A Pack Of Cigarettes

She opens the small box, and lights it with a match. The thin white cylinder called to her, like an old Siren, beckoning her with its alluring promises. The boy arrives, like a moth pulled towards a flame and offers her a good time. She says yes.

You'll lose yourself. Drink my smoke and forget. Inhale and release yourself from your troubles, your promises, your dreams, your desires.

She inhales, tries to lose herself. She drinks it in, tries to forget. She breathes and tries to release herself.

She can't.

That smoke that wisps away around her hair, in her lungs, at her lips, isn't the same.

It's not fragrant. It's not spicy. It's not exotic.

It's gray.

But the dark haired girl, with dull blue eyes and too red lips and too pale skin blows a ring of smoke from the small cigarette, flirting with regular average boys, destroying herself in an attempt to gain the normality of a raven haired queen, with sparkling intelligent blue eyes, with natural pink lips and radiant glowing skin who had tasted the delicious smoke of the hookah, who was a master at the game of politics and seduction she played with princes and kings alike.

He offers her a long drive around town but when they end up going nowhere, she doesn't complain. She doesn't complain when he roughly crushes his lips to hers, roughly runs his hands down her still forming curves in some wan imitation of passion.

It's just another attempt at being the queen who had softly, tenderly molded her lips around that of a Merman, who experienced the ecstatic thrums of pleasure as he caressed her entire body with his smooth soft hands.

It's easy enough to gently pinch this nameless boy at a specific point at his neck, and she gives a weary sort of smile as he slumps down his seat, completely knocked out.

She steps out of the car and walks back to the corner where she met him, carefully reapplying her too red lipstick, and pulls out her last white cigarette lighting it and placing it at her mouth, she waits for the next victim.

A pack of cigarettes a night.

A pack of hormone driven males a night.

It's her attempt to be Queen.

It's her attempt at normalcy.

But it's a lie.

A/N: This was by far the most difficult I've written. I wanted to show Susan's downfall without making her seem 'easy' or sleazy. I hoped to create a Susan we could sympathise with. I didn't want her to seem distant. It's also my way of explaining her turning away from Narnia but not really.

~TiaBolt.