"TUG-OF-WAR"

by Tonzura123

Disclaimer: Oh, hey! Lookie, lookie- there's actually an OC in here! But sadly, the really nice characters still aren't mine.

"For pride is a spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

-C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity- "The Great Sin"

-1948-

The door slams with a ruckus of laughs and Edmund waits a moment before speaking.

"Well, I have good news; These are some really terrible knots."

Peter rolls his head towards his younger brother's voice, tracing a black-on-black outline as his eyes adjust to the darkness of the storage room. Crates and red ink, and flickering lights the shape and color of oranges spin around him.

"Can you get out of them?" Peter asks. His voice sounds slurry to his own ears.

A short breath, exasperated, hits his cheekbone in answer: Edmund is already out. Peter can feel his brother's fingers begin to twist and tease at the rope around his wrists. Edmund tsks. Then his presence evaporates from Peter's side, and his voice calls, disembodied, from the shadows.

"Try standing."

And Peter does try, rope falling away with a hiss to the cement floor, but then his knees fold pliably beneath him, and a sharp shoulder just barely catches him.

"Oof," Edmund says. He juggles his brother's weight for moment, and Peter loops an aching arm around Edmund's neck, balancing on one sore leg as the other drags at the ground. Peter sucks in a breath and holds it, willing the floor to stay horizontal.

"We won't make it out like this," he says. Or, rather, "Wn mak 'tout like this..."

"Watch us," Edmund replies. Or, rather, "Shut up."

He kicks open the back door and they're out in the alley again. Peter can feel Edmund's shoulder relax minutely, because the alley is empty and neither of them will have to fight anyone else tonight. One of Peter's teeth is lying around here somewhere, likely behind the rubbish bins in a puddle of beer and water and urine. Peter's head flares with the memory. His foot slips on diluted blood.

A roar announces the arrival of Creature, and its high-beam lights flood the alley a moment later. The thick wheels whirr to a stand-till, exhaust pipe smoking like a chimney. One thin leg braces the bike as the rider peels back her aviator goggles with a cry of alarm.

"Peter!" Lucy exclaims. She sets out the kick-stand and runs over, helping Edmund with their brother's weight. "What in Aslan's name happened?"

"Careful with him, Lu," Edmund is saying, and Peter's limbs are being shoved around, and his face is pressing heavily against the leather of someone's warm back, and his brother (light shadow and invisible vibrations running like electricity) talking in low tones. A second body settles behind Peter. They sway. A large roar, like a lion, tears through the night. And on the lion's back, they race away.

OoOoOoOoO

"We can't let mum see him like this."

"Well, we can't exactly stow him in a cupboard."

"If you three didn't insist on getting yourselves killed every other night, this wouldn't be an issue!"

A chair squeals across hardwood floor. Peter can feel it squeal across his brain.

"I have to go."

"Edmund!"

"I have to see Jack!"

A flurry of footsteps. A slamming door. Peter doesn't remember his family being quite this loud before. He feels morosely hungover; all aching head and twisting stomach and that dulled, apathetically shredded note of conscience that mutters something like, "I am never doing that again."

Peter wishes he was hungover. It had only happened once before, when he was fourteen and learning the celebratory gestures of Fauns for the first time in his Kingship. Oh, yes- only once. But once was enough, when that one time coincided with a war council, a peace treaty, and two young women insisting they were intended to wed Peter or Edmund or both. The only good thing about hangovers was that could be shrugged off after most of the day had passed.

Injuries, on the other hand, didn't dissapate nearly as quickly.

Something wet touches him and he opens his eyes to muted sunlight and Susan's powder-canvas face hovering like a ghost.

"Peter," she breathes. A stinging sings from his head as she presses a damp, lemon-smelling rag against it. "How are you feeling?"

"Where'd Ed go?" he asks.

"How are you feeling?" she insists darkly, pressing a little harder than necessary on his scalp.

He relents with a hissed, "Fine."

