemmed stone.

In later months, whenever it had come up in her presence, it had even turned to mockery, though she had not perceived it as such:

"…What wonderful memories you all have."

There was no cock-crow to salute the fall of Susan Pevensie, but it seemed that even in England, the Witch's darkest magic had not quite died. She shut away her pain, knowing full well what her deception was doing to her siblings—not fully comprehending what it was doing to herself.

The letters seared her, pulling open her poorly cauterized wounds, lighting a match to time. She didn't go to bed, only inadvertently dozed in her armchair for half an hour before waking up to the smoggy London sunrise.

Narnia. Narnia.

Now it's all coming back, now that she's opened the door. Absolutely nothing else can fill her mind at this moment. If Susan was afraid of suffering loss before, she now sees that she has already been living through the greatest loss of all, sees that her abandonment was self-inflicted.

Dawn is coming.

Perhaps Aslan did not cast her off after all. Perhaps the desertion had truly been one-sided.

All she can do now is listen, and hope it isn't too late.

She grabs what she can manage for breakfast, gets dressed, and takes a cab to the edge of London. She hikes up into the countryside, seeking the loneliness of the steppes, startled by the hues of green and gold seeming to wave at her, welcome her coming. It's been a long time since she's been out of the grey and brown bustle of the city. The serenity of the countryside only helps quicken her heartbeat.

And now, here she sits, on this cliff-top, alone, waiting.

A warm wind laps at her shoulders, rustling her uncoiffed black hair. Goosebumps rise at once on her skin, and for a moment she forgets to breathe as the memory of a time before when she'd felt this sensation sweeps over her.

Heavy, horrible gloom—grief and wrongness and mice—a flash of dawn—the Lion, living, silhouetted above the Stone Table on which He'd been murdered.

The Lion's breath, calming every restless nerve in her being, stilling every frantic part of her spirit.

This is what she feels now.

Trembling, she dares whisper his name aloud:

"Aslan?"

Any thought she might have had that she imagined it—any of it—abandons her as a Voice, so soft she would have missed it if she hadn't been listening with every ounce of her attention, catches her up:

Do you love Me?

Her heart seems, all of a sudden, to be breaking. She wants to curl up on the ground and grieve for lost love, the wasted string of years spent searching for life among the dead, among the glamour that high society paints over its meaninglessness.

She hears the Lion now, and wonders how she could ever have been deceived.

"Yes," she whimpers, and aches for it to be true.

The Voice, even gentler, repeats itself; has Aslan heard her hesitation?

Do you love Me?

I'd sooner be eaten by You than fed by anyone else. A memory—someone else recounting a story…who had said that? A flash of green hills nestled in mountains, a remembrance of a Talking Horse and the tales of children's adventures—

—but not childish. No, she should have remembered that. They'd all learned that long ago. Narnia was where they had first learned that "childlike" was nothing like "childish".

"Yes, Aslan," she says again, a fierce urge to start sobbing rises in her chest.

Susan.

The sound of her name, spoken by that voice, resonating with utter majesty and infinite tenderness, settles into every bone of her body. She realizes she's come to her knees, though she doesn't know when and she doesn't notice the dewy dampness soaking her knees unhindered by her nylons.

Do…you…love Me?

"Aslan," she whispers, voice broken, heart (yet again) broken. "Aslan.…" Her heart cries out what she cannot draw the breath to say: You know I do.

Even when I thought I did not.

Dear heart.

That was a name she had thought Aslan had reserved for Lucy: little golden, happy, trusting, universally-beloved Lucy. The infinite tenderness in its use towards her, soaking into her soul, gives her the strength to draw herself upwards again.

There He is, and he takes her breath away. His golden gaze roots her in place as soon as she is upright on her knees. Memory returns in full, wild force, assailing her with remembered joys and hopes and loves. The gaze of the Lion brings into her a fresh, fiercer joy than she has known in…time that didn't bear thinking about.

Follow Me.

"Yes! Where, Aslan? Where?" She would go anywhere for Him. Thoughts of her siblings flash across her mind, and for a moment she hopes beyond hope for a cheating of death.

Here.

At first she doesn't understand. Here, in England? What is there here?

Yours is not the only stray heart, nor the only one who has imagined themselves abandoned by Love.

It hits her. There are others. Not bereft by Narnia, perhaps, but there are others who have known her pain. And now, she knows what hope is.

This is why they were returned home in the first place.

Her heart swells. "I…I don't suppose you'll tell me their stories, will You?"

She can feel the Lion laughing, his humor making her feel lighter on her feet, and she smiles too, wildly, for once unmindful of crow's-feet.

How long has it been since she smiled like this—out of real joy? Out of purpose?

Aslan tosses His mane.

Ride on My back once more, Daughter of Eve?

"Yes, please," she breathes.

It is a morning of coming to terms, of facing the Great Lion and her terrors and her wrongs and her losses, and reconciliation.

"Will they know?" she asks, when at last the joyous, wild flight has let her down again. She longs for her siblings, her parents, Eustace to see her change in heart, aches to ask their forgiveness. She realizes that she's never really stopped imagined them as living, never even given a thought to the possibility that they simply might not exist after death. Surely…they must be living somewhere?…if Aslan is real, then so must heaven be?

"Will they know?" she whispers. "Will I see them again?"

Aslan's gaze salves her sudden terrors.

Someday.

That will do.

She'd best make the most of time until then…

Because, for the first time since she woke up in a train station next to a brother grumbling about his electric torch, Susan Pevensie realizes what it means to be alive.

A/N: I'm sure that some of you picked up on this, but this was inspired by the exchange between Simon Peter and Jesus in the Biblical passage in John 21—just an idea that I had and ran with, though it wound up expanding much farther into backstory than I had thought it would. Reviews would be lovely! (Please tell me if you thought Susan seemed OOC at all; I wasn't entirely sure how to characterize her within this little plot.)