The morning after the duel. Fila found herself, yet again in the same bed as the Brazilian beauty. After the nights breakdown the two had spent hours talking about nothing and everything.
Bea had all the right in the world to be worried about being drawn into a duel, its very human. Especially after seeing Enzo being thrown like a ragdoll and worse, hearing his bones crack from several meters away.
It really wasn't a morally good thing to watch, and that much was obvious when the Ilvermorny team met in one of the training rooms the next day.
Sera sat on a bench just looking at nothing, Aaron had paced back and forward for so long that a path had been made where he walked on the soft ground. Daneil sat with his wand training on wand movements.
And than there was Marcus, the next champion to either be kicked into the dirt or to win.
Professor Hale had instructed him to begin training as soon as possible to prepare for Friday. And even Headmaster Fontaine stood in the training room this morning.
Fila walked up beside him and crossed her arms as she joined his observation.
"Strange isn't?" he began, his voice seemed like any other day. "We train so much, and yet after one match we lose all hope." He turned to see the girls reaction.
But Fila barley gave one and just shrugged and slightly twitched her lip. "Its normal for one to be afraid of a ghost when you haven't seen one before."
He chuckled. "That may be." He scanned the girl a little more, "So what did you think of the duel?"
The question wasn't about what she thought about the winner or loser, he asked if she still thought she could win. And what she thought about how they did.
"I think… that Enzo played to hard in the beginning, and that Rin is very trained. She might even have some bodies under her name." the analyses didn't seem to chock the headmaster as he just nodded along.
Headmaster Fontaine didn't flinch at the mention of bodies. He simply adjusted his glasses, his gaze fixed on Marcus, who was currently struggling to keep a simple shielding charm steady.
"Mahoutokoro has always had a... rigorous approach to discipline," Fontaine murmured, his voice low enough that it wouldn't carry to the students. "But Rin is an outlier even for them. She doesn't fight like a student. She fights like a person who has already made peace with the fact that the world is a violent place."
He turned his full attention back to Fila. The training room was filled with the swish-crack of Marcus's wand and the muffled thud of Aaron's pacing, but the space between the Headmaster and Fila felt like a private island of clarity.
"What did you think of the spell she used, and you know which one I'm talking about."
Fila shifted her weight to her right leg more, and put her hands on her hips. "I haven't seen it before, but it seemed like some alteration of the banishing charm, maybe some family made spell?"
The headmaster nodded. "Indeed, a family made spell. Secret and unknown to many. And very old."
Fila raised an eyebrow, "What are we doing here?"
She felt that this was a waste of time, even if they train now there wouldn't be enough learnt to make a difference.
But that could be change, Fila had a smile on her face. And it didn't go unnoticed by Fontaine as he finally succeeded with the thing he wanted. "I will leave you to it Ophelia Grindelwald." he said an turned towards the exit.
She twisted her head slightly and a loud crack came from her neck. "Alright everyone! Line up!"
With that everyone looked up and instantly knew what was happening.
Training could be fun, but it could also be horrible and hard. One of them gives you more than strength and power, its something everyone needs in a dueling ring even if it has to be taught with the help of a hammer.
The hammer this time begin Fila's ruthless magic. And Discipline being the wished outcome. Something that her grandfather had intensively trained into her during summer.
The training room went quiet as the heavy doors clicked shut behind Fontaine. The atmosphere shifted instantly, the air growing thick and static as Fila stepped into the center of the room.
"Marcus, front and center," she rasped, her voice cutting through the lingering anxiety like a cold blade. "Aaron, Daniel, Sera—perimeter. You're not spectators. You're the walls. If he tries to back out of the circle, you push him back in."
Aaron stopped his pacing, his eyes wide. "Fila, what are you—"
"LINE UP" something came out. Something that tore through the air and pulled everything in the brains of the students to listen and obey.
Fila had finally used it, for the first time in two years since she used it. Her unexplained ability that she had used on Theo when he was about to duel Mason.
The four students all lined up fast after her command. With Marcus in the center.
