Chronicles of Narnia Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day?

**A/N: Hey, I'm still alive! I originally wrote this fic in the summer a few years back and I finally remembered it when it was seasonally appropriate for posting.**

**I don't own The Chronicles of Narnia, which belong rather to Mr. Jack Lewis. I do own one or two characters in this fic (not that it matters either way). ****I also am not Sufjan Stevens, whose music provided the title for this fic.**

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**_North London, England, 1948_**

_(It's Christmas, she thinks, but she would rather die than say the words aloud right now.)_

The door slams. Her stomach tightens at the sound of Rob's boots stamping slush onto the floor of his front room.

"Susie?" his voice calls. Her heart compresses painfully at the high note in his voice. She's about to kill that cheer stone dead.

"Susie! Are you h—" Having shucked his boots, he bounds into the back of the house on sock feet, only to stop dead in the doorway, his greeting trailing into silence.

His face darkens as he blinks first at the shambles of his kitchen and then at Susan's face. She stares back, defying him to sneer at the inky streaks on her cheeks that were formerly the last of her rationed mascara.

"I burnt the dinner," she says superfluously.

Rob surveys the mess with pinched lips. "It would have been nice to know my fiancée couldn't cook before I invited my mother over for Christmas dinner."

"I can cook quite well enough," she snaps back defensively. All of her hopes for the day are long since shredded, along with her patience. "It's your stove that wouldn't light—I had to ask Mrs. Hurst across the street for matches—"

"It looks like you didn't even bother with the stove at all," he says sourly, staring pointedly at the mostly raw carrots and gravy spattered across the table where she'd hurled them in a bout of utter frustration twenty minutes and one crying fit ago. "Blast it, Susie—my parents are going to be here in half an hour. What are they going to think?"

"That you're too cheap to hire help?"

He glares. "No. No, this isn't going to reflect on me, Susie, not if I can help it—"

Something in her, having been stretched taut and thin over many months, snaps. "No—nothing ever does, does it?" she retorts and pushes herself to her feet. "Not the dime-store furniture that cracked in shipping, not the presents you couldn't arrange to have delivered on time, not the motorcar that mysteriously ran out of gasoline as soon as I borrowed it to take Lu up to Worcester—"

He rolls his eyes. "For God's sake, Susie!"

She says stiffly, "Perhaps you should tell your parents not to bother coming for Christmas."

"Perhaps you shouldn't bother coming back at all," he says, his entire demeanour radiating cold rejection, and holds out her coat—not like a gentleman does, but in a way that says the only reason he's doing it at all is because he doesn't want to bother with returning it to her later.

She pauses at the door, calling up the most regal bearing she can manage. "I would sell the ring, but you'll need the money to get your kitchen in working order if you ever want to have another woman on your arm." Prying the yellow diamond from her left hand, she flings it onto the floor behind her and shuts the door before he can respond.

Her anger keeps her all the way up the street and around the next corner, but it soon drains away, leaving her feeling as numb inside as she does outside. She slows almost to a halt. There's only a token fall of snow drifting breezelessly around her, settling on the milky suburban landscape.

_What a Christmas._

It isn't the fight with Rob that she's most upset about—breaking off her engagement doesn't hurt as much as she thinks it ought to. Some part of it is in fact a relief. The twist of anxiety in her core has unraveled, though, and there are definitely tears coming again.

She tries to tip her head back and look up at the stars, as nonchalantly as if she were an ordinary woman with a glittering destination full of food and laughter, who's just paused to admire the rare poetry of a clear winter sky on Christmas night. She sets a hand on the lamppost beside her in case her knees start trembling—she hasn't eaten since early morning, in anticipation of the dinner she wound up ruining. The hoarfrost hisses and sticks under her bare fingers.

Her own flat is twenty minutes' walk away, locked and dark and stripped of victuals in favor of a sophisticated affair with the Gladstones. She thinks of all her friends, not certain to welcome an extra mouth at their nuclear celebrations with rationing still in effect.

_What a Christmas. What a bloody fine Christmas._

From nowhere, a sabre-thin figure steps up beside her. The collar of a nondescript black coat is turned up against the chill and blending into equally black hair atop his head.

Awkwardly, she glances his way and finds him studying her intently. Dark grey eyes frown slightly as they meet hers, and abruptly she realises the man isn't as old as she'd assumed from her peripheral vision—seventeen, eighteen at most.

She shakes the rest of her tears from hot eyes. The outside chill spasms through her stomach as her vision clears and recognition registers.

"Edmund?"

Susan has divided most of her time lately between her own apartment and Rob's, and has seen almost nothing of Edmund, nor Peter nor Lucy nor their parents, since late summer when Rob proposed—though it's not for her family's lack of trying. Edmund looks to have grown just both paler and older in the intervening months.

"Lucy was right," her younger brother says without preamble. "So was I, but—oh, I wasn't going to say 'I told you so.' I'd much rather you just came home for Christmas dinner."

Staring at him doesn't prevail upon him to continue, but it seems to be all she can do.

The corner of his mouth tips upward. "You didn't think we'd forgotten about you?"

She rubs her bare hands together and wishes for her gloves. She must have left them at Rob's. "But…I said I wasn't coming," she mumbles.

She flinches at the memory of her voice over the phone to Peter when he'd asked if she was coming to their parents' for the holiday eve—_Oh no, so sorry, I'm cooking dinner for Rob and his parents—perhaps some other time, yes? It's just that this is my chance to impress the Gladstones. I'll be their daughter-in-law by next Christmas, you know, and marriage is no time to be joining family parties for the first time!_ Now that she thinks it over, Susan thinks she might have even allowed herself a smirk at the end of that flippant, awful speech.

