AN: I don't know about the rest of you, but I really like this chapter. I hope at the end there Susan isn't too OOC, I just HAD to make her tell off Jacob just once. And once again, I don't know about the rest of you but I really like Mr. Jones. I already have a sort of idea about what's going to happen with him. It's sort of sad but I think it will work. I got the idea for the end of this chapter because the other day, I was watching h2o when Emma got moonstruck and Cleo and Rikki went out side and didn't get moonstruck because the clouds were blocking the moon.

The time had come for Annie's dinner party and Susan had come close to calling and canceling. Twice, she'd picked up the phone to do so, and twice she set it back down. The reason? She couldn't cancel because every time she prepared herself to do so, a nagging thought pressed her unwilling to let her off the hook. 'Peter would have wanted you there'. Those six words kept playing over and over in her head, like a broken record until she could stand it no longer.

"Alright!" She cried aloud even though there was no one else in the studio apartment besides herself. "I'm going."

She walked over to her closet and ran her fingers along her 'pretty clothes'. She hadn't worn anything pretty in over a year but she had the feeling she couldn't just arrive at Annie's house wearing those dull traveling clothes again. She ought to dress up a little. But how little? Over a year ago before the crash, She'd have over done it with too much make-up and clothes that matched too well. Now she worried about under doing it. She hadn't dressed up in so long. What if she didn't remember how? Did she even still know how to put on lipstick? Or how to be excited about attending an event? Or how not to feel guilty about being alive when her family was not?

Finally deciding on a plain black dress and a only a touch of some light make-up, Susan started getting ready. She looked in the mirror and saw someone she hadn't seen in a long time staring back at her. A pretty young woman. Her eyes were bright and did not appear blood-shot. Her hair was curled at the tips and fastened back with a silver clasp. The red lipstick wasn't too dark nor too light and it was the only dash of color on her naturally pale skin. She noticed something was missing though. But what? She pressed her fingers lightly to her bare neck.

She dung through an old box in one of the corners with great care because she suspected it had a few sharp and/or broken objects the movers had not packed properly. She'd been to busy weeping to notice the shabby job during the move itself. Finally her hand struck the familiar feel of a velvet-laced black case. In it was one of the few pieces of jewelry Susan still owned. A string of milky-white pearls.

Slowly, she lifted the case's lid. On top of the necklace was a note. Susan gently set it aside. She didn't read it, she already knew that it said,

To our beloved Su,

we're so proud of you.

We knew you could do it.

Love,

Edmund, Lucy, and Peter.

The three of them had brought the pearl necklace as a gift for her when she'd finally-with much struggling-graduated from school.

Susan lifted the pearl string out as though she was afraid it would turn to ash in her hands as soon as her fingers touched it. Then she slowly lifted it and fastened it around her neck.

When Peter was alive, he'd liked to do it for her. She'd slide her hair away from the back of her neck while he got a good grip of the clasp. After the necklace was on, if no one was watching them, he'd kiss her neck and whisper, "I love you." In her ear.

Don't think about that now, Susan warned herself, you don't want to show up at Annie's puffy-eyed from sobbing. She willed herself to look at the pearls on her neck as if they were any old piece of jewelry and forced herself not to let her mind even start to think about the warm tickle of Peter's breath on her earlobe as he whispered his feelings to her.

Grabbing her black shawl and matching purse, Susan walked out the door and down the stairs into the pizza place she lived on top off. Lucy might have loved living there. She'd always been rather fond of Pizza, but Susan had never much cared for the stuff and was so sick of the smell that she would have given anything to live above a flower shop instead.

"Hullo, Susan." The owner smiled at her kindly. He was a nice old man about sixty-four with naturally up-curling lips that always made it look like he was happy even when he wasn't actually smiling.

"Good evening Mr. Jones." Susan said politely. "Sorry the rent is a little late this month. I promise I'll have it for you in a couple of days."

"Don't you worry about that." Mr. Jones said kindly. "After all you've been through, I'm very impressed with how you've been keeping up with everything as it is."

"Thank you, Sir." She said respectfully, feeling as she always had that she was taking advantage of the poor man's kind nature. "But you needn't act as though my late payment's not a burden on you, I know it is."

Mr. Jones shook his head. It was true that life would be a little easier if he could always count on rent from his little studio-apartment but it wasn't the young lady's fault. Whatever jobs she could get here and there weren't very well paying, he knew that well and he liked having Miss Pevensie around because she reminded him of his own daughter, Sophie Jones, who had also died last year in that horrid railway crash. He'd rather have her living above his pizza place than anyone else, no matter how well they could pay.

Susan headed for the glass-front door that led to the street. Thankfully, it had stopped raining twenty minutes ago and the only wetting she had to worry about was from cars going passed puddles too quickly before she could make it to a bus station.

"You look nice, today." Mr. Jones noted as he started kneading the dough for the latest Pizza order. It hadn't escaped his attention that Susan wasn't wearing her usual clothes which he secretly thought were rather ugly but didn't have the heart to say so. "Where are you going?"

"To a dinner party." Susan told him briefly. "A sort of...aunt...I guess...invited me."

"How nice." Mr. Jones's smile was even wider now. "You have a good time. And don't worry about getting back before closing. I'll leave the side door open for you."

"Thank you." Susan said as she walked out into the street, causing the little bells on the door to jingle a bit.

"God bless her." Mr. Jones sighed to himself, as he finished putting the toppings on the dough and slid the pizza into the oven. "Poor girl. I dare say that a party will do her worlds of good. Sophie liked parties too."

