untitled unbetaed work in progress - part one
Bunny in progress
Crossover Harry Potter/Practical Magic (Surely this has been done before? Did no one else think Gilly should have been a Slytheren - just from the snake tattoo alone?)
AU, of course, starts two years before TSS, but possible spoiler of all seven books… or is that eight since PM should be included.
Warnings: violence, death, slash (surprised? I didn't think so)
Suggestions for title appreciated - preferably something not beginning with letters 'RE'
The Boy
The boy was slight and very small for his age. This was not due to neglect as he was the apple of his mother's eye and dotted on by his many aunts. Whenever people would comment on him not looking nearly eleven - which he was and which they always did - his father would ruffle his hair and say 'don't worry buckaroo, you'll get there'. Besides being small and slight, there was not much to remark about the boy. He had a creamy completion, like many other children, wavy hair the color of milk chocolate, like many other children and a healthy dose of curiosity, like pretty much all other children.
His most unique feature which he had inherited from his father was one blue eye and one green. His father was the only man in the Owens family, which was odd since his last name was Hallett. For over two hundred years the women of the family were widowed, when they bothered to marry at all, and only gave birth to daughters. Why or how they kept going back to the Owens name had never been explained in any manner that had made sense to the boy. It had something to do with a curse which had been broken and therefore didn't really matter any more. It had been broken a very long time ago, exactly nine months before he'd been born.
His father had been a genuine Texas Ranger and now worked as the town's sheriff. He wore cowboy boots and spoke with a drawl. All the aunts flirted with him and he didn't regret giving up the chase to settle down and take care of 'the girls'. The girls were Mother, of course and the boy's older sisters Kylie and Antonia, Aunt Gilly, who was mother's sister and Aunt Jet, whose real name was Bridget and Aunt Frances who had been his grandmother's older sisters. His whole family, practiced The Craft and the townfolk knew they were different, but things were good. Once the curse had been broken people in their small New England town began to accept them. They were still called witches, but it was said without fear, just with the same tone in which they mentioned that the Greens next door were Baptists.
The boy had a good life, a happy childhood. But that all changed a year ago when the men with wands came. Out in their back garden, Kylie and he had been competing to see who could swing the highest and jump off. She was older and taller but he was more fearless. Antonia was reading or probably day dreaming, since the boy knew she read much faster than it took her to finish the thick books with garish covers of pretty people in historical costumes making out. Antonia was lounging in the shade on the old wooden glider, too lost in her world of lust and adventure to be cajoled into joining their contest. When she screamed he'd thought Jimmy Angeluv had come back from the dead again. A resonable assumption given the number of times his sisters had told him that story as they huddled under blankets with flashlights late at night.
A man in a black cloak had appeared out of nowhere accompanied by a loud cracking sound. He grabbled Antonio and yelled 'don't move' and some other words which made no sense. Kylie and he both let go of the swings, as its impossible to not move on a swing and landed hard; Kylie screaming for their mother. The boy just watched as an eerie dark red light crackled around Antonia as she fell to the ground and convulsed violently. Kylie pushed out with her hand, and with power, in the direction of the man and he stumbled back. He looked more supprised than hurt but had stopped pointing at Antonia with his stick and she stopped convulsing, althought the red light stayed wrapped around her neck, ankles and stomach.
The man pointed where Kylie had been, but she was fast and already running to the house still screaming for their mother and Gary. Gary was what both Kylie and Antonia called the boy's father. The boy knew his father was at work, but when you called, really called and really meant it, his father could hear you anywhere and would come for you. It was part of the story, the story of the boy, the story of his father and the story of the dead man from under the rose bush which always made his mother say his Aunt Gilly had the worst taste in men.
There was a crack and an explosion where the man had pointed but he'd missed Kylie again. The man called him something, it was said in the tone of a swear word, but it sounded like 'Muddle'. The boy didn't waste time trying to figure it out, or the words which had made the explosion or the words that pushed pain into his sister's body as she lay panting on the ground. The boy though about roses, he thought about how the bush, which had been torn out and the ground salted, had bloomed so much and grown so big. He dug his fingers into the ground and reached. The way Kylie reached out when she pushed people, the way his mother reached out to light candles with no match, the way the Aunts reached out to make people behave like they wanted or events occur when they wished.
He lay there in front of the man, thinking of roses, thinking of power, thinking he wanted that man to get the hell away from his sister. And he pulled. Pulled life, pulled tiny roots which hadn't died, small living things deep down in the ground. The ground split and thick thorny branches spung up pulling the man down, pulling the man into the ground. The stick dropped useless beside him and his screams drowned out Antonia quiet whimpers. The boys mother burst from the house, carring her ladle from where she'd been in her workshop. He was really glad to see his mother and thought she looked quite fierce, weilding a ladle with her dark hair tossed around in a wind which seemed to blow up from nowhere.
