A Few Self-Indulgent Scenes with Edmund

[illicitresearch]

Who: Zexion & Edmund Pevensie
Where/When: City of Ariel (Pre-Reboot), A Fussy "Prudish" Tearoom on a Chilly Late Afternoon
Warnings: Foodporn, Footsie, All that underaged sex good stuff that comes from a heavily aphro'd game context.


The end of Zexion's nose was still a fierce shade of pink by the time he finally shed his outer layers and unwound his scarf, and it still felt colder than the rest of his face, prompting the habitual rubbing between service as the tea parlous maids bustled about, shooting disapproving looks and tutting and gaping in wide-eyed disapproval at couples fondling each other beneath the twee tables as if that were actually a scandalous offense.

It was all tongue-in-cheek play, of course, and that in itself was marvelous people-watching entertainment, if not for the spoils of his own present company. Upon Edmund's arrival, he held up his own shrunken cup from its saucer with sly guilt playing at the corners of his mouth, along with a rich brown smear that he licked away with far less sublety than was proper, shrugging.

"I know, I know, skipping tea for drinking chocolate's a right punishable offense by your sensibilities,"  He surrendered, easing his shoulderblades back against the parlour chair and setting his cup back down. "But alas, it tempted me, I simply couldn't help myself."

The array of sweets seemed unfairly delectable today too, three tiers of crispy, fudgey and chewy, ganache truffles oozing caramel and delicately half-dipped rolled wafers, rich two-bite black forest cakes and other attractive morsels rolled in crushed nuts and candied peel.

Comments

[illicitresearch]

"You've had a brother to look out for you, haven't you?" Ienzo protests, folding his arms. His pout is the kind of petulance that usually gets wipe off after the first few months of jeering, except Ienzo's turned it into the sort of full mouthed, surly, bow-lipped thing that all jaded tarts wear after they become immune to being called spoiled crybabies.

Edmund's taking his sweet time with the lock, which probably would be over and done with now if he weren't flapping his mouth.

"I just told you I didn't want an archrival!" The boy hisses hotly, annoyed above all that he'd only been half-listened to. That, or he could only handle sarcasm from certain sources, and Pevensie wasn't one of those trusted wellsprings yet.

A bit tricky to snitch to someone who's made themselves scarce he thinks despairingly, and lapses into a stony quiet while Edmund continues to struggle with the pin. At this rate there won't be any warning nip for them at all, and they'll both return to the dormitories feeling like fools, and Ienzo won't feel particularly guilty about it for setting him to the task, either. It's not his fault Ed's a lousy thief.

"What help would you have me be?" He tsks eventually, looking more bored and restless than ready to burst into laughter. "Can't do it? Want me to run and get my kit?"

[just_edmund]

"We weren't always in the same school," Edmund points out, huffing in between jiggles. He's not trying to delay this - why would he? - he's the one who would get caught red-handed, if any of this goes south. He's just - well - it's been a long time! He does need practice, and it's embarrassing but there it is. He's not born good at everything. He's not Peter. "That's where the problem started, in fact. Whenever he wasn't there to look after me...well, you see how well it's worked out without him here."

Not disastrously, but there's no glory to be had for a lad who doesn't put up a good fight now that his bellicose brother is not there to jump into a brawl, no choice but to follow him into it.

"I know." It's half-chuckled, hearing the heat of frustration in the protest. "You will have to give us a better title, once the day is done."

The silence helps, and he attacks the fourth key-pin at last with a sigh of relief. He can make this work. "I can do it, if you just shut up and let me be for a moment. Here...it's just...ergh go in, damnit all...there!"

With a flourish of pride that gives way to a flush of self-consciousness, he picks the final lock and it springs open with a groaning sag. He pushes the door open. "Lecture unnecessary, Mr. Buckwald. But if there's a lock on the cabinet...you're the one to have at it. Fair's fair."

[illicitresearch]

A better title than archrivals, hm. Ienzo stares out dreamily past the window at the end of the hall, watching over the various sporting clubs at practice, and recalls very late night whispers exchanged where he and his senior mates were all given better monikers. Schemer, he was called then, and this was really quite the juvenile scheme by comparison.

But there was another boy here with him now, for better or worse. The drink might make him merry, if not cleverer with pins.

At last the lock was sprung, and there was really no time for celebrations till they'd slipped inside. Throwing one last glance down the hall, he waited till Edmund had stepped inside, giving the doorknob an extra polishing with his own hanky, then followed after with delicate care in shutting the door behind them.

The history lecturer's office was eccentric, full of decorative odds and ends, cultural artefacts, ships in bottles, piles upon piles of unsorted books. Wilkes wasn't particularly tidy in his habits, and a bit of a doddering pack rat which made him rather easy to filch from, once you could get past the door. Ienzo pulled the shade down at the window, tugged the green-shaded library lamp on at his desk, and let his eyes do a quick pass over the room to see what had changed since the last time he'd been in here. He brought the chair over and stepped around to a certain relic of a powdered wig up on a high bookshelf, perched crookedly on a marble bust.

He extracted a much better shifty pick and wrench from its depths with a grin, hopping down with a sly wink at Edmund, and then crossed to the cupboard, which was no more or less antique than anything else in the office.

"You were saying then, about Wilkes and his societies?" He prompted helpfully, settling crosslegged on the floor as he set to work on the tarnished keyhole. He screwed up his tongue in the corner of his mouth- like the 'uncle' who'd shown him had always done, let his eyes slide far left, and listened- a stupid trick, really, a conman's theatrics, but having ritual always helps. In a moment there's a click, and the cabinet swings open.

"Ah, there's not much left..." Ienzo shoulders sag in disappointment, just long enough to get Edmund peering over his shoulder in worry, so that he can laugh like a tenor bell and then dutifully pass two near-full glass bottles off.

[just_edmund]

Edmund watches him with a mixture of curiosity and mild suspicion, having looked his fill around the room and finding it very much as he'd expect Wilkes's office to look. Of far more pedagogical interest was the sure way Ienzo fetches his tools of the trade from the most unpromising of places. His eyes widen a little when he catches the wink. "You've done this before," he says, rather unnecessarily, but the obvious was too intriguing not to point out. "How...quaint."

So much for Ienzo using him to get into the office. He's surprised those notes haven't already been thoroughly ransacked to the point of making any information that could possibly pumped from him completely obsolete.

Well, in for a penny...

"I suppose there's nothing you couldn't unearth from someone willing to loosen his lips - it's all rumours, you know, but ones that everybody seems to know - so if there's any truth to be found, it will be in this room." Edmund is rather reassuring himself that he's not doing any harm in talking to Ienzo about the matter - no more harm than anyone else less circumspect might do. But first things first.

