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[fatespoken]

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

✉ TO SET UP: Just drop me a line at aeloriax[at]gmail.com or Y!M/AIM (listed in the post below) to give me a

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i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

The probability of him lying has always had the habit of leaning toward higher percentages, even more so at this moment, when his words slide sideways out without much regard to form or veracity. He plucks the syllables from thoughts that skim the surface of his conscious, jumbled and frenetic as smudged veins of alcohol break apart rationality. His words, or in this case, scrambled sense, likely are falsifiers on the tip of his tongue. Nevertheless, the history Amory recites is true as far as can be seen, the repository of antiquity and useless knowledge within that corridor of his mind left untarnished, though it's only because of the Once-King-Now-A-Boy that his recollection is brought forth. With invisible trappings and aged dust encompassing him, Pevensie is half-way anachronistic to this world, and Amory can observe it, just as he recognizes it everyday when he works beside him. But liquor has only the eyes to see the youthful features of his face, the soft mold of childhood that marks Peter as one physically entering the minimum age of manhood. His physical age doesn't stop Amory from sending his pack of cigarettes and well-worn lighter clattering against the table, sliding until it pauses an inch or two from the edge and in front of Peter. It's an offer, an offer in a brusque sense, but at least it's a gesture that denotes something other than animosity. Obviously, Amory doesn't mind corrupting the youth, or at least the physically youthful.

"Nice to know your opinion, Pevensie," he speaks, cigarette propped between the left corner of his lips so that his words come out lightly muffled, "Don't give a damn, I hope you realize. And I hope you do. You've started this habit of pestering me lately, and it's getting pretty fucking annoying. Don't you have other things to do? Family to attend to? King Charles the II, aka the court jester?"

Amory has always liked that nickname for Caspian, even if the king truly is far from mentally handicapped and the least likely possessor of that famous protruding jaw. In fact, he enjoys all his jokes and nicknames at this midnight hour, or so dictates the liquor coating his tongue. Another inhale of his cigarette is a nice balance to that coating, lungs pulling in a heavy intake - smoke singeing the back of his throat, settling in his chest where he imagines that gray cloud scarring and burning black his inward flesh. It's not a pleasant image, actually- not as pleasant as the harsh sensation of taking a drag. A sensation augmented by the edge of nostalgia, of that time in Périgueux when he had first found himself with a cigarette perched between his lips, those same lips forced against the mouth of the boy who had offered the fag, the same lips cursing in fragmented French as the other nursed a purple-splotched bruise ringing his eye. Of course, the High King is not the catalyst for this recollection. The nonlinear unfolding of thoughts was at fault, certainly not Peter who wasn't his type. If he really had a type. And he was thoroughly sick of blonds, anyway.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

With some people, there is the appeal of potential shock or providing--at the very least--the less expected of two possibilities. In this case, Peter feels that Amory is more likely to assume he will decline the offer that sneaks just under animosity but not quite around distance, and if he was younger, or if he was simply feeling younger, he might give himself over to such mild reasoning and partake. As it stands, he isn't, so he shakes his head once before sliding the pack back across the tabletop, flicking the lighter up between thumb and middle finger to eye it before proceeding to do the same as with the remaining health risks. Not that he's above smoking itself. Hardly, but it's never taken his particular fancy, not yet anyway, though he supposes if he had come to be this age back in England it might have become one. Enough boys and men--and some women--have told him the same kind of thing: it calms the nerves...or at least wears them so thin you don't remember they're there. Something like that. It doesn't work that way for everyone of course, but he doesn't expect it would.

"I realize you take my opinion for exactly what it is worth, but that you are more than ninety percent likely to do nothing about it, one way or the other," he replies, a caustic tilt to his head as he leans an elbow on the edge of the table and a cheek to curled fingers, all gold and blue and eighteen years at a glance. His gaze shapes itself into an almost lazy thing, feline reminiscent in that latitude of appearing lethargic but being altogether too alert, and part of this may be due to the hour. Peter is quite ready to go home, but he will not leave Amory here for a number of reasons that are not limited to Amory being drunk and therefore Amory being a less than suitable or reliable personage to entrust his keys with, which really is not likely something he would do even if the bartender was sober, but details, details.

