would-be drabbles, and the first line meme
Oct. 7th, 2004 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kennahijjaHad fun with the now-virulent First Line Drabble Meme. Of course since I can't drabble worth $ยง!&!, they turned into ficlets. Un-spellchecked (don't have any at home) and written in an hour, so apologies for mistakes.
"As they lay curled together in the dark of their bedroom Harry yawned." for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ari_o
cat!Harry
by Hijja (kennahijja@yahoo.com)
As they lay curled together in the dark of their bedroom, Harry yawned.
There was nothing more comforting than sharing your bed with a purring cat, even though it tended to sleep with the occasional claw out, and the hairs that found their way under Harry's pyjama top made his skin break out in small itchy bumps. There was something hilarious in the fact that he was allergic to cats, Harry thought, although at least they didn't give him the sneezes, like poor Hagrid.
He cuddled his head deeper into the pillow and shifted his hip away a fraction from Crookshanks's furnace of a fur.
Professor McGonagall lay flat on Harry's desk, asleep with one green eye open. Her striped tail dangled from the table top, hooked, twitching and utterly tempting. Under the chair, Mrs Norris was scooped against Harry's discarded trouser leg, and mornfully licked the scrape across her nose. The temptation of the Professor's twitchy tail had become too strong for her half an hour ago, and the ensuing scuffle had not gone well for her. Her yellow eyes beamed out from under the chair like electric torches with an occasional short circuit as she grew more sleepy.
Ever since Professor McGonagall had determined in 'Remedial Transfiguration' that Harry's Animagus form was a cat he'd prepared and studied, but transformation still eluded him. Sharing his nights with a handful of Hogwarts's cats in his Head Boy room in order to 'create an atmosphere conductive to animagition' had been Professor Dumbledore's idea, but so far the only things he'd got out of the arrangement were nightmares of Voldemort chasing him as a Rottweiler, and red spots. Oh, and cat-fights, the most spectacular when Crookshanks had tried to stick his nose under the Professor's tail.
At least when the bunch finally piped down, Harry had no trouble going to sleep.
He closed his eyes and finished running the last transformantic equations through his mind, hoping beyond hope that perhaps he'd achieve the change in his sleep, the best way, as Professor McGonagall had said. Then he began to drift into sleep on a wave of purrs...
A sudden crash made him jump up with an embarrassing screech. Please, not Mrs Norris and the Professor's tail again, he thought blurrily. Then he saw the door, thrown wide open and half ripped from its hinges. In the doorway, illuminated by flickering torches from the corridor, loomed a black-robed, hooded figure, its face hidden behind a white mask. Its wand was raised in a gloved fist, and already emitted green light around the tip.
Harry gave another screech and struggled frantically to free himself from the bedclothes. His whole body stung as if the Death Eater - how the hell had a *Death Eater* managed to invade Hogwarts! - had already fired a spell at him. It hurthurthurt! and how could there be so much bedding, and something tickled his nose, and had Crookshanks always smelled this bad?
He finally struggled free and more rolled than rose out of bed, past Crookshanks's back, whose fur was fluffed up to the size of a small tiger, his ears flat against his head as he hissed at the intruder. Harry bumped hard onto the floor and struggled to his feet. Feet... there suddenly seemed to be a lot of them. He stepped onto something soft and squishy, and howled when his backside began to sting abominably. He looked down, and saw a black paw with nasty claws that stood on an equally night-black tail. Harry gulped as he made the connection.
His paw. *His* tail. Quickly, he removed the curved little weapons from his appendix. The tail immediately swished back, almost on its own. It still smarted.
Something grey and dust-smelling landed next to him with a soft thud, and Harry jumped again. He got a half-glare out of a large yellow eye, and then Mrs Norris put herself half in front of him, ears just as flat as Crookshanks's, and hissing in a way that made Harry's whole spine shudder. There was quite a lot of spine, too. He could see the ribs under Mrs Norris's short dust-coloured fur, and her whipping tail. It was distracting, and Harry only realised he was following the swishing tail with his whole head, left, right, left, right again... when he felt dizzy on his paws. He dug his nose into the fur of his chest in shame. Some Animagus he was, ogling the butt of his comrade-in-claws, and in mortal peril to boot. Sirius would be *so* proud!