"Already been hitting it up? Thought you wanted to leave the old boy some grog to souse his worries away." He does peer a bit glumly around to get a view of the situation, before the laughter wafts over him and he grins. "Point, Buckwald." He isn't too buttoned up to laugh at himself when he takes things too seriously sometimes. "A prank within a prank. Cleverly done."

He accepts one of the proffered bottles with a gracious nod of the head. "Now, shall we each tipple off one, to even things out?" The bottle unstoppered, he sniffs appraisingly at it. "I rather wonder, that you hadn't heard a whiff already of our esteemed host's Freemasonery. But there are whispers of darker ones than that, even."

[illicitresearch]

"Not since last spring term." He admits bashfully with a wag of his head, a smile crossing his usually-severe face, which seems both boyish and a bit forlorn. Quaint? Was it? "(Not on my own.)" Ienzo added, fidgeting with the wig pin fashioned into a sturdier pick. "I'd hoped he'd hadn't moved around too much?"

"If there's any truth to be found, we could be here all evening." Because there's certainly quite a bit stacked up all about here for hard evidence to get utterly lost in the shuffle. Idly, he wonders if old Wilkes had kept any of his comrades' final essays in one of the filing cabinets.

Edmund let himself be pranked with a lot less entertainingly furious reactions as Even often had. But it was good to know his ease with it, not that he'd ever taken his new schoolmate for entirely humorless?

He unstoppers the second bottle with a fierce blink and flaring of his nostrils- the burn of alcohol wasn't something he'd ever quite learned to enjoy, and Wilkes' homebrew was stronger stuff by far than tavern ale or hard cider, deceptively sweet with a searing, medicinal burn down the throat. Braig used to take it straight, from a flask, and came here to replenish it often enough that Wilkes had to have known about the casual theft, somehow? Yet he'd never changed the hiding spot, or let it run dry. Ienzo had only ever sipped on it diluted before, tipped helpfully into his tea when his nerves were run down and seasonal sniffles threatened to leave him bedridden.

Not yet so convivial as to rally up a toast, or clink their bottles in cheers, he's the first to set his lips to the shrub and try a swallow, his mouth is full and his nostrils on fire by the time that Edmund's mentioning rumors of Illuminati, and because he has something on the tip of his tongue to say he hurries it, gulping and then doubling forward with a hand clapped over his mouth, muffling a ragged coughing fit.

So much for seeming shrewd and impressive, worldly wise.

With watering eyes ad warming cheeks, Ienzo's lungs finally manage to accept that the swallow had indeed gone down the right pipe after all.

"Oh, well certainly he has all the strange odds and ends, curio obsessions, that might lead one to believe he might belong to some fraternal order," he croaks, leaning forward to intimate in a wilder-eyed whisper. "(he's even got a weird ivory phallus around here somewhere- I've seen it, a big well-polished thing with bollocks attached! Dilan thinks he nicked it from a tribe in equatorial Africa.)" Sitting back, Ienzo leans his shoulder against the cabinet door. "The way you brought it up, it sounded like someone found convincing proof.in his paperwork."

He squints after a moment, tongue till swirling round his mouth to contemplate the flavor left in his mouth- despite its strength, the aftertaste was delightful, a little bit candied and herbal. "...but the professor doesn't exactly seem the type to fraternize much, does he?"

[just_edmund]

Settling in a heap beside the other boy, Edmund eyes him curiously, both for that smile and the way he seemed rather homesick for his old set. It was a different side of him than he'd seen before. He decides he liked the effect of the smile on Ienzo's face. "We might have to shake off the dust a bit, true. But Cerberus won't be back for a while, eh?"

He's just as curious at the way his compatriot sniffs with much more acumen than he does, apparently sensitive to even the smell of it. The taste, then...he halts for a moment to simply watch in amusement as Ienzo nearly chokes on the stuff. And then, why, he can't help it; he bursts into laughter, his own features more boyish and like his own age in the lightness of his broad grin. "Careful there," he says good-naturedly, slapping Ienzo on the back. "Best try the esophagus instead. Better than the old windpipe."

He raises his own phial and tastes a small bit before deciding that it's considerably easier going down than the Dwarfs' summer ales, and takes a nice-sized quaff to wash the first gulp down with. No sting or splutter here. (Was he about to live up to Ienzo's first impressions of him as a confirmed dipso?)

"Indeed, I've been longing to take a peek into those cabinets..." Companionably, Edmund leans forward when Ienzo does. The third sip does get a little dicey as weird ivory phalluses come into play, but he manages it manfully and swallows with no more than a slight cough. "Is that so? How...un-Victorian of him."

That he didn't have any more proof seemed a disappointment. He shrugs and tries to look arch. "Perhaps we'll be the first to bring the damning evidence to light. I hinted at mere rumours, you will recall." He presses his tongue to his bottom lip, catching the drops there. He should really try to savour this. "Hmm, and what exactly do you mean by fraternize?" His other brow joins its mate in consideration of the apparently well-fraternized youth tippling next to him.

[illicitresearch]

"We have time to spare." Ienzo agrees, rather relaxed now that they're here behind closed doors, with the shade drawn and the desk lamp casting low, greenish light about the office. It feels like the world's grown more intimate and more nostalgic, here on the floor in front of Wilkes' cabinet.

Even the convival slap on the back reminds him of his older friends, picking on him just a little, ruffling his hair or shoving him about (but never too much- a look from Aeleus or a sharper, silencing word from Lord Ansem's first adopted son kept him safe from rough handling). The sound of laughter ringing across the ground and in the halls was something he'd been feeling contemptuous out this term, but when Edmund sniggers at his misfortunate gulp, there's friendliness to it that makes him smile back shyly, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his blazer.

"I told you, it's miles more efficient than what they'll let college boys toss back in the pub." He coughed, wishing he had a glass of water to gulp down and ease the warmth pooling in his belly, absorbing swiftly. It used to take only a few minutes to feel lightheaded and skin-fuzzed, when they let him try a toddy. Surely a few seasons hasn't improved his tolerance that much. But Pevensie's already blown ahead of him into a third swallow, and so he feels obliged to keep pace.

"The Ancients had all kinds of funny stuff like that?" The boy declares loftily, shrugging up one shoulder, trying to play casual. "I mean, look at the Classics, even, and they're none so prudish about it? Look at the things they painted on urns! It was downright respectable to have... dionyesian revels, erastes, things like that." He babbles quickly, not breaching the subject delicately so much as dashing across it as if it were a bed of hot coals- maybe even with a little too much enthusiasm, given his nervous awareness of rumors and suspicions.

Ienzo cleared his throat again, and set the bottle down between his folded legs.

"You know, ah... get on with his colleagues?" He waved his hand in indication of the office and its haphazard clutter- Professor Wilkes was a bit of an old oddball, even to the rest of faculty. "Can you imagine him in a secret society? I mean, I guess if they're also all magpie lunatics, the freemasons, but aren't they supposed to be the ones really puppeteering the whole world from the shadows?"

