P.E
Chapter Twenty-Six: Preternatural Escape
By Tonzura123
Disclaimer: Because sobbing inconsolably on the floor won't help me in the least.
"All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of anger and wrath. But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ even when we were dead in transgressions- it is by grace you have been saved," Ephesians 2:3-5
CLANG...!
And with Edmund's body wound up in his ten-meter long tail, he zipped past Pevensie, the brush of his arching body was more like a collision with a bus. Pevensie was thrown back again, still screaming until a melodious sound like a skull cracking (or cracking against) glass windows reached the Magician's sensitive ears.
And he slid from the burning lair like jagged lightning-
-Only to be rugby-tackled on his escape into the outside hall.
CLANG...!
The courtyard clock struck three.
Witching hour had begun.
The spell had worked;
There was a tug in his stomach, the sensation of being pulled through a narrow opening, and Collins was suddenly submerged in weightless liquid, with one body in his grasp, and one struggling to keep its hold on him as they hurtled for the surface of the pool.
OoOoOoOoO
'I'm a human bolus,' Jacobs' mind was dully telling him, 'And the world is vomitting me up.'
The world, in fact, had become a pinched straw, with Cain in the very center of the unvierse's squeezing fingertips. All sight, sound, feeling, was narrowed to a point that Cain was sure he would soon also lose the ability to breathe a full breath. He could smell nothing but the scent of his own nasal passages- a sort of salty, musty, near-gagging smell. He tasted the crab from the Parent Evening as if it, too, had dared to make a re-entrance into his mouth, it's slightly bitter tang twisting his tongue in a swallowing reflex.
When the pinching intensified, it became cold and smothering. Cain fancied he felt a vague sort of slippery, bumpy surface under his fingers (if he still had fingers) and distantly thought a pair hard-soled shoes were knocking gracelessly against his shins. His mind was becoming pudding within his skull, his entire cranium had been wedged beneath a vengeful letterpress, squeezing the very juices from his brain.
'Am I dying? Am I being thrown up or swallowed?'
Both, perhaps? It held the same feeling as an elevator- the sudden loss and gain of weight, an uncertainty that felt like dropping, but with your senses simeltaneously screaming that you were still being held in the same metal lift in the department store's tie section.
Was he still at Hartbee's? When the opprobrious sensation finally ceased to disorient him, would he open his eyes to find himself wrapped around a giant snake in the middle of the hallway?
To be quite fair to poor Cain Jacobs- it had not been his bright idea to go lunging after a hissing, ten-foot-long, and clearly poisonous snake. Not at all. In fact, his best idea of the entire school year had been to follow Peter Pevensie's advise and return to the gymnasium to check after the two sisters and Thomas.
And then something grabbed hold of his legs.
The reader may remember that odd Something that grabbed hold of Jacobs shortly after Edmund Pevensie's mishap on the rugby pitch; When he had tried to escape a certain brotherly moment of bonding, the freezing force binding the muscles in his feet and legs had refused to grant him the ability to move from the spot he stood on. Instead, he'd been caught by Thomas outside the med bay door, and the two had had a rather disgruntling conversation that all but ended their long friendship. Eventually, it had let him go, and Jacobs had ended up blaming the incident on a subconcious reaction to the guilt he was feeling, quite forgetting all about the dreadful event.
But the Something did not.
Jacobs had made it maybe half-way back to the gymnasium to avoid Peter Pevensie's obviously pending wrath, when a steeling strength spread down his legs from the top of his leg to the tip of his little toe. Startled, he had found his feet reversing against his will and beginning to pick up speed until he was full-out sprinting down the glossy corridors.
It was exactly like when Pevensie had been dragging him along earlier- inexplicable power tapping into him from an unseen, unknown, untraceable source. It was nearly magic. It was surreal- preternatural.
It was racing him inhumanly down the hallways, stirring up team banners and event fliers that tapered from their tacks pinning the wall to them. He was lunging, running without ever growing weary, mounting up on that unseen force as if he could spread wings and take-off the the ground at any moment. He had never felt so free, so weightless, worriless, or happy in all the days of his life.
He smelled fire.