Professor McGonagall shot down from the desk in a whoosh of tabby fur and pressed up beside him as if to hide his smaller form. Harry's nose twitched at the sudden presence of her smell: pure aggression, adrenaline and a whiff of tuna casserole from dinner. He gave her side a lick without thinking, and admired the graceful triangle of her chin when she threw him an incredulous glare.
"Which one of you is Harry Potter?"
The figure in the doorway recaptured Harry's fraying attention, and he raised his head all the long way to the man's wand, aiming in an half-circle at the four... inhabitants of the room.
He had a sibilant, low voice that made Harry flatten himself against the floor reflexively.
His associates seemed to be made of sterner stuff. To his left, Professor McGonagall gave a veritable battle-cry of a hiss that made Harry pull his lips back from his teeth and tickled the fur at his neck awake.
The professor launched herself at the man's wand with a graceful, effortless jump, while Crookshanks, heavier and not quite as athletic, twitched his behind once, twice, and then fired himself into the Death Eater's stomach like a spitting, ginger canon ball. The man folded in half like a switchknife for a moment. Mrs Norris assaulted his left leg and began to claw at it, methodically and with bristling satisfaction.
Harry realised that he should perhaps contribute to the battle, and flattened himself for the jump, aiming at the man's unmentionables. Somehow his hind paws left the ground before his front ones, and suddenly he collided with the Death Eater's kneecap after a clumsy sommersault. With an aching face - having a nose this short meant there was a lot more face to hurt on impact - he slid down the folds of the Death Eater's robe, and collapsed next to Mrs Norris with a thud. For lack of better target, he began to claw and scratch furiously at the boot in front of him.
He saw Professor McGonagall dislodge from the Death Eater's chest and went cold as she plunged towards the floor. If she had been hit by a spell...
But she landed with a graceful curve of her back, and right on top of the Dark Wizard's wand she had pulled from his grip. She stretched out to her full length and lay right down on the wand, a decidedly cattish grin on her face.
Harry heard the Death Eater grunt as he pull Crookshanks off himself, and then the ginger tom impacted on the ground like a small meteorite, a considerable piece of robe in his mouth.
"I think that's quite enough now, Minerva," the Death Eater roared.
Harry's ears twitched in confusion. He'd never imagined Professor McGonagall being on first name basis with a minion of the Dark.
The Death Eater lifted his hands to his mask and pulled it off, revealing the furious face of Professor Snape. His lanky hair stuck out at weird angles, and there were red spots on his usually pale cheeks.
Mrs Norris, who had been peeing the hem of his robe, made a horrible choking noise in her throat and slinked away quickly, taking cover behind Harry's tail. Professor McGonagall seemed to be trembling as she rose to her paws and then re-transformed in a swirl of tartan house robes and long black hair. She spat Snape's wand into her hand and offered it to him with an insidious grin. She was still shaking with soundless laughter.
Snape looked down at his wand with disgust and opened his mouth to let loose what promised to be a foulmouthed tirade when Professor Dumbledore's face appeared behind him in the doorway. Snape's mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.
The headmaster stepped inside Harry's room and beamed down at him.
"Ah, my dear boy, you have managed at last. We thought that sometimes, if the mountain doesn't come to the wizard..." He bent down to scritch Harry's head. "I apologise for the fright we gave you, Harry, but sometimes that will trigger the transformation.
Harry plopped down on his hind paws and stared. Somehow his cat brain didn't seem to deal with surprise as quickly as his human one. He licked the fur on his shoulder blade three, four times in quick succession, without really looking at the headmaster. It would give him a cramped neck if he tried, anyway.
When a hand came down and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, he let out a meow that sounded far to plaintive for his liking. The hand was hidden inside a glove, but still smelled quite bad. Ugh! Eye of Newt. Harry gagged. He tried to struggle as he was lifted up - not helping his roiling stomach any - but the urge to just hang-in-there-and-don't-move was overwhelming. Great! His Animagus form came with an inbuilt genetic Imperius!
He ended up dangling right in front of Snape's huge face, and scrunched up his nose at the oily smell of the man's hair. Snape's teeth were even more yellow from this angle, and tuna casserole smelled *much* better on Professor McGonagall. Harry buried his nose in his fur.
Snape reached out to Harry's head, and Harry reflexively showed a pointy canine tooth at the thought of being petted by his least favourite teacher. But Snape just brushed his ears back and studied his head. "How predictable."
