I slammed into the wall with a resounding crack. My vision blurred as
white sparks flashed behind my eyes, caused by the back of my head
hitting the stone with enough speed to crack it open. I would have come
to a rather abrupt demise, if I hadn't been wearing my green robe. As
it turned out, the spells woven into it was not only defensive, but
designed to turn blows and soften harsh landings somewhat. Wincing at
the pain in my head, I pushed myself off the wall.
"You've got to do better than that," Lucas told me, his wand still levelled at my chest. "You're slow: how can you expect to still stand if you don't do anything?"
"I don't know which spell to use!" I snapped back, angry with myself for failing and angry with him for snapping at me.
"You're not supposed to use spells!" He hissed, as angry as he had been when he found me in Knockturn Alley. "You've even gone past that: the little trick you pulled in the Forbidden Forest with the green fire proves that. Let you magic do the work: it knows what to do, you know what to do if you only let it happen. Now stand up straight and we'll try again."
Gritting my teeth against the angry reply I had been about to make, I straightened up and tried to be ready for the next blow. A week at the Lucas residence had left me with a marginally better control of my magic, for which I was grateful. But, after countless explanations, I still did not know how to use it properly. Perhaps Lucas was no good at explaining things, or perhaps it was the heat of summer that made me dense. Either way, I was being routinely bashed senseless in the training sessions.
"It's simple," he would say, time and time again. "Just let your magic do the work."
But it wasn't that simple. I had tried, time and time again, to let my magic do the work, but it was nearly impossible to do something with such vague instructions. It was like being ordered to take down the moon and only being given a ladder by way of help. It was within the realm of the possible, but just out of reach. I just couldn't grasp how I was suppose to use my magic. When I had been slammed into the wall a fifth time, Lucas let me off, sighing and rolling his eyes.
A quick lunch, consisting of sandwiches and coffee, and I was off again. This time to see Frederic, Lucas' brother. Apparently, Lucas had decided that I needed better skill in hand-to-hand fighting, and had sent me to his all other than sane younger brother. Frederic though, turned out to be a bigger surprise than I had previously thought. While he quoted things incessantly, tricked and cheated his brother at every chance he got, and was more likely to end up in a straitjacket than in a teaching position, he was easier to get along with than his brother.
"Vincent's been beating you up, I see," was his greeting when I walked out of the house and onto the grass of the backyard.
Frederic had shed his wizarding robes in favour of Muggle clothing, consisting of mostly black and red. Those two colours seemed to be the Lucas' family colours, appearing everywhere, from Frederic's Muggle clothing to his brother's robes to everything in the wardrobe that didn't belong to me. In the sweltering heat of summer, the colours seemed highly inappropriate, but the brothers persisted in wearing them in spite of it.
"He doesn't pull his punches." I agreed. "But I still don't get how I'm supposed to use my magic."
"You don't?" He seemed surprised, "It's simple!"
"That's what your brother says too, but it turns out it isn't." I grumbled. "No one sees fit to stop and explain things to me."
"Well, my brother has never been one for explanations," Frederic grinned. "It is simple, if you know the basic principles. You know there's more to a spell than just the words, right?"
"Of course: you have to know what the spell does, and do the correct gestures and all," I shrugged, sitting down on the grass under one of the willow-trees.
It seemed the Lucas ancestral home was over-dimensioned everywhere, and not just their miracle of a library. To the estate belonged several acres of moorland and one small mountain. Just behind the mansion was what the brothers deemed a backyard, which was about the size of two Quidditch fields. Willow-trees circled a lake, much larger than the average garden pond, and enough grass to feed an army of horses covered the grounds. While Lucas preferred loitering inside, his brother was more often than not found in the backyard, attempting some of his latest ideas.
"Well, now that you don't have the words, you have to concentrate on the rest," Frederic told me cheerfully, gesturing wildly like he always did. "It's not difficult at all. In fact, wandless magic, while extremely hard to achieve, is easy to carry out. You just have to concentrate on what you want to happen, and if you've got magic that's strong enough, it will instinctively carry out the task. Simple, no?"
"That's all there is to it?" I asked, shocked at the simpleness.
