Happy Holidays, solarpillar! Part I of 2

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Title: War! What Is She Good For?

Recipient: solarpillar

Author: googlebrat
Pairing/Characters: War, Pepper, Wensleydale, Brian/OFC

Rating: PG

Summary: "Perhaps Pepper should have seen the writing on the wall when Brian got himself a girlfriend but somehow she never saw it coming"

Warnings (if any): None

Perhaps Pepper should have seen the writing on the wall when Brian got himself a girlfriend but somehow she never saw it coming. Sure, Alison was the annoying kind of girl who talked about hair, and clothes, and pearl pink lipstick while giggling a lot but if Brian wanted to hang out with girls like that there was no reason it should affect her.

At least, not until she suggested she might come around one evening so she could swap comics with Brian. The increase in disposable income as they reached their mid-teens had only resulted in a much higher rate of purchase of comics with lots of explosions and people being beaten up in the name of Justice. However, Pepper was currently experiencing a serious income shortage due to tramping mud all over her mother’s new carpet, and it seemed about time for some swapping. Who knew what unknown editions lurked in Brian’s room?

Brian, however, went pink to the ears at the suggestion and looked away. “Er. Better not.” The words seemed directed at the floor rather than at Pepper.

Pepper grimaced. “Your mother got some of her friends coming around again?” Oddly enough, none of the Them had mothers who seemed terribly keen on their friends meeting a herd of grubby teens. When Company came around they seemed in agreement that their offspring should be corralled into clean shirts and trousers (Pepper’s mother had long since given up trying to fight her daughter into a dress) and forced into a stiff unnatural cardboard underwear type of politeness until the last visitor had departed. Adam had loudly complained that such a policy hardly seemed honest, but parents were parents and they had Ways of making you do what they wanted.

“It’s not that. It’s er..” Brian coughed, and his voice seemed to withdraw into a low mutter as he shifted awkwardly. “Alison doesn’t think you ought to be coming around anymore.”

Pepper stared. “What’s  she got to do with anything?” she demanded. “Don’t tell me you’ve got to stop hanging around with us just ‘cause we’re not tidy enough or something.” Or didn’t get excited over the totally “awesome” nail polish she had just spent her allowance on.

Brian looked acutely uncomfortable. “No,” he admitted. “She uh. She says girls don’t hang around that long in boys’ bedrooms unless they’re up to... something.”

“Up to – oh!” Pepper flushed scarlet as she understood his meaning. She blinked, unsure whether she should be furious or finding the idea hilarious. “Brian, I’ve seen your bedroom.  We’d have to spend a week excavating before we had room to be up to anything.” And fumigating. There was a green milkshake in there which had almost certainly started its life as chocolate flavoured, and sometimes the piles seemed to rearrange themselves without human assistance. She was pretty sure there was a small civilisation under his bed breeding in the Place Where Socks Go To Die.

Brian shrugged, a silent miserable sort of movement, and stared at the floor. Refusing to meet her eyes, even as the moment stretched out silently.

Not hilarious then. In fact, really not funny at all now she came to think about it. She started to punch his shoulder in a friendly sort of way, and then, on second thoughts, withdrew her hand. Apparently anything could be misinterpreted now.  A nasty thought occurred to her. “You don’t think I’m er.. you know, do you?”

“Oh, no!” He was quick to reassure her on that at least. “I know you wouldn’t. Besides, Adam-“ He cut himself off, quickly, as though his mouth had gotten ahead of his brain.

“Adam, what?” Just as Pepper thought it couldn’t get any weirder, it turned out Adam was involved in this somewhere? Last she’d heard, this had been about Brian and Alison the pretty pretty princess.

“Adam wouldn’t like it if we, uh..” Brian trailed off.

“What’s Adam got to do with anything?” Adam might be their unacknowledged leader, but Pepper thought she had made her thoughts fairly clear on what she thought of him ordering her about a long time ago (judicious application of a toy tractor had been involved with pinpoint accuracy).

If possible, Brian looked even more uncomfortable. “Just that he uh. I don’t think he’d like it.”

“Adam does not get to say who I get to date! If I wanted to date you, I could!” Somehow that had come out sounding wrong. “Not that I want to, but I could. If I wanted to. And you wanted to, of course.”

It was fortunate that Alison hadn’t been around to hear that, but Brian stared at her as though she might have some terrible disease anyway. “I, uh, have to go,” he managed, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. “Help my mother with... stuff.”

It wasn’t even a good lie. For as long as Pepper had known him, Brian helping his mother had only been achieved by the usage of threats combined with generous amounts of bribery. He still couldn’t run quite fast enough that she couldn’t have chased him down and gotten the truth out of him by twisting his arm, but it didn’t quite seem worth it somehow.

