Title: Homesickness
Author: Circeniko
Fandom: Narnia
Pairing: none
Rating: G
Summary: Lucy wants one thing, well, really she wants two things, and the crux of the matter is that she can never have both.
Author's Notes: Despite all my attempts to write Edmund-fic, I always come back to Lucy.

Lucy was all cried out. When it had started she'd hid behind the woodshed, not wanting the others to see. A girl her age, and really, given her time in Narnia it was almost possible to say a woman her age, shouldn't be crying over a dead rabbit. It was sad, certainly, but it had only been a pet.

Except that for a moment, as she held it and it lay dying, it had turned it's head toward her, and she could almost imagine that it spoke.

It wasn't just the rabbit, everywhere she seemed to see traces of Narnia glimmering through the cracks, as if this world were only an illusion and what was real and true lay beneath it. It would have been nice if that was so, if parts of Narnia existed in this world and she could appreciate them without sorrow.

But she couldn't because she knew that what she was seeing was only an illusion, her own desires causing her mind to play tricks on her. She knew because it had happened before, in Narnia.

During her first few months as a queen, after Aslan had gone away, she had missed her mother so terribly that she imagined her face under every mane of flowing dark hair. At night she stopped sleeping because she was waiting for the sound of her mothers voice.

Eventually it got so bad that the high king stepped in, standing in front of his little sister, who was at the moment as mad and strange as Ophelia and who looked ready to collapse because she had neither slept nor eaten in days, and he yelled in frustration and bewildered fear.

"Why, Lucy? Why here? You were alright with the professor, and mother wasn't there."

"But we would have been sent back eventually," said a trembling Lucy, "here we won't," and she burst into tears. Then Mr. Tumnus came in with tea and bread, and Lucy ate for the first time in days and talked with Peter all night, and Peter never suggested that she go to bed.

They had been sent back here of course, and if the Professor was right, they might stumble into Narnia again, but she didn't have it now, and it was as if the part of her that had developed around a Narnia shaped existence was feeling the lack, and Peter wasn't here to talk to. The only one to talk to was the rabbit, poor dead thing.

Lucy wiped her eyes angrily; she wouldn't be crippled by nostalgia or homesickness. This was her home. The reasonable part of her knew it, and if she tried hard enough, maybe the rest of her would realize it as well.