Marcus stepped forward, his wand clutched so tightly his knuckles were white. He looked at Fila, then at the empty space where the Headmaster had been. "Fontaine said you're in charge?"
"Fontaine said I should stop you from becoming a stain on the marble," Fila countered, her chin tilting up. "The problem with all of you isn't that you're weak. It's that you're polite. You wait for the 'Begin' signal. You wait for the shield to hold. You wait for permission to be dangerous."
With a snap of her fingers, the training dummies made from wood sprung to life. Growing out legs and arms.
They walked with confident steps towards Marcus.
"You're waiting for them to bow, Marcus?" Fila rasped, her voice appearing to come from every corner of the room at once. "They won't. Neither will Yumi."
He dummies charged towards him at once.
The first dummy lunged. It swung a heavy wooden arm aimed directly at Marcus's head. He scrambled back, his Protego flashing into existence just in time. The impact sounded like a hammer hitting a drum, and Marcus was sent skidding across the dirt floor.
"Come on, fight like you actually want to survive!" Fila commanded, her dark green blindfold watching as the other three dummies began to circle him.
Marcus pushed himself up, but the dummies didn't give him a second to breathe. Two of them converged from the sides, their wooden hands glowing with a dull, yellow light—a mimicry of concussive blasts.
"I can't... there's too many!" Marcus shouted, his voice cracking.
Fila clicked her tongue behind her teeth. "WEAK" that sharp voice came out again. something pulled in his mind as he tried to dodged the first and second dummy.
She didn't stop the dummies. They hit him, and again and again. but she didn't stop them until he laid on the floor.
The other champions around didn't say anything, but they definitely thought about intervening. But maybe they saw something in the whole thing, behind the ugly mask so to say.
With a couple of solid steps fila stood over Marcus. "Why did you complain?"
"What?" Marcus said while he still saw stars from begin hit in the head slightly.
"You started complaining, right as we started. You didn't even try before you complained."
Marcus didn't answer. He just coughed, a cloud of training-room dust puffing from his lungs.
"I said," Fila rasped, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous hum. "Why did you complain?"
"There are four of them!" Marcus burst out, his voice cracking. "They move faster than any training dummy I've ever seen, they hit like bludgers, and I can't even see where the spells are coming from when they all glow at once! It's impossible to—"
"STAY DOWN." The shout made the boy who tried to get up fall back down with a thud. His eyes went wide, darting toward Aaron and Sera, but they were still caught in the wake of her presence, standing like stone sentinels at the edge of the circle.
"Do you seriously think that the others will show you mercy when you lay down, or when you are overwhelmed?" Fila asked not only to him but the others.
Fila let them think for a moment, she wasn't going to tell them what to think. that would be determined by they themselves.
The training room breathed.
Nobody spoke. The dummies stood where she'd stopped them, frozen mid-stance, their dull yellow glow fading back to plain wood. Marcus was still on the floor, chest heaving, one arm across his eyes like he could block out the ceiling if he tried hard enough.
Sera was the first to move. Not toward Marcus. Not toward Fila. She just shifted her weight from one foot to the other and looked at the floor in the particular way of someone arriving at a conclusion they already suspected but needed the proof of.
Aaron looked like he'd been told something in a language he understood but hadn't expected to hear out loud.
Daniel had stopped his wand movements at some point during it all and was just holding the wand loosely at his side, watching.
Fila waited.
It was Marcus who finally broke it, which was right, because it needed to be him.
"No," he said. Flat. Still looking at the ceiling. "They won't."
"Say it like you mean it."
He lowered his arm and looked at her. His lip was split slightly from where a dummy's wooden forearm had caught it, a thin red line at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were clear though. The stars were gone. "They won't show mercy," he said. "Yumi won't show mercy."
Fila looked at him for a long moment.
Then she offered him her hand.
He took it, and she pulled him up with the kind of effortless strength that always seemed slightly mismatched with how she looked, and he got to his feet and stood there brushing dust from his training robes.
"Again," she said.