"Nah, there's some more complicated things, such as actually holding back some of the magic so you don't blow up teacups when all you want is to heat your tea," he grinned. "But that's the basics of it. For simple things at least: like trying to keep on your feet when someone lobs a rock at your head, or deflect a spell someone casts at you."
"I pity your brother next time around," I grinned evilly. "He's not going to know what hit him."
"Pity myself because I can't be there to watch is what I'm going to do," Frederic's grin didn't waver. "Let's get started."
So followed two hours of rigorous physical training. Having lived in the Snake pit for six years, I already had the basic instinct that was required to carelessly throw punches at strangers. All Frederic had to do was teach me how to hurt the most, where to hit to break bones and how to angle kicks to give most effect. After the first hour, we stopped to take a breather in between fights, and I more or less collapsed on the grass once more.
"Where did you learn to fight like that?" I asked, out of breath.
"Too many bar-brawls for my age, and a rather informative month in Tibet." He said. "What I want you to do now, since you've proved that you're learning ridiculously quickly, is to use your magic to boost yourself while fighting."
"In what way?" I asked, a bit surprised. I thought I was going horribly slow, instead of learning quickly like he said. "And I'm not learning quickly: you're still worlds better than I am."
"I've had a lifetime of training: you've had little over a week." He reminded me. "You might have come here with a punch like a mule on you, and some survival skills in the way of fist fights, but I've had years, while you now have less than two months. There's no conceivable way I can teach you enough by the time you're going back to school, but damn me if I won't try. Who knows, you might even be ready for Death Eaters next time around. Stand up, and let's have at it again."
''''''''''
That night, like every one before, I fell into my bed dead on my feet, asleep before I hit the mattress. Hours of readings books, followed up by a bashing from Lucas, and ended with a two-hour fist-fight, which while not serious then at least exhaustive, was enough to kill anyone's enthusiasm for summer. Dinner wasn't exactly a happy affair either. Frederic would attempt, in his insane way, to be cheerful and quote things we had never heard of. I would try not to fall asleep in the soup, dead tired after the day's exercise. Lucas would be reading something and ignoring his brother.
A rather gloomy situation altogether. It was no better that breakfast and lunch were exactly the same, I reflected when I sat down at the kitchen table the next morning. I drained my cup of coffee in silence, reading yesterday's Daily Prophet. They had run another article on Potter, mostly about his relationship with his teachers and whether or not they favoured him because he was famous. I snorted into my cup, thinking about Snape and Lucas.
"What are you reading?" Frederic wondered from his plate of eggs.
"Daily Prophet," I replied, "It's about Potter. Again. They think his teachers favour him because he's famous. What a load of dragon dung."
"Really?" He asked, buttering his toast. "Why?"
"You've never been in Potions with Potter and Snape, I hear," I said, putting down the paper. "Potter's lucky if he can get away with only twenty points removed from his House. Not to mention what Lucas, your brother, does when he doesn't shut up."
"You go to school with him?"
"Yes." I nodded. "And he's just as annoying at sixteen as he was at eleven."
"He's sixteen already?" Frederic wondered, taking a bite of his toast. "Time flies, eh? I can still remember the day I heard the news: I was eight, playing gobstones with myself, when Mother came rushing out of the house screaming about the Potters."
"Hmm." I mumbled blandly. "Must have been quite the experience."
"Nah. She screamed a lot, our mother did," he finished the toast. "You should have heard her when Vincent upped and moved out. That was a woman who didn't need a Howler to be heard across a continent."
"When did he leave?" I asked without thinking.
"After graduation," Lucas informed me, walking through the door of the kitchen. "Not that it is entirely your business. However, since you will be staying here for six weeks, calling me Lucas will be rather cumbersome, considering there's two of us."
"And what am I supposed to call you? Francis?" I grumbled.
"Wouldn't Vincent do?" Frederic suggested. "It's his name, after all, though Francis does have a certain ring to it."
"Shut up," Lucas, no, Vincent snapped, cuffing his brother over the head. "If you ever call me Francis again, I shall write to the Daily Prophet and announce your horrid preference for pink underwear."
"But I don't prefer pink underwear." Frederic said, confused. "In fact, I think it's against our dress-code to wear pink underwear."
