[Fic] -- IWoT chapter 02 (2nd ed)
I'm posting the 2nd edition of IWoT on LJ for archival purposes. Please see the updated (now, 3rd) version on FFN for better quality.
In Way of Trouble
Chapter 02: "Of Ominous Omens"
By Hikagi
The lights sparkled in the darkness like pieces of glass on the beach as she flew overhead, gliding almost effortlessly against the cool breeze that swept across the land. The waning crescent moon shone down upon the earth and the stars were twinkling dimly, occasionally covered by a drifting cloud or two.
Below lay a quiet residential area in which the adults were home from their hard day's work and the children were asleep. All the houses were mirror images of each other, down to the very last doormat and the ornaments (or lack thereof) on the front lawn.
At first, one might stop to marvel at the level of conformity this strange group of people seemed to exhibit, but that could all be waved away by professors and anthropologists who had spent time analyzing them.
Muggles, after all, were an odd bunch.
As if knowing this, the small flighty being swooped down from the skies and gently perched on a flickering street lamp. She blinked owlishly, staring at all of the identical houses in front of her.
Now, which one was it…?
She glanced back at the letter in her possession and found the house that corresponded to the address written across the envelope. Hopping off the streetlamp, she made her way towards the intended house, arriving at a specific window on the second floor. Peering inside, she saw that the recipient of her letter was fast asleep and tangled in his sheets.
Carefully hanging on one side of the windowsill, she knocked gently on the glass, hoping to rouse the person inside to open the window since it was locked from the inside. After seeing that he refused to wake, she knocked again, only slightly louder. He still wouldn't get up.
Mentally sighing, she resorted to waiting outside, hoping that no one would see her sitting (more like precariously balancing) on a second story window before she had the chance to deliver and leave. But that was no matter; she could wait.
A few seconds later, she saw something dart out of the bushes, into the flower garden, under the fence, and into the neighbor's yard. With her superior vision, it didn't take too long for her to realize that the prey (she was getting hungry - could you blame her?) was slightly limping and not at all hard to capture, kill, and devour.
It was going to be a long wait…
The figure inside the very room was not having any better of a time in his fretful slumber.
It was dark and hardly cozy with clothes scattered here and there and neglected pieces of furniture about. The paint was starting to peel from the stucco walls due to years of abuse, the door hinge seemed to be a little rusty, and the doorknob was well worn.
The wooden floor was showing signs of decay and an occasional squeak was likely to be heard when treading upon them, though the caretakers of the house would never admit out loud much less to themselves that such a room existed in their charge. The bed was old and thoroughly worn with a huge dip in the middle of the mattress where the springs had been bent out of shape as if an object of immense weight had been dropped from a great height.
The figure thrashed about as if trying to evade an enemy in his sleep and kicked the blankets around a bit. He jerked when at one point in his dream he was captured by his mortal enemy, and responded by struggling in the hold of the deadly sheet covers. He let out a short scream of pain and in one final struggle against the enemy, the blanket, which was putting up a rather good fight by tangling itself around the young boy's arms, legs, and torso.
Still in the nightmarish trance, he pushed himself against the wall where he hit his left shoulder against something rather splintery and possibly lethal.
It had all started with a peculiar-looking round knife embedded into the ground next to a small mound and a big slab of stone. Or at least, it looked like a round blade. When he tried to push his glasses up his nose so that his eyes could focus better, he found that they were nowhere to be found - on his face, or anywhere nearby.
After the first stone slab came dozens more. Rows of what looked like graves appeared out of nowhere as the black-haired boy lifted his head to the horizon. He started down one particular row of graves feeling that something was calling out to him, his feet moving as if some unknown force were guiding him towards a specific destination.
Passing by each of the graves, he halted at one that bore scratched marks and with a morbid sense of curiosity, knelt to brush the dust off. What he saw startled him. His own mother's name was engraved on the cold stone, and as he rose to run he spotted one with his father's.
Now sprinting, the boy ran past the stone slabs trying not to see the names engraved in huge letters on either side of him. But one piece of stone made him stop in his tracks.
In the corner of his eyes he spotted one empty grave with snake patterns etched into the sides of the surface of the granite. They seemed to beckon him, inviting him to come closer with their beautiful yet deadly white faces and harsh penetrating eyes.
