(no subject)
Happy birthday, Katie! I wouldn't be around on Livejournal if it weren't for you, so happy birthday and a little story for you. I hope you're not offended, but I re-read King of Snakes tonight.
April 20
At first, Tom actually has nothing for Nazis. He doesn't think much of them at all: they failed, after all. Even while they were successful, they were the Muggle puppets of Grindlewald, and when he meets a cell of them in an Austrian wizarding villages during the winter of 1946, he thinks that they're silly. They're Muggles. They're trash. They're particularly ugly and tacky little pets that their local wizard keeps on a chain, and the fact that they still stand so straight in the mornings and click their heels together and use the formal Sie all the time -- Tom's learned enough of German that he can pick that little nuance up, and though you'd expect them to use it a lot since they're on the absolute bottom of the household pecking ladder, somewhere between the highest of the house-elves and the lowest of the wizarding staff, it's like they don't realize that they've lost the war and that they're living on someone else's recognizance. They don't realize that they're being kept on as servants, and Tom doesn't understand why they're not made aware of it.
"Well, you have to understand, Tom," Herr Fleischer says to Tom, one morning, when they've finished their lessons for their morning and are having a bit of a mid-lesson snack. There's a dull thwacking outside because one of them is chopping wood for the enormous fires that the house-elves use in the kitchen to cook the food and heat the bath water even when winter has ben spring for almost two weeks.
Fleischer has a sip of his tea. He's an old man, one with habits as measured as the dozens of old-fashioned clocks he has throughout his house. They're sitting in his library, with its heavy oak panels and thousands of irreplacable magic books. It's a collection that rivals Hogwarts in the number of volumes, but far outstrips Hogwarts in the depth of information on the Dark Arts. Fleischer is not only the wealthiest man in the village, but one of the wealthiest and most famous in all of Europe; after all, not anyone who could afford to keep five extra servants who aren't good for too much. "They're not really Muggle; they're not really wizard," Fleischer says to Tom. "They're not even really human."
***
April twentieth of 1946 is two weeks after that day. Tom hasn't seen the boys for hours -- he's been watching them with steady eyes ever since Fleischer explained them to him, so he goes looking for them. Around the back of the house, through the little copse of woods where they sometimes spend time if more than one of them has finished his chores already. Tom asks the cook, the house-elves, the human serrvants. None of them know, and Tom just ends up wandering through the village until he comes to an empty hut, one abandoned for years and years. Tom sees the edge of a pale head through the dust-covered windowpane, and he sees that the door is also open a fraction.
So je goes and stands there in the door. Opens it, in fact, and he finds that it doesn't creak because the hinges have been freshly oiled. Although the windows are dusty, the floor is clean; there is a fire in the hearthplace, and the walls inside are freshly whitewashed. In the corner, there's a low table, salvaged out of a village trash-heap, and on it, there's a framed a picture of a dark-haired man with a pleasant smile. Sepia-tones. On the table with it, there are small, rounded pebbles from the river near the village that Tom has seen the boys collecting, a feather from the eagle that one of the villagers brought down in the mountains with a well-placed stunning spell, and a tall lone candle, long as Tom's forearm on the table. All arranged neatly on either side of the picture, and in front of it, there's also little array of silver things laid out in front of the picture.
They look like medals -- one of them looks a little like the prefect badges that Tom wore at Hogwarts, and down on the floor in front of that is a little tray with half a loaf of bread on it and a little tiny filthy glass that's filled with what Tom supposes is some sort of cheap sherry. It certainly smells like it, though with the careful way that the boys shift the tray and make sure it's positioned directly in front of the picture, you'd think that it was some sort of terribly precious and rare liquor. Later, Tom finds out that they've pulled their meagre earnings for almost a month, and that they actually did buy a bottle of sherry for the occaision -- they never drank any of it, but just poured a glassful, then put the liquor away to be kept in memory.
Tom stands in the doorway for a little bit, and the boys are so rapt in their devotions that they don't realize he's there until he speaks.
