Narnia fic: "Mercy Cry" (Peter/Susan)
Jun. 21st, 2009 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Mercy Cry
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Incest. Domestic violence.
Summary: Peter, come and get me, my boyfriend hit me and I put him in the hospital with five broken bones. Peter/Susan, England, post-PC.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, settings, situations, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, settings, situations, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title from Kasey Chambers' Nothing At All.
Author's Notes: Originally written for Porn Battle VIII, prompt "Peter/Susan, remembrance," but not posted in time.
Peter ‘s sitting on one of the old, scarred wooden chairs in the waiting room when she comes out, wearing his RAF uniform and leafing without much interest through a book missing its cover and most of its pages. Susan stops in the doorway and stares at him. There’s a four-year-old boy on the other side of the room who’s doing the same thing, barely held in check by a woman Susan assumes is his mother; she has a finger hooked into the neck of his jumper.
“You came,” Susan says after a moment, and Peter looks up, tossing the book aside. “I – didn’t think you would.”
He gets up and comes over to her, tilting her chin up with two fingers. Susan lets him without moving, pressing her lips tightly together.
“How many stitches?” he asks, even though he can count them perfectly well; she’d stopped to look at herself in a mirror. She looks terrible even without the two inch cut down the side of her face.
“Six,” she says quietly.
“How many broken bones?”
“Five.” Not hers. She wouldn’t even have gotten the cut if she’d realized Tom was serious when he’d broken the bottle on the edge of the kitchen table, but the moment he’d hit her – some things can’t be forgotten, no matter how hard she tries, and she’d stopped thinking.
“Mmm,” Peter says, and takes his hand away. He tucks his cap under his arm and adds, “I’ll take you back to your flat.”
Susan smoothes her palms down the sides of her skirt, already missing the brief warmth of his touch. “Thank you,” she says with difficulty.
They’re both silent as they leave the hospital, the stitches on the left side of Susan’s face throbbing in time with her heartbeat, the handful of smaller cuts around the big one stinging along with her knuckles. It’s been a long time; she doesn’t have any callus built up there, not anymore.
Peter puts his cap on as they go out into the street, turning towards the nearest bus stop, carefully herding her along with him in that way he has that makes it seem like they’re both moving together. He doesn’t look at her except out of the corners of his eyes. Susan keeps her head down, wishing for a hat or a pair of sunglasses. They could be any couple.
Peter somehow manages to find her a seat on the bus, standing protectively between the rest of the passengers, his knees braced against the swaying of the bus as they go down the street. They have to switch busses twice before they get to Susan’s stop and get off. He walks her up the two flights of stairs to her flat, stopping on the landing while she digs in her purse for her key.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks uncertainly after she’s replaced it, standing with her hand on the knob and the door cracked open.
“Yes,” Peter says, pushing the door the rest of the way open.
Susan locks the door behind them, thumbing the light on and going to put the kettle on.
“I’ll do that,” Peter says, taking it out of her hand and pushing her gently down into a chair. “Flying Officer Horie has been suspended from duty. I had to call my commanding officer on leave in Edinburgh with his wife and two children; I don’t know Horie’s CO, so I couldn’t call him myself.”
“I’m sorry,” Susan murmurs, staring down at her bruised knuckles. It’s been a long time since she’s hit anyone, but you don’t lose the knack of it, even after all these years. She’d stopped thinking the moment the bottle slashed across her face and started again when she’d remembered she’d remembered to break his arm instead of his elbow; the latter would have crippled him permanently and he hadn’t deserved that.
Once Peter might have disagreed with that, but now –
“Where do you keep your tea?” he asks. Ordinary, like that’s what they are. Because that’s what they are.
“Bottom cabinet on the left, in the red tin,” she says. “I think there’s oolong or orange pekoe, whichever you’d like.”
“Which do you want?”
Five blows, five broken bones. His wrist first, then his jaw. It had probably been an overreaction, to say the least. “It doesn’t matter.”