"Wilkes doesn't seem like that. Not unless all of this is a really swell front."

[just_edmund]

"Not to mention, rather lighter on the wallet." This was...surprisingly nice. Not just the free liquor, but the combination of company and harmless lark. It had been quite a while since he'd done anything like this, just for the fun of it. Something inside him begins to ease, infinitesimally. Edmund finds a more comfortable spot for his shoulders against the side edge of the cabinet, his grin both knowing and kindly at his lightweight new chum.

His amusement only grew as Ienzo lectured him on the lasciviousness of the Ancients and Classics. He could barely hold back the quirk of lips as he replies flippantly. "Why certainly...we all know what the Satyrs and Fauns were really up to. When the gods themselves lead the revels and rivers of wine, why, what can we mere mortals do but follow in their prancing footsteps? Not just respectful, but worshipful."

His gaze settles with some curiosity on his hot-and-cold companion, full of fire one moment about erastes and the grand Hellenestic phallic tradition, and primly sedate the next. Just what did happen behind the doors of that mysterious black-coated set? And just where did Ienzo's place fall in the ranks of so many older, worldly fellows?

"Certainly, he doesn't strike me as the urbane harbinger of history," and Edmund takes another contemplative sip, rolling the sweet-strong liquid around in his mouth a second or two. He waves his hand. "But then, is anybody, really? We are all puppets, to some degree or other. No man's destiny is truly his own." He offers a careless grin at his own philosophical waxing and leans in with a little shake of chin. "You must promise not to turn me in for a Calvinist. Add it to the list of dangerous thoughts I indulge in."

Casually, he brushes up against Ienzo's shoulder and doesn't pull away. "In truth, there were some who thought your friends might be more of that sort than Wilkes. The Illuminati was a popular theory...but I thought it just as likely that the bunch of you might have invented a secret society all your own." His glances at Ienzo are only peripheral now. "Speaking of swell fronts. Some of them were rather old to be in sixth form, weren't they?"

[illicitresearch]

"If I were pissing my patron's money away down at the pub," Ienzo reasons, with a practiced talent for breezy persuasion, "I think he might be a little more upset with me than he would if he knew I'd taken a dram of friendly mischief on school grounds... and in the safety of our esteemed professor's offices!" He sneered in mock-jovially, lifting his bottle to the health of old Wilkes and his mam, "Surrounded by carefully curated artifacts to contemplate with our well-lubricated minds."

See? He was quite prepared to justify their thievery as innocently as possible, if landed themselves in a little trouble. Ansem knew he was lonesome this term, would pity them and pardon any serious probations, even if letters found their way home.

They'd gotten away with murder, engaging the doddering old lord's soft side for educating bright boys of terrible misfortune. Ienzo was more than comfortable, taking advantage of that by now.

He listened to Edmund speak of revels and rivers, smirking because the fellow really did sound like a praticed lush. "You worship often, eh?" Ienzo grins, imitating his swirling sip with puckered lips and a rolling tougue. It probably looked a little lewd.

Then he sniggered, and forced another swallow instead of sputtering at hearing Edmund confess to Calvanist doctrines.

"Dangerous thoughts?" He purred, lolling his head rather close to their touching shoulders and watching him through upturned eyes and oddly feathery lashes, coy at all the insinuation. "Aw, I'm sure they're mostly harmless? You only sound like you've entertained one too many gossipy tart's conspiracy theories, Pevensie."

His face falls into it's regular sullen pout, as he contemplates light and liquid through the bottle, and how much he'll need to claw his way through this particular subject.

"What's it worth to you?" Ienzo asks, heavy lidded, slumping himself a little against Edmund's shoulder with a lean of his head that's not unlike a nuzzle "I'm rather young, I'm told? So if you're asking me, a scholar's ready to start or quit studies whenever he's ready." His voice has gone lofty, lilted, toying around in the upper part of his register that he hasn't quite grown out of completely. "The others had endowed research to finish, and Lord Ansem invited us to study here under his scholarship for as long as we wished. It's a very nasty time to be out in the world, you understand?"

[just_edmund]

"Your patron?" Edmund lifts his eyebrows in a highly interested tilt. This was the first he'd ever heard of it, for Ienzo, but then he hadn't heard him talk of parents, either. "He must be a most liberal and forward-thinking one, to sanction this adventure. Certainly I'd like for none of this to reach my mum's ears...or Peter's." He grinned conspiratorially. "They wouldn't take so progressive a view of it as your patron."

It was good to know that at least one of them had an advocate should they get into hot water, but he'd be more comfortable knowing Ienzo's benefactor was, ahem, someone with some sway, enough to get the both of them out of expulsion.

"Mm, not often, not anymore." He contemplates the provocative swirl of Ienzo's lips and tongue with a pensive air. Wine was not the only pleasure he abstained from these days. "I was perhaps meant for more Classical times, myself." A strand of soft hair tickles his neck, not his own barely contained curls but a curiously shagged, straight wisp. He cants both shoulder and arm against Ienzo's lolling weight, curiously pleased by the closeness of it. "Perhaps I have been too much taken in by the nothings of the gossip-mongers. But if there's smoke, it's best not to be caught in the fire yourself, eh?"

Was that...a whine he heard in Ienzo's voice? Edmund shakes his head, lets the rather young man lean against him with a steadiness himself that suggested he was only feeling the tip of his tipple thus far. "Certainly, nobody's asking you to stand trial for your fellow scholars' endeavors," he soothes, a hand falling to Ienzo's thigh and patting him gently. "I was only repeating what I'd heard. But you must have learned a great deal, hanging around them for those terms. Endowments are not easy to come by." Lord Ansem. Was that Ienzo's mysterious patron? He files the name away. There would be plenty of time to research later.

[illicitresearch]

"Forive me, that fell out so presumptuous-sounding," Ienzo swiftly amends, pricking a pin into his own ballooning hubris before Edmund can question his choice of words with too much scrutiny. "...but don't go spoiling the alliteration for us now. His lordship is my legal guardian, technically, until I've come of age." (Unless he's eventually adopted into the noble family, expected to inherit, like Ansem's other star-protege. But for the time being he remains the last Buckwald, an innocuously charming middle class name for a scholarship boy.)

Sometimes he wondered if the need for familial approval would have been any different, if he actually had family left. Ienzo only cared just enough about Ansem's opinion of him to do all the things necessary to remain in his good graces, but any love for the man who'd been his tutor was lost somewhere along with the awareness that other people thought him unfairly spoiled, and the realization that Ansem's other, older scholars flouted the independance of their inteligence and abused their privledges regularly. If Ienzo had any choice about being orphaned, he'd have gladly taken his parents back, sooner than coming into such Dickensian Great Expectations.

