Work Text:
You’d never gain anything— and potentially lose everything— trying to demand fairness from the universe.
Freshly eleven, Liesel had come to understand this in an immediate, animal way: real as the cold nausea of hunger pains, real as jagged steel jaws biting into bone. Fairness had no foothold in the real world, where her mother was dead, her father was free, and there was nothing in all the possibilities of life and mana she could do about it except survive.
In her mind, fairness has long since been relegated to the same unreachable, rose-twined realm as the concepts of luck, and friendship, and— most nebulous and thus most useless of all— love. Luck is a story the privileged tell themselves to live guiltlessly, and love and friendship are how they sell it on.
Liesel is not lucky. Liesel is disciplined, and careful, and her plans have redundancies on redundancies. The Scholomance is very motivating that way— it rewards her clarity and her dedication, and punishes remorse and indecision. It is, she frequently thinks, the most real version of the world that exists.
Liesel has her redundancies, spiraling out into all corners of the school and wide world beyond it, but there is only the one goal, one that has never been as paltry as: graduate from the Scholomance, or: tear valedictorianship from the teeth of the less worthy. It is not: become as armed and armored as she can without mortifying from the inside out. It is also not: allow herself to be pawed by a series of disappointingly stupid and unteachable enclavers until she finds one with the correct balance of connections and personal malleability to maximize her return on investment.
The goal is decidedly not London enclave’s tall and otherwise nondescript scion Alfie, shifting to look over his shoulder as the seniors leave breakfast and say, “Alright, Liesel?”
It’s mild, perfectly natural, his body angled in subtle invitation. If she trots a little faster, she could catch up, walk along with him to the advanced metallurgy seminar they share. Because the class is one of the larger ones, the school takes pains to wend them all around a different route each and every time, and someone sharing the mana draw for wayfinding would be an unusual luxury.
She doesn’t look up at his face, because they're at the front of the pack going down the stairs and even the Scholomance’s architecture is treacherous without her full attention. But her eyes narrow as she starts to count the treads— one hundred and eighty five to the deepest labs, rising in multiples of thirty-seven— and she makes the deliberate choice to ignore him.
It’s still two weeks until term end, and until school rankings are announced she won’t have a solid understanding of her own bargaining power. The information she had on Galadriel has given her an unexpected boost with New York, but won't hold nearly the same cache with London. London also has fewer openings on tacit offer than even New York, and Alfie himself is already part of one of the most bloated and predictable alliances in the school— all the moderately-talented London enclavers have closed ranks in preparation for graduation training, along with one or two hangers-on possessed of particularly complementary artifice. She doesn’t doubt they’re in the market for additional cannon fodder to clear the way, but she has no intention of settling for anything less than a guaranteed spot.
And a guaranteed useful idiot to build on from there.
So she ignores the equally unassuming, “Good morning,” on the way to the bathrooms two days later, and the brief, “Ah, hello,” in the library a day after that. He never flags her down for a seat at meals, but is somehow always able to walk past her position. He always smiles when he catches her eye, but is never more familiar, never presses the issue.
Persistence is a virtue Liesel can appreciate; patience, however, is not particularly close to her heart. More than a week into this slow and excruciatingly polite campaign, Alfie pauses at her lab table while she’s trying to find a delicate and flattering way to explain to Magnus Tebow why his plan to create an aqueous flamethrower array is going to roast them all alive before it ever inconveniences a mal, and she can’t help but glare.
“Hi there, Liesel,” he says with a genial nod, and then turns to Magnus to ask if he might borrow the bromide back for his chestplate shield-holder— which actually is an excellent idea if he’s using aiderscale— and leaves with the giant brown glass bottle and a split second of blandly judgmental eye contact that has rage crawling up the back of her throat.
“There’s literally tanks of bromide up at the front, but okay,” Magnus says, leaning into her with a conspiratorial grin. “Sorry, what were we talking about?”
Liesel turns and smiles at him too, careful to cover her teeth. “Oh, just one more look at the third glyphic arc, I think. For fine-tuning.”
Going directly to Alfie’s room is dangerous; she doesn’t want to compromise what little progress she’s made with New York, and she really doesn’t want to find out the hard way Alfie has decided to try his hand at maleficer work now that graduation is staring him in the face. Her own room would be the safest by far, but she doesn’t want him in it— not when she doesn’t know exactly what he wants, and not while she’s still stuck metering out approving noises to the likes of Magnus Tebow. She’s used to bad behavior from a certain gender of classmate, and he doesn’t seem type, but then again, their relationship to date could be best described as fellow deer in a thinning herd. She doesn’t really know him.
