∞ [ action post ]

[fatespoken]

✏ LOGGING: This is your thread for logging, whether spontaneous or plot-related, silly or serious. His normal haunts include shifts at the Blue Light, various city bars, cafes, random encounters, etc. Prose preferred, [] are fine too.

✉ TO SET UP: Just drop me a line at aeloriax[at]gmail.com or Y!M/AIM (listed in the post below) to give me a heads-up. I'm open to anything as long as it fits ICly.

TRACKING:
March;
Peter & Amory [ Blue Light ] ✯ this is a song lyric [ in progress ]

Comments

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[orderofthelion.livejournal.com]

A year ago, Peter would have punched Amory, more than once---well, to be more precise, a little over a year ago, a year and an unlikely rebellion and some months time ago. Looking at it now, it feels closer to a lifetime itself, the messy in-between stringing together an Age of Gold and his present period of grace. As the saying goes, however, that was then, and this is now; an over simplification to be sure, but it does the job, means exactly what it spells and nothing additional. It is that type of unencumbered candor that permeates itself through his entire frame, and keeps the temper he still has in comparative check. Helpful is the suspicion that Amory is too drunk to remember what anger the blond might have spared his way, and even more helpful still is that he would, as far as Peter can tell, never admit to being struck by any of his disapproval. He has shown that much, so far, but as it is, this is not one of the times that is about Peter's own age, which, though not irrelevant, is also just not the point of anything here at all.

Amory is taking wild swings, and as wild swings are wont to, they are missing even as they betray truths or at least half-truths about him that Peter knows he would not otherwise be privy to. Combination drunk and irritable and Amory; it's interesting, and it occurs to the High King that, like most people who he has seen vest themselves in a character that shields another reality, the bartender carries some mix of fear and bitterness, the kind sometimes born of disappointment and more often of hurt. He has no hard copy history to back up the inferences, but not all of the things he learned in Narnia had to do with aptly wielding a broad sword or politely refusing courtiers, so on and so forth. Much of it is just the kind of thing another person can and has in their own life learned on Earth or a distant star.

It has to do with people, and that broad of a statement has a frightening amount of context and content that can get involved, but suffice to say, that for all his sometimes-social dryness, private shadows are no stranger to him. Besides, it is not as though Amory has made any particular secret of his drinking. Peter was honest when he said he was not the only one who had noticed, the difference being that he has been one to speak to it, not in small part, he would admit, because he prefers to have their competent barkeep...well, competent.

"That is something," he half nods and half sighs, a casual thread to those three words that keeps it from being something that could be mistaken for mockery, but again he does not make any move to call off his intervention, rare but fully invested. It is possible--it is likely--that a secret part of him (even secret from Peter himself, the eternal subconscious of his oldest and youngest moment) recognizes that it matters to let someone know they are being noticed, that the actions they take have consequences and that someone else is going to mind about it, even if the doer himself does not, or, more accurately, professes not to. Such is something of the matter here, and anyone who knows the eldest Pevensie sibling could tell anyone else: when he gets an idea into his head, when he decides something, he is immovable enough, come armies or, as is the case now, Amory.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

Peter's age may not be the immediate point of the conversation, but as haphazard dots and patterns often interlock themselves with independent circumstances, it certainly has become a point. Currently, it's the sharp-tongued spur lodged in Amory's temper; venom brimming beneath anger, delineated in a smoldering scowl layered against sheets of night. It's a look perfected and practiced, measured and utilized in only appropriate circumstances, choice situations, which make it one of the rarer entries in Amory Felix's catalog of evil eyes. For the mere act of advising him-- guidance, advice, suggestion, direction, being amongst a category of nouns that will always drag him along kicking and screaming. He hates being told what to do. He hates being advised, especially by one who's face still echoes angles of youth, the softer curve of a cheek unpressed by time— features that even the older one is criminal of. Amory isn't that much older physically, but those few years mark an important difference. Important, in the sense that even as his manager, even as someone mentally older, Peter has no right to tell him to go home. It's an upturn of that age-old phrase "Respect your elders," incorporated into the set of values that order his pride.

When off work, Peter Pevensie has no rule over him.

"You have no right to advise me. No right to tell me to go home," he sucks in a breath of air, a tempered space between silence and rancor that continues to fight its way through. A showcase of anger won't lose the King, nor will derision, and Amory feels the last ends of his nerves snapping, dissolving into the miasma of his cresting nausea and temper.

"Just be quiet, Kid."

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[orderofthelion.livejournal.com]

It is something that Peter Pevensie has any rule over Amory Felix at all, work or not, really, just saying. Very interesting. But again, with no particular aptitude for that niche of telepathy, well, it's fortunate for the barkeep that Peter thus misses out on this likely inadvertent note of admittance. This is not, as far as Peter is concerned, of much immediate importance, however.

"Perhaps not," he admits, almost too amiably. "But that won't stop me, no more than someone's advice will stop you from running head first into whatever is that's bothering you." To Peter, that is what it seems that Amory is doing, avoiding, avoiding, avoiding, but avoidance only works for so long before, like most things under tension, the thread snaps and frays beyond repair. It is something worth worry, worth the act of running metaphorically into a wall face-first over and over with the hopes of changing anything at all.

And Peter does not like to idle away when action is an alternative. Not all action garners desired results, and some ends up without any results entirely, but the adage of never knowing until one tries applies here in full. For all their often mutual dryness, wryness, and the unspoken, unwritten agreement to give each other generous berths of personal space, this does not automate out all traces of care and good intention. Certainly, the High King never gives word to it, but that can be said of his care for even the people closest to him. Bypassing the talk, there remains only the thing of making something happen, or keeping it from happening.

Tonight, he supposes, is a little bit of both.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

He tastes it even before the words slip, silver glancing across his tongue to gather in the blunt ridges of his molars. It’s like the tang of metal, a simile that carries equal force in the distribution of weight over his shoulders, a lead-lined mantle. In usual succession follows the cold, spreading like the cob-webbing of ice through muscles and veins. Stereotype says it should be warmth, as if the mind’s image of energy as activity, like the many moving parts of a machine, inspires the same in the preternatural sense. It’s more the sensation of frozen hands against bare flesh, whites of a nail’s edge lodged deep into skin. Why the sensation feels as it does, Amory has no explanation, even wondering once if it was the transliteration of a metaphorical burden. A constant that reminded men who held the infinite in their palms that they were still only men. Or it could be a warning call for what's about to happen. For the wall is crumbling, chunks and bits and pieces of power, of magic as people like to call it; a thin stream at first but crashing through suddenly as a tidal wave.

"You think you're an adult. An adult stuck in the body of a brat. But it's all pointless. You're not King, Pevensie. You're not even a man, no matter the truth. No one sees that, all they see is what you appear to be." he breaks off, severing his words with contained laughter, "You should just forget about all that. Forget about Narnia, forget about being a man. You're just a fucking kid."

He's too muddled to notice the thread snap, gathered pressure sinking back as suddenly as it came. It now rests behind the tired walls, but the deed has already been done, and the deed is irrevocable.