Harry glared and hissed.
"Accio mirror!" Harry's mirror, a gift from Hermione, flew into Snape's free hand. He stuck it into Harry's face, and Harry's ears flattened. He gave the insolent cat that stared at him a swipe with his paw, only to feel cold glass under his pads.
"Honestly, Potter," Snape sneered. "Try to get a grip on your instincts." He angled the mirror for Harry to study his reflection better. Harry saw black fur, the pink-tipped insides of his ears, and, in the middle of his forehead right below Snape's fingers, a white lightning-bolt of fur running down between the bright green eyes.
"Well, Severus, I think Harry makes for a very handsome tomcat," Dumbledore threw in cheerfully. He stroked the bridge of his nose. "Although that might not be the best term," he mused. "Not if you would put him down again so that he can transform back? We're all tired, I think."
Snape lowered Harry down to knee height and dropped him. The impact still reverberated through all of Harry's paws. He swished his tail angrily, but then sat down to concentrate.
All right, *change*!
Nothing happened.
With a panicky wail, Harry tried again. Still fur and tail. He stared up at Dumbledore in horror, and licked his paw.
"Oh, how typical, Potter!" Snape's voice grated in Harry's ears and tickled the hair on his back upright. "Merlin forbid that our resident celebrity would care for anyone's convenience as long as he can hog a few more moments in the spotlight."
Harry opened his mouth and let out an eloquent, furious hiss at Snape's knee.
"... you sadistic, greasy, smelly slimeball of a git!" he finished, out loud and staring right into the bastard of a professor's face. He was back in his pyjamas, standing barefoot on his red-golden rug.
Snape lifted an eyebrow, so smug that Harry felt an urge to claw - no, punch - him.
"It seems that with a little bit of incentive you're able to achieve some results after all, doesn't it, Mr Potter?" Snape's silken drawl flowed over Harry, before the git inclined his head to Professor Dumbledore. "Headmaster, if you'll excuse me now?"
"Of course, Severus," the Headmaster replied. "You might want to soak your robe before you go to sleep, though."
Snape snorted in disgust and turned towards the door.
"And twenty points from Gryffindor for insulting a Professor, Potter" he threw over his shoulder before exiting in a swirl of black robes. Harry snickered as Mrs Norris rubbed herself against his heels. He bent down to scritch behind her ears.
Professor McGonagall chuckled softly and ruffled Harry's hair. "And thirty points to Gryffindor for a flawless Animagus transformation. Very well done, Mr Potter."
"Indeed," the Headmaster added, with a smile that included the Professor, Mrs Norris at Harry's foot and Crookshanks, who'd gone back to sleep right there on the rug. "It looks as if the Order of the Feline has done an admirable job tonight."
- finis -
---------------------------------------------------
"They didn't empty Harry's room." for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
switchknife
Mourning Rites
by Hijja (kennahijja@yahoo.com)
They didn't empty Harry's room.
Not of any of Harry's meagre possessions, not of any of Dudley's discarded toys.
When the owl taps its beak against the kitchen window in the middle of spring, they ignore it until the racket becomes loud enough to alert the neighbours. The feathery thing lands on the kitchen counter, sitting there increasingly flustered with its envelope tied to its leg. It is Petunia who goes for a pair of scissors, cutting the leather string, careful not to touch feet or feathers. Who knows what diseases the ruddy bird carries. She takes the envelope, trembling, but although it is parchment, it isn't red, or smoking, not this time. It is from that monstrous old freak Dumbledore, however.
Apart from condolences, it offers the details of the funeral, and a magical charm that would let them attend it at that infernal school place. They never even think about going. In fact, they never speak about him at all. All they tell the neighbours is that the ungrateful little miscreant has moved out. He would have been old enough to do so, and no one expected him to come back to Privet Drive after the holidays anyway.
Vernon walks up to the little room once, when Dudley is having tea at a friend's place, and it's Petunia's Bridge night with the neighbouring ladies. He stands right inside the door, and glares at the unmade bed, the messy room. Dudders is always orderly, although Vernon suspects that it might be Petunia's doing.
He has detested the little terror ever since he first laid eyes on the scarred forehead of that pitiful bundle on their doorstep. Unnatural thing!