He keeps this tempered impatience out of the visible and verbal equation for now, however, ever the languid intruder, despite being management.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

"Anyway," he pauses, lips pressed thin for a moment, a bubble of thought anchoring itself in the flyaway striations of each iris. "Doesn't matter what you think of what I think. What I know," another pause but he does not change his casual lean. "...What I know is that you have been drinking more and more lately." He does not feel it necessary to say what he does not know, because the obvious is self-explanatory: he doesn't know why. It has not been his business--he has decided several times now--to do much more than sometimes vaguely play the role of chaperon to the other man's apartment, and at other times to simply send him a look that says he is being observed and thus noted, which in and of itself can often serve as enough of an impetus for someone to stop out of sheer desire to be contrary. Tonight it is his business. Tonight they are seated as perceptibly civil beings, a pocket of dry humanity that needs no crowd to prove it is there. This public bar has become private in its own way, and though Amory makes what Peter would say is a near resilient effort to put people off, Peter would also say there is something hollow about the ornery one's barbs--not so much that he does not mean them, more that they are vehicles for other things, the point not ultimately to offend, but perhaps to alienate. To push back. To push away.

And in a private manner of his own, the eldest Pevensie can understand some of that.

Not the 'why' again, but the what and the how of it.

He has not wanted the company of anyone in his class back home in a year's time and before he had gone through the Deep Magic again, before everything changed--and for the last time for two of them--he could not see himself doing so for much longer still. Yet likeness of any kind is not what pushes him to pursue beyond what he has before this evening, and as is often the case with a majority of encounters that brush more than their respective surfaces, it is not especially planned or wanted so much as it is a combination of things that 'happen to...' at the same time. He happens to be the one closing rather than Blue. He happens to have noticed Amory's increase of intake with the drink. He happens to be the sort of person who prefers his employees to either assess their own problems or allow someone to help them assess them together rather than to watch them slip down and out through his peripheral vision.

He happens to care.

All these things.

They come together tonight to make one blond, blue-eyed High King more of a 'fucking annoying' sort than usual. Perhaps Amory will be unprepared.

Wouldn't that be something.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

Peter should learn to channel that attention into someone more deserving; someone who would be willing to release those gates to whatever tepid waters lurked beneath darkened stares and bored-out words. For even if the High King must be used to bearing onus, and a weighty onus at that if history read its inscriptions properly, dealing with Amory must still be akin to beating down a titanium wall with a stick. A waste of time. Any time spent on him a waste, just as time spent on another is a decay of seconds. Nevertheless, Peter has found some sliver of reason to bother him, perhaps boredom, maybe entertainment, or even some pathetic mimicry of court. The Royal Court of the Goddamn Blue Light. Each server and bartender a translation; a flimsy, paper-thin parallel of some loyal subject requiring council. A king in search of his grandeur and dominion amidst wooden booths and a plebeian milieu.

Amory wouldn't have any of it.

He didn't need a King's aid-- He didn't need Peter's advice, just as he didn't need that Senator's. Fuck him. Fuck Peter Pevensie. Fuck his father. The curses are falling like bullets in his mind, thudding against the steady throb of a headache in conception. At least Peter could have been one of those royals. Like Nero who strung up religious outcasts in his garden as burning lamplight pyres, guiding pathways gold with their cries. Pinning bloody carcasses to men and letting wild animals eat them dry. Maybe if Peter had been a a sanguinary King-- then maybe he would at least be interesting. And of course, he wouldn't have had the heart to give a damn. But Peter Pevensie isn't that sort of King, even the shadow of his memory can tell him that, and Amory can't help but imagine that being devoured by wild dogs would be more pleasant than Peter's prodding.

"The earth turns, men fornicate, and Amory Felix continues to drink. What a dynamic pattern of life," he snorts dryly, right hand gesturing with each turn of a comma. Yet, the hand doesn't linger too long in the air, shifting suddenly to cradle his forehead as his head bows over. He can feel his thoughts sliding heavy, tipping and funneling inward like a hourglass flipped upside down. His nausea crests, and Amory wonders whether it's just because of the alcohol.

"Leave me alone."