The boy could see his mother's power crackle around her. Antoinia couldn't see power and could do very little with what she had, Kylie was the best and Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet said she would be as powerful as their mother one day. They weren't sure about him. He was more like his father. The whole family had been shocked that his father had learned to wield magic after meeting his mother. His father's magic was different, at least that was what the Aunts said. They said it felt different; the boy said it looked different.
No one in the family could see the magic the way he could. Sometimes though, at night as he sat on the porch swing with his father and listened to him naming stars and telling stories, the boy could point out things and show his father. Show him just how to tilt your head or squint your eyes to see the magic. That was enough, enough to let him know that there was nothing to worry about. Because when he tried to make his mother and the aunts see it they would look worried and put their heads together and talk it out over Margaritas in the kitchen.
He could see the magic now, the light blue and silver of his mother, swirling like the wind. The dark red, crackling magic still wrapped around his sister. The pond scum green of the roses blooming even in the cool spring as still more shoots burst throught the hard ground and tightly wrapped around the man and tried to enter his mouth as he screamed.
"Austin, get in the house, now," his mother said.
The boy shook his head and pointed at his sister. He said brokenly, "it's… red. Can't you see? She's dying. He's doing this. Make him stop."
The man gurgled, his gag reflex not being enough to keep out the persistant plant. His mother knelt next to Antonia running her fingertips lightly over her first on her then above her by a few inches, trying to feel what he was talking about. Antonia had stopped making any noise and had bitten through her lip, the blood covered the lower part of her face.
The boy glanced back at the house and saw the aunts looking out. Well Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet, Aunt Gilly was in town running the shop. Aunt Jet had a strangle hold on Kylie and was keeping her from running back out to them. Aunt Frances had the Book and was paging through it in between glancing up to keep an eye on the events in the yard. The boy stood shakily and thought about running in as his mother told him. But she couldn't see.
He had trouble making his voice work and had to try twice to say, "He's pushing pain into her, Mum. He… said something and pointed and the pain's… even after Kylie pushed him and he dropped that thing," he kicked the wand toward his mother, "somehow he's still doing this… he's killing her."
He wasn't ashamed of crying. His father said only cowards were afraid to cry. Antonia was a pill sometimes and all she talked about was which boy she liked and who was going with whom and what girl said what about what other girls but she was… his. He stumble over to her and his mother and tried to feel the magic the way the aunts always tried to teach him. He couldn't, all he could feel was a cold heaviness in his chest and chocked on a sob as he saw how unfocued Antonia's eyes were, how her hand felt clammy and he couldn't uncurl her tightly fisted fingers. He couldn't feel what his mother was feeling as she trembled and looked around wildly as if trying to figure out how to take what was hurting Antonia and bury it or break it. He couldn't feel, but he could see and he could reach, the way he had pulled the roses so he reached and pull the dark red crackling energy from around his sister's neck and unwound it and ball it up and push it back into the man who was pinned to the ground weasing for air.
The man's body convulsed as Antonia's had but his scream was muffled by the leaves and vines of the roses. Antonia didn't sigh, she didn't blink, she didn't give any sign that he had helped. The dark red of the pain magic was gone, but her own silvery pink light was dim and flickering. Antonia never had pushed out with her magic it just floated around her, they way Aunt Gilly's did most of the time, sort of staying inside and making her, well her. But now it was so faint almost invisible in the spring sunshine.
With a loud crack two more men appeared wearing long blue robes. They gapped at his mother. One lifted a wand, pointed at them and said, "Obliv-arrrgh" dropped his wand and clutched his now smoking arm in pain.
"Freeze," his father said. Holding a gun in his right hand and his badge in his left. It was the badge that burned the man and paralized the newcomers.
"Gary, she's not breathing!" The boys' mother wailed and started CPR on Antonia.
"You," his father said and indicated the man with the burn arm. "Start talking.
The other man looked shocked as the man immediately said, "This man is a deatheater, he escaped from Azkaban-"
"Stop talking," the boy's father holstered his gun and hollered, "Jet, I can't make hide nor hair outta what he's saying, didn't you go to school in England?"
Aunt Jet had obviously passed Kylie off to Aunt Frances as she came out, wrapping a shawl around her shoulders and said, "Azkaban's a wizards prison, they don't follow The Craft, they don't follow much of anything the damn fools."