"I know that, you know that and, though Merlin might forgive us, now Zabini knows that too." Lucas – no, Vincent – said patiently. "But who do you think the world is going to believe? You, furiously denying the colour of your underwear, or the Daily Prophet, the reading of choice for magical Britain?"
"Shut up?" Frederic requested, looking frightfully embarrassed.
I,meanwhile, was trying not to snort coffee through my nose, laughing hard enough to have me rolling on the floor. The bickering brothers were, at times, hilarious without intention. Frederic was hilarious almost constantly: it seemed to be his modus operandi, but L – no, Vincent. It was going to take a lot of time getting used to calling him Vincent. - well, Vincent was the most stone-faced man I had ever met. He would, seriously, not crack a smile at the most hilarious joke ever thought up. He was more likely to give the person in question a detention and go and kill some chocolate instead.
"Calm yourself, Zabini." Vincent told me. "You have a lesson to attend to."
"Right." I said, putting down my empty cup and trying to keep from choking on coffee. "I'll do that."
'''''''''
This time, I was ready when the blow came. It was a simple Stunning charm, but yesterday, it would have knocked me off my feet. Today, instead, I imagined the spell burning out and disappearing about a feet away from me, sputtering out like a candle. It took effort, oh yes, but it worked just the way Frederic has said that it would. All I did was close my eyes for a second, imagine what I wanted to happen, and then made it so. To be perfectly honest, there was a bit more to it than that: I didn't just need to imagine what should happen: I needed to know it, at a bone-deep level. I needed to know that the spell would burn out before it reached me, and with that knowledge, make it so.
"You've learned." Vincent – I had to stop myself from calling him Lucas even in my mind – said, lowering his wand. There was a faintly surprised look on his face, tainted with traces of pride and amusement. Only Vincent Lucas could pull of all those emotions at once. "When did you realise what you needed to do?"
"Your brother had to tell me." I said, straightening up slightly. "You know, this would have been much easier if you had just told me how."
"You were on the verge of finding out by yourself," he shrugged. "If I had let you go unaided you would have found the way."
"No, I would have snapped, and you would have been a little pile of ashes and you know that Vincent," I was growing more and more annoyed with him, and his given name slipped out by accident. "You have seen what happen when I lose control. You know how dangerous I am."
"Magic, by definition, is dangerous," he said, putting his wand back in his pocket. "It is, after all, the ability to do anything you please, as long as you have the right words and a piece of stick with some feathers in it. With magic, knowledge truly is power. But like with all knowledge, it is not what you have that matters, it's how you use it. Wandless magic has even less restrictions, so control is a major issue. But, once you have that control, it's almost impossible to lose."
"Ollivander would murder you if he knew you just called his art ´a stick with some feathers in it´." I pointed out, not replying to his statement.
"He's far too kind to murder anyone, let alone me." Vincent snorted. "I think you've proven that you are capable of wandless magic. We'll begin on what, specifically, one can do with it tomorrow."
"So I'm supposed to shove off now?"
"Precisely."
''''''''''''''
The knowledge that I had actually accomplished something more than a couple of bruises was refreshing. Frederic went easy on me that afternoon, claiming that I had accomplished enough for one day, and that he could pummel me in the morning. With those comforting words, he proceeded to conjure up some food and we spent about an hour sitting under one of the willows, eating sandwiches. Frederic, like always, was as quirky in his choice of food as in any of the things he took up: peanut butter might not be strange, but when coupled with chocolate sauce and left-over corned beef, it was.
"It's not really that bad," he told me, mouth full of the less than appetizing sandwich. "Once you actually eat it, the taste is just perfect."
"You're weird, mister," I told him, quite satisfied with my own ham-and- cheese sandwich.
"Frederic," he corrected. "Don't call me mister: it feels like you're talking to my father."
"Hmm," I said through a mouthful of sandwich.
"I thinking about going to the library." He announced out of the blue, like he always did. "Feel up to being my safety-catch?"
"Sure, as long as I come out alive." I shrugged, finishing my sandwich.
"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger," Frederic laughed, "The man who said that was named Friedrich. He was a Muggle, I believe. Neat name though."
"I bet," I snorted.