No, even before that... He'd been so very close to breaking up his engagement to Petunia when he'd found out about her freak sister, and after once bumping into her hoodlum of a boyfriend and his gang. They had made fun of him, those monstrosities, fooled around with those sticks of theirs, and treated him as if he wasn't even fully human. And *he* had to bring up their brat. They should have kept the thing and raised it among his own kind. Perhaps then the first madman to walk up wouldn't have managed to kill him.
He is glad the boy is gone, of course. But he had to go and have himself murdered, hadn't he? He couldn't just have run off to his freak world and never show his face again. Inconsiderate to the last.
Dudley waits until his parents are asleep to go and reclaim his possessions. It's not that he'd take anything that isn't *his* anyway. The little creep took all of his freaky stuff with him to that school of his, every year. Dudley knows, because he's sneaked in to look for something that might do magic for him once he was gone.
The room is dank and dusty, and Dudley's old toys are piled along the far wall. An ancient camera, his old broken TV, the playstation he short-circuited when the new model came out. Piles of stupid books he never looked at. In one corner sits a cardboard box he dumped his few surviving stuffed animals into after Piers said that thing about only little brats and fairies playing with stuffed toys. There is that large stuffed dog that mum and dad got him in the most expensive toy store in London for his sixth birthday. The little freak never showed anything like jealousy for Dudley's things, but he'd loved that dog with all his dumb heart, staring at it whenever he thought that Dudley wasn't noticing. So Dudley had dragged it everywhere, just to watch that hurt longing on the scrawny freak's face. When he got tired of it, Dudley ripped off one of the floppy ears where his cousin could see, and locked the dog into the far back of his closet so Harry would never get at it. He'd tiptoed downstairs afterwards to hear the wimp sobbing into the pillow of his cupboard.
Dudley pulls the stuffed dog out from under the pile of animals in the box, and turns it in his big fists. It looks stupid, with that ear missing and the stuffing coming out. How could the freak like something so childish?
He'd always known Harry would come to a sticky end, going to school among all those monsters. And they are monsters, Dudley has seen it when he chased those Dementoid things off two years back. Who'd go and kill a kid his own age, just like that, if not monsters? Not that he is a kid, of course. He's a man, but Harry... the little shite *has* been a kid, playing with his magic toys and only trying to be one of the big boys when he had that stick to wave around. He deserved a good beating, but to murder him... freaks, no doubt about it.
He carries the stuffed dog over to the bed and puts it on the pillow, hiding the ripped ear against the wall. His parents will never see - they don't come in here.
Petunia comes in only to clean, because this is an orderly household, and you just don't leave any place to go to the dogs. And the boy has always left such a mess; she won't have anything rotting inside.
Her eyes travel over the dilapidated nightstand. When the boy was home from that horrible school of his, she sometimes came in when he was working in the garden, or going on those night walks. Just to make sure he wasn't practising anything unnatural in here. At least in his cupboard, he'd not had enough room to get up to any mischief.
During the holidays, there always was one of his abnormal pictures on the nightstand, of his parents and himself as a baby. It was terrifying, the way the people inside moved and waved. They didn't wave at her, of course. Once, Lily had given her a shy little smile, and Petunia had screwed up her face in disgust and walked out.
It was the last time she's seen her sister, and so wrong that it hurt. Lily is *dead*! She has no place smiling and waving at Petunia as if she was still alive. It is sickening, *impious*. They are all dead and should behave like it, Lily and her freak of a husband. And now their son as well. Petunia is just glad she doesn't have one of those bewitched photographs of the boy, mocking her as well.
Oh, she should never have given in to that terrible old sorcerer when he forced that child on her! But he'd been so terrifying, screaming at her from out of that burning letter, and just after having heard that another of his ilk had murdered Lily! Petunia is only a defenceless woman, without any of those monstrous powers, and he could just have killed her as well, couldn't he, and what would have become of Duddikins and poor Vernon then?
The nerve of him, expecting her poor little family to shelter that boy, after telling her that God knows how many of that Voldimort's henchmen were still about. That little freak has hung over her family like a cloud of doom, all his life. She so wanted to be normal, and every time she looked at him, it had been a reminder of her sister, and of the murderers who might come to her door any day.
And after burdening her with all that, that horrid old man left Lily's son to die just like he her sister, taking them away and using them for his plots. Powerful enough to threaten a frail Muggle woman, but not able to protect her sister, or her nephew!