"They're always saying he's the one on the board of trustees with an optimistic eye on growing the college, both feet in the future, while the others cling stubbornly to traditions." Ienzo said anyway, proud to have a dreamer-doer of a benefactor that fancied himself a little wiser than the other rich old geezers that sat the board. "That sounds fairly progressive to me?"

Though his chosen successor thought miles and miles ahead of him, and Ienzo's real loyalty had been forged in ways meant for more Classical times, as well.

And although the memory of that enigmatic young man lingered under Ienzo's skin like a ghost, especially when he was cold and restless in the middle ofthe night, the companionable weight of Pevensie's body felt warm right now, and more comforting than anything he'd allowed himself in months. The shape of Edmund's hand felt new, but its bolder placement at Ienzo's thigh didn't make him tense or suddenly shy.

"I have learned more than I expect to, without them." He readily admits, sighing at how dull his lessons had become on their own. There was always diversion to be found in books, but no one around to be as rigorous in their dissection of them.

Ienzo nibbles at his inner lip, and wonders how he ought to address endowments and smoke and fire, satyrs and fauns, Edmund's curious nudgings around the mysteries of his extracirrcular activity. "You're just full of double entendre this evening." He eventually observes, eyes falling to the patting hand that's resting dangerously close to stroking zones that could prove troublesome for his trousers.

Then there's the thorniest rumor, of them all the one he hoped was only figure of speech, narrowing his eyes.

"Who said anything to you about standing trial?" he asks cautiously, in a lower and steely voice.

[just_edmund]

Edmund looks much less put-out by Ienzo's name-dropping of patrons and grants than curious, eager for any of the little personal tidbits that his new acquaintance has guarded so carefully until now. "How fortunate for you," he comments smoothly, nodding in sympathetic approval. "You must have been very glad to have procured such a generous and well-situated guardian. Such things can go awry so easily."

He's just dying to ask more, but doesn't want to shut down the fount of confession that the slightly inebriated Ienzo has become, and so instead he samples more from his own phial, hoping to encourage a camaraderie of continued effusive inebriation.

He wasn't sure at all what he was doing, putting his hand on Ienzo's thigh and even leaving it there when his companionable pat there was well completed, but it seemed churlish to pull back once he was in for a penny, and so Edmund goes in for the full pound. "You are a fine scholar in your own right," he comments, an absent path traced by his thumb along the course of a thigh. "You need not depend on their prowess to make a name for yourself?"

A contemplative hmph. "Am I?" His not-so-coy toyings had not fallen on deaf ears, it seemed. Edmund did not bother to blush for it. "Damn, and I was going for subtle there." His sly tone implies he's poking as much fun at himself as anyone. Oh, how fun it would be if Ienzo was in on the joke of all his pseudo-Grecian Narnian exploits! Perhaps someday, if his companion proves a very reliable sort...

But for now, it seemed their connection was still suspect to suspicion, from what Edmund was not certain at all. Nonplussed, he blinks at the suddenly on-guard boy beside him, who resembled nothing so much as a grey little cat with its hackles up. "Easy," he replies, much as he would have soothed a castle Puss so, a hand raised and extended (thumb and palm carefully wrapped around the glass), the other still rubbing a smooth path across one leg. "Nobody said anything, to me or anyone I've heard. You have no cause to worry about that."

Even as he reassured, his mind was spinning with new implications. Illegal activity not just overlooked but even sponsored by a trustee of the college? How...interesting. Edmund leans confidentially against Ienzo's side. "Even if something odd were to come out, I would hardly trust the information spread by the rest of them. You're clearly not responsible for any of their work. If you're even carrying any of it out anymore. That was the only thing I was worried about, coming here, you know?" He chances a peek between sips. "That was before I knew you came here on the regular, of course."

[illicitresearch]

"I know the other boys resent me for it, and I'll never be more than a nobody to most of them," Ienzo admitted sourly, prepared to be a disliked scholarship boy, but not for Edmund to point out how lucky he'd been, that his parents had made connections before they'd passed, that Lord Ansem knew about and fostered his early literacy. It was something of a touchy subject. "But I don't care, I'm here to get an education, not impress them."

Whether or not it mattered if he'd impressed Edmund was a a different matter, but the touch at his thigh was ticklish and warming as it neared the inner seam of his trousers, made his blood race and pool up embarrassingly in his lap. He squirmed a little, and hoped they'd both just ignore it for now.

"Nor to make a name for myself! Who said I was looking for renoun?" He flustered, just as much for being complimented for his smarts in the same breath that he'd been accused of trying to ride on coattails. "It's just that they introduced me to more exciting material than we'd ever cover at our level..."

Theoretical books in particular. He missed lying awake, fancying themselves sophists, muttering dialouges to each other till the dawning skies turned from dark to paler shades of blue.

"Subtle as a freight whistle." The boy tsked, shaking his head and setting his bottle aside, freeing up both arms to tuck them, crossed low, over his lap so the effects of Edmund's petting were a bit more well-hidden than his companion's words. "(But at least you don't coddle yourself under the desk in class, like Bertie Swarthmore.)" Ienzo noted viciously, the edge of a grin on his teeth. That had been the bigger scandal as of late, seeing the guest lecturer catch the poor bastard at it, then turn him loose to scrub his hands and report to the school chaplain, right in front of his peers.

"I told you, I haven't been in here since last spring!" He protested, convenienty glossing over any mention of carrying any kind of furthered research out. That would open a whole nest of troublesome questioning. "And it was Braig who took a nip often! I didn't carry out much beyond keeping watch for the groundsman."

And learning to lockpick, eventually.

[just_edmund]

What was possessing him? Making free with Ienzo's lap while they bandied about uncomfortable topics was hardly a deliberate plan; he so rarely dallied at all with fellow students that this was truly an anomaly, perhaps encouraged by the warmth of the cordial burning a kindly fire in the pit of his belly. Yes, he'd stick with that theory.

"Pooh, who gives two hoots about the other fellows? I certainly don't. I'd like to make a good enough impression on the profs to earn a few letters of recommendation, but renown in sixth form is hardly worth strutting about." Edmund waggled a heavy eyebrow in Ienzo's direction. "Exciting material, eh? I'm intrigued. Help a chap out and lend me something really juicy for a change."

He only half-smothered a knowing grin, spotting the modest but ineffectual attempts to hide the swell that would not have been so obvious if Ienzo hadn't drawn attention to it. "Heaven forbid," and Edmund adopted a shocked air of wide-eyed naivety. "I'm a well-bred Libertine. There are limits, after all. Self-abuse in rhetorics is well beyond my capacity to indulge, or stoop." A wandering hand on the floor of a well-stocked office, on the other hand, was just the right sort of stooping...