Succinct, pointed, hollow.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

Pinning bloody carcasses to anything, much less men, Peter deems inhumane, among other things. Never mind who the carcasses are being pinned to, or what, but think of the pinning folk. What does that kind of action do to them? How does it change them? He cannot fathom a single good thing from the consideration. Unable to read minds, however, this is not a conscious inability, his attentions geared more toward the dry turning of the drunkard's voice and how he seems to wish to slip himself into that tone and disappear into public privacy. His words that follow, to the point and certainly familiar, confirm that much.

"I would, except that you are treating The Blue Light not unlike your personal lounge, which, even in the after-hours, I have to point out, it is not." His tongue clicks at a corner of his mouth, fingertips pointedly not tapping in any especially inferential rhythm. "If you truly wanted to be left alone, I think that you would take your company," a nod to the shots, "in actual privacy." That is not entirely accurate. Peter does not think, but more feels that he knows this, but 'think' is a less abrasive term than know, something Peter understands from having taken offense to any man claiming to know anything about him from time to time when they knew nothing at all. Hypocrisy? Not quite, the difference being that those sorts were wrong and he, he feels, is rather right, but Amory Felix will not admit this to him. He knows that too. Or thinks he knows. Curiously circular, he's come to this point of heading the employee off rather than bypassing him with coincidental timing, something he could easily have managed.

"Besides, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed," he adds, but this addition fills the room with a wry stillness, as if to say: you are something--important, necessary, present, annoying, or whatever--enough that others have observed you at one time or another at the drink, and you are only dealing with your own doing. It is no one's fault for being aware, particularly when the thing, being, or action they are aware of could have taken precautions to be all but invisible. Amory is not stupid, and Amory is not one to brook fools on anyone's time, but Amory is also not immune to insecurities, to the multitude of flaws he does not broadcast. The drinking, Peter deduces, is a manifestation of some of that, even if the man himself will not recognize it.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

Of being a creature of material substance; of blood, and bone, and imperfect nature, Amory Felix is anything but inhuman, and thus hardly exempt from the flaws that dictate him as such. As a being that will do a variety of idiotic things under the disillusion that they're truly proper and most of all, right. Though he may be too stubborn to come to that realization, Amory wouldn't disagree he was human. He would fight it to the ground, sword and shield his tongue and temperament, defending those fissures that vein every time he asks himself that perennial question -- does he count for human? But nature and demeanor are stronger than the composition of blood, or rather, human nature is not so conclusively human. And amongst his collection of faults, drinking is an exception. It is an exception because Amory knows the cause. The reason. The why. The proof. He over-drinks with full intent in mind, not because of the acidic tang on the back of his throat or the rush, but because of the numbing of just those thoughts and insecurities. Alcohol flattens them into a corner where they have no voice.

"If you have a problem with me being here, then I," he pauses, already half-poised to move, right hand draped around the neck of the bottle sitting beside him, "then I will gladly remove myself." He ends his declaration with another flare of his hand; a parody of courtly civility nicked from some TV movie special or historical re-enactment. Amory thinks it quite funny, Peter. And even with that nausea as a steady wave in his head, he laughs. A dry, broken sort of laugh pieced together with minimal effort.

The laugh silences the minute he lifts himself up, wobbling ever so slightly as he aligns his balance. Last thing he wants his Peter thinking he needs his aid, any more than Peter must presume he does. Fucking Good Samaritan. Fucking High King. In his other hand, the cigarette is sent smoldering against the pad of his index finger; the trailing end of gray smoke snuffed out. Not the smartest idea, and one that will leave a mark, but his mind does not even think of caring.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

This time, Peter does not offer to see the other man home, but that is only a way of cutting out a supplementary step, skipping on to simply deciding to help him at least a majority of the way there.

"Your presence isn't the problem I was referring to," he says as he gets up only to follow Amory toward the door, brow arching at the snuffing of a smolder, though he makes no comment. There isn't much to say between them if the other man persists with what Peter identifies as some marriage of defiance and denial with a resulting fringe of dislike and whatever else can be purely attributed to the degree of drinking that has gone on tonight, and only by one of them. How one defines 'much', of course, varied on who, what, and why one is. Who Peter is, is in frankest terms, Peter, and what he is, is not limited to just one thing but that in and of itself is a qualifier, and why he is, well that much they have gone over, and he has once again resigned himself to the reality that Amory will not be expressing the who, what, or why of his self any time soon. In a way that is fine.