"Is that your father?" Tom asks. He gets a thrill of pleasure when the boys jerk around guiltily. Two of them are standing, three of them are kneeling, and one of the kneeling boys opens his mouth to say something. Tom can see that that boy's hands are shaking very badly; he was in the middle of taking some sort of book out of a silver case. Tom supposes that he was going to read it out loud to the other four since he knows that they're illiterate like stones.
There's a terrible sort of silence, then, and Tom knows that he's caught them in the middle of something that they were not supposed to do -- as if he needed more hints. They're not wearing their usual houseboy uniforms, but rather, black and silver uniforms finer than he's ever seen them wear before. The creases in them mean that these aren't normally worn very much, but the buttons have been cleaned until they're shining; the knee-high boots and the silver rings in the shape of a skull on each boy's right hand all gleam, too. Hanging in the air also is the smell of mothballs and the prickle of what Tom assumes can only be preservation charms making the hairs on the back of his neck stand.
What Tom notices after that, though, is not that the flame springs up on the candle tip without the touch of a match and only the touch of a boy's fingertips, but rather, that the one with his hand on the reader's shoulder has the bluest eyes and the sharpest teeth that Tom has ever seen on man or beast.
***
That night is the first night that any of the boys comes to Tom's room, and the first one is therefore the boy with the terribly blue eyes and the terribly sharp teeth. Tom makes the boy wrap his lips around that teeth and get down on his knees -- Tom tilts the boy's head up and forces his mouth open, then says in English that the boy can't understand, "I'm going to fuck your mouth now, and you're going to hold very still."
One of them comes to his bed every night after that. They rotate through the five of them, and with the exception of one night, they all arrive on the front of Tom's bedroom door before the sound of the downstairs mantle clock has entirely finished striking midnight. On that night, the boys had been sent up to the mountains to check up on a chalet that Herr Fleischer kept there and to make sure it was in working order. Since they hadn't been back at dinner and hadn't been back when Tom had changed for bed, so he assumed that he'd have to go without tonight.
At a little past one, though, there was a light tapping on the frame of Tom's door, and he opens it to find one of them standing there, mountain snow still in his hair and cheeks flushed from the cold.
"You're late, and you're also the boy from last night," Tom says as he shuts the door. The boy starts getting undressed by the bed.
There's a little pause while the boy undoes the buttons of his shirt. "There are only four of us now," the boy says as he strips his shirt off his shoulders, and Tom feels his breath catch a little involuntarily at the dark red marks slashing across the boy's back,. When he reaches a hand out to touch them, he feels the boy flinch away from the contact. They're actual wounds, not too deep, but certainly deep enough to hurt. They're curiously scabbed over in some parts and pink in others, as if parts of the wound have healed faster than others.
"We met a bear on the way back," the boy says, when he's bare from the waist up. The snow has melted and is dripping in rivulets down over his bare chest and collarbones; Tom can see it as rivers of silver on that bare chest, and he imagines that the cold water must burn over the wounds on the boy's back.
The boy starts to get down on his knees in front of Tom -- they've have figured out how Tom likes to get sucked off every other night and how he likes to fuck them in the nights in between -- but, then Tom looks down at the lean, beautiful face. He looks at the narrow lips and the elegant cheekbones, the ever so slightly tilted eyes that can't quite muster something resembling grief, and Tom takes a step backwards.
"Take off your pants, and go lie down on the bed," Tom says. "I want your back touching the sheets while I fuck you tonight."
***
The boy who was killed by the bear was the youngest one, the one who could read. The four survivors have all been injured in one way or another, but they heal with startling rapidity. Fleischer forbids the elves to treat them, but the boys don't even really need it. The wounds knit together rapidly, leaving only hair-fine scars on skin smoother than the sheets on Tom's bed, than the surface of the writing desk in his room that he occaisionally fucks them over. Tom never sees any of them show any grief; he never sees any of them show desire for anything, and the only thing they do in response to pain is pull away. They don't cry out; they don't show fear.