He blinked. "What?"
"Again. But this time you don't wait for them to come to you."
He looked at the dummies. Back at her. Something had rearranged itself behind his eyes. Small, but there. "All four?"
"Three," Fila said. "You earned one less."
He almost smiled. Didn't quite make it, but almost. He raised his wand and turned to face the dummies, and this time his grip was different. Not looser, exactly, but more deliberate. Like he'd chosen to hold it that way instead of just holding it out of habit and fear.
The dummies animated.
He didn't wait.
He went at the nearest one first, low and aggressive, a disarming spell followed immediately by a cutting hex that had no business being thrown that fast after a disarm, and it caught the dummy across the midsection hard enough to make it stagger. The room inhaled.
"There it is," June said from somewhere behind Fila, quiet enough that it was almost to herself.
The other dummies converged and Marcus moved with them, not away from them, taking hits he couldn't avoid and answering every single one of them instead of retreating and covering. He went down once, knee to the ground, took a concussive blast to the shoulder that spun him sideways, and got back up and kept going.
He didn't complain.
Fila watched his magic. The shape of it was different already from three minutes ago. Less careful. More honest. Fear was still in it but fear used correctly was just information, just the body saying pay attention, and Marcus was paying attention now in a way he hadn't been when the dummies were something happening to him rather than something he was happening to.
He was going to lose on Friday. Fila was relatively sure of that. Yumi was something different and Marcus had three days and one session of not complaining wasn't going to close that gap.
But losing well was its own kind of thing. Losing in a way that meant something, that left a mark on the person who beat you, that made them work for it, that was learnable. That was what the next three days were for.
She let the session run until Marcus's legs gave out properly, which took longer than she'd expected, and that was information too.
When he finally went down and stayed down she called the dummies off with a gesture and they retreated to the edges of the room and went still.
Marcus lay on his back, arms spread, chest working hard, looking at the ceiling again. This time it looked more like a choice.
"Same time tomorrow," Fila said.
A sound from the floor that was approximately agreement.
She looked at the others. Aaron had lost the hunted look somewhere in the middle of the session, replaced by something more focused, the expression of someone who had been watching carefully and filing things away. Sera looked the same as she always looked, which for Sera meant she was thinking several things simultaneously and had no intention of sharing any of them unprompted.
Daniel caught Fila's eye. "Are you going to do this to all of us eventually?" he asked. Not afraid. Genuinely curious.
"Probably," Fila said.
He nodded, slowly. "Okay."
She turned and walked toward the door, pulling it open and letting the warm corridor air replace the dust-heavy atmosphere of the training room. Behind her she could hear Marcus making the sounds of a person negotiating with their own body about whether to sit up yet.
She stepped into the corridor and let the door fall shut behind her.
Headmaster Fontaine was standing in the corridor about ten feet away, his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the opposite wall with the air of someone who had definitely not been listening through the door.
Fila stopped beside him.
"Well?" she said.
"I wasn't listening," he said.
"Okay."
A pause. From inside the training room came the muffled sound of Marcus finally sitting up, followed by what sounded like Aaron saying something and then a dull thud that was probably Aaron getting hit by someone, probably Sera.
"How long?" Fontaine asked.
Fila thought about it. About the shape of Marcus's magic in the last five minutes of the session versus the first five. The difference between someone defending themselves and someone actually fighting. "Two more days of this and he'll be ready to lose well," she said. "That's the best I can do with three days."
Fontaine was quiet for a moment. "Losing well is underrated," he said.
"I know."
He adjusted his glasses. "Your grandfather used to say something similar."
Fila didn't answer that. She looked at the opposite wall, at the stone and the climbing vine that had found its way in through a crack somewhere near the ceiling and made itself comfortable across the upper corner. Nobody had removed it. She appreciated that about Castelobruxo. Things were allowed to grow where they found purchase.
"He also said the opposite," she said, after a moment. "Depending on the day."
Fontaine made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Yes," he said. "I imagine he would."