'Come here,' they seemed to say as they started glowing an eerie color of green. 'Come here, we won't hurt you…'
There was a moment when time stood still as the scrawny boy hesitated, but he slowly walked closer to the grave. Inches in front of the stone slab, he paused, waiting for something to happen.
'Yes,' the snakes hissed with an almost soothing tone into his mind. 'Come join us…'
The little stone snakes moved around to reveal to the boy what they had been hiding from the rest of the world… His own name carved into the tombstone.
He was hardly surprised to see it, however. It seemed so…right, for lack of a better term - so fitting. He had lost his entire family, some of his comrades and peers, and many others whom he had never gotten to know. But seeing his name etched in stone couldn't compare to the feeling of shock, loss and despair from a few months ago…
Then a chilling wind rose up that sent a shiver down his spine. The boy turned to face a cloud of dark mist, sharp eyes peering from within. There was yet another moment of silence as the teenager drew a breath and prepared himself for what was yet to come.
"Seize him!" a harsh high voice commanded to the snakes on the stone. The once motionless tombstones sprang to life as they took the shape of what seemed like slithering objects, all aiming, reaching, lunging for the boy's legs.
His reflexes were fast - there was no denying that. Yet, as the boy sprinted to avoid the lunging snakes, he found himself falling fast towards the ground before him, tied down by a wave of writhing, liquid stone.
A man - no, he could hardly be considered human anymore - came out of the shadows of the black mist carrying a large and deadly python-ish snake around his shoulders in which the boy recognized as a basilisk. He had seen one before. But how he was still alive after just having locked gazes with the monster was a mystery, one of many that was bugging him at this moment.
'Master! Master! We have him! We have him!' The snakes etched onto the tombstone rattled in a frenzied excitement, glowing radiantly with energy.
"Very good," was the masked man's reply. He turned to the black-haired boy and asked, "Do you know who I am?"
The boy just stood there as if petrified, secured too tightly to even move. The stone chains that were formally binding him were brushed aside by a wave of the man's hand. By now, the snake had slithered off of the mysterious man's shoulders and had started towards the boy, hissing, eyes full of pure hatred and venom.
"I. Am. Your..." the snake-like figure dramatically drawled out, making the boy's blood race with adrenaline. Cold, red eyes peered as the basilisk proceeded to make the distance between itself and the boy shorter.
"Death."
The man's snake-like eyes pierced the boy's green ones as he gave the command with a hissing voice.
'Do it.'
The boy screamed in pain as the basilisk shot out from behind one of the gravestones and bit him squarely on his left shoulder. He could only grasp his shoulder as he tried to figure out a way to defeat the snake.
Somehow, somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew how to be rid of it, but the poison from the snakebite starting creeping up his neck and threatened to split his head apart.
Something about a bird… And the color red…
"And now, the famous golden boy I have long sought after lays dying before me. I can't help but feel disappointed in his pathetic efforts, so I shall present a little gift for him."
The snake figure rose and motioned with his head to where he kept a few people tied to wooden stakes, which the boy had not noticed earlier due to the endless rows of graves.
"As you can see, I've discovered a way to bring people back from the dead."
The black-haired boy recognized a few of the faces in the very front from the old photo albums kept at home.
"Say goodbye."
'NO!' his mind screamed as the malicious robed man raised his arms to perform that spell… That forbidden spell that would end up killing… Killing…
Don't kill them!
But the pain was blinding his senses, making him lose sight of the figures on the stakes as he heard them being tortured to death, their screams echoing in his ears with a ringing sensation.
DON'T KILL THEM!
'Mom, Dad, no! Don't kill them! Leave them a-'
Arms shot out, reaching, grasping, flailing for fresh air as the boy awoke from his dream. With a sweating brow, black hair plastered on his face, pain searing across his forehead and shoulder, and short rasps of breath, he sat up on his bed, covers astray, trying to block the images that haunted him almost every night of the summer.
Calming himself down, he slowed his breathing and his erratic heartbeat and tried to think rationally.
A nightmare…
That was all it had been. That was all it was. Even years after the death of his parents, he still longed for their presence - their comfort.