The library never ceased to amaze me. I was no small person, but even I felt dwarfed by the gigantic proportions, the multitude of books in there, and the sheer size of the bookshelves. At first, I had thought that L – Vincent's warning had been in jest, but then Frederic had requested I follow him to the library, saying he didn't want to be alone in there. The fact that the carelessly fearless Frederic didn't want to be alone with the books got through to me the seriousness of the warning more resoundingly than any amount of evil looks from his brother.
Still, the library seemed so much more beautiful than sinister. The wide windows let in the sunlight, which made patterns on the floor, the kind my sister used to dance across when I was still living at home. As Frederic began to climb one of the ladders that criss-crossed the shelving, I remained on the floor and, in a fit of impulsiveness, skipped across the light-and-shadow pattern, just like my sister did. I stopped as the tip of my boot brushed the mysterious pattern in the middle of the floor. V- Vincent, damn it, had said it was what kept the library stable.
Curious, I settled down on the floor, legs crossed, and studied the spiral. The swirling, golden pattern in the strange blue stone that was closest to me looked like a wide open eye. Without thinking, I unclasped my robe and put it on the floor, spread it out next to the spiral, to compare the patterns, see if I could find some similarities. In the middle of the back of my robe was that wide-open, unblinking eye, just the same as it was in the blue stone. Furrowing my brow, I traced it with my finger.
"The unblinking eye." I mumbled to myself.
I didn't dare touch the symbol in the blue spiral, in fear of what might happen. If it turned out to be the one making sure the library walls still stood, and touching it meant taking the support away, I didn't want to be responsible. I could just imagine the look on L-Vincent's, how hard it was to even remember to think his name, face when he found out what had happened to his thousand-year-old library.
I could hear Frederic whistle somewhere far above me, moving along one of the walkways looking for a book. Knowing Frederic, he was most likely skipping along. Cheerfulness ought to be punishable by law: as soon as I graduated, I was going to create an antidote for it. Frederic was an especially serious case: he was even cheerful in his sleep. The Lucas brothers were mirror opposites: Vincent was constantly serious, while Frederic never was, Vincent never laughed, while Frederic did it all the time. And yet, on the outside, the only things that differenced between them were the colour of their eyes, the length of their hair and their heights. And even there, it was only a couple of inches that differed.
Frederic came climbing down the ladder again, holding a heavy, blue book under his arm. Just as he came down the last rung of the ladder, he jumped off, touching the floor with a grin on his face. With a wink at me, he opened he book, pulled out a wand and cleared his throat. With a growing sense of dread, I gathered up my robe and scrambled to my feet and out of the way, but he didn't aim the wand at me, but at the doors, and then he spoke clearly.
"Perseco crinis." He said, moving his wand through a rather complicated routine.
My lips moved as I tried to decipher his words: it was Latin, but a mangled Latin. It was something with cutting off, removing, but I couldn't figure out the second word. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, I didn't have to, since outside the library, someone was approaching fast, swearing in a dozen different languages at once. The doors were thrown open, and in stormed Vincent Lucas, but something was wrong, something was off with him. He was walking too fast for me to see exactly what, but then he stopped abruptly and levelled his wand at Frederic, and I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.
His hair, previously long enough for him to hide a small tribe of pygmies in, had been viciously shorn off at about the same length as his brother's, right beneath the shoulders. To say that he was angry was to miss a perfectly good moment to use the word outraged. His hands were shaking, that's how angry he was.
"Run." He told his brother coldly. "It'd be no sport killing you where you stand."
"Come now, Vincent, you desperately needed to get rid of that mat of hair," Frederic grinned, putting the book back on the shelf, despite that it, until just a moment ago, had been filled to capacity. "You could hide in it."
"It never occurred to you that it might have been the point?" Vincent asked, dangerously calm. "If I hid in it, at least there would be no resemblance to you."
"Just because I'm prettier than you there's no need to be bitter, Vince," Frederic dared to pat his brother's shoulder. "Besides, you look good in it."
With a decidedly out of character howl, Vincent chased his brother from the library. I chuckled, watching them go, before leaving the library myself and firmly shutting the door. Once more, the house echoed with the shouts of the Lucas brothers.
Serenity was for the weak, anyway.