Might as well take another nip himself. He was outpacing Ienzo by now, but only half-feeling the effects so far. Still sharp enough to notice the neat omission of his curious prodding at the most relevant issue. No answer was going to be forthcoming about that, hmm? Telling. Edmund raised the other brow. "Oh, I assumed the majority of your group's research was carried out somewhere else than here. And I'm sure you were a very fine lookout for your drunkard friend. But you are far too comfortable a floor cushion to relinquish to watch duty now."

Half-draping against the slight but soft frame next to him, he wound a circuitous path up Ienzo's thigh to a hip, rounding its curve almost absently. "Tell me, what excites you now, what keeps you up at night with ideas too dangerous to breath in the company of your fellow students? Whisper them in my ear, I shan't tell." His head drooped confidentially against Zexion's, the soft curls tickling his neck where the collar of his shirt let pale skin peep through.

[illicitresearch]

Pevensie's advances, forward as they were, were making him positively miserable with melancholy. By the time the self-professed Libertine had a hand at his hip and a husky whisper in his ear, Ienzo was seriously considering resigning himself to the folly of having a confidante and a night-murmurer again, maybe, if this was really so much a bid for a go at his bedclothes as it seemed.

"Ah, he took all his best books with him, I'm afraid?" The sullen catamite frowned balefully, staring self-pityingly at his abandoned bottle for a long moment before reclaiming it for a deliberate, dramatic swig, as if having abruptly decided this will only come out in full if he's roaringly inebriated, and has just decided to go all in.

"I've been lonely for the lack of them." He announced, and drank deep. His cheeks pulled in puckered as he tipped the bottle back and gulped, sealing his lips over its mouth and finally plugging the hole with his tongue when it was time to tilt the bottle back down and swallow, having vacuum-sucked so much air before he'd detached himself that it made a resounding thunk of released pressure in the glass, when he did.

He coughed and blinked and hoped his erection would fold over and die in the time it took to become a less comfortable floor cushion.

"So you really must know, huh? Well, their research is concluded here." Ienzo insisted, with a tone of decided finality. "Most of it's been co-opted and classified, now, anyway, so I'm not supposed to talk about it with anyone."

That was the last he'd heard, at least, right around the time he'd made his clean break from the old hall. Swapping houses felt a little bit like going into some manner of witness protection. Aeleus was always clever with puzzles and ciphers, and his very last letter had been difficult.

"(I think they're working in the MI-13.)" He secreted, in the sort of wary whisper that spoke volumes for his own uncertainty. His schoolfellows had graduated, than seemingly up and vanished altogether.

"They entertained some... fairly radical ideas, on and off?" His tongue felt numb from the shrub, but that didn't stop him from talking in a flustered flurry once the snowball started racing rapidly downhill. Every mouthful a betrayal. "Emptying the self, emotional suppression, sometimes we spoke about connecting with parallel worlds and altering timelines, wilder things like that?" Ienzo flushed in the ears, almost embarassed to admit it. "A mix of psychology and pseudo-science."

He spoke like a man in his golden years fondly recounting his schooldays, not a child revisiting the adventures of last term. "Xeha was always reading his weird periodicals, two steps away from what some of them called batty mysticism behind his back," Ienzo bowed his head, realizing he'd let a dangerously intimate name slip, along with a truth that hid his infatuation by laughing their leader off as a mad occultist. "But Dilan reigned him in and Aeleus kept him grounded, and Even tried to wrangle all their hypothetical abstracts with... scientific procedure that wouldn't ever pass the ethics committee."

His chest heaved weakly with a sputter of nervous, pent-up laughter. He put down the bottle shakily and covered his face with his hand.

"Thats where most of the rumors come from." He groaned, rubbing over the sockets of his eyes and feeling the heavy warmth trickling through his limbs now. "They actually submitted a bunch of papers that raised eyebrows all around. (And those were the tame ones, that got published.)" The boy added flatly, before reeling himself back into weary composure and slumping into Edmund's side with a yawn.

"Anyway, traumatic memories and amnesia recovery is going to be an important field of study, for our generation."

A sobering thought, but one that really isn't going to help Ienzo now, sighing heartsick as he curls up broodily against his fellow scholar, gut burning in alarm for all the fermented apples that it's just been dowsed in.

"What keeps me up at night are all the questions we never got around to answering."

[just_edmund]

The sudden swing towards the melancholic and dour caught Edmund off-guard. He wondered belatedly if Ienzo was the morose sort of drunk. Maybe it was just the bent of their conversation that was pulling out the more glum feelings he'd apparently been storing up for a while.

"Of course - you lot were thick as thieves. I'd miss friends so dear too." It was hard not to feel for the lonely young scholar left behind by his much-admired, much-older companions. Edmund traced a hand more comforting than ribald around the lower curve of Ienzo's back, stroking there and nodding in sympathy as he heard him out, There was so much locked up in that buttoned-up, enigmatic youth, and it seemed apple cordial was one well-fitted key to his confidences.

He plied in soothing with thumb and three fingers splayed across the clothed bump of sacrum. "The things we don't know and can't explain are always the most fascinating. Little wonder that they intrigued your colleagues, however questionable the means they took in pursuit. I would like very much to read the published papers. The unpublished ones must be hard to come by." Quietly, he filed away the intriguing names for further investigation at a later time.

Such a heavy sigh, for one so young and studied. He looked wryly at Ienzo, burrowed into his side, and pressed his arm in rather kindly fashion around him, fingertips trickling over one jutting ilium. "You took me very literally. But you do toss and turn some nights, don't you? I've heard rustling from your bunk, terribly late, I suppose ruminating on all those unanswered questions and metaphysical dilemmas..."

For surely, none of those rustlings could have been anything more corporeal than the erudite ponderings of pseudo-scientific research?

Edmund hummed in musing himself. "Perhaps there are no answers easily achieved for the rest of them, but I've never thought mattresses that hard were conducive to meditation. In any case, you know what they say about two heads." More entendre? Perish the thought. He tucked his own bottle between his legs (where the companionable touches had begun to warm but not yet firm) and curled his other hand around the top of Ienzo's head against his shoulder. "You've borne all these thoughts by yourself for months. You needn't be entirely alone, you know."

[illicitresearch]

(Or just plain thieves, if their raiding of Wilkes' liquor cabinet is any indication.)

Edmund kept holding him, touching him, petting in ways that made him yearn in ways he hadn't bothered to over the past few monastic months of rote latin memorization, dourly and dilligently. The adolescent aches and pains that once had a suitor to rub out its misery nightly began to stir again under a wandering hand, his spine stretching and twisting, body wriggling closer to better accomodate a stroking hand beneath his blazer. Boys more concerned with their propriety would have something to say, about a hand that strayed near the top of their buttocks for too long.

Instead, Ienzo nestled in quite cozily beside him, drowsy-eyed. Edmund's lap was looking more and more inviting.

"My heart is sick." The boy said softly, the kind of self-diagnosis that was a little bit ashamed for letting himself become so attached, and to openly pine with such abandon after just a few swigs. There was no correcting himself now. No cure.