The bus rolled to a stop only walking distance from Annie's house. As she stepped off the bus, Susan wondered what Annie's house would be like. Surely Annie had some money being married to Jacob's brother and all that. But it seemed highly unlikely that she had a house like the one Peter had lived in with Jacob and Elise.

The house was tall and made of stone. It wasn't huge but it wasn't small either. It must have had at least two or three guest rooms judging by the size of it but it wasn't showy. It didn't have gargoyles on the roof, or fountains in the yard. The yard was kept up nicely but not painfully perfectly, the way Elise's was. Also there was a plastic toy slide that had ivy growing on it in the corner next to a gray-wire fence. Obviously, Annie and her husband had at least one child at some point in their life.

Inside, none of the guests at arrived yet and Annie was talking with her son, William who had caught some sort of bad cold.

Cough Cough. William's chest seemed to be attempting to move the location of his lungs.

"You sound awful sweetie." Annie sighed. "Don't you worry about the guests or the party tonight, you just rest up here."

"Sure thing, Mum." The boy croaked. (He had lost quite of bit of his voice due to a sore throat.)

"Poor thing." Annie looked sympathetically at her son. Even though he was in his twenties, she still saw him as her little boy.

He still lived at home and went to a nearby university to study. Which was where he spend most of his time. He was a promising student and no one would even have believed that he would one day be a Janitor in a lab on another continent some day. Everyone thought he would grow up to be a scholar or a writer or a at the very least, a math teacher.

If he had known 'Phyllis' was going to be downstairs at the dinner party that evening, he would have tired to pretend that he wasn't sick so that he could see her. But thinking that it would only be the regular guests and some girl named 'Susan Pevensie' whom his mother had taken a liking to, he didn't bother. He just took a couple of fever reducing pills and decided a nap would do him some good.

"Susan!" Annie cried happily as she opened the door and saw her standing there. "I'm so pleased you could make it." She gave her a light hug. "and you look so pretty, dear."

"Thank you." Susan smiled back at Annie feeling a little strange. She wondered what life would have been like for Peter if he had been taken in by his aunt rather than sent off to an orphanage only to become part of the pevensie family. It wouldn't have been a bad life, but it certainly would have been very different. "Where is everyone?"

"Oh, you're the first to arrive." Annie shrugged. "My husband will be home soon and then the rest of the guests should follow."

"I see." Susan nodded.

"Well why don't you take a seat over on the couch?" Annie offered. "I'd introduce you to my son, William, but I'm afraid he's come down with a bad cold." She lowered her voice. "He doesn't take care of himself like he should. Too busy studying."

Susan closed her eyes and could see Peter sitting at his desk studying for hours behind her closed lids. Maybe he had more in common with his real family than she'd ever suspected. "Peter was like that too."

"Poor boy, I thought he might have been." Annie sighed. "He was such a cleaver little boy. I remember him asking me to explain things in picture books when he was little."

The guests arrived and Susan met Annie's husband who looked almost exactly like Jacob but had a much kinder sounding voice and clearly was a much more thoughtful person.

An hour into the party, Elise and Jacob themselves showed up.

"Nice of you to join us." Annie said through her teeth.

"Yes, it is nice of us, isn't it?" Elise said with a cold smile fiddling with the edge of her fancy fur coat.

"What's she doing here?" Jacob asked eyeing with the corner of his left eye.

"This is my house, Jacob," Annie reminded him sharply. "I'll invite whomever I please."

Jacob rolled his eyes. "Why would you 'Please' to invite some gold-digger into your house?"

"Excuse me?" Susan glared at him. "I am not a gold-digger."

Jacob ignored her and went on, "She thinks she can just waltz right in because she had some sort of fling with our son Pedro."

"Peter!" Annie and Elise corrected him at the same time.

"Like it matters." Jacob went on. "She doesn't belong here."

"Stay out of my business." Annie demanded crossly.

"Pierre, is dead." Jacob said cruelly. "His little friend," he looked at Susan as if he was a king and she was a lowly servant. "isn't one of us."

Susan knew she didn't belong with them, but she had hoped to be friends with Annie. She was so much like her own mother and she'd known Peter as a little boy. But Susan wasn't a Burke. This wasn't her place. But she wasn't going to let Jacob off the hook for accusing her of being a gold-digger in front of all these people. Also, as a queen in Narnia she wasn't much used to being treated like a begger.

"I loved your son very much." Susan said looking Jacob right in the eyes. "Which is more than can be said for you."

"Mind your tongue, Miss." Jacob growled, not liking to be made a fool of in public.

"I don't want your money." Susan went on. "And if I did want money, I wouldn't take it from someone like you. No amount of money is going to bring my family back. No amount of money is going to being, Peter back. And by the way, his name is Peter. That's P-e-t-e-r not, Parker, Pedro, Perry, Percy, or Paul." Susan was on a roll now. "At least I loved him enough not to think he was a whole bloody rugger team!" Then she stomped her foot and ran out the door.

Annie called out for her to wait but she didn't stop. The guests (most of whom secretly dislike Jacob themselves but had never said so) broke into an applause.

Jacob turned red, grabbed his wife's hand and said, "Come on, Elise, we're getting out of here."

Susan ran until she came to the shore (Elise didn't live far from the shore). She climbed on a deck and jumped into the water. She felt her tail form and sighed, looking up at the sky, the clouds parted, and Susan noticed much to her shock, it was a full moon. She hadn't been struck by it in a year. And for the first time, there was no one to help her.

AN: So? What did you think? Review!