Putting that aside, the teenage boy slid out of bed, but not without a sudden lurching sound from the supporting wooden beams holding the bed together, wincing at the pain in his left shoulder.
If memory served correctly, he had been bitten by a snake in his dream. Then why did it hurt even after waking up? Experiencing pain in one's sleep was neigh well impossible, according to scientists. But they hadn't taken curses and magical scars into account during their studies.
Perhaps he had accidentally rammed his shoulder into something in the middle of his sleep? It wasn't an unlikely circumstance with all of the junk located about the room. On the other hand, it could have also been the fault of the furniture.
Maybe he should see about getting a new bed. His current one was too old and hardly fitting as a place to sleep on. True, it had a tendency to jolt every once in a while as if it were going to fall any second which was a result of years of abuse it had been put through before he had ever received it, and that archaic bedpost was bound to kill someone sooner or later. Most importantly of all, it was broken.
But then, where would he get the money? Perhaps the neighbors would be willing to give him a few odd jobs to do? But that was unlikely.
That was highly unlikely.
Oh, but how he wished…
The boy got up from his bed and proceeded to walk about his room, wary of the scattered pieces of parchments and scrolls lying about. He'd been having trouble trying to sneak all of his studying past his relatives, but they had no knowledge of the act thus far. For that, he was grateful.
It would have been troublesome if they had found out that he had been learning about that again. It was clear that his aunt and uncle didn't want anything to do with those people ("Wizards," he mumbled under his breath), or have him associate with them. But what could he say? 'Those people,' as they put it, were a part of his everyday life.
He couldn't change any of it. He certainly didn't want to.
He gingerly rubbed his temples with his right hand as he covered his eyes with the other. He was getting more prone to these migraine-like pains and the more he thought of it, the more intensifying it became.
He rubbed his eyes in hopes of clearing them before he took another step towards the other side of the room. It had been his studying and what he liked to call 'training' in the middle of night that had made him get these headaches in the first place.
If only it didn't strain his eyes so much…
'Stupid teachers, giving me so much damn homework…'
Wearing a much-too-large gray shirt and a loose-fitting pair of khaki pants, the teenaged boy rumpled his messy hair and stared at the clock just above his desk. Squinting his eyes, he stepped closer in order to decipher the minuscule black hands on the shinny face of the object by which he lived by.
He had taken to staring at the clock everyday, trying to pass by the endless time that seemed to be on his hands until the day when he would be called to join his friends once again at school…
School…
That was the one place where he felt like he belonged, the one place his relatives loathed most of all. They never had approved of his school, and the boy was convinced by now that they will never learn to like it. Since his parents had died, his aunt and uncle had taken over rather unwillingly in raising the boy up to this very day.
Still, the boy thought that his relatives might sooner raise a complete stranger or even shelter a criminal than to treat him with the respect and care a decent human being deserved. They had never taken to liking him and 'his kind'…
'It must be in the blood…'
He looked into the mirror located on the door to his closet and smiled grimly. He had been told a few times by a few of the adults he trusted that he looked exactly like his father. He couldn't really disagree though. It had been so long since he had seen his father's face, that he couldn't really compare his to his own…
His memory was starting to fade. But his head and shoulder aches didn't.
He winced once again as he moved about the room and put his hands to his left shoulder. The shirt that he was wearing stuck to his body as if the humidity of the air had intensified by a hundred fold. He removed his hand to find traces of sweat that somehow managed to soak into his cotton shirt, but thought nothing of it until he notices the coloration of the damp material and the 'sweat' on his palm…
He grimaced and grit his teeth as it suddenly dawns on him. It was looking rather dark for sweat…
He moved his shirt away from his shoulder. The punctured holes didn't look nor feel much like splinters had gotten to them. In fact, it looked a lot like…
He closed his eyes slowly, trying to remember the face of the man who had tried to attack him. It was a shrunken white face hardly like a man at all with those freaky-looking eyes. Eyes that were as thin as slits with such intent and longing to kill, the boy had been taken aback.
Still…
He peered down at his shoulder again.
That was no splinter mark… It was more like a… a…
'Snakebite,' he judged from the punctures left behind. It looked odd with three red comma-looking marks in a circular pattern. What was also exceptionally strange was that it started to fade away, leaving only a small trail of crusted blood dried up on the back of his neck.