"And the bunks are like sleeping on rocks, in our hall." He grumbled, in a voice so flat and low that it croaked past his lips. "It's true, I'm not the only one who has trouble getting some shut eye?" If a witness to his insomnia is any indication.

He's less sure what to make of Edmund's continued insinuation, but '...better than one' tiredly echoes past his lips anyway, bowing his head against the consoling hand. Having his scalp rubbed had always comforted him.

"When I go home for Winter Holiday, I can bring back copies of the journals that printed them, if you're really that curious?" He offers. Strangely enough, as if to distance themselves from it, the school hadn't kept that publication shelved for student access. But Ansem certainly had it hardbacked in his study. That could be pinched easily enough.

"Thanks." Ienzo added, after a longer pause. "I really thought I'd lost myself completely, this term."

[just_edmund]

Something lonely and yearning stirred in Edmund in congruence. It was a feeling he was used to pushing down deep, for it served no purpose here where an intimacy with anyone was a dangerous, useless thing. But the pliant drape of Ienzo's body, the whispered confessions, needled at him that his own words might turn very well on himself. You needn't be entirely alone.

"Then be kind to it," he replied simply, a hand passing over Ienzo's slight chest. "As you would be to your body." Whether or not there was a cure for it wasn't the point. Whatever troubled this boy, it weighed heavy enough on him to keep him up at night. It wasn't fair for him to bear all the burden of those unanswered questions alone.

His flush betrayed him when insinuations were turned his way suddenly. Edmund looked away, pointedly. "They're just nightmares," he said, pushing down the rise of panic. He had no idea what he'd cried out in his sleep, that Ienzo might have heard. "A bad supper can do that to a fellow. Or a lumpy rock of a bed."

Hoping for distraction, he slid his fingers through the curiously silky spiked locks. Ienzo really didn't mind this touch, did he? "I wouldn't turn down that offer. If it isn't any bother." Till then, he would just have to angle for some oral recitation of those dangerous musings. If he could manage it without adding to Ienzo's case of heartsickness.

"Lost yourself?" Edmund pressed his lips together thoughtfully. The wriggling of back and thighs under his fingers was not the resistance of a frigid tarte nor a shy retreating virgin. There was another pause as he weighed his probable success and, finally, went with his gut. He laid the bottle to one side, out of the way, and reached for Ienzo. His hands took hold of gracefully flared hips and drew them, not inescapably, towards his lap.

"I don't mean anything by this," he murmured, soothing, almost apologetic. "I just thought you might...miss this. Maybe." He didn't have any real evidence, only suspicions, assumptions, and hunches to go off of. But the way Ienzo had spoken so adoringly of his older chums...

[illicitresearch]

It was a piece of advice kindly meant, but poorly recieved, especially as Edmund laid a hand over his heart. Ienzo's lungs emptied, dry, shuddering heave of a sound, and he bowed his head, shaking it, more than a bit ashamed of himself and his bitterness. How readily he was about to betray secrets to a boy he still barely knew. That he'd courted for a little camaradie on a passing whim. This was happening so quickly, so fast, his adolescent miseries bubbling up to the surface.

"I hardly sleep, barely eat..." Indeed, what was good supper from a bad one anymore, when you weren't hurrying it down and shoving extra breadrolls in your pockets and excusing yourself to join the upper years at their projects? What was real satiation, if not a picnic in Master Ansem's attic in the summer rain, feasting on a spread of biscuits, cheese, and apples nicked from the parlour fruit bowl, shaved so carefully to crisp slices with a pocket knife and pressed imploringly against his lips.

What was a good shower anymore, for that matter, under the dormitory's squeaky, lukewarm taps, when the fagging masters ducked in past the curtain, backed you against the tile and siezed your prick while laughing and called you a wasted little Tart, instead of sidling up against you smoothly from behind with a washcloth already lathered in french-milled lavender soap? There were reasons he sometimes let himself go filthy until the smell was almost noticeable, and rinsed out his bangs over the sink, fully clothed, spinning toward the doorway with the ends sopping and spraying outward whenever someone else ducked into the washroom.

"What makes you think I've been kind to my body?" Ienzo sneered, despite every movement right now, which seemed a self-indulgence for the sake of being touched. He thought nothing less of Edmund, for his nightmares, but hated when it meant he couldn't creep off somewhere else in the middle of the night, to pace out his insomnia down the halls after lights out.

But how could he resent a boy who pulled him gently in between his thighs without any malice meant by it, with something like tender sympathy, well-meaning, and probably misplaced? He found he couldn't lean up on Edmund's chest and feel wholly supported, nor give himself entirely to straddling a lap he was a little too well-matched in size for, to feel small and slight and cherished in.

His face reddened. He did miss this. He missed it too much to move away, but it smelled wrong, and it felt wrong, but the wrongness was all in the lack of their familiarity... not in the idea of having another boy hold him, itself. It made him feel knotted in the stomach, and traitorous.

"It's not the same." Ienzo said in a shrinking tone, curling his limbs toward the center of his body, and if to make himself physically smaller in Edmund's lap, equally apologetic. "You're not the same. I don't need a fraternity, I need... I miss-"

The evidence is in his trembling thighs and tangled tongue, having trouble with the inevitable confession.

"There's a very depraved sort of hunger in me, Edmund Pevensie." He finally whispers in exhasperation. "My body belongs to someone who's already left it behind, and I've neglected it to spite myself, for giving it away. Swear to me you won't breathe a word of this?" He looks back at Edmund with a one-eyed stare that begs to be permitted, despite pouring out the shameful truth. "The rumors are true- we were bedfellows here at school, he and I, and under our benefactor's roof. And I do miss it, I do. This place is hardly tolerable anymore."

[just_edmund]

For a moment, he was afraid Ienzo was going to be sick. No more cordial for him... And then he saw that the problem went farther than a few too many sips of fermented apples. Something was fundamentally, deeply wrong with him. Unhappiness was seeped into him like some wasting disease. Edmund wondered that he had covered it so well til then. Now that he saw it, it seemed strange to him that he hadn't noticed it before. Ienzo's efforts to hide had been effective.

Not this afternoon, though. The awkwardness was palpable, more than a little uncomfortable at the raw display of a malady he clearly had no part in. It was like - like seeing a family member naked, in pain; the mixture of wrongness and compassion twisted in his gut, and he had no outlet for it here. He frowned at the accusations, the hunching frame situated in his lap. He ran tongue and teeth over his bottom lip, waiting for the full confession of it all while tamping down on any retorts that might spring to the surface. His misguided attempts to console left him with a sour taste in his mouth. Of course he wasn't the same. He wasn't trying to be. He'd been offering the comfort of intimacy, and instead found a boy on withdrawals from the drug-like effect of his Blood.

