Chapter Text
“I was thinking about it,” Peter says one day in October, when they’re walking back to the Folly through Russell Square. He wants a look at the county practitioner records. Thomas isn’t sure what the outcome of this will be, but is – perhaps – almost looking forward to finding out.
“Thinking about what?”
“You said you’d tried to find apprentices, a few years back. I wonder what would have happened if you’d tried with me?”
“You were busy rising meteorically,” says Thomas. “I don’t think you’d have been tempted.”
“No, but, see,” Peter says. “I got things together fast enough, but there was this point – I did my probation, I wanted CID, and they sent me to the Case Progression Unit. Lesley got assigned to the Murder Squad, plainclothes. I just about died of jealousy. I thought my career was over before it had started.”
“They were setting you up for management,” Thomas says; he’s seen how the system works. “They wanted you to be thinking about how cases are run, how all the pieces fit together.” Playing to Peter’s skills; look where he’d ended up.
“I know that now. But then – I mean it: I thought I was doomed to paperwork forevermore. Well, I wasn’t wrong, but it gets more interesting the higher you get.”
“Also, it gets easier to delegate it to other people.”
“That too.” Peter grins. “What I’m saying is – if you’d asked me, back then, those first few months, before I got pulled into a CSU, offered to teach me magic…I’d have said yes. No question. So fast your head would have spun. And then what would have happened?”
Thomas contemplates the prospect of Peter Grant as he must have been as a constable: ambitious in an unassuming way, frighteningly intelligent, maybe less confident than he is now, but still that solid determination under it all. “I imagine you would have learned magic.”
“I imagine I would have driven you absolutely bonkers,” Peter says cheerfully. “Even if you’d had the ability to tell me to just shut up. Not that you’d say it like that.”
“I think I would have survived. But it would have been frustrating for you, I think – there wouldn’t have been anywhere for you to go.”
“Immortal senior officers are a problem in that regard,” Peter concedes. “Still – I don’t know. It’s an interesting thought.”
The world might have been better, is what Thomas thinks. If he’d had Peter sooner, Peter’s vision, Peter’s certainty, Peter’s drive to learn. What ifs, though, they don’t help. They never have.
“I’d have liked that,” he says instead. “Driven bonkers or not. But I think I like you where you are, too.”
“Yeah,” Commander Peter Grant says, as they mount the steps of the Folly. “Me too.”