She went to see Wensleydale instead.

It was about time she visited Wensleydale anyway, she thought, riding her bike over to his house. The older they got, the more Wensleydale seemed to shrink into his books until it seemed an actual intervention might be needed to pry him outside to have some fun. Of course, the older they got the clearer it got that Wensleydale was an honest-to-goodness genius as well, which made it difficult. There had been mutterings about early university entry and teachers as well as parents seemed to view the Them as definite threats to his success.

Not that the Them had ever cared what they had thought. It just made it difficult that was all.
In fact, now Pepper thought about it, Brian talked fairly frequently about going to the cinema with Wensleydale, to see films where he enjoyed the explosions while Wensleydale explained how the effects couldn’t possibly happen that way in Real Life. And Adam had Wensleydale going around every Tuesday, under the pretence that he was being tutored in maths (somehow after such visits, Adam’s room always seemed messier but his geometry never seemed any better). In fact, it seemed that possibly the only one of Them struggling to pull Wensleydale out... was Pepper.

Her brain fought with the concept, coming to new and worrying conclusions.

It was difficult to think how to ask what was in her head, especially when Wensleydale answered the door with his glasses perched on the end of his nose, looking more like an absent-minded professor than ever. There was probably a tactful, careful way to phrase it, but Pepper just blurted it out instead, because if she could n’t to another one of the Them, who could she do it to?

“Did Adam forbid you an’ Brian to date me?”

Wensleydale squinted at her for a moment or two, not seeming to know quite how to respond to this. Finally, he sighed, and opened the door wider. “You’d better come inside.”

She followed, wondering silently when exactly they’d reached the stage where she had to be invited in rather than just charging past him. Wensleydale, perhaps having taken advice from his mother about what to do when people turned up on your doorstep looking stressed and upset, started to make a cup of tea and stopped when Pepper helped herself to a can of coke instead.

“Well,” he said, and stopped, not seeming to know how to go on. He cleared his throat and tried again. “The thing is, Pepper, you’re a very nice girl, but I simply have to concentrate on my studies right now, especially if I want to get into Oxford. You mustn’t think that I uh..” He ran his hand through his hair, looking flustered and uncomfortable. “I just.. there’s no time for a relationship just now, and..”

“Stop,” Pepper commanded, and he did. “C’mon, Wensleydale, stop being an idiot, this is me. ‘A very nice girl’? D’you really think I’d turn up to throw myself at you?”

Wensleydale looked as though he weren’t sure whether to look relieved or offended at that so she plunged on hastily. “I don’t want to go out with you. I just want to know if Adam told you and Brian not to.”

“Oh,” Wensleydale said, and there was the same awkward look Brian had had. “Well. Not as such. It’s just...”

“It’s just, what?” Pepper demanded. “It’s just Adam feels he ought to get jurisdiction over my lovelife? What?”

“Oh, no no no,” Wensleydale said, obviously trying to sound reassuring. “It’s just we always thought you guys would get together, you know? The leader of the group and the only girl? It’s.. just how things are meant to go.”

Pepper narrowed her eyes at him and Wensleydale, perhaps taking it as a warning sign, moved his chair out of reach. “Just how things are meant to go?”

“Well, like Batman and Catwoman, you know?” Wensleydale said hopefully, and flinched back as she stood up, holding his arms up defensively. “It’s just how stories go, that’s all!”

Pepper really wished that they were still young enough that hitting him with a toy tractor wouldn’t be viewed as Antisocial Behaviour, and possibly assault with an agricultural vehicle. “My life is not a story!” And if it was, no one else was going to be writing it except for herself, that was for sure.

“Well, no,” Wensleydale conceded, and peered at her thoughtfully. “So... do you like somebody else then?”

“No, I don’t like somebody else, that is not the point!” Pepper snapped. “Why should that have anything to do with anything?”

“I’m just saying, if you don’t like anybody else, you could give Adam a try and..” He wilted underneath Pepper’s glare. “What’s wrong with Adam?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him! I just don’t like him that way!”

“If you don’t like anyone that way, how would you know?” It might have seemed an entirely logical statement to Wensleydale, but Pepper itched to slap him for it.

“Why don’t you date him, if you’re so keen on it?” she demanded.

Wensleydale looked surprised. “He’s a boy,” he said, as though it were obvious, “and-”

“If you don’t like anyone that way,” Pepper imitated, mockingly, “how would you know?”

Wensleydale scratched his head and looked away uncomfortably. “He likes you, Pepper,” he said, awkward but firm. “It just seems a bit mean of you not to give him a chance, that’s all.”

Part 2: http://go-exchange.livejournal.com/137010.html