Petunia kicks the nightstand and watches it fall over with a crash, with wet eyes and deep satisfaction. She just wishes the photograph was still there, and could fall with it.
The stranger knocks at their door on Halloween night, startling all three of them.
"Those ruddy brats!" Vernon barks. "Always aping those stupid American habits!"
The stranger looks done up for All Hallow's Eve, with those girly robes the freaks wear, and a hooded cloak over them. The hood is down, and the light of the outdoor lamp glints on red hair.
I thought we'd seen the last of them freaks, Vernon thinks.
Lily! Petunia's heart stops for a second when all she sees from behind Vernon's back is red hair, before she takes another step and realises it's a young man.
He looks like one of those beasts who hexed my tongue, thinks Dudley.
"Go away! We don't want one of you monsters in our home!" Vernon orders.
The stranger just steps inside, moving as if the Dursleys aren't really there, and neither Vernon nor Dudley work up the courage to actually manhandle him out. He might hex them, or worse. Petunia just retreats into the doorway to the living room, trembling.
He walks up the narrow staircase to the upper storey, with its flowerprint-wallpaper and creaking stair, and stops in front of Dudley's second bedroom as if he knew the house's layout by heart. Of course he might have been here before. They tramped through the house before, those freaks, insolent as if they owned the place, with no regard for other people's property. He just stands there, in front of the door, unmoved by Vernon's bark and Petunia's shrill protests, and Dudley wonders if he even hears, or sees, any of them.
Then he opens the door, very softly, and goes inside. The Dursleys follow, at least until they hover nervously in the doorway, unwilling to lay a hand on him, but equally unwilling to let him meander through their home unwatched. He's one of the monsters - who knows what he might do?
The red-haired freak just stands there in the middle of the clustered room. He doesn't turn his head when Vernon switches on the bare lightbulb overhead, which illuminates the messy bed with it's ridiculous stuffed dog, the boxes full of broken toys, the fallen nightstand.
He just stands there, and then he throws his head back and screams, without a sound but with a force that it makes the Dursleys wish he'd scream aloud so they could at least put their hands over their ears to shut it out.
A small whirl of air starts to dance inside the small room, although the window is barred up and the door lets in no draught at all. It gushes over the Dursleys' faces, increasing rapidly until there is a man-sized wind hose forming around the motionless stranger. It tugs at his cloak and hair, but gently, belieing the force that builds up around him. The wind - magic, it has to be magic - doesn't just pull at the contents of the room, it turns dark as with an infusion of ashes, a grey, then black swirl that dissolves whatever it touches. It consumes like black fire, but it remains cold.
The Dursleys flee the doorway and retreat to the back wall of the corridor outside, terrified but unable to tear their eyes off the soundless destruction. The storm tears into the bedclothes, then the mattress, throwing bits of cloth everywhere, then digs through the wood of the bedstead, the nightstand, chair and small cupboard, tearing and ripping until nothing is left but tiny wooden splinters, nail-sized bits of cloth and metal, and paper scraps littering the floor. Even the lightbulb shatters at last, raining down in a shower of irridescent glass dust while electricity crackles over the bare installation wires.
The readhead just stands there in the middle of the destruction he's wrought, and there's nothing in his face to suggest he sees any of it, even less the Dursleys, huddled together in the corridor.
Oh God, just make him disappear without doing anything worse, Vernon prays silently.
Dudley just watches and can't figure out how his sullen, antisocial cousin could inspire such elemental rage, alive or dead.
And Petunia looks at the young man with her sister's hair and eyes as dark as the black storm he's conjured up, and thinks that there should be tears in those eyes, because this dry, ripping pain is painful to watch, even in a magical freak.
When he takes his stick out of his robe they whimper in fright, huddling together with their eyes shut tightly, but there is only a popping noise, like a car backfiring in the distance. When they dare look, he is gone, and nothing is left but the room, empty and littered with scraps.
No hint is left that a boy called Harry Potter, who might not have been just an ordinary boy, has ever lived in this house.
And that, the Dursleys quietly agree as they bolt the door again and return to the living room and their quiet, *normal* evening routine, is just as it should be.
- finis -
---------------------------------
Oh, and just in case someone should need an excuse to drabble, here are a few of my own
"Dead end, Potter!"
Bloody Snapping Woodcress!
He's leaning against the battered wooden door of the Shrieking Shack and watches me approach with a barely suppressed smirk on his face.