They are not particularly close, but the obstinate focus on drinking as a solution or a fix is hard to ignore and some of the stranger but stronger bonds in stories have been forged over a concern rather than an affection. Such is the beginning of the case here, though the end has yet to out itself as the blond falls into step alongside the bartender rather than behind. Maybe it would be better to say something else, but he doesn't know what to say, and he has never been too fond of idle words, so he keeps to his silence, something he does not think of being an even greater annoyance. Irony would have it that, in truth, it is the very kind of contemplative quiet that would have had him up in ire a little over a year ago.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

Spoken words are not necessary for Peter himself to become an even greater annoyance, as his presence beside him-- the fact that there's a living, breathing body shadowing him sideways, hanging upon him as if he's teeth deep in his skin like a goddamn bloody leech, is enough to drive Amory further up that wall. His temper has always been touchy thing, and even more so when he's inebriated, unable to divide innocuous circumstances from their malignant siblings. Peter could have raised a sword to his chest, and Amory would have found it as irritating as being followed. Or so he thinks. Probably not if that circumstance was truly the case, but then again, Amory isn't exactly connecting point A to point B right now. Deductive and inductive reasoning can all go to hell.

The hasty step in his stride the moment he sets off from the booth says enough, liquid in the bottle sloshing against glass sides as he rushes toward the door. He means to walk faster, but what common sense lingers tells Amory that he's likely to fall on his face. So what he settles on is a median between walking and jogging, hoping to lose the King or at least send a message of derision. And it's his greatest hope that Peter will get the note unless he is thicker than Amory has assumed. When he does reach the door, Amory heaves it open a bit too harshly - the wood jamming against his hand, splitting open the premature blister on his index finger. There's line of red streaked against the door's edge; a gift of sorts for whoever has the early shift tomorrow.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

...

Well.

If Amory hopes to lose Peter through way of a median between walking and jogging, Peter will give him the benefit of the doubt, or would if he could read minds, and credit it to the drunken stupor. Okay, well, second thoughts being second, maybe he wouldn't, but the world will never know for certain. Still, his general feeling would be that no one should be able to lose anyone at such a median, save for, perhaps, people without legs. Also babies.

Needless to say, he locks the door behind them after giving the 'gift' a cursory wipe with the edge of his shirt, frowning when it does not entirely come off, but the shirt will be fine after a cleaning. Probably. Possibly. Whatever the case, he does not hurry, feeling no need to, considering Amory's less than...strenuous pace. He even stands just where he is for a moment or two, arms crossed and considering the moderately retreating figure ahead of him before following through with, well, following anyway, half inclined to place a hand on the other man's shoulder, just to get his attention. At the last second, he refrains, stuffing his hand in his pocket instead, the other lightly resting over the device in the opposite pocket of a coat a little too light for the hour's chill, but Peter has never been especially averse to a normal winter's edge. When walking beside the bartender again, he pauses before taking a quick step ahead and standing in front of him.

"Look, obviously you're bothered by something. Fine. I'm not going to ask, but you should go home." He pauses, casting a glance to the side as if there is someone walking by, but no one else is around, not as far as the eye can tell. The deviation is a second only though, and then northern sky fixes itself back upon the person who is not exactly a friend but certainly not an enemy either, someone who has proven in his own way to find a use for diligent work and a person who keeps much of the things that fill in the blanks close to the vest. It is curious. It is hardly any of his business. But here he is, and it is true enough that some things happen more without reason than with it.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

Remember, Peter. With all the alcohol that's seeped into his brain, including a glass or four he may have had prior to sitting down, it's lucky that he hasn't taken the immediate action of falling flat on his face. (Though that would have made lovely picture on the employee of the month wall, assuming that they had one.) Being able to actually determine a destination, to decide between two ends-- the Colosseum before home, is a testament to his micrometer of lucidity. But that micrometer isn't enough for him to acknowledge that his pace is relative to snail's pace, if we're talking about a game of pursuit and capture. The point remains that he hasn't fallen on his face. Yet.