It was starting to scare him - the way his dreams were becoming more and more real as time passed on.
A tapping at the window made the boy shift his attention from the peculiar stain on his left shoulder towards the odd-looking bird outside on the sill.
A fleeting glimpse of red flashed before his eyes, but the teenager sighed disappointedly. This white owl was not the bird he had hoped to see.
But then again, maybe someone had written to him…
The majestic owl perching near the window hooted and looked in at the boy with curious, expecting eyes. The boy hurried over as if he had been waiting for this and opened the window to let the bird in. The owl hooted again, softer this time as if afraid of stirring anything from its slumber, and hopped onto a nearby table, waiting for the boy to release her for the rest of the night. He nodded his head as a sign of understanding and allowed the snowy owl to take off into the night.
The boy eagerly opened the message carried by the owl as the bird flew off to go hunting for easy prey and for a chance to rest easy after a long journey. Inside was a hastily scrawled note as if the writer had been in a hurry or was just too impatient to write a decent-sized one.
Fear not, my boy.
I will be sending someone over soon for a scheduled visit.
If things are not working well, then you can be rest assured that it will be handled accordingly.
Just be sure to refrain from rash behaviors.
Things are going as planned on our side, but we are not without losses.
Hope you enjoy the rest of your summer holiday, and be sure to keep safe.
We'll let you know if anything else happens.
There was a little more to the note, but nothing as important as the clear warning his not-quite guardian had sent to him. That was followed by the smudged and almost unreadable signature of his caretaker and what appeared to be a few accidentally-spilled drops of ink as if the writer had knocked over a bottle of ink or simply let his pen run over. The boy let out a loud disappointed sigh as he set the small scroll down on the table.
'What could this mean?' he asked no one in pertaining in regards to the letter. 'What exactly is going on?'
They weren't writing to him much. From what he could gather, the war efforts were going relatively smoothly. The 'we' part in the last bit of the letter-ish note suggested that his friends were also with the sender of the mail, but he couldn't be too sure. Much like last year, his friends and contacts had also taken to writing short notes instead of long-winded ones he had hoped for, and it was starting to annoy him again.
What did they expect? He was well recovered from the unfortunate encounter last June - that snake man didn't manage to kill him yet, right? In the last tournament he had partaken in over a year ago, wasn't he the one who was attacked and still somehow managed to find a way to survive?
The floor seemed to shake as he none too quietly stormed to his drawers to fetch his pen and parchment to write back to his caretaker and, he bitterly added, his 'friends'…
The boy was unaware of how sensitive (or paranoid) his relatives were about any sort of noise coming from his room until he heard the thudding of the wall coming from the room next to his. An older boy screamed at him to be quiet while yelling a few curses, none too loud for the adults down the hallway to hear, and threatened to beat the younger boy the following day.
He tried to calm himself from his cousin's insults by biting into his lower lip and immediately regretted it when he tasted the copper liquid at the tip of his tongue. He silently asked himself why he still continued to live with such miserable people (often he wondered if they were related at all), and thought about his parents…
They had died. No, to say that they died would be to not do them justice. They had been ('brutally' he added without a second thought) murdered in the dead of night when the moon was full and haunting. The killer was… He didn't want to think about it…
He had come face-to-face with the killer on several occasions, each time not strong enough to defeat his snake-like mortal enemy… Oh, how he wanted to kill that foul and disgusting creature with all of his being! And now said enemy was getting stronger, gathering more weapons and followers as the time ticked by, as he sat in his accursed aunt's house rotting away without the joy of practicing his new-found powers…
All students were banned from practicing any of their spells outside of class or were otherwise faced with expulsion from the school and practically the rest of the community. Oh, how he wished that it were not so. But he was already in trouble for disobeying direct orders given to him by his superiors.
The boy's thoughts were jarred from him as the clock on the wall rang signaling that the night was half over, and morning would soon be coming. He grimaced again as he looked down at his right hand, which traveled unconsciously towards his left shoulder as he walked back towards his bed.
He would have to get the bloodstains out later…
With that, the boy known as Harry Potter eased himself back into bed, his shoulder sending waves of pain across his body, and his scar searing with the pain he knew all too well.
