#zippo magic

The sensation causes Laurentius - veteran of a thousand thousand just-on-the-wrong-side-of-sober walks home from a proper dive - to stop, reach into his hoodie, and produce a gleaming flip lighter. It is, by far, the cleanest and most expensive thing on his person, outclassing even the cracked and clearly reluctantly acquired smartphone he was, until a moment ago, thumbing idly while he walked.

"Cor, Farry, yer dad's worse than mine, and mine thought affection showed up on the business end of a belt," Laurentius mutters, poking at the embers of the campfire with an idle fascination. "I've met rocks with more give than that man, and not half as bloody crag-faced."

The camping trip is one of those impromptu things where you take a bad week and try to transmute it into a decent weekend. Meeting Faramir had been a pleasant happenstance in a bar - the man looked like he was trying to drink himself under and Laurentius, recognizing the sensation during a rare appearance at the tavern, elected to combat that impulse by striking up conversation. Meeting Faramir's father while meeting up to head elsewhere was a lesson in stonework.

Laurentius glances past the fire over at his friend.

"What he said to you - wasn't right, Faramir," he mutters. "Blood is blood, and if you want my measure, you're the better man than he by half."

A moment later, he straightens up, stabs a pair of marshmellows on sticks he absolutely did not clean first, and shoves one in Faramir's hand.

"Come on, you," he says. "Nothing a bit of burned sugar and a bad joke can't fix. I didn't drag you out here to mope at me all weekend. You need to leave some moping for me to do, eh, mate? Don't hog it."

At Faramir's glance - which appeared to land at a neat intersection between irritation and amusement - Laurentius grins.

That morning Anri had risen early, while the city was still rinsed in pewter light, and walked to the park with a basket on her arm.

A fairytale scene unfolded, one of hedges furred with frost. She gathered what the season allowed her – windfall apples bruised sweet at the core, a handful of rosehips split and glowing like small hearts, rosemary clipped sparingly from a public bed. It pleased her to make a cake that had once been outside, that remembered the weather and the sky.

Back in the apartment, the kitchen was a shrine of thrift and tenderness. Pastel cupboards were scuffed to the bone, a second-hand stand mixer the colour of old cream, a tiled backdrop lined with mismatched jars – sugar like snowdrift, flour like chalk dust, a ribboned bottle of honey thick with the ghosts of wildflowers past. She pared the apples, simmering them down with honey and rosemary until the room grew warm and resinous. She folded in ground almonds, rosehip syrup dark as garnet, a pinch of lemon zest. The cake rose obediently, domed and gold, cracking just enough.

She iced it thinly. Once-burnt candles were set with care. She washed her hands and wrists, put on a clean dress she had bought in a charity shop – pale blue, the colour of forget-me-nots – and brushed flour from her hair.

The apartment held its breath as dusk came slinking. It was a space small enough that everything mattered – the thrifted sofa upholstered in a tired floral, the shelf of books whose spines were broken with love, the kettle that sang like a throat clearing.

Laurentius.

Her Laurentius.

Shabby and spark-hearted.

She lit the candles, a crown of flames shivering, and began to sing as she carried it along the narrow corridor, her voice untrained and earnest. The words were the old ones everyone knew, but they were threaded with something private, a timbre that belonged to the two of them alone.

Tiny flames made small suns on the walls and, when she reached him, the room seemed to tilt, as if the axis had shifted to the centre of his chest. She set the cake down between them on the low table. They were squeezed together by necessity, by the poky architecture and the magnetism of wanting. She could feel the warmth of him through the thin cotton of her dress, a heat like a hearth that had burned for generations.

Birthdays had a way of making faces more themselves. She saw the lines that told her where he laughed and where he held his breath. She saw the boy he had been and the man he was, the impossible tenderness of time’s work. Her love for him felt suddenly articulate.

“Make a wish,” Anri said, smiling, and waited for smoke to curl blue and sweet.

Make a wish, she says.

He finds himself unable to think of what he could possibly that was not already half-tucked into his side by way of both material necessity and need. The sweet girl had mapped him so thoroughly already: the cake was perfect, the candles were perfect. He would not have been surprised had he discovered, in fact, that she'd managed somehow to make the weather perfect - frosty and brittle, clean in a way he couldn't properly explain.

He can feel her pressed against him. Not for the first time, Laurentius marvels that she is at once so close, so soft, and so eagerly in love. It's an eagerness that stokes the same heat in him. He takes a deep pull of the smoky air around the candles, revels in the scent of smoke.