'''''''''
Ending Notes: I just couldn't let them get along for a whole chapter. Besides, Frederic is more amusing when he's making trouble anyway. It seems I'm running out of things to write pretty quickly in this part, but there's still some chapters to go; say four, at the most. We're nearing the end, folks. Soon, part three will be started.
"You've got to do better than that," Lucas told me, his wand still levelled at my chest. "You're slow: how can you expect to still stand if you don't do anything?"
"I don't know which spell to use!" I snapped back, angry with myself for failing and angry with him for snapping at me.
"You're not supposed to use spells!" He hissed, as angry as he had been when he found me in Knockturn Alley. "You've even gone past that: the little trick you pulled in the Forbidden Forest with the green fire proves that. Let you magic do the work: it knows what to do, you know what to do if you only let it happen. Now stand up straight and we'll try again."
Gritting my teeth against the angry reply I had been about to make, I straightened up and tried to be ready for the next blow. A week at the Lucas residence had left me with a marginally better control of my magic, for which I was grateful. But, after countless explanations, I still did not know how to use it properly. Perhaps Lucas was no good at explaining things, or perhaps it was the heat of summer that made me dense. Either way, I was being routinely bashed senseless in the training sessions.
"It's simple," he would say, time and time again. "Just let your magic do the work."
But it wasn't that simple. I had tried, time and time again, to let my magic do the work, but it was nearly impossible to do something with such vague instructions. It was like being ordered to take down the moon and only being given a ladder by way of help. It was within the realm of the possible, but just out of reach. I just couldn't grasp how I was suppose to use my magic. When I had been slammed into the wall a fifth time, Lucas let me off, sighing and rolling his eyes.
A quick lunch, consisting of sandwiches and coffee, and I was off again. This time to see Frederic, Lucas' brother. Apparently, Lucas had decided that I needed better skill in hand-to-hand fighting, and had sent me to his all other than sane younger brother. Frederic though, turned out to be a bigger surprise than I had previously thought. While he quoted things incessantly, tricked and cheated his brother at every chance he got, and was more likely to end up in a straitjacket than in a teaching position, he was easier to get along with than his brother.
"Vincent's been beating you up, I see," was his greeting when I walked out of the house and onto the grass of the backyard.
Frederic had shed his wizarding robes in favour of Muggle clothing, consisting of mostly black and red. Those two colours seemed to be the Lucas' family colours, appearing everywhere, from Frederic's Muggle clothing to his brother's robes to everything in the wardrobe that didn't belong to me. In the sweltering heat of summer, the colours seemed highly inappropriate, but the brothers persisted in wearing them in spite of it.
"He doesn't pull his punches." I agreed. "But I still don't get how I'm supposed to use my magic."
"You don't?" He seemed surprised, "It's simple!"
"That's what your brother says too, but it turns out it isn't." I grumbled. "No one sees fit to stop and explain things to me."
"Well, my brother has never been one for explanations," Frederic grinned. "It is simple, if you know the basic principles. You know there's more to a spell than just the words, right?"
"Of course: you have to know what the spell does, and do the correct gestures and all," I shrugged, sitting down on the grass under one of the willow-trees.
It seemed the Lucas ancestral home was over-dimensioned everywhere, and not just their miracle of a library. To the estate belonged several acres of moorland and one small mountain. Just behind the mansion was what the brothers deemed a backyard, which was about the size of two Quidditch fields. Willow-trees circled a lake, much larger than the average garden pond, and enough grass to feed an army of horses covered the grounds. While Lucas preferred loitering inside, his brother was more often than not found in the backyard, attempting some of his latest ideas.
"Well, now that you don't have the words, you have to concentrate on the rest," Frederic told me cheerfully, gesturing wildly like he always did. "It's not difficult at all. In fact, wandless magic, while extremely hard to achieve, is easy to carry out. You just have to concentrate on what you want to happen, and if you've got magic that's strong enough, it will instinctively carry out the task. Simple, no?"
"That's all there is to it?" I asked, shocked at the simpleness.
"Nah, there's some more complicated things, such as actually holding back some of the magic so you don't blow up teacups when all you want is to heat your tea," he grinned. "But that's the basics of it. For simple things at least: like trying to keep on your feet when someone lobs a rock at your head, or deflect a spell someone casts at you."
