Celandine's Chronicle (celandineb) wrote in cels_fic_haven, @ 2009-03-02 08:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | narnia ficlets peter/susan |
Narnia ficlet: Nothing Lasts Forever [Peter/Susan, general]
Title: Nothing Lasts Forever
Author: celandineb
Fandom: Narnia
Pairing: Peter/Susan
Rating: general
Length: 383 words
Warnings: Angst
Summary: Some things do not become easier with time.
Note: For realpestilence who wanted Peter/Susan, anguish.
In more ways than one it wrenched Peter to the heart when they blundered back through the wardrobe to England so unexpectedly. The two most difficult things about the return were learning again to be a schoolboy instead of High King, and losing Susan. There was no question about the latter for either of them; they both knew well what could happen if anyone discovered that they had been lovers, and any case they would soon be going off to their different boarding schools.
Even on their brief second visit to Narnia, they could not become again what they once had been to each other. Time was too short, and circumstances simply did not allow for it. By then, though, Peter had grown accustomed to the ever-present ache of loss. He tried hard not to envy Edmund and Lucy, not only for the fact that Aslan had intimated that the two of them would someday be allowed to return, but because they did not suffer the same loneliness that he did. Peter suspected that Edmund's affections would always centre on men, but he was too young yet to have experienced the difficulties that would cause in England. And Lucy... Peter never failed to smile when he thought of his little sister. He had no doubt that she could and did love deeply, but Lucy, he was sure, was not the sort who would ever "fall in love" in such a way as to become heartsick over it.
What brought Peter the greatest secret anguish, though, was not that he and Susan could no longer be lovers, but that over the years their estrangement became almost complete. To begin with he had been fearful of remaining too close, worried that one or both of them would find temptation too great, but the chasm between them widened over time until it became unbridgeable except in the most superficial ways. Peter saw Susan turn to nylons and lipsticks and permanent waves, and it hurt him twice over: first that she should now find pleasure in such material trivialities, who once had been a gracious queen of Narnia; and second that what she chose to value was all artifice meant to capture the heart of another, when she ought to have known that Peter's was hers forever.