They stood there a moment longer, the corridor quiet around them, the muffled sounds of the training room settling into the background. Then Fontaine straightened, pressed a hand briefly to his lapel, and walked away down the corridor with the unhurried confidence of a man who had seen a great many things and made his peace with most of them.
Fila stayed where she was a moment longer.
She thought about her grandfather's hands, large and careful, correcting the angle of her wrist on a summer morning that smelled of old stone and distant mountains. Showing her the difference between power used in anger and power used with intention. The lesson had been the same as the one she'd just taught Marcus. The man who taught it to her was complicated in ways that the rest of the world had already decided about before she was born.
She pushed off the wall and started walking toward the greenhouse wing. She needed plants and quiet and the specific kind of thinking that happened when her hands were in soil and the rest of her could just breathe.
Spending time with plants had its way of, well making time go really fast.
"Fila?!" a loud voice came from behind her.
She almost jumped up into the ceiling but turned around. "YES?" she shouted out in a I got really scared tone. Only to find June and Bea standing there. And as if she hadn't been shocked before, she never thought she would see these two together.
June had her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had gone looking for a person and was mildly offended by how long it had taken. Bea stood beside her with her hands clasped in front of her looking like she was trying to decide if the situation was funny or concerning and had landed somewhere in the middle.
"Why are you two together," Fila said. Not accusatory. Genuinely baffled.
"She found me," June said, pointing at Bea.
"She was the only one who knew where you'd gone," Bea said, pointing at June.
"And you just." Fila gestured between them. "Teamed up."
"We walked here," June said. "It's not a blood oath."
Bea made a small sound that was almost definitely a suppressed laugh, which she covered by looking at a point slightly above Fila's head.
Fila stood with her hands and knees covered in dirt. "What's the time by the way?"
June and Bea looked at each other first, "Eight" the said in unison.
"Ah… that's not good." Fila said while brushing the dirt of her hands. "Were you in the greenhouse," Fila said to Bea.
Bea looked at her own hem. "The east one. Yes. Professor Silva needed someone to re-stake the climbing plants on the far wall and I offered because it seemed better than sitting in my room thinking about Friday."
"Smart," Fila said.
"Have you eaten anything today," June asked.
Fila thought about it with genuine effort. "No," she concluded.
June made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite exasperation and was mostly just the noise of someone who had expected this answer. She turned and started walking back toward the main corridor. "Come on then. The kitchen staff leave things out until nine."
"You know where the kitchens are already," Fila said, falling into step.
"Miles showed me," June said. "He has connections everywhere. I don't know how he does it, he's been here three days."
"He's like that at home too," Fila said. "First week of term he always knows which professors give extensions and which bathroom on the third floor floods. Nobody knows how."
Bea had fallen into step on Fila's other side. The three of them moved through the corridor together, the school quieter now at this hour, the kind of quiet that only happens when most people are somewhere else and the building gets to just be itself for a moment. The vine in the upper corner of the wall tracked past them as they walked. Fila noticed a small white flower had opened on it since this morning.
She didn't mention it. But she noticed.
The kitchens at Castelobruxo were nothing like the ones at Ilvermorny. At Ilvermorny everything was stone and efficiency and the kind of organized chaos that produced food for five hundred students three times a day with military precision. Here the kitchen felt like it had grown rather than been built, the ceiling vaulted and irregular, copper pots hanging from beams that had actual leaves growing along them, the whole room smelling of something sweet and herbed that Fila couldn't immediately identify but that made her stomach register an opinion about having been empty all day.
A woman with grey streaked hair and flour on her forearms looked up when they came in and did not appear remotely surprised to see three students at this hour. She pointed wordlessly at a long wooden table near the far wall where covered dishes had been left out, then went back to whatever she was doing.
Fila sat down and lifted the nearest cover. Rice and something dark and rich and slow-cooked that smelled like it had been in a pot for the better part of a day. She pulled the dish toward her without ceremony.
June sat across from her and took the bread. Bea sat beside Fila and poured water from the jug at the center of the table into three cups, which she distributed without asking, because this was the kind of thing Bea did without making it a thing.