It is an odd sensation, celebrating birthdays. It's stranger still, he thinks, to celebrate him - scruffy, quiet, agreeable in a way he always considered born of desperation rather than sincerely felt altruism. If you'd asked him on his last birthday, he might have told you not to waste the flour or the sugar on the cake; he's sweet enough as it is, he'd say, not meaning it, not at all.

Anri makes it extremely difficult to remember that sensation - that bone-deep understanding that he ought to apologize for showing up. She has since the start. She poses a question that he does not have an answer to: what do you do when you've stripped away all evidence that you are, in fact, less in some irreparable and cosmic way?

Well, you blow out your candles, and you kiss the girl at your side, and you murmur that you love her against her lips, and you tell her:

The headmaster peers at Laurentius over the tops of thin, well-made spectacles. The boy imagines those glasses cost more than everything he owns - knapsack, two hoodies, two pairs of increasingly distressed jeans and a few t-shirts, as well as whatever books he can pilfer from the orphanage library.

Could have him all for 25 quid, depending on your choice of thrift shops.

"Mr. Cooper," the man says again, dragging Laurentius out of his distracted internal accounting.

"Oh, er, it's Laurentius, sir," the boy returns. "Laur to my friends."

"Laur--"

"You can call me Laurentius, sir," the boy says. It sounds like a joke, a boy being difficult for the sake of it, but there's an edge - an anxiety in it that gives the headmaster pause.

He watches Laurentius for a moment - a scrawny, ill-kept boy from St. Gwynevere's Orphanage, just down the way. He looks entirely out of place in the office, itself all stern mahogany and thick books crammed into stalwart shelves. Something akin to sympathy wanders through the headmaster's chest, and he removes his spectacles and folds them in front of him on his desk.

"Laurentius," the man says, more kindly. "I am trying to ascertain why you struck Mr. Harrowby across the face."

"He only went and called me mum a barrel, didn't he," Laurentius mutters, sinking into his hoodie as he leans back in his chair. "I was willin' to let that one go, last name of Cooper an' all."

"But you didn't let it go," the headmaster prompts.

"No, because when I ignored him he graduated it from barrel to 'coffin,' Mr. Pavel," Laurentius retorts. More anger seeps into his voice than he meant to show, and he tugs the cowl of his jacket further down to hide his face. "At that point I had to put one across his jaw, didn't I?"

"I would have, certainly," said Mr. Pavel. The statement hangs in the air between them before Laurentius gives him a confused look from beneath his hood.

"What?"

"Might have struck him twice, really," Mr. Pavel muses, steepling his hands in front of himself. "Just between you and me, Laurentius, I find Mr. Harrowby to be a bit of a prat."

"What's your game? You're not going to suspend me?" Laurentius says. The promise of escape from whatever consequences he'd been braced for seems to liven the boy up a little; he leans forward again, placing his hands on Mr. Pavel's desk.

"No, Laurentius, but I am going to ask you not give Mr. Harrowby what he wants. The little bugger - don't tell anyone I said that - subsists almost entirely on other people's irritation," Mr. Pavel says. "As far as I'm concerned, you're going to spend a day at home tomorrow as punishment, and then we'll call it even."

"His parents will--"

"His parents will very shortly have to account for Mr. Harrowby's appalling manners, whatever their history with our fine institution might have been prior to his arrival," Mr. Pavel said. "If I may speak plainly, I do not care to throw a young man who is otherwise very promising out of my school because he reacted very reasonably to someone being a, as previously described, prat."

"Promising? My grades are barely passing," Laurentius protests. His conscience roars in anger - what are you doing? They're going to let you stay! Shut up!

"And I trust that, sufficiently motivated, you will take that intense interest in reading and read the material provided, and those marks will soar," Mr. Pavel says. "You aren't subtle, Laurentius. Your teachers report you as a ravenous reader, tearing through books that no 15-year-old has any business comprehending. I've no doubt that if you applied that interest in the right direction, you'll do fine."

Laurentius stares at the man, unable to find the words to continue arguing.

"Right," Mr. Pavel says, retrieving his spectacles. "Today's a Tuesday. I'll expect to see you bright and early Thursday morning, Laurentius, given that you will stay home tomorrow as a consequence of your entirely understandable outburst."

"Laur."

"What?"