"Yes," said Edmund, his tone utterly without judgement, "we know."

"What are you…"

Now it's his eyebrows that quirk at her, and she bites her lip. Of course. Edmund always was fond of lonely walks in the cold. She can't remember when they started being an indulgence for his introspective, quick mind rather than an outlet for his sullen, misanthropic temper, but he hasn't foregone the habit any day for years.

Still, this park is more than two miles from their parents' home. Is she just lucky to have intersected his path? She can envision Lucy in her mind's eye, badgering Edmund to "run into" Susan, carry her off over his shoulder if need be. Not that Ed would have needed much pestering to carry out such a scheme, she suspects.

"Come on," Ed says, and nudges her as he starts walking, opposite of the way she'd come. She hobbles beside him, internally cursing her stylish but impractical red pumps and her shaking legs.

"I said I wasn't coming home," she repeats weakly. He takes no notice, and asks only,

"Rob?"

Her jaw clenches so hard it makes her ears hum. "He…I…we…we're not…bugger Rob," she spits out in probably the most unladylike outburst of her modern adult life. Unruffled, Edmund slips an arm around her shoulder for a moment.

"Robert Gladstone doesn't deserve you," he says. Susan doesn't know whether to say "I know" because there is a part of her that's still raging at the man she didn't love as much as she'd wanted to, or start crying because Edmund knows her so well and she's missed him these last months.

They opt for companionable silence during the rest of the trek home. It takes the better part of an hour, thanks to her ill-suited pumps, but her younger brother seems content to restrict himself to her limited pace. Susan is glad of his silence. She has had enough judgement for the holidays, and her Just brother is all the more worthy of his title for knowing when to extend grace.

Something shifts in the bottom of Susan's belly as they enter the enduringly familiar suburb she's known her whole life. She analyzes the intrusion carefully. Is it nervousness?—she hasn't spoken with her family in weeks. Is it excitement?—she had been looking forward to a happy holiday, though as the hostess, not a guest. Her stomach twists again, this time followed by a string of loud, unhappy borborygmi. She remembers again the gravy spotted on the hem of her dress, and realises that she's hungry. Ravenous, in fact.

Voices are audible from somewhere amidst the happy blaze of firelight inside the living room window—carols, and probably a lecture from their father on proper use of the diaphragm in singing.

Edmund trots up to the front door and opens it with a little ceremony, standing aside with a bow to let her enter first. Susan steps up and into the light-filled archway with unease. Although Edmund meant the gesture as a little joke, it pokes uncomfortably at vague, cloudy familiarities.

But then her heels land on checked tile instead of polished stone, and the sensation is forgotten.

_"Susan!"_

Skidding out from the living room is shining, grinning Lucy, holding a cup of hot chocolate ornamented with a peppermint stick whose frothy tang Susan can smell from here. Peter, galumphing down the hall to greet her with a laugh, has two roasting sticks in one hand and a tin of chestnuts in the other—

(—a sudden bright vision flies into her mind: a black-haired girl in a silver crown and crushed green velvet sits by a massive hearth in the hall of a great white castle by the sea, as a pair of Badgers on either side painstakingly teach her the most time-honoured ways of roasting their season delicacy, much to the dismay of a passel of Squirrels, who prefer their nuts quite raw…)

She stands still, trying to absorb the sudden atmosphere of, of—oh, she can't place what she's feeling, what she's missed.

Their parents have come up behind their golden-haired children to embrace their prodigal brunets. They are the source of the singing she'd heard on the stoop: her father warbles a slightly-off-key _O night divine!_ in her ear as he sweeps off her coat, and her mother pauses between a more melodious _O night—when Christ was born_—to kiss her on the cheeks.

"Welcome home, Su," says Ed, and then he takes off down the hall, having effortlessly slipped out of his boots while she stood dazed. "Oi, Magnificent! Six penny chocolates says I can burn a more manly chestnut than you—"

Peter snorts as he tosses his younger brother one of the roasting sticks. "Hey, Su hasn't even come in the door yet—"

"Ugh, boys! You can finish your argument later!" Lucy embraces her sister with one arm and shoves the mug of cocoa into her hand with the other. "It's fresh, Su—I can make myself another cup; you need it more than I do—" Mission in hand, she bounces back in pink-and-green-stockinged feet to the kitchen.

(Susan considers how fifteen is much too old for Lucy to still be wearing different-coloured stockings, but she recognises them as picks from a bundle of socks she knitted herself for her little sister and she cannot be miffed.)

She blinks again—the tears are definitely back, but pleasantly warm instead of scalding—and looks at the portrait of the lion, a sketch of Lucy's hanging framed over the hall table. A subtle shift in the play of lovingly rendered charcoal lines, an almost imperceptible shimmer of gold—

—she could swear it smiles warmly upon her.

"Su!"

Lifting Lucy's creamy peace offering—how many weeks of her prized sweet rationing went into this one cup?—to her mouth, Susan kicks off her pumps and goes down the hallway towards the impromptu chorale, now joined by her siblings' voices in a rendition of "The First Noel" that automatically makes her smile.

_(It's Christmas, she thinks, and it's about time.)_

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**A/N: Happy Christmas/winter festivities, everyone! I wish you all a blessed ****and lovely holiday. Thanks for reading!**


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Chronicles of Narnia, Family