The entire ordeal took place in a matter of seconds: First, Cain smelled the smoky tang of hickory wood and furniture polish, then he saw the licking flames tearing mournfully against the open office door. And while he was busy wondering just when, pray tell, the building had been set on fire and why the blazes the fire alarms weren't going off already, a monstruous band of living, writhing scales errupted from the mouth of the reception door, a slack form dangling from the tail end of steel-trap jaws and sword-sharp teeth.
Yet the Something did not slow down in the least when facing such a brute.
He must have yelled- Who could possibly resist such a base human reaction when charging for certain death? He must have yelled, and he distantly heard the courtyard bell strike a third time.
And once he'd slammed full force into that wall of brick-sized scales, wrapped his arms around the sewercap-round tail, and prayed to whoever was listening to SAVE ME!, the world swallowed him whole.
Colours, if there had been colours, had been gulped down with him, twisting into a fuzzy, twitching blackness along with every reliable sense of direction. For what felt like ten years had actually been less than ten miliseconds. Then the colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings came rushing back so suddenly and so violently, that he almost dared to inhale while under the water's surface-
Did dare, Cain breathed curiously inward, surprised on a variety of levels when his lungs didn't protest and force the placid, sea-green liquid back out of his body.
His head had already broken the surface. Coming back to himself somewhat, Cain flailed for the shore of the small pool he was wading in and crawled up the side of the grassy embankment, feeling a little ironic that, on top of all else, his clothes were perfectly dry from the plunge.
"But then, why not?" he asked agreeably, turning to the large, sweating man across the pool and the young boy in his arms, "Do I know you?"
Both were pale and dark-headed, though one was a lifeless grey, like someone who'd recently been quite ill, and the other was flushed in his plump cheeks from exhertion.
"How can you stand it?" the fat man gasped, nearly doubled over in pain. Blood poured off his lips, and a lisp marred most of his words, "How can you stand there smiling like an idiot in this terrible place?"
Cain didn't know what the man's problem was, but he felt a sharp prick agaisnt his heart at the word "idiot" and another in the way that the man scowled pugnaciously at the pleasant wood around them.
Cain thought that the place was absolutely beautiful; The tall trees were gently swaying in an invisible breeze, thick around their trunks and lush with rich ever-green leaves. The air was just as still as the waters of the multiples pools scattered around the wood, and as calmly hushing as the motionless boughs murmuring lullabies above them. One could almost forget everything...
"Fool!" the man lisped, and struggled to stand with the boy in his arms, the flush in his cheeks steadily spread down to his swaying jowls and ran like spilled cranberry juice down the sides and front of his neck, "What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?"
"I didn't do anything! I've just been standing here, minding my own business!" Cain shouted back hotly, his chest throbbing with a troubling boil of energy, like a shaken bottle of hornets, "What are you so bothered about?"
"That spell was only meant for two passengers: Myself and my puppet! You've ruined everything!"
"Hey-" Cain began, "I'm really, truly sorry for whatever I apparently did, sir-" He froze.
Sir-
Collins.
His mind frantically backtracked.
"Snake!" Cain whispered, eyes darting around the treeline, in case it came slithering out with its maw aimed at him, "What happened to that giant snake? It had Pevensie's brother- Wait. Spell? What do you mean 'Spell'? Like magic? Real magic- that's why we're- Where are we?"
"This brother, you mean?" Collins brushed a stray peice of hair from the face of the boy resting against him, and Cain felt the blood drain out of his face while Collins smiled lovingly down at the corpse of Edmund, "We're in a form of purgatory for Cosmic Travelers. This is the Wood Between the Worlds. It is a fabled and revered place- by mortals, of course. Jadis never cared for it. Would that my fangs could have sunk a little deeper at the first bite..." He sighed wistfully and stroked the white skin of the neck bending grotesquely from Edmund's collar, "I could have gained the strength to level this hell-hole to the ground."
An unforgiving chill blasted down Cain's spine as he caught sight of the split tongue forking out of Collin's mouth.
"Murderer," Cain breathed, praying with all of his might that any of this was a dream, or that the corpse was someone else, or that the dead could rise from their graves like Nos Feratu, "You killed-! You-" He couldn't speak, but quickly gained his feet, prepared to bolt into the shaded wood and scream for help.
