Title: Ingénue
Warning(s): Mildly disturbing imagery
Summary: Train wrecks always make the front page
A/N: Meant to be a small character analysis of Susan Pevensie.
"Come with us. Come back to Narnia, Su. Everything will be the same as it was before: magical and fantastic and ideal. No more food rations, no more running to bomb shelters, no more fear." Peter pleads, he begs, but his words fall on deaf ears. (When he was a King everyone listened to him)
Susan looks at herself in the mirror and smiles at her reflection (perfect, utterly perfect) and continues to apply her lipstick with an unpronounceable French name. She's going out with another nameless beau that'll be dumped in another week: she never stays with any man longer then six weeks tops. (Susan always finds some flaw in them that sends her reeling, because she was once a Queen according to her siblings, and a Queen deserves the best)
"Oh please, don't speak another word about that made up place. Everyone will start to think you're absolutely mental; for when John Manchester and his 20,000 pounds he'll inherit when his father dies hears I have a mental sibling, he'll leave me in a flash," Susan sighs. Peter's resolve breaks: he takes her by the shoulders far too roughly than he intended, and his eyes blaze with a fury that scares her to death. (That look –she vaguely remembers seeing it on a…battlefield?)
"Stop it! What happened to the old Susan that giggled over the slightest thing? The Susan who came with me to the cinema every weekend, or ran to me crying with arms outstretched? Who would tell Lucy stories late into the night, and understand Edmund's moods better than anyone?" He cries, watching slowly as her face suddenly transforms into something he vaguely remembers. She looks like a child again, her pink lips quivering and eyes shining with unshed tears.
"That Susan died with the war." Then she's gone forever, Peter knows this indefinitely. She pushes him away and looks him square in the face with a look of complete abhorrence. (That stare used to be reserved solely for her enemies or crude suitors that wanted her hand)
"Look at you, you're a train wreck. You believe in fairy tale nonsense when you should be considering marriage. Have you even courted a girl once this year? No, because you're too wrapped up in a make believe place. Grow up."
"I'd rather be a train wreck then an empty shell of a human being," Peter retorts, and then he's out the door, leaving nothing but the lingering scent of his cologne.
The next day promptly at six o'clock in the morning, the paper arrives. Her eyes, red and swollen, scan the newspaper with a quivering lip and a sob echoing through the parlor. She reads gruesome firsthand accounts about how the train crashed, and that there were no survivors, and that an unidentified body of a blond haired young man was found embracing the bodies of a young girl and a young boy not so younger than himself –as if trying to protect them.
(Train wrecks always make the first page)
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing but the plotline.