He met the pleading stare head-on, and some of what he thought was written across his face. How did he, the one who rarely sought out the gossip and yet seemed to end up on the receiving end of it all too often, become the unwitting confidante for this boy's sordid affairs? If he'd given any credence at all to the rumours, it was to the idea that Ienzo might have been puppy-struck with certain ones of the older fellows in his group, might have offered certain liberties in exchange for their favour or protection or - or secrets from their research or what-have-you.

But the way Ienzo spoke of it, it was as if he belonged body and soul to his departed leader. Edmund tried to imagine being in love with that sort of person, someone who played fast and loose with the laws of humanity, ethics, and memory itself. It boggled him. "I swear," he said, without thinking, for he was never the type to go about spilling secrets. That was the easy part. Harder, much harder, was any sort of other reply to the bewildering succession of emotions Ienzo had lashed out with. Some of that struggle flashed across his features as well.

"You can't have what you think you need, while you are here," he said plainly, at last. "You do yourself no favours by self-flagellation. Sooner or later, it must all catch up with you." It already had, on the inside; Edmund suspected it would not be very long before the outside cracked too. "If you think things are bad now, imagine how it would be if your benefactor received news that you had fainted from malnutrition, or went raving mad one day in the lecture hall." Not just Ansem, either, for such news would no doubt be of interest to the close-knit circle, graduated or no.

He sighed a little. This was all very much more serious than he'd ever imagined when he'd cozied up to Ienzo. Just what sort of Pandora's box had he cracked open with his own dogged curiosity?

[illicitresearch]

He was losing his classmate, that much seemed clear from Edmund looking at him like he was rubbernecking a roadside wreck, or like his hands were suddenly much fuller than he'd expected. Then came his pragmatic cautioning, well meant and gentle with lack of condemnation as it was, chiding him only a little for the rusty parts of his self-maintenence that weren't accidental.

"I know all that." He groans tiredly, folding his butterflied knees over Edmund's parted thighs and bowing forward, his hands coming up to rub at his face. "They would all think it was from the pressures of placing me early. Or changing my house." There were perfectly rational things to excuse a breakdown. He'd penned plenty of pages about how people cracked under stress, to set formulaic answers in their hands in the headmaster's office, or even with his dreaded nemesis the school chaplain.

"I'm not a fool. I know what to say." Ienzo insisted, his voice bottoming out dryly in the gravelly basement of his still-undeveloped lower register. He taught me exactly how to lie, if suspicions ever arose. What he hadn't been instructed directly, he'd learned from watching how smoothly his charismatic senior slid on polite charm and easy ignorance when he'd overstepped boundaries, how he'd tactfully weave elegant alibis that Ienzo only needed to nod his head silently and go along with. But he never told me what to do, if I suddenly confessed it to a new friend. Ienzo realized, sitting here in Pevensie's lap. How could I, when he said that no one else would ever be clever enough, to be on the level with us?

There was certainly some quality of exclusivity in their deep companionship, in the way he'd been herded away from socializing with schoolmates closer to his own age. He'd never had peers that weren't his elder 'brother's' boys. They had been an impenetrable set, and what he and their ringleader had was even more intimate. Only Braig had even given the annoying impression of being privy to more secrets, but he had the honor of being Xeha's first chum, if not his favorite, and the biggest eavesdropper.

"My marks are fine," The scholarship boy smiled wanely, and reasoned so tamely, self-assured that his academic skill would always be beyond what his lessons would be able to challenge him with. "So apart from poor attendance at clubs, no one ever notices a thing around here, about me... (Only you've ever noticed, that I was watching you.)" He added, raising his head bashfully.

"I just wish they'd write." He wagged his head with a harsh sigh, exhasperated, and ashamed that they'd left him without means of keeping abreast. "Or that I even knew where to post letters, these days." He'd never felt so cut off, even in his younger years of isolated home tutelage, when he wrote beautifully, but Lord Ansem feared that he'd never use his tongue to express a thing unless the library doors were kept locked, and all the fountain pens were taken from him. That was probably when he'd first learned to privately hate his master.

"It's like he never even existed." Ienzo moped, angry at the inteligence agencies for their no-contact protocols, but even more betrayed still that his fellows could not bend a few rules for his sake, just as they always had. "(Like we never existed.)"

"I must sound so droll and stupid, right now." He scoffed in embarassment, fidgeting with his own fingertips. "Whatever Secret Society business you thought you were weaseling your way into, I bet you couldn't imagine it was so pathetic?"

[just_edmund]

Gods. Edmund wasn't sober enough to handle an emotionally-compromised, too-clever-by-half lad with a self-destructive penchant. Nor was he drunk enough to laugh it all off as a lark or overlook the pitiable rawness with a few handy gestures. He wanted to tuck the plaintive youth into bed, then rub at his temples and drink the rest of that bottle of cordial. That plan was still an option, right?
,
(At least he needn't worry about anything, er, popping up on his end at the moment. A Bulgy Bear taking a mudbath would be more erotic than this cataclysm of uncomfortable feelings.)

"I'm glad you have your alibis all worked out," Edmund said dryly. "I've noticed you watching. I didn't notice all the rest. You've hidden it well. Perhaps too well."

Awkwardly, he patted Ienzo's shoulder, unsure what one did to soothe a cast-off puppy-love. He still had not the faintest idea how to reply to each new outburst, and so he merely nodded at the right intervals and quietly sipped at the flask so that he was spared any further need for words. Fortunately, Ienzo seemed in no short supply of them. Maybe he just needed someone to listen for a while?

Oh. Damn. Called out on his faces. Edmund could have groaned. Susan would have killed him for letting all that chagrin show so plainly. They'd practiced their poker faces so many times...

The hand he laid on Ienzo's shoulder was much more sure this time. "Friendship and affection are never pathetic," he said, with a shake of his head. "It isn't wrong to feel as you do. It must make things very difficult for you here." Of all the fellows Ienzo could have told this tale to, Edmund's was surely the most sympathetic ear. Nevermind that Lucy would be much more qualified to comfort the broken-hearted young man, or Susan to take him in hand and make sure he took proper care of himself.

"How do you plan to make it through the next terms?" he added gently. "Graduation is a long way off yet. Would your sponsor let you have a private tutor, if the stress of boarding school got to you?" Privately, he thought to himself that it sounded as if Ienzo's beau had cut off communication on purpose, ending the schoolboy affair either for the good of both parties or perhaps more self-serving reasons. It was an observation that seemed unkind to point out to Ienzo just then, especially since he was no doubt clever enough to have considered it himself.

[illicitresearch]

Edmund didn't have to sound so scathing, that he had all his bases covered, or that his misery had been presenting too covertly for company, up until now. It left him feeling a little disdainful pressure in his schoolmate's tone, and almost left him wanting to slink out of Edmund's lap and go sit up in the professor's chair, tinker with his collection of desk fidgets. He didn't, but only because the boy reached out to steady his shoulder comfortingly, and he'd feel guilty pulling away from that consolation.

