Nicholas wasn’t actually told much by either Lambros or Luca.

Lambros skimmed over his own troubles and focused mostly on warning Nicholas of the tactics Haochen Xia used and how the high mage could take a soul from someone -magical core and all- to get access to Family Magics. Lambros taught him how Nicholas can counter rituals targeting his soul, specifically the kind of rituals the high mage used.

Lambros also explained with incredible detail how to break out Rafael if he did get caught by the creature reform centres. Nicholas now has that memorised and repeats it back to Stavros and Rafael verbatim. All the collars, cages, drugs, the control centre…

Rafael starts looking sick and Stavros starts looking angry. It’s not going to happen, Nicholas is certain, because Nicholas is an Ayad and countries would burn before his friends got hurt. He literally had to die and Stavros was put into a coma before someone got their hands on Rafael.

Nicholas is utterly, arrogantly confident that Rafael is safe but he’s still going to start his studies on healing in the drugs section and they’re all going to keep a closer eye on the reform centres in case Lambros does something and it goes wrong.

But other than the three of them, Lambros didn’t really mention world events. He complained about how utterly useless everyone was and gave a vague timeline on Luca’s troubles with the high mage but that information capped off when Lambros went through the ley line.

Luca was even worse. He said the words ‘high mages’ as in plural and went quiet immediately upon seeing the dawning horror in everyone’s faces.

Both of them kept repeating that they were going to deal with it and everything was fine.

So an entire four hours later and far too many questions Nicholas couldn’t answer, he trots downstairs after Rafael and Stavros only to be waylaid by Mariana in the common room.

"Here," she says and puts a vial in his hand. "For sore muscles. Make sure to eat properly too."

Nicholas stares after her as Mariana leaves, a grin slowly splitting his face. He turns to his friends. "Did you see that?"

Stavros rolls his eyes.

"She thought you were about to pass out last night, so she nearly followed you up to bed," Rafael admits.

“We’re going to have a baby!” Nicholas cheers, clutching the vial to his chest.

"Sure, and before one pops out, you can catch up on homework because it's SC year and you're behind," Rafael says idly.

Nicholas' smile drops off his face at the reminder of School Certificate exams.

Stavros pats him on the shoulder. "I'll get your charms and technomancy; Rafael can go after potions and folk. You've got the rest."

“That’s like nine more!”

“Have I ever been particularly charitable?”

Nicholas splutters.

Nicholas gets back to the doom room last -because he stops to pet a fluffy cat familiar wandering in the hall- and dumps off the stack of papers onto his bed, where Rafael and Stavros have already piled up theirs. All three boys stand around the bed and stare at the mountain of assignments and notes in front of them.

“Do we really do that much?” Stavros asks in confusion.

The school has three levels of classes for each subject. For example, a student can have Runes, Advanced Runes, and then an extra Extension Runes that is done as well as advanced classes. Extension is mainly made up of a personal research project that they work on over the year instead of coursework.

Ever since electives opened up in year nine last year, the faculty shoved the boys into every extension class possible with their marks, which means an extra nine hours of classes a week and who knows how much homework, where the boys can't get up to mischief.

Because it was against their will, though their parents were happy and ‘strongly encouraged’ it, the boys cheat off each other or Stavros and Nicholas just won’t do homework unless it’s interesting or a practical.

Work smarter, not harder, right?

“Help me read through this?” Nicholas begs with doe eyes.

“You can throw most of it and use copies of mine with just a handwriting charm to change it,” Rafael says. “You need to read over the ones that don’t have me or Ross in the class though.”

They split up at the start of every year, taking each other’s classes so no matter what, they always have at least one other person. But with Adam gone, Nicholas is going to be alone in Extension Transfiguration and Folk Magic.

“I can drop down in folk so we’re together,” Stavros offers. “I could probably push it and get into transfig extension classes?”

“No point, exams are too close anyway,” Nicholas admits. “Ugh, exams.”

“Come on,” Rafael says, shoving the paper out of the way. “Let’s get started.”

The boys come stumbling down to the dining hall, mentally exhausted from going through all the notes (Stavros and Rafael also need to play keep-up because they didn’t do shit when Nicholas was gone) and find an open table.

The hall is massive, with giant windows that reach the ceiling to show off the view of the lake glittering in the moonlight. Some students take food and run off to eat outside or elsewhere but the hall is generally loud and crowded unless someone throws up a muffling ward.

Along one side of the hall is where five large glass paintings hang from the wall, denoting the five magic tracks. The paintings have stylised mages moving in slow motion as they cast magic according to their track, currently only half filled up with colour. Each track point earned adds another drop of colour to the painting, otherwise they stay as clear glass.

InCore has the least, as it should be with Nicholas and Stavros to cause trouble.

The entire place is filled with round tables and circular bench seats in disarray because students drag them around, banish some, and conjure new ones. Much like the disjointed common rooms, if a bunch of teenagers have access to magic, everything not held down by wards doesn’t last the week.

The table they find, a large twelve-seater, is half-filled with younger boys still discussing the menu scrawled on the table. Nicholas slumps over as soon as he takes his seat and Stavros sits backwards to chat with the students at the next table over. Rafael is ordering for all three of them by tapping around on the enchanted menus that will occasionally try to nudge students towards healthier meals by sliding salad options and such under wherever your finger is pointing.

“My brain hurts,” Nicholas grumbles in his folded arms. “I want ice cream.”

“You can have it after food. You want tofu stir-fry?” Rafael says and pets Nicholas on the head.

Nicholas is half-heartedly vegan because of Rito and looks particularly upset when he sees any of his friends (mainly Stavros, definitely on purpose) eating lamb. Sometimes they’ll sneak off to the kitchens to rewrite the shopping list so no one gets lamb at all.

“Jalfrezi,” Nicholas admits. “Extra spice, I want to cry.”

Stavros looks over with a frown. “I don’t eat spicy.”

“Yeah, but it’s my food.”

“Yeah, but I’m going to eat it too.”

“Yeah, but go fuck yourself.”

“Yeah, but try me, shithead.”

Rafael orders the food and sits back to wait for the dishes to pop up as Nicholas and Stavros descend into calling each other buttface.

Rafael does not tell them a letter finally came back from Adam’s parents. Nicholas had wanted to visit and make sure they were doing well, but with those rumours about the situation happening because someone wanted an heir, Adam’s father seems intent on blaming Nicholas and Stavros for being heritage.

It’s probably grief and misunderstanding that’s struck Adam’s parents so hard. Rafael doesn’t particularly care, not after reading that letter, not after tearing it to shreds and burning it in his anger. He’ll just have to tell Stavros and Nicholas the letter said something else.