Collins snorted, and suddenly seemed very amused by the entire thing, though still sweating profusely, so that deep stains marred the fabric beneath his arms and neckline.
"I had risibly little to do with this," he gestured to the sagging limbs and hanging head with a gleaming palm, "All I needed was his approval- or, should I say- his agreement to our terms?"
It was then Cain saw fit to recognize the sweat-smeared stains across Collin's front as blood, " Terms- Pevensie was- What was he, suicidal? He agreed to let you-"
Cain realized he couldn't voice Edmund's status out loud. Even in this absent wood, with no one but a corpse and two murderers, he couldn't confess to just what he may have been assisting all along.
"Ah. That," Collins allowed apologetically, "may have been written in too fine a print for young Mr. Pevensie to conclude."
His legs tingled, like a billion nerves were clicking on and off in rippling waves, the hairs standing parallel to the mossy grass swimming under his feet and drifts of that useless energy breezing up his spine to wing across the length of his arms. A warm fire boiling in the cold, metallic pot that had settled in his stomach. A welling surge of adrenaline and mindless fear loosed Jacobs' tongue and lended it a permit to speak it's own;
"His brother won't let you live for much longer."
"I can still kill you, Mr. Jacobs," Collins spat, though he didn't quite look up to it, from Jacobs' point of view, "But I think we've wasted enough time here." He smiled cordially, wide mouth stretching into a thin, ghastly smirk, "I will still extend an offer, if you so truly wish to escape this God-forsaken wasteland."
"I'm not that stupid!" Cain yelled, the pricking back, "Just what would accepting anything from you do for me? Are you planning on using me like you used him?"
"Your conduct is most dissapointing," Collins' mouth twitched, politely fighting off a smile, "But amusing nonetheless. How exactly do you intend to return home without my assistance? Haven't we worked together all along, Mr. Jacobs?"
Jacobs thought hard and furiously for a moment, then, momentarily defeated, delivered a select grouping of very choice words to his Headmaster.
"We're quite stuck, Mr. Jacobs. We might as well get along."
Bored now, Collins loosed his hold so that one hand gripped the wrist of Edmund's arm and dragged along while Collin's circled to pool towards Cain, like some over-grown rag doll, "With the spell askew, I'll have to find a way to pass us onto the next world."
"I'm not helping you again," Cain swore, as Collin's raised his brow in a show of irony, "I mean it. Blackmail away you- you quintuple-chinned freak," a new wave of bravado seemed to seize him, "I'm taking Pevensie."
Collins laughed.
"Too precious, little one. But honestly, " the doughy cheeks bunched in smile laxed into waxy, blood-irritated bags of flesh beneath his hollowed and cold eyes, "Who do you think you're fooling? What is this new, improved Cain Jacobs that I see before me? Suddenly and surprisingly willing to risk everything for the boy he's been trying to beat all year. The boy he's had it in for since the first day of physical education class, all those months ago. Glaringly obvious in his hatred. Talking illy about him to anybody he met- even his dear Headmaster."
He actually made a little hissing noise, his bloody tongue flicking in displeasure out into the open and still air of the Wood.
"Ah, those Pevensie brothers-! We do despise the high and mighty, don't we Cain? What did those boys have that you didn't? Siblings? Friends? A father that loved them and a mother they could go home to? I suppose even your 'All Right' mother doesn't compare, eh? And your father-"
"-Step-father," Cain intoned, his vision tunneled.
"Oh, step-father. My apologies. You see, I sometimes forget how similar the two of us really are. Neither of our fathers actually cared if we ate, slept, or kept breathing, did they? Because nothing we did for them would ever matter. They were selfish creatures bent on only pleasing themselves with themselves and no one else could satisfy their expectations of their deluded and ego-centric worlds."
"My father loved us."
"Yes. That's why he told you he left, is it not? You mother wrote me as much. And your step father tells me you're a vicious liar, take after your old man. But you figured out the truth, didn't you? Using your friend Thomas Macintosh and his family's extensive research, you tied all the points together and got yourself a very pretty picture of what your father did, didn't you?"
"I told Thomas how we became friends," Cain said, but the words felt numb and shallow.