Both men in blue looked mad but neither could say anything, and they wouldn't be able to until the boy's father told them to or told them that they were free to go. Sirens sounded in the distance and Gilly's car skidded up over the rise in the yard and parked off kilter. She jumped out, open-mouthed and just shook her head and ran to his mother. She took over the chest compressions while his mother focused on the breathing. His mother's face was smeared with Antonia's blood. It hurt, sitting there, watching Aunt Gilly pushed against Antonia's chest, feeling her cold, lax hand in his.
"She's gone," the boy said.
His mother ignored him and kept breathing, but his Aunt Gilly, tears streaming down her face looked right at him but kept counting the compressions.
"Can you bring her back, Mum?" He asked. "Like you did for Jimmy? Can you bring her back?"
His mother looked up in horror, the ambulance pulled up and the EMS personell took over. His mother went in the ambulance with Antonia and Gilly said she'd follow. None of the people with the ambulance had looked at the roses and the body wrapped in them on the ground or at the men in robes frozen in the yard, but then Aunt Frances was inside with the book, probably telling Kylie just what to do.
The men in the blue robes were Aurors. The boy's father wasn't impressed. The wizards seemed suprised that they'd been bested by someone from outside their orderly world. Or not so orderly as the boy's father pointed out.
The one who hadn't been burned was younger and muttered something about Antonio. The word 'squib' set Aunt Frances off into a black rage. Truth was Aunt Frances didn't have nearly as much push as Aunt Jet did, nor had she gone to the fancy school that Aunt Jet had gone to - Aunt Jet said it was because she was too busy chasing boys. But Aunt Frances was the creative one, and with her ideas and Aunt Jet's power they were quite the team. Since Aunt Jet was busy rounding up Kylie and packing up some stuff to take with them to the hospital, the boy decided he could help out Aunt Frances, after all he didn't know exactly what impotent was but if Aunt Frances decided that was what these men needed to be then they would be it until she told him they didn't need to be it any more.
As the Aurors contacted their bosses, regarding evacuating what was left of their deatheater and compensating the Americans, the boy's father cocked his head and squited at them before looking at the boy and saying, "you don’t have to do everything your aunts tell you to, y'know." The boy thought about it and nodded. He wondered if it had been a good idea, showing his father how to see magic, because the Aurors and their deatheather now had black bands about a foot wide circling their hips.
Unrelated - part 38 of Reconciliation is up here http://community.livejournal.com/humaninterest/
Crossover Harry Potter/Practical Magic (Surely this has been done before? Did no one else think Gilly should have been a Slytheren - just from the snake tattoo alone?)
AU, of course, starts two years before TSS, but possible spoiler of all seven books… or is that eight since PM should be included.
Warnings: violence, death, slash (surprised? I didn't think so)
Suggestions for title appreciated - preferably something not beginning with letters 'RE'
The Boy
The boy was slight and very small for his age. This was not due to neglect as he was the apple of his mother's eye and dotted on by his many aunts. Whenever people would comment on him not looking nearly eleven - which he was and which they always did - his father would ruffle his hair and say 'don't worry buckaroo, you'll get there'. Besides being small and slight, there was not much to remark about the boy. He had a creamy completion, like many other children, wavy hair the color of milk chocolate, like many other children and a healthy dose of curiosity, like pretty much all other children.
His most unique feature which he had inherited from his father was one blue eye and one green. His father was the only man in the Owens family, which was odd since his last name was Hallett. For over two hundred years the women of the family were widowed, when they bothered to marry at all, and only gave birth to daughters. Why or how they kept going back to the Owens name had never been explained in any manner that had made sense to the boy. It had something to do with a curse which had been broken and therefore didn't really matter any more. It had been broken a very long time ago, exactly nine months before he'd been born.
His father had been a genuine Texas Ranger and now worked as the town's sheriff. He wore cowboy boots and spoke with a drawl. All the aunts flirted with him and he didn't regret giving up the chase to settle down and take care of 'the girls'. The girls were Mother, of course and the boy's older sisters Kylie and Antonia, Aunt Gilly, who was mother's sister and Aunt Jet, whose real name was Bridget and Aunt Frances who had been his grandmother's older sisters. His whole family, practiced The Craft and the townfolk knew they were different, but things were good. Once the curse had been broken people in their small New England town began to accept them. They were still called witches, but it was said without fear, just with the same tone in which they mentioned that the Greens next door were Baptists.
