Finnian slept uneasily. His dreams were haunted by sleeping snakes and documents on desks, papers that either shuffled away when he approached or turned out to be blank. He could hear his father's voice, but when he listened closer, it wasn't his father but Mr. Hawthorne, telling him to pay attention in alchemy class; but the class consisted of his teammates, who were giggling at him and calling him a loser. Frustrated, he tried to hide behind his textbook, only to find a thousand pictures of an unsmiling Hikaru Hiyama staring back at him, pictures that blinked and turned into a young man with blond hair and a familiar face.
When his alarm rang, he was almost relieved.
"You're lucky you don't get dreams like I do," he told Anthony, and then paused. Did snakes dream? He had tried looking it up once and emerged with tons of search results for dreams about snakes and no helpful information.
The python, in any case, was not about to enlighten him, so Finnian dropped the matter and padded off to the bathroom. When he reemerged with clean hair and brushed teeth and got dressed in his room, his mind was still full, and by the time he went downstairs for breakfast it wasn't showing any signs of getting emptier anytime soon.
He had barely made it off the stairs when he noticed that something was off.
His parents usually listened to the radio over breakfast in the morning, a relic from the time before smartphones had brought faster and easier access to information and, in Finnian's opinion, quite outdated. Today, however, he wished they were listening to the radio as always. But they weren't; the sound came from the television above the kitchen table.
His parents never turned on the TV in the morning.
"What's going on?" he asked, but his father remained silent, sipping his coffee with his eyes glued to the screen. His mother was busying herself with breakfast—not using magic, Finnian noted—and pointedly ignoring everything else in the room.
Huffing in frustration, Finnian plopped into his usual seat at the table and sought his answers from the television instead.
And grimaced.
Glaring back at him from the screen was a man he knew better than he'd like. He was perhaps in his sixties (Finnian had never bothered to find out his age, and didn't care now), tall, and dressed in an ill-fitting suit that was at least a decade out of fashion. It still looked better than his hair, though, which had never been in fashion in the first place. The peroxided blond mop on top of his head bore a passing resemblance to a bird's nest, crossed over with a beginner's attempt at building a tent out of straw. Whether it was his real hair or a poorly-styled wig was a mystery for the ages.
And to make matters worse, the man in question was standing on a stage, yelling into the microphone to an entirely disproportionate number of obviously brain-dead listeners.
"This has gone on long enough!" he was shouting as Finnian sat down. "The so-called government is lying to you, and they want you to swallow that! They've already decided to let in the Dark Mages! They're stealing your knowledge! They're stealing your jobs! They're just waiting for the chance to replace all of us!"
Yells from the crowd. Finnian glared at the screen. Did this man ever end his sentences with anything other than an exclamation mark?
"But I," the man continued, "will make sure that doesn't happen! I'll take all the Dark Mages and send 'em—send 'em right back where they belong!"
Deafening cheers. Finnian sat in horror, still trying to make sense of the whole situation before his eyes dropped down to the headline accompanying the video.
BREAKING: WILLOUGHBY ELLISON ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY FOR ARCHMAGE ELECTIONS
Finnian stared, gaped, and read it again. No, he hadn't misread it.
"What the f—"
"Finnian, language!" his mother called out from the stove.
"He can't be serious!" Finnian gestured furiously towards the screen, which had now switched back to a pleasant-sounding news announcer. "He's not even a politician—he's a businessman! And a bad one!" He huffed. "He's gone bankrupt so many times we stopped doing business with him—what absolute, bone-headed, peanut-brained idiot would entrust him with a country?"
His father finally set down his coffee cup. "He's got a surprising amount of followers, actually," he said.
"What followers? Zombies he brainwashed, or people he paid to support him instead of paying his taxes?" Finnian jumped to his feet. "Didn't you hear what he said? He was lying through his teeth. Lightwood would be the last person on earth to let the Dark Mages into our spaces!"
"Naturally," his father replied, "but many people are still criticizing him for being too soft. The protests mostly inconvenience common people—those who don't sit in warded, hidden homes or schools or offices like we do, but have to weave their way around the angry mob or brave the lion's den. Not to mention the old families think the protesters deserve to be shot at…or burned at the stake."
Finnian was quiet. He hadn't really thought that far; the protests had merely been an annoyance, their demands distant and removed from his own reality, a problem for others to deal with. To him, the witch hunts were something that had happened in a distant past, something to learn about in history class, not something that still affected the reality he lived in today.
"But on the other hand," his father continued, "more and more people are agreeing with the protests. If we don't find a strong candidate soon, they'll vote an inclusionist into office and ruin everything our ancestors ever fought for."
Finnian processed the words for a moment, then he spun on the spot. "Wait," he burst out. "You can't be supporting him!"
"Not him," his father admitted, "but the cause he stands for. I dislike him as much as you do, but he's our best hope at the moment."
