The Guardians, Chapter 1
The hell?: Yes, this is a Harry Potter/W.I.T.C.H-crossover. I'm sorry about that.
Title: The Guardians, or The Unforgivable Fanfic
Author: Me
Rating: PG-13, I'd say
Word count: 2846
Warnings: Slash, silliness, a large amount of FAIL
Pairings: You know, I haven't got a clue just yet
Summary: Five very different boys are forced to don wings to try to save the world and hopefully also themselves , using magic that they are less than apt at controlling and what unity they can summon whenever they are not squabbling.
Chapter One
Departures and arrivals
“This…is…not…fair…”
Peter crammed the rest of his textbooks into his bag, realising just a moment after that he had probably squashed his lunch flat. He groaned, but there was no time to do anything about it, so he grabbed the slightly dripping bag and sprinted towards the door…
…and sneezed.
He stopped, shocked, and looked around at his room. It didn’t look much like his room anymore, though. It didn’t look much like anything, except maybe a dump. Where had that freaky blast of wind come from? Must be a draught somewhere…?
He was jolted back into action when he suddenly realised that he wasn’t getting less late for school by standing there. Muttering words that Sirius would be surprised he knew and his father would ground him for, he crashed down the stairs, wondering how come this always seemed to happen to him. It really wasn’t fair. He had to try so hard in school to be able to even pass - he tried just as hard as Remus, who got A’s at everything, and much harder than James and Sirius, who despite not working at all still managed to scrape quite good grades. And they were never this late, either, even though Peter knew for sure that he was the only one that set his alarm at-
Hey, wait a minute… His alarm clock! Confusion hit him so hard that he actually stopped in his tracks. He had put his alarm clock on the windowsill this evening so that he’d be sure that he’d make it to the first day of the term. There was no way he could’ve turned it off in his sleep.
“Granny Minnie? Are you awake?”
“In here…” She was standing in front of her old armoire, staring at something inside, and rather hastily shut the doors when he entered the room.
“Do you know if anyone killed my alarm clock while I was asleep?”
“What? Oh, no, I don’t think so.” She seemed a bit distracted, but not distracted enough not to suddenly fix him with a hawk-eyed stare. “Aren’t you a bit late?”
He sighed. “Yes, I am. I’ll be going shall I?” Remembering something, he stopped in the door and turned around, blushing slightly. “Oh, and my room is a bit untidy. I’ll clean it when I get home from school, promise.”
“Hmm?” She looked up, he hand once more clutching the handle to the armoire door. “Oh, yes. Fine. Certainly. Oh, that’s right, I have a… a surprise for you. Why don’t you bring over your friends after school?”
Peter narrowed his eyes. “This is not going to be something embarrassing, is it?”
“What? Embarrassing?” She looked honestly surprised. “What kind of embarrassing thing would that be?”
“Something like when you tried to teach us to dance when we were twelve?”
“What’s embarrassing about that is that I’ve got a grandson with two left feet. But no, nothing like that. Something… rather exciting.” She gave Peter a strange, sharp look, and suddenly he felt strangely… detached, as if he was floating outside his body.
“Right…” he heard his voice say, and was rather pleased to notice how sceptical he sounded. “I can bring that new guy that our teacher talked about at the end of last term.”
“You do that,” said his grandmother, while Peter wondered despairingly what had possessed him to make such a suggestion. “Now, my advice is to hurry up.”
“Oh… yes, of course…”
When he stepped outside he heard something break underneath his foot, and looked down upon the sad remains of his alarm clock. Well, that proved it. There was definitely a draught in his room.
***
Someone else was running out of time at that exact moment, but in her case there was more at stake than detention. Soon the delivery gates through which she had snuck in would close, and then she had no idea how to get out of the Prince’s castle, and that meant she’d have no escape route if she was discovered by the guards. But she still hadn’t found the gunpowder she was looking for.
Ducking behind some crates to avoid the patrols, Lily studied the map her informant had given her again. It was crudely drawn, and scribbled with coal on the inside of a flour bag, for her informant was never left alone for very long. But if she read it right, the door was supposed to somewhere here. Maybe it was hidden…? Of course! There was a large set of shelves covering one of the walls just a little way away, that had to be it. And then, there had to be a switch, because she couldn’t imagine that the Snakelord was patient enough to wait for that shelf to be moved every time he came to inspect. But where?
