And, at a point in the middle of the night when the time was right…

Casey had been feigning sleep, attuned to the background noises of the small country house and bookstore where he was spending part of spring vacation as the Norling’s guest. He arose silently, not in night clothes but neither crisply dressed in regular outfits such as the school uniform.

He crossed to his trunk, removing some items. Most importantly, a shriveled hand magically taxidermied to hold a dark candle. As Casey lit he also called out, quietly, for Dingy.

There was a fwomp on the mattress. Then master and elf were off, on their pre-determined task. Through the building, through the many twists in the hallways from home to business, to a dead end portion of the retail bookshelves where Alvis and his father had previously shown off the passageway to the basement workshop.

The rug was charmed aside and Dingy lifted the trapdoor. Casey held the non-light of the Hand of Glory down the steps, a light only for him and Dingy at this point of time. It was cooler and musty down here. Casey had a chill travel along the skin of his stomach.

Workshop, crafter’s table, shelves and cabinets, parts scattered. Mold and wood shavings, whether that was the actual smell or Casey’s over-sensitive nose. And, starting by the stairs, bundles of parchment strewn around in lopsided stacks and crumpled rolls. Order forms, designs, the drafting history of the little family of artificers.

“Ok,” Casey set the Hand of Glory aside, its magical light never too intense and ethereal in nature, as proper shadows were never formed when it was the only light source. “If we catch onto any patterns, start focusing on amulet models.”

Minutes passed as student and elf searched, a task as challenging as finding needles in haystacks. Actually, harder, because you could summon out the needles if you knew they were there. In contrast Casey had no idea what the plans he was searching for looked like, or even if they had been kept. He noticed a scrap of an old comission his family had did not match the copies here, so the format offered no assistance.

The nighttime search became a timeless blur, cramped in the section of workshop where Casey and Dingy had holed themselves in from moving stacks of parchment, quiet except for their own movements. Maybe not that quiet.

Their own movements were enough. The brush of parchment and rustle of moving hands was enough to cover up the soft sliding sounds and even softer thump from across the darkened room. Careful, quiet footsteps, intimately familiar with the basement’s layout, slid unnoticed across stone floors. Consumed with their task, the searchers noticed nothing, not until the approaching one made his presence known with a single, pointed noise.

 “Ahem.”

Alvis tried not to take too much satisfaction in the reaction he’d earned. When the pair bothered to look up, they would find him peering down at their scattered search with one set of fingers resting wearily in the Hand of Glory’s dessicated palm. The other hand held a carton of skim milk, open and aloft, threatening to tip at any moment and spill its contents over the darkly burning wicks.

Alvis had, obviously, not been asleep when Casey lit up his Hand of Glory. He rarely slept easily, being very much a night owl used to Astronomy Club meetings and late-night studies. He’d pretended, these last few nights, for Casey’s benefit, so that the guest would not feel required to stay up as late his host.

He also had not told Casey about the second entrance to the workshop, the hidden fireman’s pole in his parents’ room that connected their second-floor flat to the basement below. When he’d heard Casey head down the stairs and found his parents un-wakeable, Alvis had guessed what was going on. He didn’t question how Casey got hold of a Hand of Glory -- god knows the Slytherin collected stranger things -- only snagged the milk from the kitchen as a just-in-case and slipped down the pole quiet as a church mouse.

Now he glowered at Casey, milk poised in an unspoken threat, eyeing the house elf and its master with the slightest hint hint of how badly this could end their friendship if things were not delicately handled.

“Casey. I trust you have a reason to charm my family and go prowling around our house in the dead of night.”

The hunt became, like many things of late, an obsession of Casey’s entire focus. Dingy was tasked to the cramped quarters of the paper storage given the elf’s small frame. Casey skimmed documents, the specs varied but none exactly what he was seeking.

“Ahem,”

And then he was startled. The only saving grace Alvis had to not being jinxed on the spot was his impossibly accurate position next to the shriveled hand. That, and Casey was realizing it was very hard to think about even harming Alvis, or a way of escaping this situation without bringing irreparable harm to the Norlings.

Casey was frozen for some terse moments. Obviously Alvis must have realized what Casey was up to navigating the house, it was his house after all. And smart enough to realize he should pick up some milk from the kitchen, then he only would have had to grope around for the light. Casey didn’t take Alvis for the kind that shopped at Borgin and Burkes.

To Casey’s further self-inflicted horror, he realized that below his classmate’s hand the Hand of Glory had only its main candle and two fingers lit. Each extra finger alight kept the sleeping residents of the building unconscious. How had Casey not paid attention to the enchanted flame not catching? Why hadn’t he bothered setting up a sneakoscope, or another one of a dozen stupidly obvious setups in retrospection?