The boy had a good life, a happy childhood. But that all changed a year ago when the men with wands came. Out in their back garden, Kylie and he had been competing to see who could swing the highest and jump off. She was older and taller but he was more fearless. Antonia was reading or probably day dreaming, since the boy knew she read much faster than it took her to finish the thick books with garish covers of pretty people in historical costumes making out. Antonia was lounging in the shade on the old wooden glider, too lost in her world of lust and adventure to be cajoled into joining their contest. When she screamed he'd thought Jimmy Angeluv had come back from the dead again. A resonable assumption given the number of times his sisters had told him that story as they huddled under blankets with flashlights late at night.
A man in a black cloak had appeared out of nowhere accompanied by a loud cracking sound. He grabbled Antonio and yelled 'don't move' and some other words which made no sense. Kylie and he both let go of the swings, as its impossible to not move on a swing and landed hard; Kylie screaming for their mother. The boy just watched as an eerie dark red light crackled around Antonia as she fell to the ground and convulsed violently. Kylie pushed out with her hand, and with power, in the direction of the man and he stumbled back. He looked more supprised than hurt but had stopped pointing at Antonia with his stick and she stopped convulsing, althought the red light stayed wrapped around her neck, ankles and stomach.
The man pointed where Kylie had been, but she was fast and already running to the house still screaming for their mother and Gary. Gary was what both Kylie and Antonia called the boy's father. The boy knew his father was at work, but when you called, really called and really meant it, his father could hear you anywhere and would come for you. It was part of the story, the story of the boy, the story of his father and the story of the dead man from under the rose bush which always made his mother say his Aunt Gilly had the worst taste in men.
There was a crack and an explosion where the man had pointed but he'd missed Kylie again. The man called him something, it was said in the tone of a swear word, but it sounded like 'Muddle'. The boy didn't waste time trying to figure it out, or the words which had made the explosion or the words that pushed pain into his sister's body as she lay panting on the ground. The boy though about roses, he thought about how the bush, which had been torn out and the ground salted, had bloomed so much and grown so big. He dug his fingers into the ground and reached. The way Kylie reached out when she pushed people, the way his mother reached out to light candles with no match, the way the Aunts reached out to make people behave like they wanted or events occur when they wished.
He lay there in front of the man, thinking of roses, thinking of power, thinking he wanted that man to get the hell away from his sister. And he pulled. Pulled life, pulled tiny roots which hadn't died, small living things deep down in the ground. The ground split and thick thorny branches spung up pulling the man down, pulling the man into the ground. The stick dropped useless beside him and his screams drowned out Antonia quiet whimpers. The boys mother burst from the house, carring her ladle from where she'd been in her workshop. He was really glad to see his mother and thought she looked quite fierce, weilding a ladle with her dark hair tossed around in a wind which seemed to blow up from nowhere.
The boy could see his mother's power crackle around her. Antoinia couldn't see power and could do very little with what she had, Kylie was the best and Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet said she would be as powerful as their mother one day. They weren't sure about him. He was more like his father. The whole family had been shocked that his father had learned to wield magic after meeting his mother. His father's magic was different, at least that was what the Aunts said. They said it felt different; the boy said it looked different.
No one in the family could see the magic the way he could. Sometimes though, at night as he sat on the porch swing with his father and listened to him naming stars and telling stories, the boy could point out things and show his father. Show him just how to tilt your head or squint your eyes to see the magic. That was enough, enough to let him know that there was nothing to worry about. Because when he tried to make his mother and the aunts see it they would look worried and put their heads together and talk it out over Margaritas in the kitchen.
He could see the magic now, the light blue and silver of his mother, swirling like the wind. The dark red, crackling magic still wrapped around his sister. The pond scum green of the roses blooming even in the cool spring as still more shoots burst throught the hard ground and tightly wrapped around the man and tried to enter his mouth as he screamed.
"Austin, get in the house, now," his mother said.
The boy shook his head and pointed at his sister. He said brokenly, "it's… red. Can't you see? She's dying. He's doing this. Make him stop."
The man gurgled, his gag reflex not being enough to keep out the persistant plant. His mother knelt next to Antonia running her fingertips lightly over her first on her then above her by a few inches, trying to feel what he was talking about. Antonia had stopped making any noise and had bitten through her lip, the blood covered the lower part of her face.
The boy glanced back at the house and saw the aunts looking out. Well Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet, Aunt Gilly was in town running the shop. Aunt Jet had a strangle hold on Kylie and was keeping her from running back out to them. Aunt Frances had the Book and was paging through it in between glancing up to keep an eye on the events in the yard. The boy stood shakily and thought about running in as his mother told him. But she couldn't see.
He had trouble making his voice work and had to try twice to say, "He's pushing pain into her, Mum. He… said something and pointed and the pain's… even after Kylie pushed him and he dropped that thing," he kicked the wand toward his mother, "somehow he's still doing this… he's killing her."