“If I was a switch, where would I hide? Or rather, if I was a snakeman with scales for brains, where would I hide the switch? Oh my, the oldest trick in the book…” She pulled at one of the torches, and there was a loud cthunk! from somewhere inside the wall, before heavy bolts shot out from the wall and forced the a section of the shelves to reluctantly swing forward on screeching, rusty hinges. Lily grimaced wildly at the sound and quickly slipped inside, hoping against hope that the guards on patrol hadn’t heard.
After a frantic search she realised that getting the door closed from the inside was apparently not an option; the only switch was the one outside. She cursed herself for not letting Andromeda come with her when she asked; having an extra pair of hands outside that gate would’ve been really useful. But there was nothing to be done about it now. She would just have to work very fast.
When Andy had told her to look for crates with the royal seal on them, she had apparently left out one tiny problem; there was hardly anything but crates in the storeroom, and it was so dark that looking for the pale grey royal seal was a right bitch. And lighting a match to find crates full of gunpowder didn’t seem like such a good idea. Lily wasn’t that good with languages, but she could swear fluently in all the eleven tongues of Meridian, and she applied that knowledge right now.
Eventually, after a nerve-wrecking search during which her heart pounded so loudly in her ears that she was sure she wouldn’t hear the guards coming, she finally found the crates. They were small and square and surprisingly heavy, and were stacked neatly on top of each other at the very back of the room. At least something was working for her advantage; there were shelves obscuring her from every direction, and there was a window rather close by. Sure, it was a miserably narrow slit close to the ceiling, but the crates would easily get through. She could probably squeeze in too if it came to that.
Moving the crates to the window and then hauling them into the moat from there was hard work, but she could already see the faint movement in the unnatural, thick vegetation surrounding the castle. Soon dark shadows detached themselves and started to retrieve the floating crates. Lily smiled despite her aching limbs; the gunpowder would now aid the rebels instead of their oppressors.
There was of course a plan. She was to take twenty crates, one for each one of them, and then get scarce. Lily knew about plans, in theory. In practice, not so much. She figured that each rebel out there could carry at least three crates each and still be mobile, and even when they couldn’t carry any more crates they could still sabotage the gunpowder by pouring it into the river. Thus, so long as no one was around, she saw no reason to stop at twenty. Sure, Andy would probably be after her hide for it later, but this was now, and the less gunpowder Prince Lucius and the Snakelord had at their disposal, the better.
She had managed to clear forty-five crates when she could hear a muffled exclamation from the door, followed by a smattering of called orders and requests for backup. She swore vehemently under her breath, throwing a disappointed look at the pile of crates still left. She had barely managed to make a dent in the supply. What good would forty-five crates do the rebels if the enemy had hundreds upon hundreds? Unless…
It took a candle, a match and thirty precious seconds to conclude her work there, by which time guards were already appearing. They stopped at the sight of her, staring at what from their point of view was a frail young woman, barely more than a child; she had always been short and slight and had always seen this as an asset, and it was once more proved now as it gave her time to swing herself up to the window, wave cheerfully at them, and step out into thin air.
Only then did she realise that an eighty-foot drop into water was rather nastier than it at first had appeared. For one thing, hitting the water was like hitting a solid wall. She wondered briefly if that meant she wouldn’t sink before unconsciousness took her.
***
“I am not pleased, Tom. Not at all.” Prince Lucius was pacing his study, white with rage. The black-haired young man kneeling before him was watching him with impassive red eyes. If he was frightened - and few people were unaffected by the Prince’s rage - he was very good at hiding it.
“I am sorry, my prince. Apparently the rebels planted some kind of trap. Probably just an ordinary candle leaned to fall into an open crate once it had burned to a certain level. Simple, but very effective. Our whole stock of gunpowder has been depleted, and large parts of the contents of storeroom five were destroyed in the explosion and following fire. Thankfully, however, there were no damages to the castle. The magic on the walls still holds strong.”
The prince snorted sharply in irritation and disgust. “Of course it does. How many did we lose?”
“Guards, sir?” There was a hint of a nonchalant sneer on the young man’s face now. “Since the explosion was limited to the storeroom, we only lost the first patrol to enter, and since we’ve searched all bodies found, and all evidence points at that they failed to apprehend the trespasser… Well, they would have been sentenced to death anyway. Of course, we did lose a dozen or so of the castle servants in the fire when we attempted to rescue as much as we could that hadn’t already been destroyed…”
The prince waved a pale hand to silence him. “Yes, yes, that is of little matter. Servants can be replaced. So can guards, but that takes more time. How about the gunpowder? How about everything that was lost in the fire?”
“We have sent despatches for new supplies already.”