Something was going to happen.
Soon…
To Be Continued…
Yatsuka Hikagi
January 27, 2004
In Way of Trouble
Chapter 02: "Of Ominous Omens"
By Hikagi
The lights sparkled in the darkness like pieces of glass on the beach as she flew overhead, gliding almost effortlessly against the cool breeze that swept across the land. The waning crescent moon shone down upon the earth and the stars were twinkling dimly, occasionally covered by a drifting cloud or two.
Below lay a quiet residential area in which the adults were home from their hard day's work and the children were asleep. All the houses were mirror images of each other, down to the very last doormat and the ornaments (or lack thereof) on the front lawn.
At first, one might stop to marvel at the level of conformity this strange group of people seemed to exhibit, but that could all be waved away by professors and anthropologists who had spent time analyzing them.
Muggles, after all, were an odd bunch.
As if knowing this, the small flighty being swooped down from the skies and gently perched on a flickering street lamp. She blinked owlishly, staring at all of the identical houses in front of her.
Now, which one was it…?
She glanced back at the letter in her possession and found the house that corresponded to the address written across the envelope. Hopping off the streetlamp, she made her way towards the intended house, arriving at a specific window on the second floor. Peering inside, she saw that the recipient of her letter was fast asleep and tangled in his sheets.
Carefully hanging on one side of the windowsill, she knocked gently on the glass, hoping to rouse the person inside to open the window since it was locked from the inside. After seeing that he refused to wake, she knocked again, only slightly louder. He still wouldn't get up.
Mentally sighing, she resorted to waiting outside, hoping that no one would see her sitting (more like precariously balancing) on a second story window before she had the chance to deliver and leave. But that was no matter; she could wait.
A few seconds later, she saw something dart out of the bushes, into the flower garden, under the fence, and into the neighbor's yard. With her superior vision, it didn't take too long for her to realize that the prey (she was getting hungry - could you blame her?) was slightly limping and not at all hard to capture, kill, and devour.
It was going to be a long wait…
The figure inside the very room was not having any better of a time in his fretful slumber.
It was dark and hardly cozy with clothes scattered here and there and neglected pieces of furniture about. The paint was starting to peel from the stucco walls due to years of abuse, the door hinge seemed to be a little rusty, and the doorknob was well worn.
The wooden floor was showing signs of decay and an occasional squeak was likely to be heard when treading upon them, though the caretakers of the house would never admit out loud much less to themselves that such a room existed in their charge. The bed was old and thoroughly worn with a huge dip in the middle of the mattress where the springs had been bent out of shape as if an object of immense weight had been dropped from a great height.
The figure thrashed about as if trying to evade an enemy in his sleep and kicked the blankets around a bit. He jerked when at one point in his dream he was captured by his mortal enemy, and responded by struggling in the hold of the deadly sheet covers. He let out a short scream of pain and in one final struggle against the enemy, the blanket, which was putting up a rather good fight by tangling itself around the young boy's arms, legs, and torso.
Still in the nightmarish trance, he pushed himself against the wall where he hit his left shoulder against something rather splintery and possibly lethal.
It had all started with a peculiar-looking round knife embedded into the ground next to a small mound and a big slab of stone. Or at least, it looked like a round blade. When he tried to push his glasses up his nose so that his eyes could focus better, he found that they were nowhere to be found - on his face, or anywhere nearby.
After the first stone slab came dozens more. Rows of what looked like graves appeared out of nowhere as the black-haired boy lifted his head to the horizon. He started down one particular row of graves feeling that something was calling out to him, his feet moving as if some unknown force were guiding him towards a specific destination.
Passing by each of the graves, he halted at one that bore scratched marks and with a morbid sense of curiosity, knelt to brush the dust off. What he saw startled him. His own mother's name was engraved on the cold stone, and as he rose to run he spotted one with his father's.
Now sprinting, the boy ran past the stone slabs trying not to see the names engraved in huge letters on either side of him. But one piece of stone made him stop in his tracks.
In the corner of his eyes he spotted one empty grave with snake patterns etched into the sides of the surface of the granite. They seemed to beckon him, inviting him to come closer with their beautiful yet deadly white faces and harsh penetrating eyes.
