rememberettersberg | Open Post: Hooked On A Feeling

Open Post: Hooked On A Feeling

What hobbies have you got? Susan had asked him, and he had to admit to not being sure. At school and for some time after, he played rugby. More recently, he only watched it on the television Peter had set up in the tech cave. Here at the mansion, he has books and research and the beginnings of mentoring, but it occurs to Nightingale that he has been building himself a facsimile of work and very little else. He's survived that way for half a century and been perfectly all right (though others may disagree with that assessment) but here, in this hinterland between realities, he is feeling a growing itch for... whimsy, perhaps.

At this moment, propping up the bar with a pint of bitter and a crochet hook, no one would dare accuse him of being whimsical. Nightingale is scowling fiercely at the hook, the yarn, his pint, and the book sitting open beside it. Company would be more than welcome.

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"Excellent work!" Nightingale is near exuberant, clapping his hands together once for punctuation. "Again, again, maintain your momentum - and this time say lux whenever the shape clicks in your head. Begin to associate the word with the shape."

Laertes snaps his palm closed over the light, then spreads his fingers and starts to form it again almost at once. It gathers threads faster, now, winding and plying late spring over early summer, growing thick and round at the center. "Lux," says Laertes, and the werelight blossoms into light again. This time, it gives off the very faintest heat, no warmer than skin.

"Control the heat," Nightingale warns. "Concentrate on making it exactly the same every single time. Feel the word as you say it. Let the saying of it help the spell into existence."

The admonition sharpens Laertes's focus. He has learned swordplay by the same principle--repetition until his muscles remember each position innately, until he can snap into sixte without conscious thought. Banishing the werelight, he imagines it in its purest form, like a single pure note of unvarying pitch. He pictures the link between that note and the spindle, until the note becomes the sound that the spindle makes as it winds spring and summer into light. "Lux," he says. The light of it is cool, clear.

"Lux," again: the same note, the same pitch, the same image of the spindle winding up. It comes more swiftly, this time. Still not easy, and a long way from instinctive, but his heart thrills to feel the same cold, clear light. The act can be repeated. It isn't a fluke; it isn't a miracle. It's an act of will.

"Lux." The werelight illuminates his smile, the shattering gladness of it.

"You've got it." Remembering the beer slowly warming on the table at his side, Nightingale raises it in a toast. "For the next few days, set aside some time to keep practising. The word is the spell is the word. They should be entirely entwined. But Laertes, this is very important now that you're progressing - don't overdo it. A couple of hours a day, no more."

"What might befall me, if I overdo it?" he asks, and unconsciously rubs out an old ache (long since eased) where he'd strained his wrist in fencing.

Nightingale opens his mouth to give his usual blithe answer ("strokes, brain haemorrhages, aneurysms") but then thinks to pause and translate into something less modern. "Too much magic can wither the brain," he settles on. "It's not usually a concern for apprentices but better to be safe than sorry."

"How does that happen?" Laertes asks, resting his elbow on the bar and his chin on his hand. "Magic seems rather to train the mind, like any other skill. What causes the brain to wither, rather than flourish?"

"It seems to boil down to simply forcing too much energy through too small a conduit. Picture a dam with a tiny hole bored through it. The water may trickle through slowly and steadily, but trying to squeeze more water through more swiftly or with greater force will eventually destroy the dam." Nightingale shrugs. "I'm not a medical man - I have a brilliant doctor friend researching the matter much more thoroughly - but that is my understanding, at least."

"Tell me more of your friends," says Laertes, remembering how it felt to hear of Enjolras's closest companions--as though, for a moment, their ghosts filled the narrow compass of the grounds, and their two disjunctive worlds overlaid each other like a palimpsest. (And, admittedly, he's also remembering Claudius's coy remarks about Nightingale's apprentice.)

"Dr Walid, Abdul, is known around the world for his gastroenterological expertise, but his more private fascination is the science of magic and its effects on the human body. He has a wonderfully morbid sense of humour, the oddest things delivered in the most gentle of Scottish accents." He smiles, wistful. "My housekeeper, Molly, is probably my oldest friend. She was a refugee of sorts, brought to safety at the Folly before I began working there. For decades after the war, it was just the two of us. She is of the fae, so other people often find her disconcerting, but her demeanour is not her fault."

"Now I'm curious," says Laertes, and indeed, his expression is rapt. "What about her is disconcerting?"

Nightingale affects a tone of spooky solemnity, eyes twinkling. "She appears to glide instead of walk, she hisses instead of speaking, her teeth are too many and too sharp." He laughs. "I'm given to understand that she resembles a certain character trope from horror films - a silent, pale, ghostly girl with long black hair. Peter, my apprentice, is fond of her but startled by her sudden presence in a room at least three times a week."

"And tell me more of Peter," Laertes urges. "How long has he been your apprentice? Is he diligent and careful with your arts?"

Nightingale laughs again, bright and unfettered. "Diligent and careful are words I imagine Peter to be utterly unfamiliar with. He's impulsive, cheeky, easily distracted, and apt to set things on fire." Fondness permeates every word. "He's also as smart as a whip and has tremendous potential as a practitioner. We've been working together for almost a year and a half."

"I understand better now why you've had such patience with me," Laertes laughs. "How did you find each other? Was he another young man barging into your home and demanding to be taught silversmithing and magic?"

Nightingale snorts. "He was a young police trainee sent to guard a crime scene. He took a witness statement from someone who turned out to be a ghost and hared off on his own unofficial investigation. Dragged another trainee along with him for the ride." His face darkens momentarily at that, but he moves on without further comment. "I caught wind of it quickly and got him recruited into the Special Assessment Unit, which is the Met's impressive euphemism for the Folly these days. The entire case was riddled with the uncanny and Peter turned out to have a knack for sensing magic... and using it too."

"It's clear you have a great interest in his career," says Laertes. He guesses from the context that police means a constabulary. "Is he a personal friend, as well as a colleague and an apprentice?"

"I'd like to think so," Nightingale says. "He's much younger than I and we've lived incredibly different lives, but we get along well enough. He's brought life back into the Folly."

"If you return, will you seek out other apprentices?" Laertes asks, a little more quietly. "Forgive my rudeness, but at times you seem ... very lonely."

Nightingale's first instinct is to protest, suffused with a quiet sort of shame at being so perceived, but then the question hits him, forcing the breath out of his lungs. "I had a second apprentice," he admits. "A colleague of Peter's, the one who went along with his initial investigation. Lesley was... horribly injured in the line of duty, unable to continue working with the police. Peter had demonstrated the process of lux for her - completely without permission, of course - and she turned out to be an incredibly swift learner. Just before I came here, we discovered that she had betrayed us, allying herself with a dangerous dark practitioner."

"It must claw at you, to know that you can't resolve it. I'm sorry," says Laertes. He looks down at his hands. "I know not what I would do, if I were so betrayed. What did you intend for her?"

"We'd had no time to form a plan," he says. "Yet another reason to worry about the situation I've left behind, I'm afraid. If she'd stayed, I would have attempted to have her apprenticeship formalised like Peter's. There has been a significant reemergence of magical activity in our world - the more people trained to respond to it, the better."

"Do you know what caused this reemergence? Or does that cause remain veiled to you?"

"It's probably tied to whatever is keeping me young." He shrugs. "There aren't enough of us left to make a proper study of it."

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