“Good.” The prince stopped pacing, sinking down to his knees in front of Tom and grabbing both his hands in his, squeezing them so hard that his knuckles went white. The young man winced but said nothing. He met the prince’s burning stare with unblinking calm. In fact, he had not blinked at all since he came there, and judging from the fact that he had no eyelids, it seemed unlikely that he was going to start.
“This has been happening more frequently, Tom,” the Prince hissed, leaning forward. Tom didn’t back away. “Suddenly they are impertinent. Suddenly they do not fear us. And I’ve heard stories of a new leader, a leader they call the Tiger Lily. It is likely that it was she that led this attack; maybe she even was the one to infiltrate the castle. And she’s here, I want you to find her. Do I make myself clear? They can’t have gotten far, but I don’t trust mere guards on this mission. You have to find her and bring her to me. The sooner we can have her publicly executed, the better. Let us remind them that the privilege of living peacefully in Meridian can be withdrawn at any moment. And then, the only thing that remains is resting peacefully here in death.”
“Yes, my prince.” A cold, nasty smile parted Tom’s lips, revealing teeth that elongated into fangs as the prince watched them. Tom’s irises spread to blot out the white in his eyes, and the pupils narrowed into a snakelike resemblance at the same time as his hair seemed to recede back into his skull, revealing white scales. As the prince let go of his hands and stood up, Tom’s whole body was already covered in the same white scales, broken by a jagged slash of black following his spine. The long, powerful body of an enormous snake had replaced his from the waist and downward.
“You are so much more beautiful in your true form,” the Prince remarked casually, his eyes now burning with a different flame, and the Snakelord smiled a lipless smile at him.
“Thank you, my Prince,” he hissed, a cloven tongue flecking out to taste the air at the end of the last, drawn-out consonant.
***
It had been a shitty morning.
His mother had been called to an emergency meeting at work at 6 AM and had sped off into the morning gloom with Severus watching from the window. He had to walk to school, and the really great part, aside from the horrible weather, was that he wasn’t entirely sure of his way there. After wandering around aimlessly - watching the digits on his clock count down to School start, to Late, and then to Very Late - he finally found it. A flat, yellowish building that reminded him more of some kind of an industrial warehouse than a school. It was half past, and his first class would end in a quarter of an hour. Sighing and dragging his feet behind him, Severus went without much hope to find someone who could direct him to classroom 314 B.
When he finally arrived people were already streaming out of the open door. Most of them walked past him without so much as looking at him, and a ridiculously pretty young man almost walked right into him.
“Wha- Uh, sorry,” his eyes flickered briefly to Severus and then once more turned back to another boy as he continued on his way. “I’m telling you, James, that bloody flame fucking jumped at me…”
Severus stood frozen as his new classmates filtered past, waiting for the corridor to get empty so that he could sneak into the classroom and check if the teacher was still there. After a couple of minutes or so the din of adolescent voices faded, and he took a tentative step toward the door.
“Uhm…”
Severus spun around, surprised. A short, plump boy was standing by a row of brightly pink lockers, looking embarrassed and confused. A bit down the corridor another boy waited; a skinny, tall fellow with brown hair.
“What?” It came out a lot more hostile than Severus had intended it, and he flinched a bit at the sound of his own voice. What was his bloody damage? Was he somehow destined to scare people away?
The short boy also flinched and blushed. “I… uh, that is we… that is, me and my friends… we thought that maybe… well, perhaps, if you wanted to… you could come and hang with us after school? Seeing as you’re new and all, I mean.” As Severus didn’t answer his blush deepened and he began to back away. “I mean, if you don’t want to come then that’s cool with us, I just thought… I’d… ask…”
“I…” Severus blurted out, mostly to stop the guy from leaving before he’d even managed to articulate some kind of an answer. There really seemed to be no reason why not, he concluded. It was, of course, going to be a complete and utter failure, and they’d realise soon enough that he was absolutely unsuitable as friend material, but not even trying was pathetic even by his standards. He sighed. “Fine then. I suppose I’ll come.”
The boy’s face showed such a huge amount of relief that it was almost comical. “Oh. Great! You… Your name is Severus, right?”
“Yes.” There was an awkward silence before Severus remembered that he should be saying something. “And you are?”
“Peter. Peter Pettigrew. Uh, you should probably speak to Mr Slughorn. He’s still in there.” He indicated at the classroom door. “Then we have class one floor down, 208. Uhm… see you then, I suppose.” He waved awkwardly and then fled down the corridor with his friend. And Severus was left to ponder the depressing fact that he was already screwing up everything that he possibly could, before steeling himself and knocking on the classroom door.
This new school was clearly going to be hell.