You Can't Play With Fire Without Getting Burned

Francesca Malfoy had always been something of a living paradox. She was a Hufflepuff Malfoy, had a tendency to get b!tchy when she cared, and often got quiet when she had a strong opinion upon the subject matter at hand. Therefore, it was no surprise that two of her favorite things were fire and water.

There was little Cesca enjoyed doing more than swimming. There was something about the feeling of water against her skin that the teenager adored, craved even. The way that water picked up her blonde locks and swirled them about her shoulders and face relaxed the teenager like nothing else could. Cesca adored fire just as much, but in a completely different way. Where water relaxed the teenager, fire excited her.

The Hufflepuff had loved fire for as long as she could remember. The girl would be perfectly content to just stare at a burning candle for hours upon end, allowing herself to be hypnotized by the dancing flame. Fire was a paradox too, when Cesca thought about it. It killed people, burning them to death inside the safety their own homes, even as it saved others from freezing during cold winter nights.

Cesca's attraction to fire had driven her to do something... fairly moronic. She'd never properly been taught the fire-making spell, but had done some research, and independently mastered incendio quickly enough. While that hadn't exactly been an intelligent move, it hadn't been nearly as bad as playing with the spell. After all, further improving her proficiency with the useful charm had seemed like the next logical step. The fact that she was somewhat of a pyromaniac had absolutely nothing to do with her choice of charms to practice. Perhaps if she told herself that enough times she might end up believing it.

The blonde had actually gotten pretty good with the spell, controlling the direction in which it went with ease, and entertaining herself by forming shapes with the magical flames. However, Cesca had pushed too far. The girl wasn't sure if she'd depleted her magical reserves, or if attempting to create a sphere of fire three times the size of her head had been a bit too ambitious. Either way, the Hufflepuff had received some rather impressive second degree burns from the ordeal, covering the entire top half of her right arm up to the elbow. Which was why she was on her way to the Hospital Wing.

Walking through the large double doors, she spotted Healer Ivanov and headed straight for him. "I'm burned," Cesca said bluntly, holding her arm out for the man to look at without so much as a word in greeting.

It had been a slow morning in which the steady stream of potions-related injuries had let up considerably – that dissipation of traffic being owed to the theory classes and exams going on. However, that didn’t mean that the Hospital Wing staff weren’t rushed off of their feet. The students suffering from Lycanthropy were due their monthly dose of Wolfsbane and the cauldrons had been bubbling all morning. Cael wanted to make sure they had their vials before dinner so they could at least get over the potion before eating but the timings were going a bit haywire much to his dismay and the introduction of a Slytherin Beater into the Wing just made things worse for him.

It took a little over half an hour to get the Beater strapped up. With a broken collar bone and a sprained pair of ankles it would be a few weeks yet before the riled young man could move again. The Slytherin wasn’t content with the prognosis either and made sure Cael knew about it regardless of the look on the Healer’s feet when the Beater began grumbling. In the end, Cael had to turn his back, draw the curtain and let the Quidditch player amuse himself or cry and whine or whatever he wanted to do. Cael wasn’t going to keep him company if he didn’t want to play ball.

However, as soon as the doors opened, Cael half wished that he’d stuck to the Slytherin because none other than Francesca Malfoy strode in with what, at a first glance, looked like superficial burns but once she came closer, Cael could see that superficial was not the world to describe the state of her arm at all. The Healer blinked, his mind not even gathering its wits to retort that a ‘please’ would have been nice.

“Alright, hold on… just tell me, is it painful, especially, or are you alright?”

He doubted she was hurting that much, unless the Malfoy stiff upper lip really did have that much power. He figured it was a deep dermis burn and by the look of it, it was too but he wouldn’t have liked to have taken any course of action before establishing how it was affecting Francesca. He didn’t want to make it worse before trying to make it better.

“Come here, sit on one of the beds over there,” he gestured to one of the ones by the window before hurrying off to get some cooling and healing salve from the healing pantry. He returned after a few moments.

Cael set down the salves and a roll of bandage on the table at the end of the bed. He inspected the burn again from afar before sitting down on the bed beside Francesca.

“An incendiary gone wrong, love?” He inquired brightly with a half-smile

"Yes it's painful!" the teenager snapped, looking at the healer as though he was some sort of idiot. Registering just how rude that had been, and how very unintelligent it was to insult the man who had both the power and resources to take the pain away, Cesca ducked her head and murmured something that wasn't an apology but would almost certainly be presumed to be one.

"I'm alright, I suppose, but it does hurt," the Hufflepuff clarified, cursing that fact that she didn't know how burns were healed. Would it be a short process, or a long one? Would Cesca be requiring potions, spells, perhaps both? Despite the large amount of time the girl spent around fire, she'd never gotten seriously burned before. Sure, she'd had her fair share of minor first degree mishaps, but never anything that had needed medical attention or taken more than a few days to fully heal. This, on the other hand, would certainly have taken more than a few days to heal without magical intervention. Cesca could practically feel the blisters starting to form.

Heading over to one of the Hospital Wing cots the man had gestured towards, the blonde pushed herself onto it with effortless grace that one could only achieve from years of conditioning. Really, the witch had no idea what her brother was always talking about, she was very cooperative!

Cesca had figured that the trained wizard would likely be able to figure out what had happened just by examining her arm, but the question unnerved her all the same. Making a mental note to stop underestimating people so often, the blonde prepared to do what she did best.

Slouching her shoulders slightly, the witch curled in upon herself, causing her normally petite form to appear even smaller than it usually did. The Hufflepuff looked a year, perhaps even two, younger than her fourteen and was often underestimated for it. Cesca had spent years detesting her appearance, before realizing how to use it to her advantage. After all, there was so much more one could get away with when always overlooked or considered an innocent.

Looking up at Cael through big blue eyes, the girl chewed on the inside of her lip. "It was an accident," Cesca admitted softly, eyes watering ever so slightly. Ducking her head for a moment, as though shy and trying to build up the courage to speak, the teenager flared her nostrils in the same way that she did when trying not to tear up. "You're going to fix it, aren't you?" the Hufflepuff asked meekly, turning her head back towards the wizard's, "And make sure it doesn't scar? Mummy'd get mad, she always says that scars aren't becoming on girls."

Cesca had learned as a very young child, that the best lies and stories and covers were always based, at least partially, on the truth. In the little act she'd just put on, all of the nervousness and almost-crying and hesitation had been a front. The comment about her mother? Not so much. So if that last sentence had come out a little more bitter that the girl had intended? Well, she'd be the only one to know about the little flaw in her acting skills.