Dust missing scenes (Peter/Susan)

[bedlamsbard]

As we have established, I get a kick out of writing scenes that are never meant to go in Dust and work in and around the chapters. (Usually they're Peter/Susan! Because otherwise what I still swear is subtext would probably become text. I have done Eustace before, though.)

So, two three scenes. First one takes up shortly after the end of Dust 12; this was written before I decided to have the lockdown, so there are no references for that.



Susan takes careful catalogue of the damage done to her body. There’s nothing critical, just cuts and bruises across most of her skin. Some of them she can’t even see, there’s so much dirt on her.

She slips gratefully into the hot bath Lior Confesor’s drawn up for her, resting her head against the back of the tub and reveling in the feel of the hot water against her skin. After a moment she reaches for a sponge and a bar of scented soap and begins to wash the dirt away. There’s so much of it on her that it turns the water muddy.

She hears Peter’s step outside the door and calls, “You can come in.”

The door opens, closes again; Susan tips back her head to watch him approach upside down. “Will you do my hair and my back?” she asks.

“Of course.” His hands are light as he cards through the thick mass of her hair, his touch sure against the curve of her skull. Susan relaxes into his hands, closing her eyes.

“How are you feeling?” he murmurs.

“Better after the bath,” she replies, sitting up so that he can soap her back. She closes her eyes again as he pours water over her head and shoulders. It’s starting to cool now, lukewarm rather than as hot as it had been before. Susan reaches back to lift her hair away from her neck and turns to smile at Peter. “Hi.”

He smiles back at her. “Hi.”

She turns her head back and kisses him, slow and very certain. Peter braces himself on the edge of the bath and kisses her back. “I love you,” he murmurs, honey-slow against her mouth.

“More than anything,” Susan replies. “Everything.” She reaches around to cup the back of his head in one hand, still kissing him.

“Su.” Another kiss. “Susan.” Another one, and she twists around to raise herself up out of the tub, getting him all over water as she puts her arm around his neck.

“Gods,” Peter bursts out, seeing the bruises on her torso.

Susan kisses the edge of his mouth. “It looks worse than it is.” She sucks a kiss into the slide of his neck and Peter seems to make a decision, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her up out of the tub. She wraps her legs around his waist and slides her fingers into his hair, kissing him furiously as he carries her over to the bed.

“Peter!” she gasps, arching up into him as he lays her down. He pulls his clothes off between kisses, dropping shirt and trousers on the floor. “Peter,” she says again, pressing her fingers down his spine, and lets her head fall back. “Peter.”

“You’re all right,” he says in Eschmoun, pressing kisses into her neck, her collarbone. “Seven gods, you’re all right.”

Her hands in his hair, his mouth on her breast, her legs curled up around his hips, his cock sliding into her. Susan puts her head back, moaning, and digs one hand into the sheets, the silk crumpling up between her fingers. Peter is sucking kisses into her skin, kisses that are going to turn into bruises tomorrow, but these are bruises she wants. These are good bruises.

She’s being loud, ridiculously so, and the first word on her lips is Peter’s name, in between moans. She rips her nails down his back, hearing his gasp when she draws blood. “Love you,” Susan pants, “love you so much. Aslan, Peter, please, Peter, Peter –”

Peter kisses her messily and gracelessly, their teeth knocking together painfully. She tightens her legs around his waist as he comes, his hips bucking into hers. Peter muffles his shout on her shoulder, his teeth digging into her skin.

Susan arches her back up off the bed, shouting as she comes and clawing stripes down Peter’s back. “Peter!” she screams, and again, until her vision whites out and then goes dark. She passes out from a combination of fantastic sex and four – five – days worth of sheer exhaustion.

She wakes up what seems like a long time later, sunlight streaming over her face. She’s using Peter as a pillow, her bruised cheek resting on his chest. He’s got his arms around her, reassuring and comforting; Susan raises her head and presses a kiss against his chest, then another, higher, on his collarbone.

He tilts his head down towards her and smiles. “Love you,” he murmurs.

Susan scoots up to kiss him properly. “I missed you,” she says against his mouth, and she doesn’t just mean this past week, she means the last nine years, everything they’ve done to each other since they first tumbled through the wardrobe. They’ve torn each other to shreds until there’s nothing left but bones, blood, and emotion. “I love you.”

Peter takes another slow kiss from her mouth. “We should really get up. It’s late.”

“We really should,” Susan agrees, but she’s kissing him again anyway, long and thorough, before she swings her legs over the side of the bed and gets up. Dear gods, she’s sore; she’s one big bruise.

Lior’s left clothes for them before she’d drawn up the bath last night; Susan dresses slowly, enjoying the feel of the fabric against her skin.

Peter comes up behind her and does up her laces, kissing her neck. “Not the time, I know,” he murmurs after he’s tied off the last of them, settling his arms around her waist. He’s already dressed, she notes, tilting her head to one side to give him better access to one of the few unbruised portions of her body.

Past their own heavy breathing Susan can hear the bustle of the street below – hooves on pavement, a hawker selling newspapers, the raised sound of voices, cart wheels over cobblestones. A city, and in the way Cair Paravel had never been, because Susan still remembers Cair Paravel being first and foremost her home. This – isn’t Narnia. Except it is, now.

Peter’s mouth is warm against the side of her neck, so damn familiar that she could write a bloody book on the things her brother can do with his tongue. Susan turns her head and kisses him, curling her fingers in the front of her shirt.