Peter bangs about a bit as he looks for her mugs, then the kettle starts to whistle merrily before he takes it off the stove. After a moment, he brings over two mugs of steaming golden tea, giving her the good one and keeping the chipped one for himself. They sit in silence as they wait for it to cool. Oolong, Susan notices. Not orange pekoe or the Earl grey she half-remembers buying.
“I’m sorry,” she says to her teacup, running the tip of one finger over the rim. “I didn’t know who else to ask.”
Peter, come and get me, my boyfriend hit me and I put him in the hospital with five broken bones. I have to get stitches and there’s a police constable asking questions I don’t know how to answer, please come and take care of this all.
“It’s all right,” Peter says. “You’re my sister. I’m glad you did.” He undoes the top few buttons on his jacket, undoing his tie and letting it hang loose around his neck.
“How long are you staying?” Susan asks, playing with her mug.
“My leave’s up in two days.”
“I don’t have a couch,” Susan says awkwardly.
“I’ve slept in worse places than the floor.”
They finish their tea in silence. Peter gets up to take their mugs to the sink. Susan curls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She wants to feel fourteen again, scared and confused and stiff from the shock of spilling someone else’s blood for the first time in her life, or twenty and alternately angry and terrified because someone she trusted hurt her. Instead she feels thirty-five and tired.
“What would you do if I wasn’t here?” Peter asks, leaning his hip against the counter.
She doesn’t even have to think about the answer. “Take a bath.”
“So do it,” he says. “Don’t get your stitches wet.”
“Are you –”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He sheds his jacket before he goes to tackle the dishes she’s left to soak in the sink.
Her flat is tiny, but it has its own bathroom with a claw-footed tub. Susan fills it with hot water and adds a handful of bath salts before she sheds her wrinkled, blood-stained clothes and sinks gratefully in. It’s a far cry from the bath houses of Cair Paravel, but it’s better than nothing. She stays there until the water goes cold, then gets up and dries herself off, wrapping herself in a robe before pulling the plug and going out.
The dishes are washed and dried and put away; Peter is still sitting at her table, reading her copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. He looks up as she opens the door.
“Why do you do this?” Susan asks, wrapping her arms around herself, backing up against the doorframe. “Why are you here?”
“Because you asked,” Peter says, glancing at the page number before he puts the book down.
“I didn’t ask you to stay.”
“Because you’re my sister and I care about you.” He looks at her with huge blue eyes, bruised from lack of sleep; Susan clenches her fists against the urge to kiss him, because she still –
“You came last time, too.”
“You have terrible taste in men,” Peter says, the ghost of a smile on his face. “Worse than anyone I’ve ever met, even me or Lu, who’s fucking her art professor. And I know the officers here, too.”
“Thank you,” Susan says dryly, then she tips her head back against the doorframe and stares at the mildewed ceiling. Could there be anything more different than Cair Paravel, which had probably never seen a speck of mildew in its life? She looks back at Peter, hearing the words echo hollowly in her ears as she speaks. “But I threw you out last time. You still came when I asked.”
“You’re still my sister.” Peter gets up and comes over to her, cupping her face between his hands. “Susan –”
“Do you still love me?” she asks suddenly, turning her face up to him.
“I’ll love you till the day I die,” he says. “Which will probably be soon and in a giant fireball when I finally get shot down for good.” He smiles, but it sobers quickly. “I love you.”
“Peter,” she says. “Peter.”
He drops his head and kisses her, soft, close-mouthed. Susan’s the one who opens her mouth and deepens the kiss, putting her arms around his neck. Then the movement jerks at the stitches on her cheek and she pulls away, wincing.
“All right?” Peter asks.
Susan touches them, looks at her fingers. “Well, I haven’t torn them,” she says, and for a moment this is almost familiar, this banter, this cheerful back-and-forth about glancing injuries. They could be –
They’re not.
Doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered.
She slides her fingers into his hair and pulls Peter’s head down for another kiss. “Take me to bed,” she says against his mouth. “Please.”
His arms are tight around her. “Yes,” he breathes, and she lets him pick her up, grunting a little under her weight. She wraps her legs around his waist, repositioning and rebalancing herself as she kisses him again.