'Come here,' they seemed to say as they started glowing an eerie color of green. 'Come here, we won't hurt you…'
There was a moment when time stood still as the scrawny boy hesitated, but he slowly walked closer to the grave. Inches in front of the stone slab, he paused, waiting for something to happen.
'Yes,' the snakes hissed with an almost soothing tone into his mind. 'Come join us…'
The little stone snakes moved around to reveal to the boy what they had been hiding from the rest of the world… His own name carved into the tombstone.
He was hardly surprised to see it, however. It seemed so…right, for lack of a better term - so fitting. He had lost his entire family, some of his comrades and peers, and many others whom he had never gotten to know. But seeing his name etched in stone couldn't compare to the feeling of shock, loss and despair from a few months ago…
Then a chilling wind rose up that sent a shiver down his spine. The boy turned to face a cloud of dark mist, sharp eyes peering from within. There was yet another moment of silence as the teenager drew a breath and prepared himself for what was yet to come.
"Seize him!" a harsh high voice commanded to the snakes on the stone. The once motionless tombstones sprang to life as they took the shape of what seemed like slithering objects, all aiming, reaching, lunging for the boy's legs.
His reflexes were fast - there was no denying that. Yet, as the boy sprinted to avoid the lunging snakes, he found himself falling fast towards the ground before him, tied down by a wave of writhing, liquid stone.
A man - no, he could hardly be considered human anymore - came out of the shadows of the black mist carrying a large and deadly python-ish snake around his shoulders in which the boy recognized as a basilisk. He had seen one before. But how he was still alive after just having locked gazes with the monster was a mystery, one of many that was bugging him at this moment.
'Master! Master! We have him! We have him!' The snakes etched onto the tombstone rattled in a frenzied excitement, glowing radiantly with energy.
"Very good," was the masked man's reply. He turned to the black-haired boy and asked, "Do you know who I am?"
The boy just stood there as if petrified, secured too tightly to even move. The stone chains that were formally binding him were brushed aside by a wave of the man's hand. By now, the snake had slithered off of the mysterious man's shoulders and had started towards the boy, hissing, eyes full of pure hatred and venom.
"I. Am. Your..." the snake-like figure dramatically drawled out, making the boy's blood race with adrenaline. Cold, red eyes peered as the basilisk proceeded to make the distance between itself and the boy shorter.
"Death."
The man's snake-like eyes pierced the boy's green ones as he gave the command with a hissing voice.
'Do it.'
The boy screamed in pain as the basilisk shot out from behind one of the gravestones and bit him squarely on his left shoulder. He could only grasp his shoulder as he tried to figure out a way to defeat the snake.
Somehow, somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew how to be rid of it, but the poison from the snakebite starting creeping up his neck and threatened to split his head apart.
Something about a bird… And the color red…
"And now, the famous golden boy I have long sought after lays dying before me. I can't help but feel disappointed in his pathetic efforts, so I shall present a little gift for him."
The snake figure rose and motioned with his head to where he kept a few people tied to wooden stakes, which the boy had not noticed earlier due to the endless rows of graves.
"As you can see, I've discovered a way to bring people back from the dead."
The black-haired boy recognized a few of the faces in the very front from the old photo albums kept at home.
"Say goodbye."
'NO!' his mind screamed as the malicious robed man raised his arms to perform that spell… That forbidden spell that would end up killing… Killing…
Don't kill them!
But the pain was blinding his senses, making him lose sight of the figures on the stakes as he heard them being tortured to death, their screams echoing in his ears with a ringing sensation.
DON'T KILL THEM!
'Mom, Dad, no! Don't kill them! Leave them a-'
Arms shot out, reaching, grasping, flailing for fresh air as the boy awoke from his dream. With a sweating brow, black hair plastered on his face, pain searing across his forehead and shoulder, and short rasps of breath, he sat up on his bed, covers astray, trying to block the images that haunted him almost every night of the summer.
Calming himself down, he slowed his breathing and his erratic heartbeat and tried to think rationally.
A nightmare…
That was all it had been. That was all it was. Even years after the death of his parents, he still longed for their presence - their comfort.
Putting that aside, the teenage boy slid out of bed, but not without a sudden lurching sound from the supporting wooden beams holding the bed together, wincing at the pain in his left shoulder.