“I’m so glad we’re here,” she murmurs.

He quirks an eyebrow at her. “Here specifically.”

“You know what I mean,” Susan says, kissing him again.

Peter lingers on it a moment before he pulls away, slapping her lightly on the rump. “Let’s go save Narnia, shall we?”



Second scene is an alternate version of the beginning of Dust 15; there was actually a point when I thought it would take up immediately after Dust 12, without the intermediary Tirian POV in Dust 14. (Seriously, one of these days, we shall go through Dust and pick out all the chapters where Peter and Susan wake up in bed together. Granted, I think there are only two, but if we count all the missing or cut scenes, there are, like, a milliion.)



Susan’s smooth stomach is silky beneath his palm when he wakes up, her tangle of dark hair tickling his nose. Outside the window, rain beats down hard in the street; Peter raises his head to watch the shadows of the drops against the neat pale green of the curtains.

“What’s going on?” Susan murmurs, her voice thick with sleep.

She’s exhausted; he won’t bother her until she’s gotten enough rest or he needs her. “Go back to sleep,” Peter tells her, and presses a kiss to her bare shoulder before he gets up.

There are clothes set out for him, left the night before by whoever drew up the baths they’d taken last night – bath, rather; they’d shared the tub and the bathwater, because there’s no part of each other they haven’t seen and they’d lost all body modesty a long time ago. Peter dresses quickly, noting the quality of the fabric absently – it’s good, sturdy cloth, though not the kind that would ever make it to a noble’s sempstress. A well-off merchant is far more likely.

He may be High King, and generally have other things on his mind than fabric, but he’s no fool.



Third scene is from the missing three days between Dust 12 and Dust 15, but refers to events that happened during the Golden Age and in England post-LWW.



“I want to tell you a secret,” Susan says, closing the door behind her.

Peter, sitting cross-legged on the bed, glances up from his book. “Of course,” he says.

Susan swallows, wrapping her arms around herself. She sees the concern in Peter’s eyes before she closes hers and says, “I was pregnant the day we went after the White Stag.”

There’s a long silence, and then Peter bursts out, “What?”

“I was –”

“I heard you the first time,” he says, and she hears his bare feet hit the floor as he swings his legs off the bed.

Susan sits down hard on the floor, her hands in her hair and her face against her knees. “I was going to tell you when we got back to Arn Abedin.”

“Susan,” Peter breathes. He sounds like he’s only a few feet away from her.

She shakes her head, feeling the fabric of her skirts rub against her forehead. “I’d already miscarried twice before, before I could tell you. And before that I – that was before we were – from the festival night.”

“I remember,” Peter says softly. “Aslan, Susan, why didn’t you say something?” He touches her face lightly.

“What would it have accomplished?” she whispers. “It’s done. It’s over. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“I could have been with you,” Peter says. He cups her face in both hands and Susan raises her head, surprised to feel the tears on her cheeks.

“What would that have done?” she says again.

“I would have been with you,” he says, and kisses her.

Susan tips her head back, opening her mouth against his. “It’s too late now,” she says.

“No,” he says. “I’m here now.”

She uncurls her legs, lets Peter scoot up to kneel between her spread thighs and press her back against the door. “It’s over,” she says. “Peter, it’s over. I just – I needed to tell you now.”

“Oh, Susan,” Peter says, sounding heartbroken. He pulls her into a hug and Susan buries her face in his shoulder, crying silently as Peter picks her up and carries her over to the bed. He sits down, pulls her onto his lap, his arms tightly around her as he kisses her hair. “I love you,” he whispers.

Susan cups his face between her hands and kisses him hard and desperate. She pushes him down onto the bed, pulling at his shirt until she can slide her hands up beneath it, over his bare skin. “It’s over,” she says again. “It’s done. It’s almost ten years gone.”

“Susan,” Peter says breathlessly, reaching for her, but Susan pins his wrists with one hand and kisses him again, stifling his protests. She lets him go a moment later, taking one hand and pressing his palm against her flat stomach.

“I had dreams for a week back in England,” Susan tells him. “Nightmares. About what might have happened if we’d stayed.”

“I didn’t know,” Peter says, staring up at her. “Nightmares?”

She’d woken up from dreams of pain and blood, some nights feeling the phantom kicks of a baby that she hadn’t yet been far enough along to feel in reality. “In my dreams I always miscarried,” she says. “I remember lying in your arms with the blood flowing out of me – so much blood. And giving birth in the bed, our bed, only the baby was born dead. And a wound in a fight, something even Lucy couldn't cure. Every night for a week, Peter. A week!”

“Susan,” he says again, reaching for her.

She turns her face away. “A week,” she whispers. “And on the seventh day my courses started and I knew we weren’t in Narnia anymore.”

“We’re in Narnia now,” Peter says. “Susan, please.”

“I haven’t thought about this in years,” Susan tells him. “We’d been through Lantern Waste a thousand times, Peter, why that time? Did he know? Did Aslan know?” She’s aware in a distant kind of way that she’s shaking. “Did he take our baby?”

“Susan,” Peter breathes, and this time she lets him pull her down. He wraps his arms around her and kisses her hair. “Susan,” he says again, softly, and she cries for the first time in years, clutching her fingers in the fabric of his shirt. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s over,” she whispers. “It’s done.”