"Wrong answer," Susan remarks. Her long hair is pinned up and pulled back, blue eyes nearly black.

Peter realizes that they're in the bedroom Peter shares with Edmund, and one of his legs is resting chillingly above the blankets, propped and wrapped like a mummy on display. He squints at it. "Is my leg broken?"

"Sprained ankle. And stop craning your neck like that- You need to keep your head steady for a while."

"Lucy?"

"Downstairs."

"Ed?"

"Never you mind."

Peter throws back the covers and wheels himself around to plant both feet on the floor. The frightful twinging in his right leg gives him pause. Susan takes the opportunity to grab him roughly by the shoulders and push him (with surprising strength) back onto the bed.

"No, Peter."

"But, Edmund-"

"-Is fine. So fine, in fact, that he's been awake half the night and just left to speak to some man called Jack. What on earth were you doing last night to come home all bloodied like this?"

"I don't know," Peter says honestly. "I don't remember."

OoOoOoOoO

Edmund does remember.

He makes a point to remember everything about his family. Just like he remembers that Peter is about to turn nineteen again; that his brother has been at Oxford for a year now without Edmund. Edmund, who is Peter's sparring partner; who was trained to be Peter's sparring partner. It's how the whole mad thing manages to work. But a year without sparring made skills and reactions flacid at best. It was a miracle that Peter had lived through last night.

"What'll it be, sir?"

It's a half-empty cafe near the water front called Inklings, where he and Peter finalized the Friends and their operations, and Jack works here.

Jack, the waiter, almost manages an extra fifty percent raise with Edmund around. They have a system. Usually, Edmund follows it. But Edmund remembers all too well that last night, Jack's information hadn't been correct, and now Peter is laid-up because of it. Today is not a day for systems. Today Edmund declares National Impatience Day.

"The truth," Edmund retorts. He looks Jack in the eye and takes pleasure when the grown man twitches. "And maybe a refund. I was less than pleased with yesterday's tea."

Jack returns the look blankly, "But- Sir, I gave you-"

The truth. Jack gave him the truth. Edmund can see it in his eyes.

And behind Jack's shoulder, a pair of blue eyes watching them.

Edmund stands- the eyes, attached to a girl, flutter and duck behind a large family of seven. Edmund hears the back door amidst a forrest of chattering children, muttering mothers, and fool-hardy fathers. He slips around them, cane gripped tight, and kicks open the back door.

He's in an alley again, much like the one from last night. Bins and stacks of crates and boxes that could hide any number of armies, or one silly girl. He can smell oranges, coffee, and the Thames. A whisper of jasmine to the left.

A footprint, about her size, in the mud.

A reflection in glass.

A glance.

A long walk to find a ghost of a girl by the bank of the Thames, right beside an old beached steamer. She leans back on a king-purple suitcase and smokes. Bloodred lips and pearl-white teeth set Edmund's on edge as she greets him with a curled smoke smile.

"Don't be so fussy," she calls. "Lovers' quarrels are always messy affairs."

"Peter is not your lover," says Edmund savagely.

"Is, was, will be."

"Never."

She considers him.

He knows how he must look; a split lip and bruising eye, hobbling with a cane and scowling, and most of all he looks young. Dreadfully young. But that's her misperception, not his.

"Do you really want to play tug-of-war, Tiny Tim?" she asks.

Edmund almost manages to feel sorry for her; she doesn't understand at all.

"You don't want to play any war games with me," he says. "And you really don't want to involve yourself with my brother."

OoOoOoOoO

They had met some years ago, before the war, because their parents (her father and his dad) were old school chums. Both had attended Oxford. Both studied to be professors. But then, at some point or another, her father had come into money and decided he was better off living comfortably on that sum than creating a significantly smaller sum by a classroom profession.