If memory served correctly, he had been bitten by a snake in his dream. Then why did it hurt even after waking up? Experiencing pain in one's sleep was neigh well impossible, according to scientists. But they hadn't taken curses and magical scars into account during their studies.
Perhaps he had accidentally rammed his shoulder into something in the middle of his sleep? It wasn't an unlikely circumstance with all of the junk located about the room. On the other hand, it could have also been the fault of the furniture.
Maybe he should see about getting a new bed. His current one was too old and hardly fitting as a place to sleep on. True, it had a tendency to jolt every once in a while as if it were going to fall any second which was a result of years of abuse it had been put through before he had ever received it, and that archaic bedpost was bound to kill someone sooner or later. Most importantly of all, it was broken.
But then, where would he get the money? Perhaps the neighbors would be willing to give him a few odd jobs to do? But that was unlikely.
That was highly unlikely.
Oh, but how he wished…
The boy got up from his bed and proceeded to walk about his room, wary of the scattered pieces of parchments and scrolls lying about. He'd been having trouble trying to sneak all of his studying past his relatives, but they had no knowledge of the act thus far. For that, he was grateful.
It would have been troublesome if they had found out that he had been learning about that again. It was clear that his aunt and uncle didn't want anything to do with those people ("Wizards," he mumbled under his breath), or have him associate with them. But what could he say? 'Those people,' as they put it, were a part of his everyday life.
He couldn't change any of it. He certainly didn't want to.
He gingerly rubbed his temples with his right hand as he covered his eyes with the other. He was getting more prone to these migraine-like pains and the more he thought of it, the more intensifying it became.
He rubbed his eyes in hopes of clearing them before he took another step towards the other side of the room. It had been his studying and what he liked to call 'training' in the middle of night that had made him get these headaches in the first place.
If only it didn't strain his eyes so much…
'Stupid teachers, giving me so much damn homework…'
Wearing a much-too-large gray shirt and a loose-fitting pair of khaki pants, the teenaged boy rumpled his messy hair and stared at the clock just above his desk. Squinting his eyes, he stepped closer in order to decipher the minuscule black hands on the shinny face of the object by which he lived by.
He had taken to staring at the clock everyday, trying to pass by the endless time that seemed to be on his hands until the day when he would be called to join his friends once again at school…
School…
That was the one place where he felt like he belonged, the one place his relatives loathed most of all. They never had approved of his school, and the boy was convinced by now that they will never learn to like it. Since his parents had died, his aunt and uncle had taken over rather unwillingly in raising the boy up to this very day.
Still, the boy thought that his relatives might sooner raise a complete stranger or even shelter a criminal than to treat him with the respect and care a decent human being deserved. They had never taken to liking him and 'his kind'…
'It must be in the blood…'
He looked into the mirror located on the door to his closet and smiled grimly. He had been told a few times by a few of the adults he trusted that he looked exactly like his father. He couldn't really disagree though. It had been so long since he had seen his father's face, that he couldn't really compare his to his own…
His memory was starting to fade. But his head and shoulder aches didn't.
He winced once again as he moved about the room and put his hands to his left shoulder. The shirt that he was wearing stuck to his body as if the humidity of the air had intensified by a hundred fold. He removed his hand to find traces of sweat that somehow managed to soak into his cotton shirt, but thought nothing of it until he notices the coloration of the damp material and the 'sweat' on his palm…
He grimaced and grit his teeth as it suddenly dawns on him. It was looking rather dark for sweat…
He moved his shirt away from his shoulder. The punctured holes didn't look nor feel much like splinters had gotten to them. In fact, it looked a lot like…
He closed his eyes slowly, trying to remember the face of the man who had tried to attack him. It was a shrunken white face hardly like a man at all with those freaky-looking eyes. Eyes that were as thin as slits with such intent and longing to kill, the boy had been taken aback.
Still…
He peered down at his shoulder again.
That was no splinter mark… It was more like a… a…
'Snakebite,' he judged from the punctures left behind. It looked odd with three red comma-looking marks in a circular pattern. What was also exceptionally strange was that it started to fade away, leaving only a small trail of crusted blood dried up on the back of his neck.
It was starting to scare him - the way his dreams were becoming more and more real as time passed on.