"I pity your brother next time around," I grinned evilly. "He's not going to know what hit him."
"Pity myself because I can't be there to watch is what I'm going to do," Frederic's grin didn't waver. "Let's get started."
So followed two hours of rigorous physical training. Having lived in the Snake pit for six years, I already had the basic instinct that was required to carelessly throw punches at strangers. All Frederic had to do was teach me how to hurt the most, where to hit to break bones and how to angle kicks to give most effect. After the first hour, we stopped to take a breather in between fights, and I more or less collapsed on the grass once more.
"Where did you learn to fight like that?" I asked, out of breath.
"Too many bar-brawls for my age, and a rather informative month in Tibet." He said. "What I want you to do now, since you've proved that you're learning ridiculously quickly, is to use your magic to boost yourself while fighting."
"In what way?" I asked, a bit surprised. I thought I was going horribly slow, instead of learning quickly like he said. "And I'm not learning quickly: you're still worlds better than I am."
"I've had a lifetime of training: you've had little over a week." He reminded me. "You might have come here with a punch like a mule on you, and some survival skills in the way of fist fights, but I've had years, while you now have less than two months. There's no conceivable way I can teach you enough by the time you're going back to school, but damn me if I won't try. Who knows, you might even be ready for Death Eaters next time around. Stand up, and let's have at it again."
''''''''''
That night, like every one before, I fell into my bed dead on my feet, asleep before I hit the mattress. Hours of readings books, followed up by a bashing from Lucas, and ended with a two-hour fist-fight, which while not serious then at least exhaustive, was enough to kill anyone's enthusiasm for summer. Dinner wasn't exactly a happy affair either. Frederic would attempt, in his insane way, to be cheerful and quote things we had never heard of. I would try not to fall asleep in the soup, dead tired after the day's exercise. Lucas would be reading something and ignoring his brother.
A rather gloomy situation altogether. It was no better that breakfast and lunch were exactly the same, I reflected when I sat down at the kitchen table the next morning. I drained my cup of coffee in silence, reading yesterday's Daily Prophet. They had run another article on Potter, mostly about his relationship with his teachers and whether or not they favoured him because he was famous. I snorted into my cup, thinking about Snape and Lucas.
"What are you reading?" Frederic wondered from his plate of eggs.
"Daily Prophet," I replied, "It's about Potter. Again. They think his teachers favour him because he's famous. What a load of dragon dung."
"Really?" He asked, buttering his toast. "Why?"
"You've never been in Potions with Potter and Snape, I hear," I said, putting down the paper. "Potter's lucky if he can get away with only twenty points removed from his House. Not to mention what Lucas, your brother, does when he doesn't shut up."
"You go to school with him?"
"Yes." I nodded. "And he's just as annoying at sixteen as he was at eleven."
"He's sixteen already?" Frederic wondered, taking a bite of his toast. "Time flies, eh? I can still remember the day I heard the news: I was eight, playing gobstones with myself, when Mother came rushing out of the house screaming about the Potters."
"Hmm." I mumbled blandly. "Must have been quite the experience."
"Nah. She screamed a lot, our mother did," he finished the toast. "You should have heard her when Vincent upped and moved out. That was a woman who didn't need a Howler to be heard across a continent."
"When did he leave?" I asked without thinking.
"After graduation," Lucas informed me, walking through the door of the kitchen. "Not that it is entirely your business. However, since you will be staying here for six weeks, calling me Lucas will be rather cumbersome, considering there's two of us."
"And what am I supposed to call you? Francis?" I grumbled.
"Wouldn't Vincent do?" Frederic suggested. "It's his name, after all, though Francis does have a certain ring to it."
"Shut up," Lucas, no, Vincent snapped, cuffing his brother over the head. "If you ever call me Francis again, I shall write to the Daily Prophet and announce your horrid preference for pink underwear."
"But I don't prefer pink underwear." Frederic said, confused. "In fact, I think it's against our dress-code to wear pink underwear."
"I know that, you know that and, though Merlin might forgive us, now Zabini knows that too." Lucas – no, Vincent – said patiently. "But who do you think the world is going to believe? You, furiously denying the colour of your underwear, or the Daily Prophet, the reading of choice for magical Britain?"