He carries her back into her bedroom and lays her down on her bed, kissing her as he unbuttons his shirt and lets it fall to the floor. His teeth are light on the edge of her jaw, the tendons of her neck, the line of her collarbone. He sucks a careful kiss into the skin of her shoulder, then the top of her breast, undoing the tie on her robe and pushing it aside.
Susan lets her head fall back, staring up at the ceiling as Peter kisses his way down her belly to the soft skin of her inner thighs. “I love you,” he murmurs, his lips fluttering against her. “I’ll always love you.”
She reaches for him, pressing her fingers along the curve of his skull and the line of his neck. “Please,” she says – begs; there’s a high keening note in her voice that she hasn’t heard in a long time. “Please, Peter, please, please –”
“Susan,” he breathes, leaning up to kiss her again. She hears him heel his shoes off, then pulls away long enough to undress the rest of the way. He settles over her, his hands familiar on her hips and breasts as he kisses her.
She touches the edge of his jaw. When he looks at her, his eyes are as blue and endless as the Great Eastern Ocean. “I love you,” she tells him.
“I know,” Peter says. He kisses the stitches on her face, just beneath her eye, and Susan raises her hips up to him, groaning in the back of her throat as he pushes into her.
His shoulders are broad beneath her hands, familiar, even though the scars there are newer than they had been once. The patterns are the same, though. Their scars are always the same.
Peter takes her apart piece by aching piece, until Susan is gasping and moaning and clawing at his back. For once, she’s not thinking; it’s like fighting again, like breaking someone down to blood and bones and muscle, only better. And God, it’s Peter, it’s Peter; there’s never been anyone who knows her and loves her like Peter does. He knows every inch of her body, knows what makes her moan and what makes her gasp, what makes her scream and what makes her go silent. There’s no one else like that.
She comes with his blood under her fingernails and Peter’s mouth on hers, his kiss messy and graceless. Susan smears her fingers down his back, holding him as he puts his face down into her shoulder and shudders, hips bucking into hers.
“I love you,” Susan says, because if all she looks at is Peter, she can pretend they’re home and that everything’s all right.
He cups her face in his hand. “I know,” he says, and kisses her softly on the mouth. “I love you too.”
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Incest. Domestic violence.
Summary: Peter, come and get me, my boyfriend hit me and I put him in the hospital with five broken bones. Peter/Susan, England, post-PC.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, settings, situations, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, settings, situations, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title from Kasey Chambers' Nothing At All.
Author's Notes: Originally written for Porn Battle VIII, prompt "Peter/Susan, remembrance," but not posted in time.
Peter ‘s sitting on one of the old, scarred wooden chairs in the waiting room when she comes out, wearing his RAF uniform and leafing without much interest through a book missing its cover and most of its pages. Susan stops in the doorway and stares at him. There’s a four-year-old boy on the other side of the room who’s doing the same thing, barely held in check by a woman Susan assumes is his mother; she has a finger hooked into the neck of his jumper.
“You came,” Susan says after a moment, and Peter looks up, tossing the book aside. “I – didn’t think you would.”
He gets up and comes over to her, tilting her chin up with two fingers. Susan lets him without moving, pressing her lips tightly together.
“How many stitches?” he asks, even though he can count them perfectly well; she’d stopped to look at herself in a mirror. She looks terrible even without the two inch cut down the side of her face.
“Six,” she says quietly.
“How many broken bones?”
“Five.” Not hers. She wouldn’t even have gotten the cut if she’d realized Tom was serious when he’d broken the bottle on the edge of the kitchen table, but the moment he’d hit her – some things can’t be forgotten, no matter how hard she tries, and she’d stopped thinking.
“Mmm,” Peter says, and takes his hand away. He tucks his cap under his arm and adds, “I’ll take you back to your flat.”
Susan smoothes her palms down the sides of her skirt, already missing the brief warmth of his touch. “Thank you,” she says with difficulty.
They’re both silent as they leave the hospital, the stitches on the left side of Susan’s face throbbing in time with her heartbeat, the handful of smaller cuts around the big one stinging along with her knuckles. It’s been a long time; she doesn’t have any callus built up there, not anymore.
