#the line is 'swimming and archery were THE THINGS susan was good at'

[queenlucythevaliant]

have you ever heard it? can you remember?

i. The gulls were crying. The gulls were always crying, in her memory. Whatever far off places Susan travelled after her family was gone, she always came back to the sea.

ii. The beach at Cair Paravel was the first place in Narnia where she really felt at home. She'd wade into the water with her eyes shut and feel she could be in England, on holiday with her mother and father. She'd open her eyes, and there would be waves cascading endlessly towards her.

iii. Before long, she knew every tidepool, every shoal.

iv. There weren't any bathing suits in Narnia, but no one seemed the least scandalized when Susan took to swimming in her underthings. There wasn't anything else for it, and she had to swim. She just had to.

v. She wasn't the only one of her siblings to love the sea, of course. Edmund loved sand and sailing and reading on the beach, and Peter liked to gaze out at the ocean and think. Lucy spent even more time at the beach than Susan did; she would rise before dawn and sit on the rocks as the sun rose over the waves. Susan was never sure whether her little sister was there to greet the sunrise, or to wait for Aslan.

vi. But for Susan, it was sense-memory. Water was water, wherever she was, and it always reminded her of home. She'd go out past the breakers, pull her limbs into a familiar breast stroke, and she'd feel like she was everywhere she loved all at once.

vii. Aslan came, and she was soaking wet to greet him. He laughed, in his lion-ish way, and didn't mind at all when Susan embraced him.

viii. Somehow, Aslan never got drenched from his journeys across the sea, but he was damp as though with mist. The scent of salt and brine clung to him, an overtone to that fierce, wild smell that was his own. Susan breathed in deep, those two scents she loved most in the world.

ix. In England, back at school, she'd go to the swimming pool and imagine she was in Narnia.

x. It wasn't the same, of course. The swimming pool at her school had no crying gulls, no smell of salt, no cascading waves. There was no Aslan coming towards her from the T-line at the other end of the pool. But if she submerged herself completely, Susan could imagine.

xi. She swam with her eyes shut too often, and her coach was growing irritated. It was affecting her times in practice, which would bleed over into competition if she wasn't careful. Somehow, Susan couldn't be bothered to care.

xii. One weekend, she and Lucy snuck away to visit the boys, and they all went down to the lake to reminisce about Narnia. When Lucy and Edmund spoke of their summer sailing the eastern sea, Susan was positively stiff with jealousy. Yet when they all dove into the water in the end, her heart pounded out a rhythm of home, home.

xiii. Six years after her last trip to Narnia, Susan hadn't touched a bow in four years. She still went swimming every week.

xiv. After the railway accident, she went to live by the sea. She missed her family, and she couldn't stand to live in the places they had lived. She wanted to forget.

xv. Susan had missed the salt air. She had missed the waves. There was a feeling of home by the sea that she couldn't quite place; a soothing echo of long ago dreams and fairytales.

xvi. But there were the gulls crying, "Can you remember?" and it broke her heart all over again.