Post-Battle Interlude

[rememberettersberg]

As the last of the zombies disperse, dust fading in the chill air, so too does Thomas' mood, the manic good humour that had kept him going all day. Every part of his body hurts, the solid ache of extended exertion, and he knows that he must look as awful as he feels. A mirror reveals the grim reflection of a past age; Captain Nightingale, awash with blood and mud, clothes torn to rags and skin caked with grime.

He strips without thinking much of it, dives into the freezing shock of the lake's still depths, and swims until his aches turn into leaden exhaustion. A part of him, as always when near open water, reaches out in search of its spirit but encounters only dank emptiness. Usually this would bother him, but tonight it feels right, apt.

There's a towel on the shore when he emerges, one he didn't leave there, and he wonders at the mansion all over again. Hordes of undead by day, the comfort of a fresh and fluffy towel at night. His lakeside office glows with warm light and the promise of fresh tea. He trudges towards it without conscious thought, mind half a century away.

Not primarily an open post, but he'll talk if anyone turns up.

Comments

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan can recall a moment - a very recent moment - where Thomas expressed concern about her own Irish tea. She's polite enough not to comment on it, but she's thinking about it as she goes and pours herself a cup. Then she claims her own little patch of floor, adjacent to Thomas, and sits down, legs folded to her side, one arm propping her up, the other curled around her mug. "It has been a strange few days," she remarks, tone carefully neutral.

[rememberettersberg]

He recalls the same thing, of course. "One may be slightly hypocritical after a week containing a mansion-wide truth spell and an invasion of the undead, don't you think?" He sips from his own mug to underscore the point. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry for blurting it out like that. I'd had only seconds to realise the depth of what you've been going through."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It's nothing," Susan demurs. "I appreciated the concern, truthfully."

[rememberettersberg]

"Still, it was rather gauche." He regards her silently for a long moment. "How are you coping now?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Better," Susan admits, though she does feel hollow about the whole affair. She tries for a smile, but they're still unfamiliar on her face; the best that can be said is that her lips quirk, briefly. "It was nice to have tasks to focus on today." She takes a sip of the well-doctored tea. "I did briefly find myself missing my old bow."

[rememberettersberg]

"I don't think there'll be a better moment to find another one and get reacquainted," he says. "Who knows what else lies in store for us here?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan shakes her head, fingers curling around the base of her mug. "You've been here longer than I," she says. "Is it often like this?"

[rememberettersberg]

"Having to fight is a first," he says. "But strange events are alarmingly regular. I thought I had some idea of a pattern, but then the zombies appeared. It's hard to imagine what to prepare for next."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"This week has rather felt like being put through the wringer, one way or another," Susan says, a wry expression flitting across her face. "I shudder to think what else might emerge."

[rememberettersberg]

"Whatever this place is, I don't think it wants to hurt us physically." He frowns. "Emotionally, on the other hand... that seems to be where it derives whatever it's looking for from us."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Oh, well, that's easy then. Susan hasn't felt anything she can recognize as a real emotion in months. "That's jolly queer," she says, thoughtfully, and then: "The place seems to have a sort of sentience to you, then?"

[rememberettersberg]

"It feels like a game, doesn't it? All this." He waves an arm vaguely, encompassing their surroundings. "We're here for something or someone's amusement, in my opinion."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I can't say I've had that thought yet, no." She gives Thomas a wry sort of glance. "But then I've been distracted since arriving here. Before, too."

[rememberettersberg]

"You have every right to be." He drains his teacup as though it were a shot glass. "Would you have preferred to go back there?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I -" Susan hesitates, thinking for a moment. "I miss my family, like the parts of my heart dedicated to them have been scooped from my body and now it struggles to beat," she admits. "I loved Narnia, too, completely and totally. When I was a child." A pause. "I wrote it off when Aslan told me I could never return." She gestures, in a way that communicates her impatience with her own thorough repression of its reality, then shakes her head. "I liked my life in London before they died. I was completely lost after - I still am - but I liked my friends and my classes and my flat and the fact that I had a job." She catches her lower lip between her teeth and chews, absently, still thinking through the question. "We never left bodies behind before, when we traveled. I think. If the price of going back is dying, I don't want that. If I could go again, for just a week or a year or five years, I don't know if I'd want that, either." She tries for a smile, and fails. "I've heard it said that it's better to have had, and lost¹, but I've tried that and I'm not ready to repeat the experience anytime soon. There's little of my heart left to spare. I believe I would have preferred to stay in London."

Or would she? Would she have remembered Narnia, if she had stayed? Would she have ever learned that her siblings went back? She frowns, still puzzling.

¹Susan's typist did NOT anticipate that they would be quoting so much damned Tennyson when they took her on...

[rememberettersberg]

"I'm sorry. That was a very difficult question." Nightingale gets to his feet, gathering himself to make a fresh pot of tea. "Perhaps one day we'll manage a conversation that isn't quite so fraught," he says, wry.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan considers this while Nightingale fiddles with his tea. "No time like the present," she offers. "What hobbies have you got, Thomas?"

[rememberettersberg]

At first he looks surprised by the question, then thoughtful, then finally, after an awkwardly long silence, confused. "I don't know," he says. "I'm often very busy with work."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Tell me about your work, then," she says. There's no need to draw any further attention to his reaction to her first question. "If you would like."

[rememberettersberg]

"My organisation is called the Folly," he begins, relieved. "It's just me, my apprentice, and the housekeeper now, but it was very expansive when I first joined. I did a lot of work with the Foreign Office at first, travelled all over the world, then went into the army when the war broke out. Hitler had assembled a collection of magical research, all as unethical and dreadful as one would expect, and the magically inclined contingent of the British forces were tasked to retrieve it."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, well done, you," Susan says, emphatically. She doesn't believe there's magic in the world she grew up in - it rather seemed all constrained to Narnia - and since Thomas read about Narnia in a children's book, perhaps they are from slightly different Londons. But still, the thought of a Hitler with access to magic! Horrifying.

[rememberettersberg]

"Mm. The Black Library was secured, but at tremendous cost of life." He sighs. "Those of us left ended up scattered. Some gave up on magic altogether. Others eventually retired and died. In the end, there was just me. The Folly became part of the Metropolitan police, the Nazi research materials safely under lock and key with me as guardian. Just enough of a reputation and job title left to bring me in on relevant investigations."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I was still young, at the start of the War," Susan says, thoughtfully. "They tried to protect us from the worst of it. I still see the scars everywhere I turn, back home." And in herself, too, but that goes without saying. "I am not surprised to hear of the scatter, but am sorry that, in surviving it, you have been left alone."

[rememberettersberg]

"Things were slowly changing," he says. "And then I arrived here and everything changed rather more rapidly." His smile is wistful but there. "And I am far from alone here."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"That's good," Susan says, firmly and with very little jealousy. She's tracing back through the thread of their conversations. "So you have magic then, do you?"