A tapping at the window made the boy shift his attention from the peculiar stain on his left shoulder towards the odd-looking bird outside on the sill.
A fleeting glimpse of red flashed before his eyes, but the teenager sighed disappointedly. This white owl was not the bird he had hoped to see.
But then again, maybe someone had written to him…
The majestic owl perching near the window hooted and looked in at the boy with curious, expecting eyes. The boy hurried over as if he had been waiting for this and opened the window to let the bird in. The owl hooted again, softer this time as if afraid of stirring anything from its slumber, and hopped onto a nearby table, waiting for the boy to release her for the rest of the night. He nodded his head as a sign of understanding and allowed the snowy owl to take off into the night.
The boy eagerly opened the message carried by the owl as the bird flew off to go hunting for easy prey and for a chance to rest easy after a long journey. Inside was a hastily scrawled note as if the writer had been in a hurry or was just too impatient to write a decent-sized one.
Fear not, my boy.
I will be sending someone over soon for a scheduled visit.
If things are not working well, then you can be rest assured that it will be handled accordingly.
Just be sure to refrain from rash behaviors.
Things are going as planned on our side, but we are not without losses.
Hope you enjoy the rest of your summer holiday, and be sure to keep safe.
We'll let you know if anything else happens.
There was a little more to the note, but nothing as important as the clear warning his not-quite guardian had sent to him. That was followed by the smudged and almost unreadable signature of his caretaker and what appeared to be a few accidentally-spilled drops of ink as if the writer had knocked over a bottle of ink or simply let his pen run over. The boy let out a loud disappointed sigh as he set the small scroll down on the table.
'What could this mean?' he asked no one in pertaining in regards to the letter. 'What exactly is going on?'
They weren't writing to him much. From what he could gather, the war efforts were going relatively smoothly. The 'we' part in the last bit of the letter-ish note suggested that his friends were also with the sender of the mail, but he couldn't be too sure. Much like last year, his friends and contacts had also taken to writing short notes instead of long-winded ones he had hoped for, and it was starting to annoy him again.
What did they expect? He was well recovered from the unfortunate encounter last June - that snake man didn't manage to kill him yet, right? In the last tournament he had partaken in over a year ago, wasn't he the one who was attacked and still somehow managed to find a way to survive?
The floor seemed to shake as he none too quietly stormed to his drawers to fetch his pen and parchment to write back to his caretaker and, he bitterly added, his 'friends'…
The boy was unaware of how sensitive (or paranoid) his relatives were about any sort of noise coming from his room until he heard the thudding of the wall coming from the room next to his. An older boy screamed at him to be quiet while yelling a few curses, none too loud for the adults down the hallway to hear, and threatened to beat the younger boy the following day.
He tried to calm himself from his cousin's insults by biting into his lower lip and immediately regretted it when he tasted the copper liquid at the tip of his tongue. He silently asked himself why he still continued to live with such miserable people (often he wondered if they were related at all), and thought about his parents…
They had died. No, to say that they died would be to not do them justice. They had been ('brutally' he added without a second thought) murdered in the dead of night when the moon was full and haunting. The killer was… He didn't want to think about it…
He had come face-to-face with the killer on several occasions, each time not strong enough to defeat his snake-like mortal enemy… Oh, how he wanted to kill that foul and disgusting creature with all of his being! And now said enemy was getting stronger, gathering more weapons and followers as the time ticked by, as he sat in his accursed aunt's house rotting away without the joy of practicing his new-found powers…
All students were banned from practicing any of their spells outside of class or were otherwise faced with expulsion from the school and practically the rest of the community. Oh, how he wished that it were not so. But he was already in trouble for disobeying direct orders given to him by his superiors.
The boy's thoughts were jarred from him as the clock on the wall rang signaling that the night was half over, and morning would soon be coming. He grimaced again as he looked down at his right hand, which traveled unconsciously towards his left shoulder as he walked back towards his bed.
He would have to get the bloodstains out later…
With that, the boy known as Harry Potter eased himself back into bed, his shoulder sending waves of pain across his body, and his scar searing with the pain he knew all too well.
Something was going to happen.
Soon…
To Be Continued…
Yatsuka Hikagi
January 27, 2004