They ate for a while without talking. The kitchen breathed around them, warm and green-smelling, the copper pots catching the low light.
"How is he actually," Bea said, eventually. Not looking up from her plate.
Fila knew she meant Marcus. "Scared," she said. "Getting less scared. Not fast enough."
"Is there a version where he wins?"
Fila thought about Yumi. The magic that didn't move. The completely different approach every time. "There's a version where he surprises her," she said. "That's not nothing. Surprised people make mistakes. But in honesty, he's fucked."
June taped the table with her finger a little too hard and made the two of them look at her. "Sorry, just the thought about them taking another win."
"The goal is always losing well until it's not." Fila ate another mouthful. "If he gets lucky and reads her right, maybe something else. But I'm not training him for luck. Luck doesn't need training."
June had been quiet through this, working her way methodically through the bread. Now she looked up. "What would you do. Against Yumi."
Fila looked at her.
"If it was you," June said. "In the ring on Friday."
It was a reasonable question and also a slightly uncomfortable one in the way that questions about yourself always are when you've spent the day thinking about someone else. Fila put her fork down and thought about it properly, the way she thought about plants when she was trying to understand what they actually needed rather than what they seemed to want.
"I'd make her commit early," she said. "To one approach. Something that felt like a real opening so she'd take it and show me what her instinct is when she thinks she's winning." She picked up her fork again. "And then I'd use that."
"Use what."
"Whatever she shows me." Fila shrugged one shoulder. "Everyone has a thing they go back to when they think they've got you. Even people who change their approach every time. Underneath the changing there's always something that's just them."
June looked at her for a moment. "What's yours."
Fila smiled, small and sharp. "Ask me after I lose one."
June laughed, genuinely, surprised out of it. Even the kitchen woman near the far counter made a sound that might have been a quiet laugh, though she didn't look up.
Bea was watching Fila with that expression again. The patient and gravitational one. She looked away when Fila caught it, back to her plate, and took a neat sip of her water.
"Eat," Bea said.
"I am eating."
"More."
"You're doing the plant thing again."
"I don't know what that means."
"Watering me," Fila said. "Sun and water. You're very literal about it."
"Well I need my flower to be healthy and keep looking good." She said quietly, but not quietly enough as the whole kitchen almost stopped and June when pale. And Fila stopped eating.
Bea had already turned into the same shade as a tomato.
The kitchen woman at the far counter had gone very still in the specific way of someone who had heard everything and had decided that the most respectful thing she could do was pretend she hadn't. She resumed stirring whatever was in front of her with great concentration.
June picked up her cup of water and took a very long, very deliberate sip. She set it down. She looked at the ceiling. She appeared to be doing complex calculations in her head about where to direct her eyes for the foreseeable future.
Fila had not moved. Her fork was still in her hand, hovering somewhere above her plate, suspended in the moment before Bea had said what she'd said. She was looking at the side of Bea's face, which was currently the color of something that had been in the slow-cooked pot all day.
Bea was staring at her own plate with the focused intensity of someone hoping that if they looked at it hard enough it would open up and let them in.
"Bea," Fila said.
"I didn't say anything," Bea said.
"You said something."
"It was a figure of speech."
"Was it."
"Yes." A pause. "Partially."
June made a sound into her water cup that was definitely a laugh disguised as a cough, which she then disguised further by putting the cup down and finding something extremely interesting to look at on the far wall.
Bea finally looked up. Her face was still doing the tomato thing but her eyes had that quality they sometimes got when she had decided to stop retreating and just stand where she was. Proud and slightly terrified at the same time, which on her looked like a specific kind of courage.
"It came out wrong," she said. With dignity. Some of it.
"How did it come out wrong," Fila said. Her voice had dropped to a register that was quieter than usual and had something careful in it, careful in the way you are with things you don't want to break by handling them incorrectly.