Just the thought of getting a means to have that amulet back had mired Casey’s usual considerations before action.

“Just, just wait,” Casey said, for once with less nerve that what was commonly heard in his voice. For all the conflicting reasonings in his head, at this point of being discovered Casey was most apprehensive about he and Alvis sharing equal visibility because of his state of dress. Not undress, not really, but only the larger size of the clothes were not making certain definitions discernable. Casey hated wearing the undergarments to bed.

Similarly frozen like his master and ward, Dingy was halfway out of the nook he had entered, unmoving. Save for a hand poised to turn over the pot helmet to administer self punishment out of stress.

“Just wait,” Casey said again. Nothing was forming in his mind of what to say or do next.

Casey O’Doherty at a loss for words. This was a rare night indeed.

Alvis stayed quiet, continuing to watch his classmate flounder. He probably would have felt more like he had the upper hand if it wasn’t for the actual Hand, the Glory one, with its weird light. Gran’s old books -- the ones that had been passed down through her side of the family, gotten banned in recent centuries, and were now illegal to sell off -- said that the Hand of Glory’s light could only been seen by its owner, their comrades, and anyone who touched it. That meant that if Alvis didn’t want to lose sight of the would-be burglars, he was stuck keeping skin contact with the rotted remains of some dead murderer’s actual hand. Its pickled skin felt like touching a cold, barely-dead fish. It gave way a little under his fingers and smelled worse than an outdoor toilet at the height of summer.

Alvis made a sick noise and straightened his back to get as far away from the Hand as he could without losing contact. “This thing is disgusting,” he muttered, breaking some of the tension that had suffused the room. “How can you possibly stand to carry it around with you? It’s completely unsanitary. Can you even wash it between milk-baths or is that all curdling into the skin too?”

And he didn’t even want to think about the candle. Made from the fat boiled off a corpse. Who even thought of that nonsense?

“Merlin’s beard, Casey. I know Hands are useful artifacts in theory but this stench can’t be worth it, especially not with your bad health. Uck.”

For all that he spoke so lightly, Alvis wasn’t about to let Casey off the hook. He kept a cool eye on the other boy at all times and didn’t quite smile, not relaxing his tense state in the slightest.

There was no easy way to explain what he had been doing or crafting a ready excuse to mask that pursuit. Frustration ate away at Casey’s mind.

“Well boo-hoo for your normal nose,” Casey said. True, his own sense of smell was more sensitive in some areas than others, and the first time the Hand had been off putting until Casey got used to it after frequent use. “It’s a perfectly fine thing if you’d stop poking it. Honestly.”

Fed up with the artificial not-darkness Casey changed stance with his wand to have a temporary orb of light bob off around the room, drifting like a small sun. The regular light carried the oversaturated edge from the still lit hand.

He still had no headway on where to start talking with Alivs.

As the room lit up, Alvis stepped away from the Hand but didn’t completely abandon it. He kept the milk ready to throw. He didn't think Casey would attack him -- he hadn’t after that first surprise -- but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. If their friendship had taught him anything, it was how to be cautious while dealing with other people.

So they stood there, each in their sleeping clothes and bare feet. After a moment of staring Alvis sighed, folding his arms. “What are you doing down here, Casey? Why the middle of the night, why use the Hand, why do any of this? Did you…”

And here his voice broke. He bit his lip and turned his head away, dreading the answer he might feel out before it could be put to words.

“Did you only agree to come out here so you could do this?”

What options to end this situation now dwindled as Casey realized he hadn't the heart to do any of them. Stun Alvis by this point, try to extract or wipe his memories, abscond for the hills. Curious. Had it been from the friendship with Alvis? Or had Casey ever been the kind to do what action was necessary regardless of consequences? For all the times he had planned, it was rare he ever acted on them.
 
Behind him a stack of parchments gave way and Dingy slid to the floor. Casey looked over his shoulder. The elf looked fine as he straightened himself up.
 
Finally Casey could put thoughts to words, however hollow those words were sounding as a sensation of emptiness was beginning to stretch inside of him like an ever-widening fissure. "It wasn't the only reason I came here it was just...opportunistic."
 
Because Casey had no particular close kinship with his family or anyone else, it didn't matter to him in the slightest where his vacations were spent. Why not have the short holiday with Alvis? It would be free from maintaining another act.[1] If the Norling's so happened to be the latest generation of a family that had more connections to Casey's own then he had ever realized before befriending Alvis...
 
All of that was too much to say, so Casey just stuck to minimal explanations for now. "There was something your family made, long ago, that I needed to find.”

1.	With Ariel's Zoe Torret, we had much discussion about Casey spending the holidays with Zoe's family using the Hexy persona, but such events were considered offstage.