The four survivors can't read at all, and Tom sees them sometimes in corner, puzzling over the strange shape of letters so they can try to read their precious book. They live in a house that contains the greatest library in continental Europe, under the employment of one of the most famous scholars in the wizarding world, and the five boys are illiterate. Blind to the world, to greater possibilites, to ambition.
Tom doesn't offer to teach them to read; he rather doubts that they could even really learn.
***
Tom leaves the village at the end of spring. He's learned all that Herr Fleischer has to teach him, and both of them know it, so Fleischer writes him an introduction to a Count that he knows further east who will have more to teach Tom, and Tom leaves on the first day of summer.
When Dumbledore defeats Grindlewald for good in the spring of '49, British and American wizards enact a parallel version of the British and American Muggle armies occupation, and in fact, they burn the old Fleischer mansion to the ground. They disperse the matchless collection of Dark Arts books, and all of the beautiful magical clocks either disappear into kindling wood for the chilly spring nights or into the pockets of victorious forces. Years later, Tom is sitting in the innermost, most private and most secure rooms of the Malfoy Manor, receiving Lucius and Narcissa's obesiance -- he looks up, then, and sees that the clock sitting on the mantle behind their bowed heads is the same clock that sat on the mantle of Herr Fleischer's library, ticking in much the same way it did when Herr Fleischer explained that the five boys he employed weren't really human.
"They can do a little magic," Fleischer had said that day. "They can survive cold that would kill a man; they can run tirelessly for days, and they can smell blood in the air and taste it in water. Perhaps you have heard that Grindlewald's Nazis were trying to surpass what it was to be merely human, that they to live forever?"
Tom nodded, and Fleischer had another sip of tea before he cleared his throat before they went back to discussing the usage of demiguise fur in dark potions.
In the spring of 1949, Herr Fleischer runs when he hears that the British are coming, and his servants and the house-elves are left to hold the Fleischer house against the enemy. They don't do this very well, though. They, too, run at the first oppurtunity, and the villagers, eager to prove to the British that they're not fans of Grindlewald, loot everything worth looting and set fire to the house. When the British show up at the end of the week, the villagers show them all the house-elves and the miserable human servants, and they also show the British the skeletons of four boys in the smoking ruins of a hut at the end of the village, where they fled to once the villagers set fire to main Fleischer house. The boys refused to come out of the house, and they also repulsed any attempts to try and get them out, so the villagers set fire to the hut. Once the fire has done smoldering, they show the British the four bodies curled and curiously intermingled with each other. The skeltons are so thoroughly burnt that the bones dissolve to ash when touched.
The next winter, though, when the British are gone, a pack of wolves appear. There had never been wolves in that valley before, and no matter what sort of hounds or tracking spell the wizards in that village brought out, they could never track the wolves, much less get close enough to cast a capturing charm. Traps came to no avail either, and the villagers would sometimes find even that one of their own sheep and dogs, or even worse, a boy from the village, with their leg nearly torn in half by the steel-jawed trap. The families of the men who set fire to the house have sheep snatched out of their barns and wives who miscarry nine-month pregnancies.
The pack of wolves only stay around for one winter, but during that winter, they wipe out every last bear in the valley. Villagers would find enormous bruins dragged from their dens with their throats torn out, or they would see vultures hopping into small earthen bank and come out with bits of bear fur in their feathers and their necks covered with gore. Every last bear in the valley is killed without having a bite taken out of it by the wolves, and on the first day of summer, the villagers see that on the road out of town, there are five sets of enormous wolf-prints, all heading in one direction.
This story isn't meant to be sympathetic to Nazis at all. It really only works if you sort of go into the story thinking and expecting the Nazis to be big, evil wolves instead of five boys who've been thrown to the world to sort of fend for themselves and have a profoundly twisted and non-standard idea of what Naziism entails because they never get a chance to read Mein Kampf and were too young during the Reich to have really been properly indoctrinated. I hope nobody gets offended.