Regardless, Mr. Dawson was a rather likable man- very ordinary, with ordinary likes and dislikes (Queen, rugger, and taxes, respectively), and an overall ordinary outlook on life. He was the same age as his father, though he looked a little older because of his salt-and-pepper hair and the funny walrus moustache that dangled over his lip and quivered like a gerbil while he spoke. He was most often seen wearing some sort of smoking jacket, particularly before meals, and his left hand perpetually held a fat sausage of a cigar between his thumb and ring finger. He was fond of Peter's father, and supremely courteous to Peter's mother, and that was all a boy Peter's age could really ask for.

When Peter was three, and meeting him for the first time, Mr. Dawson had looked at him, bent over, and shook his hand vigorously.

"And what is this?" the gentleman demanded of the small and silent boy. Reaching behind his ear, Mr. Dawson pulled out a fresh stick of chewing gum, "It's a good thing you keep your ears so clean," Mr. Dawson told Peter seriously, "Otherwise I'd have found something rotten back there- like brussel sprouts." And while the jovial man was pulling another stick of candy from Susan's ear, Peter pocketed his prize.

Yet while Mr. Dawson was fun loving and lively, good with children and rather lacsidasical about his manners, his wife, the Lady Grace Dawson, was not any of these things.

Rather, the woman was a stickler for social order and precisely timed tea steeping. With one hand, she held a good grip over her husband, with the other, over his friends.

It was for this reason that Peter had first met Charlotte, though he hadn't the foggiest notion of Lady Grace Dawson's ploys at that naive period in his life.

On that day, the Lady was sitting in the drawing room, swollen like a bumblebee and stitching a complex pattern of day lilies into a pillow. At the time, Peter had thought nothing of it, for his mother was swollen as well- it was how Peter thought all mothers looked. But it seemed a subject that both fathers had difficulty forgetting, and kept mentioning it, laughing at each other while the Lady sat sternly frowning at Peter and Susan, and while Mama blushed a little from the corner of her eyes to the tip of her chin. Finally the subject became centered on what gender each baby would be, and Peter perked up, interested.

"Well, with Gracie here, we're hoping it will be a boy," Mr. Dawson was saying, puffing on his cigar and quivering his lively moustache, "You know, a strong, able boy to carry on the family business."

The men laughed, but Peter thought that staying home all the time seemed a very lovely and rewarding business indeed.

"Poor tyke," Papa smiled, "Helen thinks ours is a boy as well."

"Do you?" Mr. Dawson asked of Mama, very animated in his sincere happiness for her.

"It's the same as Peter felt," Mama smiled, and Peter went to her and gripped her thumb and pinkie in each of his hands.

Lady Dawson sighed.

"It's not a woman's place to speak of such things," she said.

"Oh! Bother that humdrum! We're all friends here! And if anyone should know, it's you, my dear Helen. Why-! You've both raised two of the finest children in all of London, I'm sure."

"But surely all children are different," Lady Dawson returned, frowning at Mama, "Not to insult your experience, Helen, but one can never be certain about these kinds of things."

"I can," Mama answered, and lifted Peter to sit tucked up against his mystery sibling. He placed his ear against her belly and listened to the second, softer lub-dub that was intruding on the steady pulse of his mothers'.

"But how?" Mr. Dawson asked.

"By the way he kicks. Or doesn't kick, I should say."

"Your baby doesn't kick?" asked the Lady, in tones that would suggest her own babe was proficient in that matter.

"He pushes out very slowly, like he's testing his boundaries. Occasionally, he'll kick. But only if I put off on eating a meal, or if I move too quickly from one place to another."

Mr. Dawson grinned at Papa, "Sounds like a regular rogue, Charles."

"Oh, I'm sure he'll be taken care of, eh Peter? You'll look after him, won't you?" for Peter was pressing his cheek against his mother in search of the brother who supposedly lived there, "He's so eager to be a big brother again."

But of course, at that moment, Peter yelled and Mama said "Oomph!" and the baby withdrew its little foot from where it had struck Peter square in the nose.

"Why'd he do that?" Peter asked, "Did I make him angry?"

