Who: Ienzo & Edmund Pevensie Where/When: A Private Boys' Academy, 1940's England Warnings: A slew of Boarding School Tropes, probably (Implied Fagging, Disciplinary, Peer Heirarchy) Underaged Smut
YIKES THERE'S JUST A LOT OF SETUP HERE, I'M SORRY
The term was shaping up to be considerably more hideous than last.
It wasn't even that he was in any position to be picked on, really, as the names of last year's graduates still held considerable weight, and Ienzo had been slavishly dilligent to a considerably tight ring of them. In fact, it was thoroughly unusual for a overly bright boy who passed entrance exams three years ahead of schedule to be treated as an equal among a cabal of senior students, when he certainly wasn't related by blood in any way, and was rumored to have lost both parents.
Ienzo might have been pecked at for his achievements if he'd chose to be precocious about them, but his calculated demeanor had pulled in even tighter and more cautious since the departure of his elder 'peers'. But a merciful administrator must have caught wind of trouble before summer holiday ended, because Ienzo found himself transferred to another dormitory entirely, and rooming with a fresh set of boys his "own age".
Their youth felt alarmingly alien to him. There were tears and fights and punishments inflicted on the entire dormitory forthe outbursts of one or two brats, and older students bullying them in line...
Ienzo sort of fell very aloof to it all, untouchable as he buried himself in his books, to lessons mismatched to the fellows he was rooming with, which was an added reason to be solitary. He didn't speak much, but when he did it was with all the quietly tamed authority of an adult, except on the very rare occasions when darkness winked sudden life into his eyes and something subversive crept its way past his lips, usually too subtley murmured as inward commentary for anyone to notice, but once or twice bringing a rowdy room around to dead silence and long, wary staring.
Then the new master of Religious Studies suggested to one of his blueblooded favorites that Ienzo ought to have his unruly bangs managed, which brought him into a freshly hellish, stonefaced war with an upper year who regularly pinned him down whenever he could with a visciously pointy pair of steel shears, stealing forelocks one at a time, snip by snip. His hair looked more like an assymmetrical modernist mess by the day, but Ienzo staunchly refused to have it all set sensibly, glowering through the jagged ends.
(Braig told a thousand variations of how he lost an eye, absolutely none of them true, but those scissors were beginning to give Ienzo nightmares of becoming a bald cyclops in his own struggles.)
The trees shed their leaves prematurely too, this year, and the frost came unseasonably early. School blazers, doubled kneesocks and an old woodstove set at the opposite end of an institutional row of steel bunks didn't do much to stave off chill. Ienzo spent many nights fiercely lonely and fitfully awake, shifting his knees against the sheets to generate some friction. He missed Even's scoldings and Dilan's gruff pessimism, which had proven an unsual comfort in a backwards way. He missed having stalwart Aeleus to match stride with across campus, even if his firm imprint on the memories of most upper years still proved a salvation from getting kicked around and spat on.
But most of all he missed their enigmatic ringleader's bed, and warm whispers against his ears of nihilistic philosophies born from parts of the world thought thoroughly unsavoury. Stuff that made his mind feel as if it might explode out his ears while his heart hammered and swelled and made his whole body ache with queerest wanting. No one had even heard from him since graduation day. He wasn't off to any pretigious university (though he easily could have) but it surely something greater than the pettiness of formal academia. Where exactly had he gone to? It remained something of a mystery, a riddle he was still trying to piece out in the depths of his abandonment. Maybe behind enemy lines, doing work that required a certain stroke of mad genius. Or maybe he'd been a double agent all along, poisoning student bodies with wild ideas.
The only new boy of the lot in his dorm who merited any attention at all was the academy's second installment from the Pevensie family, who couldn't seem any less like his lionhearted bore of an upright, virtuous brother. Edmund seemed gripped by a peculiar snarl of identity crisis all jangled up in a barely suppressed pubscent cocktail. He seemed unconventionally wise in his pondering eyes and that made him intriguing, particularly when he occasionally piped up like someone who was also well beyond his years in this mind and as well as someone high above his social standing.
Ienzo didn't make efforts to cozy up to someone who seemed so volatile under the surface, because he couldn't afford to attach himself so early in the term. But there would be time for dreaded group projects to get to know him better, maybe. Or that casual literary society that met down in the village pub, which they'd carefully teased one another about sneaking off to after curfew, sometime. It was a testing of the waters that seemed more appetizing the closer he watched, whenever Edmund couldn't catch him looking.