Peter puts his cap on as they go out into the street, turning towards the nearest bus stop, carefully herding her along with him in that way he has that makes it seem like they’re both moving together. He doesn’t look at her except out of the corners of his eyes. Susan keeps her head down, wishing for a hat or a pair of sunglasses. They could be any couple.
Peter somehow manages to find her a seat on the bus, standing protectively between the rest of the passengers, his knees braced against the swaying of the bus as they go down the street. They have to switch busses twice before they get to Susan’s stop and get off. He walks her up the two flights of stairs to her flat, stopping on the landing while she digs in her purse for her key.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks uncertainly after she’s replaced it, standing with her hand on the knob and the door cracked open.
“Yes,” Peter says, pushing the door the rest of the way open.
Susan locks the door behind them, thumbing the light on and going to put the kettle on.
“I’ll do that,” Peter says, taking it out of her hand and pushing her gently down into a chair. “Flying Officer Horie has been suspended from duty. I had to call my commanding officer on leave in Edinburgh with his wife and two children; I don’t know Horie’s CO, so I couldn’t call him myself.”
“I’m sorry,” Susan murmurs, staring down at her bruised knuckles. It’s been a long time since she’s hit anyone, but you don’t lose the knack of it, even after all these years. She’d stopped thinking the moment the bottle slashed across her face and started again when she’d remembered she’d remembered to break his arm instead of his elbow; the latter would have crippled him permanently and he hadn’t deserved that.
Once Peter might have disagreed with that, but now –
“Where do you keep your tea?” he asks. Ordinary, like that’s what they are. Because that’s what they are.
“Bottom cabinet on the left, in the red tin,” she says. “I think there’s oolong or orange pekoe, whichever you’d like.”
“Which do you want?”
Five blows, five broken bones. His wrist first, then his jaw. It had probably been an overreaction, to say the least. “It doesn’t matter.”
Peter bangs about a bit as he looks for her mugs, then the kettle starts to whistle merrily before he takes it off the stove. After a moment, he brings over two mugs of steaming golden tea, giving her the good one and keeping the chipped one for himself. They sit in silence as they wait for it to cool. Oolong, Susan notices. Not orange pekoe or the Earl grey she half-remembers buying.
“I’m sorry,” she says to her teacup, running the tip of one finger over the rim. “I didn’t know who else to ask.”
Peter, come and get me, my boyfriend hit me and I put him in the hospital with five broken bones. I have to get stitches and there’s a police constable asking questions I don’t know how to answer, please come and take care of this all.
“It’s all right,” Peter says. “You’re my sister. I’m glad you did.” He undoes the top few buttons on his jacket, undoing his tie and letting it hang loose around his neck.
“How long are you staying?” Susan asks, playing with her mug.
“My leave’s up in two days.”
“I don’t have a couch,” Susan says awkwardly.
“I’ve slept in worse places than the floor.”
They finish their tea in silence. Peter gets up to take their mugs to the sink. Susan curls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She wants to feel fourteen again, scared and confused and stiff from the shock of spilling someone else’s blood for the first time in her life, or twenty and alternately angry and terrified because someone she trusted hurt her. Instead she feels thirty-five and tired.
“What would you do if I wasn’t here?” Peter asks, leaning his hip against the counter.
She doesn’t even have to think about the answer. “Take a bath.”
“So do it,” he says. “Don’t get your stitches wet.”
“Are you –”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He sheds his jacket before he goes to tackle the dishes she’s left to soak in the sink.
Her flat is tiny, but it has its own bathroom with a claw-footed tub. Susan fills it with hot water and adds a handful of bath salts before she sheds her wrinkled, blood-stained clothes and sinks gratefully in. It’s a far cry from the bath houses of Cair Paravel, but it’s better than nothing. She stays there until the water goes cold, then gets up and dries herself off, wrapping herself in a robe before pulling the plug and going out.
The dishes are washed and dried and put away; Peter is still sitting at her table, reading her copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. He looks up as she opens the door.
“Why do you do this?” Susan asks, wrapping her arms around herself, backing up against the doorframe. “Why are you here?”
“Because you asked,” Peter says, glancing at the page number before he puts the book down.