"You can call me Laur," the boy says, standing up. "Uh - thank you, Mr. Pavel. I'll...I'll do right by it. The, ah, chance, I mean."

through-fire-and-flame: laurentius of the great swamp, as written by chez. semi-private and selective. affiliated with the incredible @swordluck. blanket content warning for gore, dissociation, and fire. rules, verse tags, and regulations listed below.

(header art from here.)

He shouldn't have this book - this half-rotted thing, spine mostly broken, the leather-bound cover singed in places and warped in others, the pages so yellow as to beggar belief they'd ever been a crisp white off a fresh press. By all accounts this thing should be carefully preserved in a museum somewhere; it represents at this moment more value than everything that has passed through Laurentius' hands previously in his lifetime. But he has it, and he's curled up in a little hovel somewhere in the rainy slums, and by the light of a candle he's devouring it.

That isn't to say there's much left to devour. There are entire sections missing, ashen smears across parts of pages that render the text beneath nigh unreadable. The notes are helping - someone else had this book before him, and they were industrious in making little remarks and notes on the text throughout. Someone named "S. Salaman," if the notetaker's handwriting could be sufficiently deciphered; that took some doing, as the hurried scripture occasionally descended into total incoherence before whirling back 'round to stark clarity again.

"This bit about understanding yourself before you can understand the Fire is occult nonsense," reads one note. "Bugger that. I've plenty of unplumbed depths and I plan to leave 'em that way."

Going by the way the subsequent note rambles on, Laurentius pictures an old man bent over the table with a lighter or torch in one hand and a drink of something stiff and noxious in the other. Salaman sounds like a wry bastard, going by his input, but his less sardonic notes serve as a translation for these arcane instructions. It boils down to speaking with the world, he says - convincing reality there ought to be more Fire, more Life, in this particular spot. Occultism, really, is a conversation, and...

Laurentius carefully lays the book - painfully aware just how dry the thing is, and he knew very well it should have gotten wet in the surreptitious dash here from the archive - on the table, picks up the ancient Zippo lighter he pilfered off another slummer, and steps back.

He takes in a breath, catches his thumb against the wheel of the lighter, mutters the words he saw in the book and wills the Fire to respond.

Click.

What follows is the whisper-tear of a flame coiling into existence above the lighter and arranging itself into a tight, but wavering orb. The thing streaks and weaves as Laurentius pulls the lighter to and fro, eventually reasserting its shape a couple of seconds after the fact. He stares, transfixed, at the results of it. There was a world - just a few moments ago - where magic was a far off and strange concept, one he was only dimly aware had any purchase in the real world, and even then through rumors and hearsay among the other slummers.

Now there's a world after, and he stands on the precipice of it.

He can't help but think how pretty she looks in the winterglow of the television, spilling out into the otherwise dim living room. The black and white movie she put on is long forgotten, of course; what began as an earnest attempt to educate Laurentius on the merits of Casablanca quickly dissolved into lazy, languid, tangled cuddling and smiling, tired kisses. They'd had a long day, the both of them.

By this point, he's laid back on the couch almost totally horizontal, and Anri's taken advantage of the angle to drape herself across him, preventing any aspirant escapes. He doesn't mind; the gentle weight and warmth of her against him is the sort of comfort that still sends his mind spinning into stunned euphoria that she's his girl, and he's her man.

Well, pillow, currently, going by the soft, sleepy breathing she settles into, and the way she tucks up under his chin. One hand reaches up, runs his fingers through her hair, teasing out the remnants of the braids she wears at work.

Eventually, he'll have to take the poor girl to bed. But for now, Laurentius kisses the top of her blond-crowned head, and loops one arm around his waist as he shifts a little to get more comfortable, and smiles into her hair.

"So, I don't - I don't understand," Laurentius says. "There's fire in you, somehow? Like, the magic is inherent? How does that work?"

She'd asked him to teach her more about how to use it, familiar as he is with his own Fire, but the latter arcana stemmed from hours of reading and practicing - there was nothing internal about it, outside of the will to act.

The rest was a sort of...conversation, so to speak, with the world around him, working out a deal to create fire where there shouldn't be fire.

A living focus. It's a marvel. She's a marvel, clearly. He's not positive what he can teach her, but that earnest stare makes him want to try, even without the threat of having her bodyguard called on him.

(He'd heard about the man in the silver suit - Laurentius didn't like his chances against a street tough, much less somebody accomplished.)