Chapter Text
Susan’s hands ache, her head does too.
The service was lovely, cheap, the wake is cheaper.
Another person approaches her, shakes her hand tightly, as if to offer her comfort, all it does is make her hand ache more.
She’s not entirely sure she’ll remember any of this tomorrow. Even now, her gaze is locked on the person’s glasses, the flash of the lenses as the light hits them with every bob of the head as the person attempts to ‘console’ her.
She smiles, says something she’s sure is probably just a bit too sharp and excuses herself.
She pushes through the meager crowd, offers a painted smile to anyone who glances her way and hurried to tuck herself in the bathroom.
Leaning against the sink, she shakily reaches into her bag and pulls out her lipstick.
The mirror in the bathroom is grimy, but her reflection is all too clear. Her lips are bright red, stained from years of constant lipstick. Her hands tremble as she carefully applies another layer.
“Susan Pevensie,” she murmurs to herself, rolling her name around her mouth like a new taste, “you are a woman made of steel, you will not bend just because the oven got turned on.”
She is more, she has to be more, than the deep pervasive ache of her siblings absence.
Her siblings' teeth were stained with blood, with each other’s golden ichor, their skin brushed with silver and gold, features painted in bronze, and hair of silk.
Susan is far too human for her taste, far too fragile . Susan Pevensie is a woman who grew up in a country at war, a woman who has endured , who taught her sister to tie her shoes, her brother to tie a tie. Peter taught her how to throw a punch, she taught herself how to take one.
The doorknob is cold under her touch and when the door opens everything seems far more daunting than it did seconds before, but she squares her shoulders, soldiers on, because she is nothing if not her siblings’ sister, nothing if not herself, nothing if not Susan Pevensie.
(She is a queen made of blood and gentle hands. She taught her sister how to stitch a wound closed, her brother to ride a horse. Peter taught her how to hold a sword, she taught herself how to hold a shield.
Her crown had always been warm no matter if she left it out in the snow. The Gentle Queen will not surrender.)
She’ll paint herself a canvas if that’s what it takes. Susan Pevensie can’t stand her own humanity so she won’t be any longer.