Again, happy birthday, Katie!
April 20
At first, Tom actually has nothing for Nazis. He doesn't think much of them at all: they failed, after all. Even while they were successful, they were the Muggle puppets of Grindlewald, and when he meets a cell of them in an Austrian wizarding villages during the winter of 1946, he thinks that they're silly. They're Muggles. They're trash. They're particularly ugly and tacky little pets that their local wizard keeps on a chain, and the fact that they still stand so straight in the mornings and click their heels together and use the formal Sie all the time -- Tom's learned enough of German that he can pick that little nuance up, and though you'd expect them to use it a lot since they're on the absolute bottom of the household pecking ladder, somewhere between the highest of the house-elves and the lowest of the wizarding staff, it's like they don't realize that they've lost the war and that they're living on someone else's recognizance. They don't realize that they're being kept on as servants, and Tom doesn't understand why they're not made aware of it.
"Well, you have to understand, Tom," Herr Fleischer says to Tom, one morning, when they've finished their lessons for their morning and are having a bit of a mid-lesson snack. There's a dull thwacking outside because one of them is chopping wood for the enormous fires that the house-elves use in the kitchen to cook the food and heat the bath water even when winter has ben spring for almost two weeks.
Fleischer has a sip of his tea. He's an old man, one with habits as measured as the dozens of old-fashioned clocks he has throughout his house. They're sitting in his library, with its heavy oak panels and thousands of irreplacable magic books. It's a collection that rivals Hogwarts in the number of volumes, but far outstrips Hogwarts in the depth of information on the Dark Arts. Fleischer is not only the wealthiest man in the village, but one of the wealthiest and most famous in all of Europe; after all, not anyone who could afford to keep five extra servants who aren't good for too much. "They're not really Muggle; they're not really wizard," Fleischer says to Tom. "They're not even really human."
***
April twentieth of 1946 is two weeks after that day. Tom hasn't seen the boys for hours -- he's been watching them with steady eyes ever since Fleischer explained them to him, so he goes looking for them. Around the back of the house, through the little copse of woods where they sometimes spend time if more than one of them has finished his chores already. Tom asks the cook, the house-elves, the human serrvants. None of them know, and Tom just ends up wandering through the village until he comes to an empty hut, one abandoned for years and years. Tom sees the edge of a pale head through the dust-covered windowpane, and he sees that the door is also open a fraction.
So je goes and stands there in the door. Opens it, in fact, and he finds that it doesn't creak because the hinges have been freshly oiled. Although the windows are dusty, the floor is clean; there is a fire in the hearthplace, and the walls inside are freshly whitewashed. In the corner, there's a low table, salvaged out of a village trash-heap, and on it, there's a framed a picture of a dark-haired man with a pleasant smile. Sepia-tones. On the table with it, there are small, rounded pebbles from the river near the village that Tom has seen the boys collecting, a feather from the eagle that one of the villagers brought down in the mountains with a well-placed stunning spell, and a tall lone candle, long as Tom's forearm on the table. All arranged neatly on either side of the picture, and in front of it, there's also little array of silver things laid out in front of the picture.
They look like medals -- one of them looks a little like the prefect badges that Tom wore at Hogwarts, and down on the floor in front of that is a little tray with half a loaf of bread on it and a little tiny filthy glass that's filled with what Tom supposes is some sort of cheap sherry. It certainly smells like it, though with the careful way that the boys shift the tray and make sure it's positioned directly in front of the picture, you'd think that it was some sort of terribly precious and rare liquor. Later, Tom finds out that they've pulled their meagre earnings for almost a month, and that they actually did buy a bottle of sherry for the occaision -- they never drank any of it, but just poured a glassful, then put the liquor away to be kept in memory.
Tom stands in the doorway for a little bit, and the boys are so rapt in their devotions that they don't realize he's there until he speaks.