Speaking about the winter's chill, Amory's own shoulders are thinly sheltered aside for his only long-sleeve layer. What may be a brisk wind to Peter, is likely a biting chill for Amory, cold pricking against skin not yet accustomed to an winter as season. It's either that his brain is too preoccupied with trying to forge sense from pink elephants, or that warmth from spirits have managed to pervade even his furthest extremities. Or maybe he's chosen not to mention it, swallowing up his discomfort as he would never swallow his pride, firm steps marching toward his chosen destination. It wasn't like he hadn't heard Peter's words, and surely he must have, considering that Peter's voice was the single sound against a vaulted midnight sky. But hearing wasn't equivalent to listening, and even with those words pointed at him, Amory chooses to step forth in ignorance, syllables as empty as the air that circles around him.

Suffocating.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

That the other man turns to go without a word is not surprising, but Peter finds reason enough to follow even still, lips pressed in a thin line characteristic of a majority of his expressions, even some of his smiles, not that he wears one now. Amory's insistent silence does nothing to dissuade the High King from his decided pursuit, eyes never wavering from the focus even as he reconsiders his own words, shaping and reshaping, thinking and rethinking.

"Amory." It is only a name, but sometimes a name is everything. A name can be stop and a name can be please and a name can be listen. A name can be anything as soon as everything, in fact, and so it holds that semblance now, anchored between them like a line that loops two separates together until they appear circular and seamless, not separate but integrated, involved. If he needs a word for what he has chosen to be, Peter supposes 'involved' might very well do.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

Just as his voice frames the air, the High King's presence is the center-point of this landscape; all color, sound, and light as amorphous figures suspended in suffocation by the ink of the hour. Amory can't ignore Peter regardless if ignorance is what he chooses, for as long as those assured lines of his character remain, Peter would never be a person capable of simply being ignored. It is why Amory hesitates, only for a breath of a second, his head edging over his shoulder to catch Peter's glance- the narrowing of his eyes intercepting Peter's characteristic thin-lined look.

"I told you once already," he speaks, the tone of his voice stretched taunt, then tightening into contracted sound. It seems to be only anger, but how strangely it carries itself with a weight that seems possibly palpable. "I told you I don't need your help, kid. Fuck your concern and all your damn insistence. Fuck you, Peter Pevensie."

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[oshutup]

"I heard you," he replies, unperturbed by the anger, ever aware of the heavy anchor invisibly linked to it, dragging behind the harshness of consonants and vowels that aim only to discourage the outside force, which, at present, is Peter himself. Trading loose barbs for something of more stoic origin, the blond has noted that breath of a second only because in one lifetime he learned sometimes a breath of a second is all one has. So noted, he tailors his own tone, though that should not be misconstrued as veiling, less a matter of strategy and more one of accuracy to what he means to say. The bristling that happens at the category of 'kid', much like the breath of a glance is there too, but only for its own second. It may be enough to have been noticed, however.

"Somehow, your insults get less and less effective the more you try to use them," he informs rather than suggests, as if it is a fact, and as far as Peter can tell, personally, it might as well be.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

"And your attempt at playing adult gets less and less effective the more you try at it," he retorts, voice snapping back at a tempo that leaves no doubt to exactly what is fueling his venom. If not echoed in his voice, it's defined in his stance, shoulders drawn back and muscles rigid as he turns half-circle to face Peter. "Let me tell you something," he double-checks the enunciation of his words. None of that languid pronunciation for him; he won't drag his words through the mud until he has a few shots more.

"My father doesn't look a day over thirty-five, and trust me, I'm being generous. Do you know how old he really is?" a single step forward, "Two thousand ninety-one. But that's fucking irrelevant because to everyone else, he's barely out of his twenties. An adult back in his day, a relative youth in ours. Do you think everyone respects him? Do you think he's treated as he should be treated? Hardly."

He shakes of his head, stringing it onto another one of those dry, insipid laughs. In fact, Amory Felix lies. The way in which his father carries himself has always reflected years beyond his form; an unmistakable personage that has led both men and businesses throughout the folding of years. In the last three decades, he's played the role of a lawyer, a real-estate investor, a historian, and a winery owner, amongst other things and all at the same time. To claim that he hadn't garnered respect in each venue would be a blatant lie.

Of course Peter didn't need to know that.

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[orderofthelion]

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

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

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

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

i buried it too deep under the iron sea;

[fatespoken]

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

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

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

"Just be quiet, Kid."