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Wingardium Leviosa is a first year spell, one Lily's had down for years now, simple levitation.

Still, it's good to practice the basics sometimes.

Which is why there's a small brown teapot (empty, of course) hovering about five feet above a table tonight.

And below it, a redheaded witch with her wand out, watching it slowly spin in the air.

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"So they make their loaves look like fish?

"Wouldn't you think that if you'd spent all day fishing, the last thing you'd want would be bread shaped like more fish?

"What are the Districts?"

"I'm not certain if they do use the shape yet."

Only that The Capitol did. He'll know in a few months. If he can get out into the District's while they are on the Tour. They might be locked in the train or in rooms under guard, but he would like to.

"The Districts are what make up Panem. There are twelve, once there were thirteen, and they are all broken up by their production industries."

"So they're like, what, counties?"

"Maybe. The twelve districts break up the whole area of the continent." Different worlds and different terms, but he was making the effort to put it all together.

"Same idea, then, I think, though I'm certainly not from a country big enough to cover a whole continent."

"The way things are done in each of them is different. I've been working my way through all of them," with a wave of the back of his hand at the basket. "In no real order."

"It's an interesting way to learn geography. Bread by bread.

"And when you're done you have something useful."

Lily approves.

"Which District are you from?"

Much better than sleeping and remembering the faces of the dead from each.

"Twelve. We specialize in coal, but my family isn't involved with it."

"And what does the bread from District Twelve look like?"

She hopes it's not black and lumpy.

That wouldn't exactly be appetizing.

"Normal." He thought about the word and then shrugged, with an odd smile for catching himself using the word, with someone he'd already talked about things being too difference to reference that way.

"Brown or golden on the outside, white on the in. Unless we mix different things into it. But its a lot of usual more than optional."

Though that had to do with consumer ability to buy than ability to make.

His normal (and his own smile at it) gets a smile in response.

"Round? Oblong? Shaped like stars?" she asks.

"About so long." He held his hands a little over a foot wide. "Mostly rounded across the top, just rising, and flat on the bottom like the shape of the pan."

A little telling -- and it's hard to tell if it's pride or simply tempered patience (maybe it's a combination of both after so long, and after the weird absolutely freedom he has now) -- when he adds. "I've made more of them than I could even attempt counting."

"You're a baker, then?

"That's why your family doesn't work with the coal, is it?"

"My father is the baker for District 12, and we've all run the bakery and learned to do everything in it." He manages to make we've sound much larger than the two people in question so far.

"When I was working there, I did more with cakes in the last few years than specifically focusing on making the days loaves."

"You must have started working there when you were young," Lily says.

He doesn't look much older than she is, and he's talking about years in a bakery.

"What do you do now, instead?"

"I haven't decided yet."

His entire life is planned for him now.

Both in the fact he can do whatever he wants, in the smallest, most microscopic sense (even if it is great in comparison to the life of the boy eating stale bread), and he has a life-time of expectancies before him (being remembered and training other children to go do what he just did).

"Bake breads from other places to pass the time."

And to pay respects to the lives he can't forget.
And keep himself from sleeping, because sleep was worse.

Edited 2010-12-16 02:52 (UTC)

"It's all right. I haven't decided what I want to do, either, really.

"Maybe I'll try some different things and see how they go.

"Probably not baking, though. I can boil water to make tea, and that's just about the limits of my skill in the kitchen, much to my mother's despair."

Peeta laughed, and attempting some slight step.

"You couldn't just flick your wrist now and make it happen?"

There's a telling glance toward the...wand on the table.

"You can't create food with magic. It's one of the rules. I could summon it to me, I could increase what I had, or I could change it, which would include cooking or putting ingredients together with magic, I suppose ... "

She's never thought about it before.

Peeta shook his head, listening to the list. It's....well, magic. It's hard to fathom. And it's easy to be leery of. Too easy. Except Lily is being incredibly nice and open. In a superficial fashion.

"That's a lot of things you could do right there."

"As long as you have something to start with," Lily says.

"Do you want to see?"

It's a little hard to be entirely excited about. She could do anything. But she is asking, and Peeta nodded, interest showing far more than any of the uncertainty. "Okay."

Lily thinks for a moment, then says, "May I use one of your rolls?"

Edited 2010-12-16 03:33 (UTC)

Peeta reached out and plucked out off the top few on the pile and held it out to her. There's a surreptitious edge of course. It's all about learning more.

But it's more, too. It always is, isn't it?

"Thank you."

She takes the lid off the teapot, and then picks up her wand.

Aguamenti, first, to fill the teapot with water.

And then she hold the roll above it, and, face showing rather more concentration that she has needed yet this evening, she transfigures it into a small green fish that slips from her fingers and into water below.

Where it swims in the small circle that it can manage in the teapot.