"How. But not why. You couldn't have found out any of that if you weren't close to Thomas and his family of Encyclopedia makers," Collins grinned, all of his gleaming white teeth flashing between two bloodstained lips,"You used your only friend like a marionette- and masterfully, I might add."
Cain stared at the pool, anger, sadness, regret, confusion, fear, sickness, wonder, and helpless calm mixing together in that boiling pot that had once claimed to be his stomach. Collins circled around him, dragging Edmund's flopping corpse behind him as he went, sometimes the patches of grass and the slant of the hill causing Edmund's body to turn onto its back. The whites of its eyes gleamed up at him like crecent moons, waning into the darkness of his clasped lashes. His free hand stiffly fingered through the blades of grass, parting green with combing digits.
As if, even in death, he was fighting to grab hold of life.
"You and I, Cain Jacobs," James Collins drawled, his breathing heavier and harsher than before, but his manipulations coming just as easily, "Are mirror images of each other. The only difference being that I have Power you cannot comprehend."
"...You mean Death?" Cain watched Edmund's lidded eyes, and realized the boy probably died with them closed: Collins didn't seem the type to close them out of respect, "You kill people. That's your power. You can't, say, get that tree over there to sing a song."
Collins stared impassively at him, ignoring the tree in question and merely looking at Cain with pending disgust at his train of thought, nothing at all like the man who pretended to be avuncular with unexpecting students.
"You can get a kid to do what you want when you threaten his family. You kill him when he doesn't do what you want. You can lie to adults. You can lie to your staff and the parents who let you have their children for the better part of a year. You sit in your huge chair, sipping tea and plotting the best way to twist a kid's mind around your little finger. Well, I can do that. I can do any of that, if I really wanted to."
Cain's mouth crushed to one side of his face, emotion nearly blinding him, anger and frustration and shock making him light-headed and heavy-limbed.
"I don't want to. I want to go home. I want to get Pevensie back to his brother so that he can get a proper funeral. I want to say I'm sorry to my mother. I want to tell off my father- both of them. I want to tell Thomas I'm sorry. I want to let him know he's kept me out of trouble in more ways than I can count and I owe him more than I can ever repay. And once I've made everything right in the best way I know how, I want to help Peter Pevensie and his family track you down like the snake you are and make sure the last thing you ever bite is the dust under your bodiless head."
Collins sighed, "So I presume you aren't going to help me willingly."
Cain braced his self to run... or to fight. The hairs on the back of his neck felt so electrified that they seemed to stand completely apart from his body. He swallowed.
"Your tongue. Did Pevensie Senior do that for you?"
The tongue flickered uneasily, already half-healed into two separate entities.
"I'm not so unreasonable to not give you a painless end, Mr. Jacobs," the Headmaster smirked, and raised one hand, stumbling drunkenly towards him with Edmund in tow-
And the Wood Between the Worlds trembled by the Lion's roar.
And Edmund blinked.
A/N:
HE LIVES!
I hated to have to give you all so much Cain and Collins without Ed or Peter. It's an OC overdose. But, some things were highlighted about Cain's anger issues, and in the next chapter, certain Wrongs are Made Right.
Also, I wanted to get it out there to you all that I'm thinking about quite a few different story ideas to put up after P.E is over.
These include:
A oneshot of a romantic comedy, starring Edmund Pevensie as a Lovestruck Teenage Boy and Lucy Pevensie as the Sister with Sense, also lending to Peter and Edmund's relationship as bro
thers, so bromance fans will not be disappointed.
A multichapter about how Peter and Edmund came to like each other as people, not only loving each other because they were brothers. (It's called "Monochrome" and I've been planning it since the ninth chapter of P.E.)
A multichapter AU about if Edmund had never been reclaimed from Jadis. (It's been done, I know. But not like this.)
And quite a few more. Til then, though, I'll work hard to get the next chapter up sooner, and to make each and every last one the best that it can possibly be for all the wonderful readers who have kept up with P.E for over a year. My best to you all. Make sure to leave a message or review if you have any comments, questions, concerns, or snarky remarks. Any and all of these will be read and used to craft this story to be the best that it can possibly be for its audience.
As Always,
-Tonzura123
New Vocabulary:
risible- ridiculous
avuncular- of or like a kindly uncle
opprobrious- abusive