The words Ellison and hope, Finnian thought, had no business being anywhere near the same sentence. "What hope?" he burst out. "This is Hellison! I wouldn't trust him to tie his own shoelaces, let alone run a country!"
"Finnian—"
"No! Absolutely not!" Finnian's voice was growing louder and louder with every word, but he didn't care. "We are not supporting this clown—this absolute joke of a man! If people find out, the world will be laughing at us for years!"
Sighing, his mother placed a pan full of eggs and bacon on the table between them. "No discussing politics at the breakfast table," she said with forced calm. "Finnian, since when do you even care about that sort of thing?"
"I don't care about politics." Finnian was already shoveling food into his mouth at a breakneck speed. "This is common sense." Before his parents could say anything, he cleared his plate and pushed it away. "Thanks for the food, I'm leaving. Where's Lucy?"
The drive to school was silent, Finnian's eyes fixed unseeingly on some point in the distance. He still couldn't believe it. Support Ellison—what an idea! And yes, he understood where his father was coming from. He knew keeping the Dark Mages out was important to him; he had learned, just like Elaine and Cassander and all the other children of Light Mage nobility, that their ancestors had fought against the Dark Mages once, and many had given their lives for it. He had learned that his father had lived through the first generation of riots as a young man, twenty years ago, that he wanted to avoid the chaos that had come with it back then. But…
But was it so important that supporting Ellison—lying, five-times-bankrupt, tax-evading Ellison—was really worth it?
Would letting the Dark Mages into their world really be worse than having Ellison for an Archmage for seven whole years?
Finnian Day was fifteen and had the privilege of not needing to care for politics.
Maybe he should start now.
~ ~ ~
Finnian arrived at school to find half of it already talking about this morning's news. Elaine and Cassander would want to discuss it with him too, he knew; and he was in absolutely no mood to talk about Willoughby Ellison any more than he already had. So, instead of seeking them out as usual, he found himself wandering the campus, searching for the side entrance to slip into the school building unnoticed by his friends.
He was greeted by an empty hallway, and then, around the corner, a meow. Finnian had just been about to ignore it when the meow was followed by a voice he knew.
He strained, but he couldn't make out what it was saying. Not speaking English, Finnian thought, inching closer to the corner as quietly as he could, peering past with cautious eyes. Hikaru Hiyama sat crouched on the floor, petting a tabby cat and holding what appeared to be a conversation with it. There was a friendly, unguarded look on his face that Finnian had never seen on him around any human conversation partners, and his ever-tensed shoulders had softened and relaxed.
The cat made a chirping noise, and Hikaru smiled as he replied something in Japanese. It wasn't a wide smile; just a quirk of the lips, the slightest crinkle of his eyes. But it was still…something. Something that wasn't his usual stone-faced expression where he didn't seem to care about anything or anyone.
Is that cat more interesting to you than we are? Finnian wanted to ask, but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to disrupt the moment and say it out loud. Conflicting emotions were burning in his chest. He was angry—at Hikaru, at the cat, at himself, he didn't know and didn't want to know. But he was also…fascinated. Mesmerized, in a way that was both similar and fundamentally different from the first time he had seen him fly.
Hikaru scratched the cat's ears, and it purred and rubbed its head against his palm. Then it slipped around his legs and walked away—making straight for the corner where Finnian was still hidden.
Following it with his gaze, Hikaru looked up and his eyes met with Finnian's.
There was an awkward pause.
Hikaru's eyes hardened, his smile fading. Finnian resisted the urge to take a defensive step back, gritting his teeth to stand his ground. With great difficulty he forced his face into a sneer, feeling like he had already lost even though they hadn't exchanged a word.
"What, Hiyama?" he asked, his own voice ringing hollow in his ears. "Hiding from your adoring fanbase again? Don't worry—I'd be the last person to sell you out to them." Forcibly keeping his chin up, he began to stride past him. "The last thing I need is a flock of girls crowing over how adorable you look talking to that cat and smiling."
No sooner had he finished that sentence than his face heated up, struck by the sudden reality of his words. Where had he taken that from? Hikaru hadn't—he wasn't—adorable. Though the girls would undoubtedly love the image, they went crazy over caring guys and cute animals, especially if the guys were good-looking, which Hikaru doubtlessly was. Objectively. From a hormonal girl's perspective, anyway.
Hikaru didn't say anything. Finnian could feel his gaze on his back as he went, dark and heavy, but he didn't slow and didn't turn. The way Hikaru's expression had gone cold at the sight of him, like a candle that had been extinguished, was gnawing at him in ways he couldn't and wouldn't explain.
It just wasn't fair, he thought as he went. Hikaru was already Mr. Perfect. And now here he was, talking to cats like it was an actual conversation, like he could understand the animal's language. And maybe he could. And it was yet another thing that Finnian couldn't do.
Damn it all.
With the way things were going, this school year was going to be an absolute nightmare.
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