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She wonders sometimes in those dark days if she will ever see her children again.
She does [doesn’t she?].
But, they are not her children any longer.
Instead Peter steps off the train, his eyes hard and calculating, only turning to warmth when they fall upon his siblings and then his eyes are the world she stands upon and the sky that would crush all under it if not for Peter’s shoulders holding it square above her head.
Instead Susan slips from the station with all the grace of a queen, her gate steady and smooth, the world trembles with each breath she takes and the sun she knows would burn them all to ash if not for Susan’s steady soul.
Instead Edmund stalks inside the door of her home, his posture something terrible, and he speaks incessantly, but no information is forthcoming and she knows that if not for his sharp mind the wild would swallow them whole.
Instead Lucy smiles up at her from her bedroom door, all teeth and eerie in a way that makes no sense, and Helen Pevensie knows that the sea would rise to take them captive if not for Lucy’s boundless joy.
She wonders [in what is meant to be celebratory times] if maybe her children never really returned.
Because, she remembers when Peter’s eyes were bright with not knowledge, but wonder, and she remembers when Susan’s smiles were not sharp and burning like the sun, but bright and warm as a hearth.
She remembers when Edmund raged against his brother’s shadow and now he sits quietly content in it and she remembers when Lucy was nothing but normal, if not a dreamer, and now her youngest sings songs in languages she has never known ‘nor heard.
(Peter steps off that train a forgotten king, the only piece of his kingdom that remains his own flesh and blood, and a sky that weighs almost too much on too small shoulders.
Susan glides from that platform a lost queen, the only thing left of herself a sun that threatens to burn even her and siblings that are beginning to feel distant.
Edmund slinks through the door to his once-home a redeemed traitor, the only thing to show a wild that lives on and is beginning to consume him and family that begins to overwhelm.
Lucy beams at her once-mother with all the poison of a desperate child that never learned to be past what she could see, the only thing in her sight a sea that easily would drown her and all she held dear.)
[They didn’t.]
(Helen Pevensie meets her children’s gazes and she does not recognize them any longer, she meets their gazes and she turns on her heel and she shudders at the blood in their nails and on their teeth.)