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Thread Dos: The Jolly Good Private Academy Bedfellows
Date: 2016-11-23 08:55 am (UTC)Where/When: A Private Boys' Academy, 1940's England
Warnings: A slew of Boarding School Tropes, probably (Implied Fagging, Disciplinary, Peer Heirarchy) Underaged Smut
YIKES THERE'S JUST A LOT OF SETUP HERE, I'M SORRY
The term was shaping up to be considerably more hideous than last.
It wasn't even that he was in any position to be picked on, really, as the names of last year's graduates still held considerable weight, and Ienzo had been slavishly dilligent to a considerably tight ring of them. In fact, it was thoroughly unusual for a overly bright boy who passed entrance exams three years ahead of schedule to be treated as an equal among a cabal of senior students, when he certainly wasn't related by blood in any way, and was rumored to have lost both parents.
Ienzo might have been pecked at for his achievements if he'd chose to be precocious about them, but his calculated demeanor had pulled in even tighter and more cautious since the departure of his elder 'peers'. But a merciful administrator must have caught wind of trouble before summer holiday ended, because Ienzo found himself transferred to another dormitory entirely, and rooming with a fresh set of boys his "own age".
Their youth felt alarmingly alien to him. There were tears and fights and punishments inflicted on the entire dormitory forthe outbursts of one or two brats, and older students bullying them in line...
Ienzo sort of fell very aloof to it all, untouchable as he buried himself in his books, to lessons mismatched to the fellows he was rooming with, which was an added reason to be solitary. He didn't speak much, but when he did it was with all the quietly tamed authority of an adult, except on the very rare occasions when darkness winked sudden life into his eyes and something subversive crept its way past his lips, usually too subtley murmured as inward commentary for anyone to notice, but once or twice bringing a rowdy room around to dead silence and long, wary staring.
Then the new master of Religious Studies suggested to one of his blueblooded favorites that Ienzo ought to have his unruly bangs managed, which brought him into a freshly hellish, stonefaced war with an upper year who regularly pinned him down whenever he could with a visciously pointy pair of steel shears, stealing forelocks one at a time, snip by snip. His hair looked more like an assymmetrical modernist mess by the day, but Ienzo staunchly refused to have it all set sensibly, glowering through the jagged ends.
(Braig told a thousand variations of how he lost an eye, absolutely none of them true, but those scissors were beginning to give Ienzo nightmares of becoming a bald cyclops in his own struggles.)
The trees shed their leaves prematurely too, this year, and the frost came unseasonably early. School blazers, doubled kneesocks and an old woodstove set at the opposite end of an institutional row of steel bunks didn't do much to stave off chill. Ienzo spent many nights fiercely lonely and fitfully awake, shifting his knees against the sheets to generate some friction. He missed Even's scoldings and Dilan's gruff pessimism, which had proven an unsual comfort in a backwards way. He missed having stalwart Aeleus to match stride with across campus, even if his firm imprint on the memories of most upper years still proved a salvation from getting kicked around and spat on.
But most of all he missed their enigmatic ringleader's bed, and warm whispers against his ears of nihilistic philosophies born from parts of the world thought thoroughly unsavoury. Stuff that made his mind feel as if it might explode out his ears while his heart hammered and swelled and made his whole body ache with queerest wanting. No one had even heard from him since graduation day. He wasn't off to any pretigious university (though he easily could have) but it surely something greater than the pettiness of formal academia. Where exactly had he gone to? It remained something of a mystery, a riddle he was still trying to piece out in the depths of his abandonment. Maybe behind enemy lines, doing work that required a certain stroke of mad genius. Or maybe he'd been a double agent all along, poisoning student bodies with wild ideas.
The only new boy of the lot in his dorm who merited any attention at all was the academy's second installment from the Pevensie family, who couldn't seem any less like his lionhearted bore of an upright, virtuous brother. Edmund seemed gripped by a peculiar snarl of identity crisis all jangled up in a barely suppressed pubscent cocktail. He seemed unconventionally wise in his pondering eyes and that made him intriguing, particularly when he occasionally piped up like someone who was also well beyond his years in this mind and as well as someone high above his social standing.
Ienzo didn't make efforts to cozy up to someone who seemed so volatile under the surface, because he couldn't afford to attach himself so early in the term. But there would be time for dreaded group projects to get to know him better, maybe. Or that casual literary society that met down in the village pub, which they'd carefully teased one another about sneaking off to after curfew, sometime. It was a testing of the waters that seemed more appetizing the closer he watched, whenever Edmund couldn't catch him looking.