"Is that your father?" Tom asks. He gets a thrill of pleasure when the boys jerk around guiltily. Two of them are standing, three of them are kneeling, and one of the kneeling boys opens his mouth to say something. Tom can see that that boy's hands are shaking very badly; he was in the middle of taking some sort of book out of a silver case. Tom supposes that he was going to read it out loud to the other four since he knows that they're illiterate like stones.
There's a terrible sort of silence, then, and Tom knows that he's caught them in the middle of something that they were not supposed to do -- as if he needed more hints. They're not wearing their usual houseboy uniforms, but rather, black and silver uniforms finer than he's ever seen them wear before. The creases in them mean that these aren't normally worn very much, but the buttons have been cleaned until they're shining; the knee-high boots and the silver rings in the shape of a skull on each boy's right hand all gleam, too. Hanging in the air also is the smell of mothballs and the prickle of what Tom assumes can only be preservation charms making the hairs on the back of his neck stand.
What Tom notices after that, though, is not that the flame springs up on the candle tip without the touch of a match and only the touch of a boy's fingertips, but rather, that the one with his hand on the reader's shoulder has the bluest eyes and the sharpest teeth that Tom has ever seen on man or beast.
***
That night is the first night that any of the boys comes to Tom's room, and the first one is therefore the boy with the terribly blue eyes and the terribly sharp teeth. Tom makes the boy wrap his lips around that teeth and get down on his knees -- Tom tilts the boy's head up and forces his mouth open, then says in English that the boy can't understand, "I'm going to fuck your mouth now, and you're going to hold very still."
One of them comes to his bed every night after that. They rotate through the five of them, and with the exception of one night, they all arrive on the front of Tom's bedroom door before the sound of the downstairs mantle clock has entirely finished striking midnight. On that night, the boys had been sent up to the mountains to check up on a chalet that Herr Fleischer kept there and to make sure it was in working order. Since they hadn't been back at dinner and hadn't been back when Tom had changed for bed, so he assumed that he'd have to go without tonight.
At a little past one, though, there was a light tapping on the frame of Tom's door, and he opens it to find one of them standing there, mountain snow still in his hair and cheeks flushed from the cold.
"You're late, and you're also the boy from last night," Tom says as he shuts the door. The boy starts getting undressed by the bed.
There's a little pause while the boy undoes the buttons of his shirt. "There are only four of us now," the boy says as he strips his shirt off his shoulders, and Tom feels his breath catch a little involuntarily at the dark red marks slashing across the boy's back,. When he reaches a hand out to touch them, he feels the boy flinch away from the contact. They're actual wounds, not too deep, but certainly deep enough to hurt. They're curiously scabbed over in some parts and pink in others, as if parts of the wound have healed faster than others.
"We met a bear on the way back," the boy says, when he's bare from the waist up. The snow has melted and is dripping in rivulets down over his bare chest and collarbones; Tom can see it as rivers of silver on that bare chest, and he imagines that the cold water must burn over the wounds on the boy's back.
The boy starts to get down on his knees in front of Tom -- they've have figured out how Tom likes to get sucked off every other night and how he likes to fuck them in the nights in between -- but, then Tom looks down at the lean, beautiful face. He looks at the narrow lips and the elegant cheekbones, the ever so slightly tilted eyes that can't quite muster something resembling grief, and Tom takes a step backwards.
"Take off your pants, and go lie down on the bed," Tom says. "I want your back touching the sheets while I fuck you tonight."
***
The boy who was killed by the bear was the youngest one, the one who could read. The four survivors have all been injured in one way or another, but they heal with startling rapidity. Fleischer forbids the elves to treat them, but the boys don't even really need it. The wounds knit together rapidly, leaving only hair-fine scars on skin smoother than the sheets on Tom's bed, than the surface of the writing desk in his room that he occaisionally fucks them over. Tom never sees any of them show any grief; he never sees any of them show desire for anything, and the only thing they do in response to pain is pull away. They don't cry out; they don't show fear.