"Shut up?" Frederic requested, looking frightfully embarrassed.
I,meanwhile, was trying not to snort coffee through my nose, laughing hard enough to have me rolling on the floor. The bickering brothers were, at times, hilarious without intention. Frederic was hilarious almost constantly: it seemed to be his modus operandi, but L – no, Vincent. It was going to take a lot of time getting used to calling him Vincent. - well, Vincent was the most stone-faced man I had ever met. He would, seriously, not crack a smile at the most hilarious joke ever thought up. He was more likely to give the person in question a detention and go and kill some chocolate instead.
"Calm yourself, Zabini." Vincent told me. "You have a lesson to attend to."
"Right." I said, putting down my empty cup and trying to keep from choking on coffee. "I'll do that."
'''''''''
This time, I was ready when the blow came. It was a simple Stunning charm, but yesterday, it would have knocked me off my feet. Today, instead, I imagined the spell burning out and disappearing about a feet away from me, sputtering out like a candle. It took effort, oh yes, but it worked just the way Frederic has said that it would. All I did was close my eyes for a second, imagine what I wanted to happen, and then made it so. To be perfectly honest, there was a bit more to it than that: I didn't just need to imagine what should happen: I needed to know it, at a bone-deep level. I needed to know that the spell would burn out before it reached me, and with that knowledge, make it so.
"You've learned." Vincent – I had to stop myself from calling him Lucas even in my mind – said, lowering his wand. There was a faintly surprised look on his face, tainted with traces of pride and amusement. Only Vincent Lucas could pull of all those emotions at once. "When did you realise what you needed to do?"
"Your brother had to tell me." I said, straightening up slightly. "You know, this would have been much easier if you had just told me how."
"You were on the verge of finding out by yourself," he shrugged. "If I had let you go unaided you would have found the way."
"No, I would have snapped, and you would have been a little pile of ashes and you know that Vincent," I was growing more and more annoyed with him, and his given name slipped out by accident. "You have seen what happen when I lose control. You know how dangerous I am."
"Magic, by definition, is dangerous," he said, putting his wand back in his pocket. "It is, after all, the ability to do anything you please, as long as you have the right words and a piece of stick with some feathers in it. With magic, knowledge truly is power. But like with all knowledge, it is not what you have that matters, it's how you use it. Wandless magic has even less restrictions, so control is a major issue. But, once you have that control, it's almost impossible to lose."
"Ollivander would murder you if he knew you just called his art ´a stick with some feathers in it´." I pointed out, not replying to his statement.
"He's far too kind to murder anyone, let alone me." Vincent snorted. "I think you've proven that you are capable of wandless magic. We'll begin on what, specifically, one can do with it tomorrow."
"So I'm supposed to shove off now?"
"Precisely."
''''''''''''''
The knowledge that I had actually accomplished something more than a couple of bruises was refreshing. Frederic went easy on me that afternoon, claiming that I had accomplished enough for one day, and that he could pummel me in the morning. With those comforting words, he proceeded to conjure up some food and we spent about an hour sitting under one of the willows, eating sandwiches. Frederic, like always, was as quirky in his choice of food as in any of the things he took up: peanut butter might not be strange, but when coupled with chocolate sauce and left-over corned beef, it was.
"It's not really that bad," he told me, mouth full of the less than appetizing sandwich. "Once you actually eat it, the taste is just perfect."
"You're weird, mister," I told him, quite satisfied with my own ham-and- cheese sandwich.
"Frederic," he corrected. "Don't call me mister: it feels like you're talking to my father."
"Hmm," I said through a mouthful of sandwich.
"I thinking about going to the library." He announced out of the blue, like he always did. "Feel up to being my safety-catch?"
"Sure, as long as I come out alive." I shrugged, finishing my sandwich.
"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger," Frederic laughed, "The man who said that was named Friedrich. He was a Muggle, I believe. Neat name though."
"I bet," I snorted.
The library never ceased to amaze me. I was no small person, but even I felt dwarfed by the gigantic proportions, the multitude of books in there, and the sheer size of the bookshelves. At first, I had thought that L – Vincent's warning had been in jest, but then Frederic had requested I follow him to the library, saying he didn't want to be alone in there. The fact that the carelessly fearless Frederic didn't want to be alone with the books got through to me the seriousness of the warning more resoundingly than any amount of evil looks from his brother.