Instead, she offhandedly mentions needing a better Breton dictionary for finals to Henri, who knows Sam and Claire, who’s had a massive crush on Chloe for ages and is more than happy to arrange a New York-Lyons-London mass study sesh in the library on Saturday. Everyone is nervy, worried about midterm grades and the start of gymnasium runs, and they all leap immediately at the chance to move in numbers to the highest floor— away from the uncertainty surrounding what might or might not be waiting in the hall below the school.
When London arrives, Alfie finds her in the crowd immediately, lifting a casual hand in greeting. This time she doesn’t look away, and neither does he; he strolls leisurely through the tables in the midst of the hoard of St. James until she can stand and say, “I’m going to the Brythonic section, does anyone want to come? I’ll take point.”
“Ta very much, I’ll take rear,” Alfie says, and they veer off before anyone can volunteer to go in the middle.
Some places in the stacks are worse than others, but today they seem mostly subdued— no unnaturally deep shadows or flickers of movement behind the spines when she sparks a tiny bluewhite light on her finger with a hushed “Zunden,” the floor under their feet dull with scuffing but whole. They move beyond the first circle and into the inner shelves, just slightly narrower and colder, wood knotted and varnish gone sticky. The voices of the throng of people in the common area are quieter than they should be.
There’s a little grouping of carrels here, with good sightlines down all the curving rows if you had an ally to watch the ones you couldn’t. A boy from Stockholm had died here Liesel’s freshman year, because he didn’t.
“A bit short of the Brythonics,” Alfie observes.
Liesel gives a noncommittal hum. “I will set a wire cantrip, if you check the desks.”
“I can do a full ward,” Alfie offers, and in her peripheral vision he’s already lifting a hand. “Reini—”
“Oh no,” Liesel says, facing him squarely on with filaments of whitehot plasma arcing between her fingertips. “Please. I would really prefer to set it myself.”
In the staticy light, Alfie blinks. “Then a cantrip would be lovely, thank you.”
He at least does a properly thorough job with the carrels, giving her his back while he works. One binder-mimic scurries away with burnt edges and a handful of agglo grubs are reduced to sand and paper clips under his muttered incantations. Liesel finishes laying the cantrip before he’s done, and with a single syllable sets her little spark adrift above them, bright in comparison to the eternally dim orange overheads.
“So,” Liesel says, with a sidelong gaze that many have incorrectly interpreted as flirtatious. “Alfie. Is there perhaps something I could help you with?”
To be this incessant for this long, an enclaver to an independent— there’s a slim chance whatever he’s about to offer is something worth considering after all. It’s at least worth braving the stacks to find out.
“Well, yes,” Alfie says, checking the underside of the last chair before he stands, facing her over the empty tabletops. He doesn’t check her cantrip, which makes him either very stupid or wildly overconfident; his eyes do flicker up to the spark, before returning to her face. “At least, I hope so, and I appreciate your time. I think we might have… mutually beneficial requirements, so to speak, and I’d like to see if we can come to some sort of agreement. Arrangement.”
“Do you, now?” she asks, still light and sweet. “I'm very interested to hear what you think I require.”
He frowns a bit at that, but his face is still gratingly earnest as he considers her. “You’ll forgive me, I hope," he says slowly, "for being a bit blunt. You've been more obvious since the start of term, and I think I have a fairly clear idea of your basic requirements, but—”
“If you are going to be disgusting,” Liesel says, feeling the full spool of the wire cantrip in her fingertips, wondering how it might look tight around his neck, “this conversation will be over quickly.”
“Not my intention,” Alfie says immediately, hands raised. “Not at all. But, Liesel, you have to admit you’ve not given me much else to work with. Why Magnus in the first place? Why Ravi, of all people?”
“Why not you, do you mean?” she asks tiredly. Gott in Himmel, save her from self-obsessed enclavers.
“That would be charmingly entitled of me, wouldn’t it,” Aflie says with a crooked smile. “But they're just a part of something bigger, right? You’re valedictorian track, for God's sake.”
She could kill him, and quite easily; he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that the cantrip just contracted around them by a few inches, copper seething over wood. That smile makes it especially tempting. But he still hasn’t told her what he wants.
“If I were,” she says, very deliberately, “it would be quite silly of me to say anything about it before the end of term. Wouldn’t it, Mr. Alfred Cooper Browning the several times descended?”
She nearly closes the cantrip around them both when the lamp above them brightens, a burnt-hair smell like overclocked machinery and a half-audible whine rising until it glows as warm as sunlight. The light sends something long and sinuous sliding back into the shadows with a hiss behind Alfie, but he doesn't even twitch. He stands frozen, eyes darting over the lamp, the table, the newly-revealed shelves high above, hands hanging open in the air.