“I didn’t ask you to stay.”
“Because you’re my sister and I care about you.” He looks at her with huge blue eyes, bruised from lack of sleep; Susan clenches her fists against the urge to kiss him, because she still –
“You came last time, too.”
“You have terrible taste in men,” Peter says, the ghost of a smile on his face. “Worse than anyone I’ve ever met, even me or Lu, who’s fucking her art professor. And I know the officers here, too.”
“Thank you,” Susan says dryly, then she tips her head back against the doorframe and stares at the mildewed ceiling. Could there be anything more different than Cair Paravel, which had probably never seen a speck of mildew in its life? She looks back at Peter, hearing the words echo hollowly in her ears as she speaks. “But I threw you out last time. You still came when I asked.”
“You’re still my sister.” Peter gets up and comes over to her, cupping her face between his hands. “Susan –”
“Do you still love me?” she asks suddenly, turning her face up to him.
“I’ll love you till the day I die,” he says. “Which will probably be soon and in a giant fireball when I finally get shot down for good.” He smiles, but it sobers quickly. “I love you.”
“Peter,” she says. “Peter.”
He drops his head and kisses her, soft, close-mouthed. Susan’s the one who opens her mouth and deepens the kiss, putting her arms around his neck. Then the movement jerks at the stitches on her cheek and she pulls away, wincing.
“All right?” Peter asks.
Susan touches them, looks at her fingers. “Well, I haven’t torn them,” she says, and for a moment this is almost familiar, this banter, this cheerful back-and-forth about glancing injuries. They could be –
They’re not.
Doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered.
She slides her fingers into his hair and pulls Peter’s head down for another kiss. “Take me to bed,” she says against his mouth. “Please.”
His arms are tight around her. “Yes,” he breathes, and she lets him pick her up, grunting a little under her weight. She wraps her legs around his waist, repositioning and rebalancing herself as she kisses him again.
He carries her back into her bedroom and lays her down on her bed, kissing her as he unbuttons his shirt and lets it fall to the floor. His teeth are light on the edge of her jaw, the tendons of her neck, the line of her collarbone. He sucks a careful kiss into the skin of her shoulder, then the top of her breast, undoing the tie on her robe and pushing it aside.
Susan lets her head fall back, staring up at the ceiling as Peter kisses his way down her belly to the soft skin of her inner thighs. “I love you,” he murmurs, his lips fluttering against her. “I’ll always love you.”
She reaches for him, pressing her fingers along the curve of his skull and the line of his neck. “Please,” she says – begs; there’s a high keening note in her voice that she hasn’t heard in a long time. “Please, Peter, please, please –”
“Susan,” he breathes, leaning up to kiss her again. She hears him heel his shoes off, then pulls away long enough to undress the rest of the way. He settles over her, his hands familiar on her hips and breasts as he kisses her.
She touches the edge of his jaw. When he looks at her, his eyes are as blue and endless as the Great Eastern Ocean. “I love you,” she tells him.
“I know,” Peter says. He kisses the stitches on her face, just beneath her eye, and Susan raises her hips up to him, groaning in the back of her throat as he pushes into her.
His shoulders are broad beneath her hands, familiar, even though the scars there are newer than they had been once. The patterns are the same, though. Their scars are always the same.
Peter takes her apart piece by aching piece, until Susan is gasping and moaning and clawing at his back. For once, she’s not thinking; it’s like fighting again, like breaking someone down to blood and bones and muscle, only better. And God, it’s Peter, it’s Peter; there’s never been anyone who knows her and loves her like Peter does. He knows every inch of her body, knows what makes her moan and what makes her gasp, what makes her scream and what makes her go silent. There’s no one else like that.
She comes with his blood under her fingernails and Peter’s mouth on hers, his kiss messy and graceless. Susan smears her fingers down his back, holding him as he puts his face down into her shoulder and shudders, hips bucking into hers.
“I love you,” Susan says, because if all she looks at is Peter, she can pretend they’re home and that everything’s all right.
He cups her face in his hand. “I know,” he says, and kisses her softly on the mouth. “I love you too.”