Bea opened her mouth. Closed it. "I meant that you are—" She stopped again. Tried a different entrance. "What I was trying to say was—" That one also didn't make it to the end. She pressed her lips together and looked at Fila with the expression of someone who had run out of retreats and was now simply standing in the open.
"I think what you said came out exactly right," Fila said.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Bea held her gaze for a moment that was longer than most moments. Then she looked back down at her plate and picked up her fork and took a bite of something with the concentrated composure of a person assembling themselves from available materials.
"Eat your food," she said. Her voice was steady. Mostly.
"You just told me I needed to look good," Fila said.
"Fila."
"I'm going to think about that."
"Please don't."
"I'm already thinking about it."
"I will leave," Bea said, with great finality, and absolutely no intention of doing so.
June put her cup down. She looked between the two of them with the expression of someone who had just watched something happen and was still processing the full shape of it. Then she picked up another piece of bread with the quiet efficiency of someone who had decided the best contribution she could make to this moment was to stay out of it and finish her dinner.
The kitchen settled back into its warmth around them. The copper pots caught the low light. The kitchen woman resumed her stirring with the professional neutrality of someone who had seen a great many things in this kitchen and had opinions about none of them.
Fila ate her food. She was smiling, small and private, aimed at her plate so only the rice could see it. Beside her she could feel the specific quality of Bea sitting very straight and eating with precise deliberate movements, which was what Bea looked like when she was pretending something hadn't happened while also thinking about nothing else.
It was, Fila thought, a very good way to sit.
After a few minutes Bea reached out and pushed the bread basket slightly toward Fila's side of the table, without looking up, without comment. An offering from someone who wasn't ready to say anything else but wasn't done saying things either.
Fila took a piece of bread.
"Thank you," she said. Low. Meant for the bread and also not just for the bread.
Bea's fork paused for half a second. "You're welcome," she said, at the same volume. Meant for the same things.
They finished dinner. The kitchen woman cleared around them with quiet efficiency and the warmth of the room and the lateness of the hour settled into their bones the way good food in a warm place does when you've had a long day and the people you're sitting with are the right ones.
Eventually June stood and stretched her arms above her head. "I'm going to sleep before I say something I'll regret," she announced, which was not entirely clear in its implications but felt complete as a statement. She pointed at Fila. "Seven tomorrow."
"Seven," Fila agreed.
June pointed at Bea. "You." She seemed to decide against finishing that sentence and just nodded once instead, firmly, and walked out.
The kitchen was quiet with just the two of them in it now. Bea was still sitting, turning her empty cup between her hands in small rotations that she probably wasn't aware she was doing. The kitchen woman had disappeared through a side door at some point in the last few minutes, with what Fila was increasingly certain was deliberate tact.
"I'm not going to make it weird," Bea said, to the cup.
"I know," Fila said.
"I just." She stopped the cup turning. "I say things sometimes. Before I've finished deciding if I mean them."
"And did you mean it."
Bea looked at her. Something in her expression had settled, gone past the embarrassment into something quieter and more considered. "I think I've been meaning it for a few days," she said. "I just hadn't caught up with myself yet."
Fila looked at her for a moment. At the dark steadiness of her eyes and the way she was sitting with it now, the thing she'd said, not running from it, just holding it out and letting it exist.
"Okay," Fila said.
Bea blinked. "Okay?"
"Okay," Fila said again, in the same tone. Which meant several things that neither of them were going to put words to in a kitchen at eight thirty at night after a long day, because some things didn't need words yet and were better for not having them.
Bea looked at her for another moment. Then something in her face did the thing where a smile found its way in through the side, quiet and warm and not performing anything, just there.
"Come on," she said, standing. "You need to sleep before seven."
"I might actually sleep tonight," Fila said, standing too.
"Good." Bea pushed the bench in behind her. "I'll take partial credit for that."
"You can have it," Fila said.
They walked out of the kitchen together into the quiet corridor, the warm light of the school folding around them. and without either of them focusing on it, their hands had intertwined as they made their way towards the snakes common room. Which had become the main sleeping address for Fila.