Chapter Text
Rule number one: after you’ve survived a case involving a personalised trauma montage and literal Nazi war crimes, you don't go home hungry. So when Nightingale and I saw the kebab shop still lit across from the Imperial War Museum, we took it as a sign.
The windows were fogged, fryer hiss steady under the tinny pop station on the radio. We ducked inside. Heat closed over us, the smell of cumin and fried onions hitting like a wave.
We ordered at the front—doner for him, chicken for me, a pair of beers from the fridge under the till—and took our paper plates to the narrow counter in the back by the sugar packets. I leaned carefully on the tabletop as I tore back my foil and let the steam billow. The Formica was sticky in a way I didn’t want to test.
Nightingale tucked in like it had been a week since his last proper meal. Maybe it had.
I let my food cool and watched as he addressed himself to the task. Impeccable table manners, as ever, but the velocity was… impressive. Colour seemed to be coming back into his cheeks in real time. Even his hair looked revived. It was doing that thing it always does about two hours into any proper tactical op: springing free of its neat side part as the natural curl pattern reasserts itself, pomade be damned. The extra volume suited him.
I felt a sudden, stupid, overpowering rush of—something. Fondness, maybe. Or sheer bloody relief. I was still half-giddy from the oxygen we’d huffed on the kerb, still processing our escape from a Nazi curse-trap set eighty years ago for the worst of reasons. A trap we’d just saved the city from. After that, anything felt possible. And everything around me looked beautiful.
“Don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat this fast before,” I remarked, when Nightingale’s kebab was nearly gone.
He smiled ruefully, wiped his mouth, coughed once into the napkin. "Making up for lost time, I suppose."
I took a bite of pita as he brushed a hand over our bottles of lager. There was the flare of a delicate little spell—felt impello-ish, but with an unfamiliar base—then the neat clink of metal on laminate, bottle caps spinning to a stop beside the salt shaker.
“You’ll have to teach me that one,” I said.
Nightingale raised an eyebrow, clinked his bottle against mine. "Perhaps once you’ve mastered fifth-order evocation."
He took a long pull and set it down again. "Though I daresay you'll make quick work of it, given how well you landed that eleventh order sequence tonight."
I flushed.
He coughed into his shoulder, then looked me straight in the eye. "I mean it, Peter. You did complex, unfamiliar, seriously advanced work under extremely trying circumstances. It was well done, from start to finish."
Heat crept further up the back of my neck. I took a quick swallow of beer to cover it.
"That was some wild shit, sir. If you don’t mind my saying.”
He nodded solemnly. Ate another chip. "It was."
"Did you…" I began. "Toward the end, with all those… names. Did you— were you— expecting that to happen?"
"To be honest with you, Peter, I wasn't really certain what to expect." He took a sip of lager. "But I'm not surprised that's where the magic took us, eventually. Given what we were there to do."
"No?"
“It follows what most of the literature would suggest, you know. On the topic."
"On mnemonic magic?"
"I meant the literature on… loss. Trauma, if you like." He looked past me to where the window condensation was creating a rainbow of refracted traffic light. "Naming. Acknowledgment. That sort of thing is supposed to allow… progress." The pause around the word was small but noticeable.
I ate some more kebab. “Felt a bit literal.”
"The most effective tactics often are the most straightforward."
I looked out the window then, too. For a moment, I'm pretty sure we were both picturing the same thing: Thomas Nightingale, ca. 1947, carving row after row of names into the walls of Casterbrook. By hand; without magic. He’d told me the doctors had said it might help. He’d told me it hadn’t, really. But maybe it had just been the first of many small, mundanely literal steps on a much longer journey. Maybe tonight had been another, in its way.
Nightingale snapped out of his reverie first, pushing a few unruly locks of hair back off his forehead and lifting his bottle from the table.
“We’ll need to notify Health and Safety first thing tomorrow,” he said. He paused to drain the last of his lager. “Get Forensics in for the photographs, file the case reports. Process the satchel. We can discuss what that involves tomorrow.”
I nodded.
"We'll have to log the shattered display case with the Museum, too," he added as he stood up, grabbing our plates and empty bottles. "Not going to help your reputation for property damage one bit."
I tried to kick him under the table, but he just sidestepped gracefully on his way to the rubbish bin.
He was already reaching into his pocket for the keys to the Jag as he returned. "Shall we?"
"Do you—" I blurted, impulsively. "Do you fancy a walk before we head back? By the river, maybe. Bit of fresh air?"
I felt silly as soon as I’d said it. We were both knackered, and the paperwork wasn't going to file itself. But I was buzzing with good food and cheap beer, maybe still a little high on compressed oxygen. The night didn't feel finished yet.
Nightingale looked surprised for a heartbeat, then smiled and dropped the keys back into his pocket. "That sounds lovely."
He stepped to the counter without another word, returning moments later with two squares of baklava wrapped in wax paper. He handed me one and gestured toward the door.
"After you."
I almost tripped over my own boots.
The bells on the door jingled as a wash of warm air followed us out onto the street, into the night.