The four survivors can't read at all, and Tom sees them sometimes in corner, puzzling over the strange shape of letters so they can try to read their precious book. They live in a house that contains the greatest library in continental Europe, under the employment of one of the most famous scholars in the wizarding world, and the five boys are illiterate. Blind to the world, to greater possibilites, to ambition.
Tom doesn't offer to teach them to read; he rather doubts that they could even really learn.
***
Tom leaves the village at the end of spring. He's learned all that Herr Fleischer has to teach him, and both of them know it, so Fleischer writes him an introduction to a Count that he knows further east who will have more to teach Tom, and Tom leaves on the first day of summer.
When Dumbledore defeats Grindlewald for good in the spring of '49, British and American wizards enact a parallel version of the British and American Muggle armies occupation, and in fact, they burn the old Fleischer mansion to the ground. They disperse the matchless collection of Dark Arts books, and all of the beautiful magical clocks either disappear into kindling wood for the chilly spring nights or into the pockets of victorious forces. Years later, Tom is sitting in the innermost, most private and most secure rooms of the Malfoy Manor, receiving Lucius and Narcissa's obesiance -- he looks up, then, and sees that the clock sitting on the mantle behind their bowed heads is the same clock that sat on the mantle of Herr Fleischer's library, ticking in much the same way it did when Herr Fleischer explained that the five boys he employed weren't really human.
"They can do a little magic," Fleischer had said that day. "They can survive cold that would kill a man; they can run tirelessly for days, and they can smell blood in the air and taste it in water. Perhaps you have heard that Grindlewald's Nazis were trying to surpass what it was to be merely human, that they to live forever?"
Tom nodded, and Fleischer had another sip of tea before he cleared his throat before they went back to discussing the usage of demiguise fur in dark potions.
In the spring of 1949, Herr Fleischer runs when he hears that the British are coming, and his servants and the house-elves are left to hold the Fleischer house against the enemy. They don't do this very well, though. They, too, run at the first oppurtunity, and the villagers, eager to prove to the British that they're not fans of Grindlewald, loot everything worth looting and set fire to the house. When the British show up at the end of the week, the villagers show them all the house-elves and the miserable human servants, and they also show the British the skeletons of four boys in the smoking ruins of a hut at the end of the village, where they fled to once the villagers set fire to main Fleischer house. The boys refused to come out of the house, and they also repulsed any attempts to try and get them out, so the villagers set fire to the hut. Once the fire has done smoldering, they show the British the four bodies curled and curiously intermingled with each other. The skeltons are so thoroughly burnt that the bones dissolve to ash when touched.
The next winter, though, when the British are gone, a pack of wolves appear. There had never been wolves in that valley before, and no matter what sort of hounds or tracking spell the wizards in that village brought out, they could never track the wolves, much less get close enough to cast a capturing charm. Traps came to no avail either, and the villagers would sometimes find even that one of their own sheep and dogs, or even worse, a boy from the village, with their leg nearly torn in half by the steel-jawed trap. The families of the men who set fire to the house have sheep snatched out of their barns and wives who miscarry nine-month pregnancies.
The pack of wolves only stay around for one winter, but during that winter, they wipe out every last bear in the valley. Villagers would find enormous bruins dragged from their dens with their throats torn out, or they would see vultures hopping into small earthen bank and come out with bits of bear fur in their feathers and their necks covered with gore. Every last bear in the valley is killed without having a bite taken out of it by the wolves, and on the first day of summer, the villagers see that on the road out of town, there are five sets of enormous wolf-prints, all heading in one direction.
This story isn't meant to be sympathetic to Nazis at all. It really only works if you sort of go into the story thinking and expecting the Nazis to be big, evil wolves instead of five boys who've been thrown to the world to sort of fend for themselves and have a profoundly twisted and non-standard idea of what Naziism entails because they never get a chance to read Mein Kampf and were too young during the Reich to have really been properly indoctrinated. I hope nobody gets offended.
Again, happy birthday, Katie!