Traditions and Fireball Biscuits
"Hi, you're back! And just in time for dinner," Abigail greeted me in the entrance hall of the Folly.
"Well, I'd never pass up on Molly's cooking," I half-joked. To be honest Molly's cooking is pretty delicious, so long as she steers clear of sheep lungs, cow brains and the like. "Oh wait, what happened to your hand?"
Abigail quickly pulled her bandaged right hand behind her back. "Nothin'."
I frowned at her.
She frowned back for a moment, then sighed and rolled her eyes the way only a teenager could. "I burned it a bit, a'right?"
"A bit as in, stick your hand under cold running water and you're fine, or a bit as in, you should probably have a doctor take a look at it?" I asked, slipping into a sort of protective big brother mode (except I'm an only child and Abigail is my cousin, not my sister. Though she's also my fellow wizarding apprentice, that's got to count for something, right?)
"Don't worry, I checked and re-bandaged her hand when I arrived about half an hour ago," came the soft Scottish accent of Dr Walid as he walked over to us. "Hello Peter."
"Hi," I said back. "Nice to see you outside of work."
"It's been a while since I came over to the Folly just for dinner and not to discuss a case you and Thomas were working on, hasn't it?" he agreed. "Dinner's ready, by the way."
As per usual, Molly had cooked enough food - mashed potatoes and some kind of roasted vegetables - to feed at least twenty people. Less usual were the Christmas tree-shaped chocolate biscuit sitting on one of the dinner plates, and the way Molly gently but insistently steered Abigail towards that seat.
"Uh, thanks?" said Abigail as she sat down. "What did I do to deserve sweets before dinner?"
"I believe it has something to do with the state of your right hand," said Nightingale cryptically.
"You mean how I made my first werelight today?"
"You did? Abi, that's great!" I congratulated her.
"Don't call me that," she complained, but with a big grin on her face, and held up her uninjured hand for a high-five. I obliged her, of course. Walid smiled openly at that, while Nightingale tried to frown disapprovingly at our lack of table manners but didn't quite manage it.
"It's actually a tradition from Casterbrook that someone must have told Molly about," he explained. "The first time a student was able to cast a werelight he was given a biscuit or a piece of chocolate as a reward."
"That's nice," I said, smiling at the thought of twelve-year-old Thomas Nightingale proudly looking at his first ever werelight... before quickly sticking his hand in a bowl of cold water because that werelight had burned his palm. (Had it? Even Nightingale couldn't cast perfectly controlled formae right from the start, could he?)
"Did you burn your hand, too, the first time you made a werelight?" asked Abigail, like she'd read my thoughts.
"I did." Nightingale winced slightly at the memory. "It was rather painful for a few days, and the school nurse banned me from playing in the following weekend's rugby game." The way he said it, it was clear that he definitely considered not being allowed to play rugby the bigger of those two evils.
"I also burned my hand a little, the first time I managed to cast a werelight," I told Abigail when I'd finished eating. "Didn't get a biscuit for it though..."
Nightingale reacted to my side-eye with a brief shrug and a simple "Peter, you were already in your early twenties when you cast your first werelight. Abigail is still a child by comparison."
"Oi, I'm fifteen," Abigail grumbled around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. "What?"
"Nothing, I was looking at the guy next to you. What's with the facial expression, Doc?"
"Well, I could say 'I have no idea what you're talking about, officer' but I know that's not going to work with you. Molly made more chocolate biscuits and one of them especially for you."
"Abdul, I'm very disappointed," said Nightingale as he put down his knife and fork, but his eyes were twinkling with good humour as he spoke. "I really thought you would last longer before telling Peter about that."
"What can I say, Thomas, your apprentice is too skilled at making people talk," Walid joked. "Oh, thank you Molly."
Molly had just swept into the dining room, soundlessly as usual, and deposited a small plate of chocolate biscuits on the table. Unlike Abigail's Christmas tree from before dinner, these ones came in less festive shapes: there was a circular biscuit decorated with red and orange icing to resemble a fireball, a bone-shaped one with white icing, one decorated to look like a fox's face, and a bigger one with similar colouring to the fireball, but less regular in shape.
"Aww, thanks!" I said to Nightingale, Walid, and especially to Molly, as she'd been the one to actually bake the biscuits. In response Molly did a little curtsy-like motion before leaving the room with a tray of dirty dishes, leaving us to figure out who should get which biscuit.
That last part was quite easy really - Abigail got the fox biscuit, Walid the bone-shaped one, Nightingale the fireball one (obviously), and me the other fireball... thing. "I believe it's supposed to resemble an explosion," said Nightingale after taking a closer look at it. "An appropriate choice for you, Peter."
"What do you mean, Sir, I haven't exploded anything with magic in two weeks," I retorted with a grin before taking a bite from my biscuit. (It was delicious.)
"Right, you're down from exploding several apples a day to just one explosion every few days to every other week," Nightingale agreed. "Partly because you're no longer spending as much time practicing with apples."
"You practice magic with apples?" asked Abigail, setting her half eaten fox biscuit down on her napkin.
"Some formae are practiced on apples first, yes," said Nightingale. "Including Impello, the one you're going to learn next now that you have mastered the werelight. The goal of Impello is to make an object float in the air - not to explode it," he added with a meaningful glance at me (I raised my hands in the universal 'Who, me?' gesture).
Later, when I'd returned to the Folly after taking Abigail home, I overheard part of a conversation between Walid and my boss. "You know, Thomas, Peter might get his penchant for exploding things from you..."
I hoped Walid wouldn't bring up Ettersberg and the Tiger tanks Nightingale had destroyed there, because that's a topic my guv (understandably) doesn't like talking about. Instead, I heard Nightingale's voice: "If you're referring to my duel with Varvara Sidorovna, I brought that barn down around us in a planned and controlled way. Peter, by contrast, made those apples explode accidentally because he wasn't focused enough."
Actually, he wasn't completely right about that. Some of the apples I'd made go boom deliberately, hoping to better understand the difference between a correctly cast Impello (making the apple float) and a failed one (a faceful of apple pulp). The strategy hadn't quite worked out, but a few weeks later I'd mastered the forma anyway.
"If you say so," I heard Walid's voice again. "Keep me updated on Abigail's progress, will you? I'd like to know if, and how, it's different from Peter's."
"Ever the scientist, are you?" said Nightingale, but despite the two of them standing with their backs to me, and the distance between them and my position halfway up the stairs, I could hear the smile in his voice.
"Definitely not just that, I've also grown very fond of those two and want to see them doing well."
"So do I," said Nightingale quietly, though still loud enough for me to hear, then added at a higher volume: "I'm glad you could make it, it was really nice having you here. Drive safely on the way home, will you? The roads might be icy."
"Drive safely, from you of all people!" Walid called over his shoulder, throwing Nightingale a grin before stepping outside onto Russell Square. "You've never driven a car safely and carefully in your life!"
He's not wrong there, I thought, grinning slightly to myself as I made my way further up the stairs to my room. Abigail had once asked me if wizarding apprentices were also given badges like the Boy and Girl Scouts, except not for First Aid and Lighting a Fire but for Werelight, Floating Apple and so on. For the record, there's no such thing as wizarding apprentice badges, but maybe I should create one for Not Getting Sick While Being In The Jaguar With Nightingale Driving...