Still, the library seemed so much more beautiful than sinister. The wide windows let in the sunlight, which made patterns on the floor, the kind my sister used to dance across when I was still living at home. As Frederic began to climb one of the ladders that criss-crossed the shelving, I remained on the floor and, in a fit of impulsiveness, skipped across the light-and-shadow pattern, just like my sister did. I stopped as the tip of my boot brushed the mysterious pattern in the middle of the floor. V- Vincent, damn it, had said it was what kept the library stable.
Curious, I settled down on the floor, legs crossed, and studied the spiral. The swirling, golden pattern in the strange blue stone that was closest to me looked like a wide open eye. Without thinking, I unclasped my robe and put it on the floor, spread it out next to the spiral, to compare the patterns, see if I could find some similarities. In the middle of the back of my robe was that wide-open, unblinking eye, just the same as it was in the blue stone. Furrowing my brow, I traced it with my finger.
"The unblinking eye." I mumbled to myself.
I didn't dare touch the symbol in the blue spiral, in fear of what might happen. If it turned out to be the one making sure the library walls still stood, and touching it meant taking the support away, I didn't want to be responsible. I could just imagine the look on L-Vincent's, how hard it was to even remember to think his name, face when he found out what had happened to his thousand-year-old library.
I could hear Frederic whistle somewhere far above me, moving along one of the walkways looking for a book. Knowing Frederic, he was most likely skipping along. Cheerfulness ought to be punishable by law: as soon as I graduated, I was going to create an antidote for it. Frederic was an especially serious case: he was even cheerful in his sleep. The Lucas brothers were mirror opposites: Vincent was constantly serious, while Frederic never was, Vincent never laughed, while Frederic did it all the time. And yet, on the outside, the only things that differenced between them were the colour of their eyes, the length of their hair and their heights. And even there, it was only a couple of inches that differed.
Frederic came climbing down the ladder again, holding a heavy, blue book under his arm. Just as he came down the last rung of the ladder, he jumped off, touching the floor with a grin on his face. With a wink at me, he opened he book, pulled out a wand and cleared his throat. With a growing sense of dread, I gathered up my robe and scrambled to my feet and out of the way, but he didn't aim the wand at me, but at the doors, and then he spoke clearly.
"Perseco crinis." He said, moving his wand through a rather complicated routine.
My lips moved as I tried to decipher his words: it was Latin, but a mangled Latin. It was something with cutting off, removing, but I couldn't figure out the second word. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, I didn't have to, since outside the library, someone was approaching fast, swearing in a dozen different languages at once. The doors were thrown open, and in stormed Vincent Lucas, but something was wrong, something was off with him. He was walking too fast for me to see exactly what, but then he stopped abruptly and levelled his wand at Frederic, and I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.
His hair, previously long enough for him to hide a small tribe of pygmies in, had been viciously shorn off at about the same length as his brother's, right beneath the shoulders. To say that he was angry was to miss a perfectly good moment to use the word outraged. His hands were shaking, that's how angry he was.
"Run." He told his brother coldly. "It'd be no sport killing you where you stand."
"Come now, Vincent, you desperately needed to get rid of that mat of hair," Frederic grinned, putting the book back on the shelf, despite that it, until just a moment ago, had been filled to capacity. "You could hide in it."
"It never occurred to you that it might have been the point?" Vincent asked, dangerously calm. "If I hid in it, at least there would be no resemblance to you."
"Just because I'm prettier than you there's no need to be bitter, Vince," Frederic dared to pat his brother's shoulder. "Besides, you look good in it."
With a decidedly out of character howl, Vincent chased his brother from the library. I chuckled, watching them go, before leaving the library myself and firmly shutting the door. Once more, the house echoed with the shouts of the Lucas brothers.
Serenity was for the weak, anyway.
'''''''''
Ending Notes: I just couldn't let them get along for a whole chapter. Besides, Frederic is more amusing when he's making trouble anyway. It seems I'm running out of things to write pretty quickly in this part, but there's still some chapters to go; say four, at the most. We're nearing the end, folks. Soon, part three will be started.