He wasn't ashamed of crying. His father said only cowards were afraid to cry. Antonia was a pill sometimes and all she talked about was which boy she liked and who was going with whom and what girl said what about what other girls but she was… his. He stumble over to her and his mother and tried to feel the magic the way the aunts always tried to teach him. He couldn't, all he could feel was a cold heaviness in his chest and chocked on a sob as he saw how unfocued Antonia's eyes were, how her hand felt clammy and he couldn't uncurl her tightly fisted fingers. He couldn't feel what his mother was feeling as she trembled and looked around wildly as if trying to figure out how to take what was hurting Antonia and bury it or break it. He couldn't feel, but he could see and he could reach, the way he had pulled the roses so he reached and pull the dark red crackling energy from around his sister's neck and unwound it and ball it up and push it back into the man who was pinned to the ground weasing for air.
The man's body convulsed as Antonia's had but his scream was muffled by the leaves and vines of the roses. Antonia didn't sigh, she didn't blink, she didn't give any sign that he had helped. The dark red of the pain magic was gone, but her own silvery pink light was dim and flickering. Antonia never had pushed out with her magic it just floated around her, they way Aunt Gilly's did most of the time, sort of staying inside and making her, well her. But now it was so faint almost invisible in the spring sunshine.
With a loud crack two more men appeared wearing long blue robes. They gapped at his mother. One lifted a wand, pointed at them and said, "Obliv-arrrgh" dropped his wand and clutched his now smoking arm in pain.
"Freeze," his father said. Holding a gun in his right hand and his badge in his left. It was the badge that burned the man and paralized the newcomers.
"Gary, she's not breathing!" The boys' mother wailed and started CPR on Antonia.
"You," his father said and indicated the man with the burn arm. "Start talking.
The other man looked shocked as the man immediately said, "This man is a deatheater, he escaped from Azkaban-"
"Stop talking," the boy's father holstered his gun and hollered, "Jet, I can't make hide nor hair outta what he's saying, didn't you go to school in England?"
Aunt Jet had obviously passed Kylie off to Aunt Frances as she came out, wrapping a shawl around her shoulders and said, "Azkaban's a wizards prison, they don't follow The Craft, they don't follow much of anything the damn fools."
Both men in blue looked mad but neither could say anything, and they wouldn't be able to until the boy's father told them to or told them that they were free to go. Sirens sounded in the distance and Gilly's car skidded up over the rise in the yard and parked off kilter. She jumped out, open-mouthed and just shook her head and ran to his mother. She took over the chest compressions while his mother focused on the breathing. His mother's face was smeared with Antonia's blood. It hurt, sitting there, watching Aunt Gilly pushed against Antonia's chest, feeling her cold, lax hand in his.
"She's gone," the boy said.
His mother ignored him and kept breathing, but his Aunt Gilly, tears streaming down her face looked right at him but kept counting the compressions.
"Can you bring her back, Mum?" He asked. "Like you did for Jimmy? Can you bring her back?"
His mother looked up in horror, the ambulance pulled up and the EMS personell took over. His mother went in the ambulance with Antonia and Gilly said she'd follow. None of the people with the ambulance had looked at the roses and the body wrapped in them on the ground or at the men in robes frozen in the yard, but then Aunt Frances was inside with the book, probably telling Kylie just what to do.
The men in the blue robes were Aurors. The boy's father wasn't impressed. The wizards seemed suprised that they'd been bested by someone from outside their orderly world. Or not so orderly as the boy's father pointed out.
The one who hadn't been burned was younger and muttered something about Antonio. The word 'squib' set Aunt Frances off into a black rage. Truth was Aunt Frances didn't have nearly as much push as Aunt Jet did, nor had she gone to the fancy school that Aunt Jet had gone to - Aunt Jet said it was because she was too busy chasing boys. But Aunt Frances was the creative one, and with her ideas and Aunt Jet's power they were quite the team. Since Aunt Jet was busy rounding up Kylie and packing up some stuff to take with them to the hospital, the boy decided he could help out Aunt Frances, after all he didn't know exactly what impotent was but if Aunt Frances decided that was what these men needed to be then they would be it until she told him they didn't need to be it any more.
As the Aurors contacted their bosses, regarding evacuating what was left of their deatheater and compensating the Americans, the boy's father cocked his head and squited at them before looking at the boy and saying, "you don’t have to do everything your aunts tell you to, y'know." The boy thought about it and nodded. He wondered if it had been a good idea, showing his father how to see magic, because the Aurors and their deatheather now had black bands about a foot wide circling their hips.
Unrelated - part 38 of Reconciliation is up here http://community.livejournal.com/humaninterest/