It isn't wrong. Maybe Edmund was pretending to be deaf, or he really was more liberally classical, to overlook all the confessions of partaking in his Senior friend's penchant for vaguely incestuous pederasty. But then again, would he have ever dared to coax him into his lap, if he hadn't suspected that Ienzo had already been the recipient of some friendly fondling?

"I used to enjoy school so much." He sighed out in earnest exhasperation, the sort of wistfulness that could only be attributed to one who had genuine passions for learning, dulled a little by the lack of illicit research in the basements of derilict campus buildings, peppered by erotic interludes. "I... Now I'm just going through motions. Like everyone else, but... it's difficult, yes, to connect with."

He sobers himself quickly, for someone so young and suffering infatuations that could leave a bullheaded youth rather fixated and unable to reel himself back, even under the guidance of someone trying to gently steer him toward another line of thought.

But Ienzo recognizes it at once, Edmund's careful redirection toward strategizing, and instead of resenting it fully, tries latching on, because he hasn't had a real conversation that hasn't gone circular or trite in months.

"What would that fix?" He laughs a little, brokenly, shaking his head because he doesn't really think that retreating to Lord Ansem's study would be any more useful for him, in the long run. "I can get through it, it's just..." Is painfully boring and lonesome even a good excuse, right here in the middle of his first proper tiny 'escapade' with a new conspirator? "Well, apart from you, all the other lads are boorish and juvenile."

And about that- It's something else that's perplexing and curious about Edmund, the mystery he still hadn't been able to sort and now while he's trying to brush off the embarassment of coming clean about his intimacies is as good a time as any.

"You try to act like you're not a few years ahead of yourself." Ienzo observes shrewdly, leaning forward and draping his forarms over Edmund's shoulders, letting his hands hand limp-wristed, as he surveys Edmund at half-arms length with cooler, appraising eyes. "Which is awfully interesting, you'll have to share your methods, sometime, but I haven't got the patience to do the same."

[just_edmund]

"Consider yourself lucky to have had a time when you enjoyed school." This time the dryness was all for himself. Edmund envied him those years of having close companionship, trust, protection, stimulation, all at his fingertips. A Blood for a brother, and a popular one at that, had not been the same thing at all. He was given begrudging berth because of that reputation, once they were at the same school, but it did not invite any further kindness or camaraderie than that. And that wasn't even taking into account those years of relentless bullying and pressure to bully in return. Thank the gods those days were behind him.

At least it was a feeling he could easily understand in Ienzo. Edmund wondered absently if he would have taken that bargain, a year of feverish learning and exchanged attentions, for two years of hollow loneliness. When it came down to it, how much different was it from his own predicament? He'd gotten far more than a year - fifteen years, a month, six months - and now came the time to pay the piper, with people who could not possibly begin to understand him, and lessons finished in minutes, leaving him hours of unfilled time to reflect, remember, want. Painfully bored and lonesome was not such a bad descriptor.

One corner of his mouth lifted in acknowledgement of the compliment. "My goal in life, to not be boorish and juvenile." The scrutiny turning back to himself, now...Edmund blinked, caught off guard. "Do I? I suppose I'm lucky not everybody has your sharp eyes, then. I'd rather not be...noticed...in a place like this. Which is why I suppose I found you so disconcerting."

He was sensible of the diversion, deliberate on Ienzo's part, although he wasn't sure what to make of the arms slung about his shoulders. "I'm afraid my methods consist mostly of not having been part of a high-profile society of scientific geniuses and misfits," Edmund commented, with a wryness that kept his tone light. "Camouflage by omission. But I shouldn't mind forming a private club, very exclusive you know...something for the Preservation and Mutual Well-Being of Precocious Young Minds." Absently, he let his fingers curl around a hip on each side, fingertips a few inches apart across the breadth of Ienzo's pelvis bone. He had turned a consciously blind eye to any of the more questionable aspects of the young man's affairs, content to accept it as something more star-crossed than sordid. He couldn't find it in him to judge him for it.

"I'd welcome the chance to do more than merely survive, here. It is a shameful waste of talent, just getting by." Edmund peeped thoughtfully at the would-be wunderkind. "Even if the others don't know. Especially if they don't know."

[illicitresearch]

"I suppose." The boy agreed half-heartedly, uncomfortable with the thought that he'd had a golden year of feeling so alive while his schoolmates had experienced nothing of its kind. It made them so difficult to talk to, made him feel foreign and alien as Xeha must have been when he first came to school, nothing but raw, immediate experience and wild visionary dreams to guide him. But Ienzo had none of his Senior's natural magnetism to gather other intellectual misfits to him, or so he'd thought- until he'd had Pevensive here, scrubbing away at the lock.

Should he feel guilty now, for having enjoyed himself for that too-brief window of time? Hadn't Edmund just finished telling him not to punish himself over it? Should he try, perhaps, to throw himself fully into the present and see what happened?

"I've started learning that, watching you?" Ienzo agreed sheepishly, when Edmund admits his deliberateness in trying to coast beneath anyone's radar. "It's better to try to blend in and be a Nobody." It was a little to late for him, who had made a name for himself tailing around with that set of older boys, youngest accepted scholarship kid? Showing up the professors with a quick tongue, assignments done, and then some? Slinking back into the shadows might make his benefactor believe he'd backed the wrong horse, prancing out of the gate and then losing wind less than halfway through, with the departure of his mentors.

But maybe there's something new to fill his sails, named Edmund Pevensie, secretively matured and quietly heretical, making casually indecent proposals while flirting with the shape of his pelvic bone. The warmth of his hands, seeping through the wool of Ienzo's winter trousers, was inviting enough that it left him churning his hips a little in Edmund's hold, muscles in his bottom leading the motion. It wasn't meant to chase that touch away so much as encourage some extra kneading from his fingers, a stir of movement to suggest he still could be stirred.

Especially if no one ever knew.

"I.. think I rather like the sound of that?" He spoke tenatively, his voice a smoothed sort of practiced nimble tiptoe, eyes careful but much surer-footed than the sort of innocent youth who wasn't contemplating a second go at sharing bunkspace. "And tell me," Ienzo swallowed, hands coming together in consideration behind Edmund's head, fingertips scrunching together at the back of his hair. "What would this private club do more of, exactly, aside from taking tipples off our dear History prof's stash?"

"That is..." And here he goes digging in deeper, a shift of his curiousity that blooms with the kind of strange, spiraling intensity that shrinks the rest of the world down to insignificance. A question that probes and hones right in on his schoolfellow's passions, particularly whatever falls outside of cirricular guidance. "What sort of things interest you most, strike your secret fancy, outside of lessons?"