"Of course not," Mr. Dawson diplomacized.

"Come 'ere, Pete," said Papa. He lifted the boy into his arms and put Peter's his hand onto his mother's stomach.

"There he is again!" Peter cried, his hand tingling from the force of the blow.

"Absolutely, there he is," Mama agreed, puffing a bit and rubbing stiffly.

"You see, Peter?" Papa said, "He's only saying 'hello' to you."

"Hello," Peter replied, "Hello, little brother."

Lub-dub! said the awaited intruder, and stilled his attack.

"Well fancy that," Mr. Dawson exclaimed, the turned to his wife, who was doggedly threading her needle in and out of the throw-pillow's silken boarders, "This- right here- is why I love children."

"You like their innocence- but what of when they've grown up? Or, rather, when they bicker and fight and pay you no mind? What then, Hubert?"

"I'll love them all the same!" Mr. Dawson proclaimed, but seemed a good deal bothered after she had said her say, and puffed vigorously on his cigar.

It wasn't too long after the matter, that Mama announced that Susan was getting sleepy, so they'd best be off. The men shook hands (Mr. Dawson shook Peter's as well) and the women exchanged pleasantries across the room to each other, and Papa took Peter's hand in his and led them all out into the street to call a cabby.

Peter began to tell his Mama's belly "Good-night" and "Good-morning" after that day.

OoOoOoOoO

The point was, those men weren't supposed to be in the alley that night. Edmund had made all of his plans on this point. He had become to lenient in his trust of Jack. He should have spread out his web. Instead, on blind faith, he told Peter they would be safe on the reconassaince mission that night. And because of Edmund's trust, and Peter's weakened skills, they barely escaped with their lives.

Lovers' quarrels indeed.

Edmund seethes on the walk home. It rolls off of his shoulders. He can feel it dripping down his back and trailing on the sidewalk behind him like a track of blood. And he secretely hopes some fool will try to follow it to its end. He is more than prepared- his hand is white on the cane.

When he walks up the lane and through the garden of the Pevensie home, he finds Susan pulling on a long coat and picking an umbrella out of the stand.

She looks up at him, eyes wide. "Are you all right?"

"Of course," he says. Then, of the umbrella, "What's that for?"

"...Edmund," she says slowly, "It's pouring rain outside."

"No it's-"

Something does trickle down his back then, and a cold thrill runs over his body to realize that he is sopping wet. The soft crush of a storm surrounds the house and hums through the wood.

"Oh," is all he can say.

"You must be more angry than I thought." In a rare show of affection, Susan puts down her own things and helps Edmund out of his. It's like a moment from their past- when Susan would help wrap bandages around his bleeding limbs or help him limp from room to room, his stomach not quite over being impaled. For a moment, Edmund wants to turn around, throw his arms around her, and hold tight until her heart melts under the hot confusion of his own. It's such a boyish thing to want. It's such a necessary thing.

"Thank you, Susan," Edmund says.

And that is all they say.

A/N: Ha! There- more bromance for you guys. I haven't written Peter and Edmund in a while.

I meant for this to be a oneshot but it's growing like a weed. It's going to be another short-story like "Magician's Cousins" (the final chapter of which is half-way finished). Next time, we'll discover what Peter and Edmund were doing in the alley as Edmund fills in Peter's missing memory.

There's something else that's building in this story, and it's the presence of Susan Pevensie. I know that my works typically align themselves with C.S Lewis' canon-Susan, who pulls away from Narnia. In my stories, this is partially due to a spell that James Collins place on her in "P.E". For some reason, in this story, Susan is speaking up again. I think that will be important for her story (also in development) called "P.S."

Also, I want to let you know that Charlotte Dawson and Peter Pevensie are NOT going to pair up. That's not how I roll. Romance is my bane. But it is important that you get to know her, because she will also appear in "P.S".

In any event, hope you're enjoying nice weather and summer-time fun!

As Always,

-Tonzura123