Nobody moved for what felt, to Arthur, like a very long time, though he would learn later it had been only a few seconds. The smoke still curled up from the scorched patch of earth between them. His arm was still raised at the angle it had finished on, and it had begun, distantly, to hurt, a deep singing ache that ran from his palm to his shoulder, but the pain had not fully arrived yet, held off by whatever the body did to a person in the moment directly after something impossible.
It was Felix who moved first.
He took a step back. Just one, small, involuntary, the particular retreat of a body reacting faster than its owner's pride could catch up to stop it, and his hands, still faintly smoking at the fingertips, closed slowly into fists at his sides.
FEL: That's not possible.
He said it to no one, to the yard, to the scorched ground, the particular flat disbelief of someone whose entire understanding of the world had just failed to account for what he'd watched happen in front of him.
FEL: Nobody does that. You can't just- you don't have anything. You're not supposed to be able to-
ART: I don't know what happened.
It was the truth, plain and small, and it did nothing to soften Felix's expression, which had moved past disbelief now into something closer to a kind of dawning, unwelcome fear, the particular vertigo of a boy who had built a year of his identity on a certainty that had just come apart in his hands.
He did not say anything else. He turned, pushed through the ring of silent watching children, and walked quickly toward the far side of the yard, not running, but close to it, and nobody stopped him, and nobody followed.
The crowd remained.
They stared at Arthur the way people stared at something they did not have a category for yet, and Arthur, becoming aware of all those eyes at once, felt his knees go strangely unsteady, the adrenaline that had carried him through the parry beginning, now, to recede.
ELS: Arthur.
She was at his side before he registered her moving, her hands hovering near his arm without quite touching it, uncertain where it was safe to hold him.
ELS: Your hand. Arthur, look at your hand.
He looked. His palm was an angry red, the skin along the heel of his hand blistered in a thin line that traced the exact path the bolt had grazed before he'd turned it, and now that he was looking at it, now that the shock had cracked open enough to let something else through, the pain arrived all at once, sharp and total, and he made a small sound and folded his arm against his chest.
ELS: That needs looking at. Properly looked at, not just wrapped in something.
ART: I'm fine.
ELS: You are not fine, you're burned, don't be stupid about this.
He almost laughed, despite everything, at the particular fierceness in her voice, the same fierceness she'd brought to the fence a year ago, except this time it was aimed entirely at making sure he took care of himself rather than at anyone who'd hurt him. The schoolhouse door banged open. Master Hobbes crossed the yard at a pace none of the children had ever seen him move at, his coat still half buttoned, clearly having come straight from whatever he'd been doing when the noise reached him, and he pulled up short at the edge of the scorched patch of earth, his eyes moving quickly over the smoking ground, the dispersing crowd, Arthur's raised and blistered hand.
HOB: What happened here?
Nobody answered immediately. A dozen children looked at each other, each waiting for someone else to find the words first, and it was Elsie, finally, who spoke.
ELS: Felix threw a bolt at him. A real one. Not a showing off one.
HOB: A real one.
ELS: He was going to hurt him. Properly hurt him. And then Arthur-
She stopped, apparently uncertain how to finish the sentence in a way that would sound like anything other than impossible, and Master Hobbes turned his full attention to Arthur, his eyes sharp now in a way Arthur had not seen from him before, the particular focus of a teacher recalculating everything he thought he knew about a student.
HOB: Arthur. What did you do?
ART: I don't know.
HOB: You don't know.
ART: I put my hand up. That's all I remember deciding. Everything after that just happened.
Master Hobbes crouched, studying the scorched earth, the particular deep black char that marked where the redirected bolt had struck ground instead of flesh, and then straightened and looked at Arthur's hand with a different kind of attention entirely, careful, searching.
HOB: Let me see that properly.
Arthur held his arm out, wincing as Hobbes turned it gently in the light, examining the burn along his palm and the inside of his forearm, the particular clean, deliberate line of it.
HOB: This isn't a burn from being struck.
ART: What do you mean?
HOB: I mean a boy struck by lightning doesn't walk away with a line like this. He walks away in far worse shape, or he doesn't walk away at all. This looks like a burn from something that grazed past, not through.
He said it slowly, half to Arthur and half to himself, the particular careful working-through of a man encountering something he did not yet have a framework for, and around them the gathered children had begun to whisper, the word already moving from mouth to mouth the way words did in schoolyards, faster than any adult could contain it. Arthur caught fragments of it. Deflected it. Stopped it cold. Didn't even flinch. He did not feel, hearing it, anything like triumph. He felt, mostly, tired, and his hand hurt with a deep insistent throb that made the whole world feel slightly too bright and too loud, and he was abruptly and overwhelmingly aware that he wanted, more than anything, to be sitting quietly somewhere with his mother's hands checking him over the way she checked every scrape, counting the pieces of him to make sure they were all still there.
HOB: Right. You're coming with me. We'll get that hand properly seen to, and then I think we need to have a conversation, you and I, about exactly what just happened here.
ART: Am I in trouble?
Master Hobbes looked at him for a long moment, something in his expression difficult to read, weighing something that had nothing to do with punishment.
HOB: No, Arthur. I don't think trouble is the word for this at all.
He placed a hand carefully on Arthur's uninjured shoulder, steering him gently toward the schoolhouse, and Elsie fell into step on his other side without being asked, and behind them the yard remained scorched and smoking and full of children who would spend the rest of the day, and likely the rest of the week, retelling what they had just seen in versions that grew stranger with every telling. Arthur did not look back at any of it.
He walked toward the schoolhouse with his burned hand cradled against his chest, and the ringing in his ears slowly fading, and underneath the exhaustion and the pain, something small and unfamiliar sitting quietly in the center of him, a question that had no shape yet, only weight. What am I.**.?