“Ah, about that," he says, several silent seconds later. "Best to stick to the nickname. At least where it can hear.”
“It,” she says. “The… Scholomance?”
“Yeah. Yes.”
Which was everywhere, all the time, for the last three and a half years. “I see,” she says, staring up at the lamp. It's the most interesting thing he’s done so far.
“Right,” he says, clearing his throat. “Right. Listen, Liesel— can you tell me what is it, precisely, that you're looking for?”
Liesel drops her eyes to stare at him instead. It's almost funny, that they have the exact same question for each other; the prisoner's dilemma of the Scholomance in full swing. The look of genuine entreaty on his face is still deeply irritating. “Oh, my apologies. I thought you already had the general idea.”
“I know what you’ve chosen,” he says. “I know none of them have worked, for whatever reason, and I honestly don’t know why you’re bothering.”
“How could you possibly say it isn’t working, when you don’t know why I’m doing it?” she snaps. “And you’ve yet to demonstrate any reason why my choices should be any of your business."
“It’s complicated,” he hedges, then hastily adds, “wait,” as she steps away. “Please.”
And despite her inclination to leave him there in the oddly brightened stacks, the sounds of conversation still a low rumble from a few shelves over, she does wait. He’s right, after all; she does want him, or someone just like him. She just needs the other shoe to drop.
“We don’t know what’s going on out there,” he says softly, like he’s confessing something dire. “Bangkok is gone, and even before that it wasn’t looking great for Shanghai and London’s longterm coexistence. And a big part of that is the Scholomance, how seats are allotted, how induction works. There’s going to be a war, if it hasn’t started yet. If we can’t stop it.”
“You are stating the incredibly obvious,” she says. “Everyone knows these things.”
“But unlike everyone else, my da is in line for Dominus in London,” Alfie says, sharper. “Our Dominus now is— I don’t really have words for how cruel and cowardly the inner circle is. It's like they want to just make things worse and worse, like they can’t imagine anything different. But something has to change. I might actually be able to do something about it, once— if I leave here, instead of sitting around in our gardens admiring the problem. If I can get all of us out, we can change things for everyone.”
“So... you want to save the world,” she says. Starting with his enclaver friends. Who he obviously presumes will then happily assist him in destroying their own highly privileged status quo. “And you want me to— help?”
“I’ve seen your assignments, the special project you did for advanced alchemy,” he says, and she would really, truly like to know how, her cantrip coiling a bit closer to his heels. “Even if you don’t make valedictorian, you’re probably the most brilliant incantor I've seen. And if what you want is an enclaver, well,” and then he gestures at himself, shaggy hair, rawbone frame and all.
It’s incredibly arrogant. Also morbidly novel, to have an enclaver attempting to throw himself at her rather than the other way around. As for the rest… it’s the height of wishful, willful thinking; the worst kind of blind enclaver optimism sans any kind of proposal or strategy, sustained on pure hubris.
It is exactly what she needs.
“What I am looking for is my father and his wife dead,” she tells him, bluntness for bluntness. “Munich. Mueller.”
“Oh,” Alfie says. Then, “Ah. No German enclaves,” like he’s solved a great mystery. It is massively irritating, but he is exactly what she needs and she feels almost lightheaded with the dawning satisfaction of it, the same feeling as a perfect score, a perfect chord.
“My only real requirements are a place in the best enclave that will take me, and a partner that will help,” she tells him. “You are correct— you fit the description almost exactly.”
And as expected, Alfie says, “Almost?” with the start of a frown.
It’s probably for the best the aspiter swarm chooses then to attack. Honestly, it’s shocking that nothing tried before, considering how long they’ve been standing alone with just copper wire and will between them and the dark. Liesel gets to demonstrate the full range of her plasma summons, ever so careful of the books, and Alfie’s evocation of refusal is one of the most succinct and elegant pieces of spellcasting she’s ever seen. He’s becoming more annoyingly perfect by the second, actually, and he still looks a bit worried as they duck out of the shelving with the last of the bitter, stinging ash following them in a cloud.
“Just come for first run with us next week,” he says, barely out of breath. He’s not even looking at the other enclavers as they call out, wanting to know what happened, the whole London pack alert and on their feet— just her. He doesn't break eye contact even when Orion Lake plunges past them into the shadowy stacks at a dead run, nearly knocking him over.
Patience is not one of Liesel's best-practiced virtues, but— the reversal is just too appealing. “I will consider it,” she says, and leaves him standing there to join the New York enclavers for what she already suspects will be the last time.