I never found out how he brought you back.
The fourth toast to the memory of Great Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore and the defeat of the Dark Lord at the hand of his Boy Who Conquered, and Lucius Malfoy was looking for a way to slip away from the party.
Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, was driving him slowly, persistently mad.
"You bloody undead piece of shite!"
"Harry Potter has given Biddy a hat!"
"Now, Lucius, I'm sure you don't want to insist on compensation for your... act of generosity," says Albus Dumbledore, eyes hard and distinctly untwinkling for once.
So you want to go to Hogwarts?
Emotions were still running high when Hogwarts' students poured into the Great Hall for the evening banquet after one of the most violent Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch matches ever.
Hermione cursed under her breath as she attempted to wrestle a furiously struggling MONSTER BOOK OF MONSTERS back into her bag after Care of Magical Creatures.
It's a night that mirrors her state of mind.
"As they lay curled together in the dark of their bedroom Harry yawned." for
ari_oby Hijja (kennahijja@yahoo.com)
As they lay curled together in the dark of their bedroom, Harry yawned.
There was nothing more comforting than sharing your bed with a purring cat, even though it tended to sleep with the occasional claw out, and the hairs that found their way under Harry's pyjama top made his skin break out in small itchy bumps. There was something hilarious in the fact that he was allergic to cats, Harry thought, although at least they didn't give him the sneezes, like poor Hagrid.
He cuddled his head deeper into the pillow and shifted his hip away a fraction from Crookshanks's furnace of a fur.
Professor McGonagall lay flat on Harry's desk, asleep with one green eye open. Her striped tail dangled from the table top, hooked, twitching and utterly tempting. Under the chair, Mrs Norris was scooped against Harry's discarded trouser leg, and mornfully licked the scrape across her nose. The temptation of the Professor's twitchy tail had become too strong for her half an hour ago, and the ensuing scuffle had not gone well for her. Her yellow eyes beamed out from under the chair like electric torches with an occasional short circuit as she grew more sleepy.
Ever since Professor McGonagall had determined in 'Remedial Transfiguration' that Harry's Animagus form was a cat he'd prepared and studied, but transformation still eluded him. Sharing his nights with a handful of Hogwarts's cats in his Head Boy room in order to 'create an atmosphere conductive to animagition' had been Professor Dumbledore's idea, but so far the only things he'd got out of the arrangement were nightmares of Voldemort chasing him as a Rottweiler, and red spots. Oh, and cat-fights, the most spectacular when Crookshanks had tried to stick his nose under the Professor's tail.
At least when the bunch finally piped down, Harry had no trouble going to sleep.
He closed his eyes and finished running the last transformantic equations through his mind, hoping beyond hope that perhaps he'd achieve the change in his sleep, the best way, as Professor McGonagall had said. Then he began to drift into sleep on a wave of purrs...
A sudden crash made him jump up with an embarrassing screech. Please, not Mrs Norris and the Professor's tail again, he thought blurrily. Then he saw the door, thrown wide open and half ripped from its hinges. In the doorway, illuminated by flickering torches from the corridor, loomed a black-robed, hooded figure, its face hidden behind a white mask. Its wand was raised in a gloved fist, and already emitted green light around the tip.
Harry gave another screech and struggled frantically to free himself from the bedclothes. His whole body stung as if the Death Eater - how the hell had a *Death Eater* managed to invade Hogwarts! - had already fired a spell at him. It hurthurthurt! and how could there be so much bedding, and something tickled his nose, and had Crookshanks always smelled this bad?
He finally struggled free and more rolled than rose out of bed, past Crookshanks's back, whose fur was fluffed up to the size of a small tiger, his ears flat against his head as he hissed at the intruder. Harry bumped hard onto the floor and struggled to his feet. Feet... there suddenly seemed to be a lot of them. He stepped onto something soft and squishy, and howled when his backside began to sting abominably. He looked down, and saw a black paw with nasty claws that stood on an equally night-black tail. Harry gulped as he made the connection.
His paw. *His* tail. Quickly, he removed the curved little weapons from his appendix. The tail immediately swished back, almost on its own. It still smarted.
Something grey and dust-smelling landed next to him with a soft thud, and Harry jumped again. He got a half-glare out of a large yellow eye, and then Mrs Norris put herself half in front of him, ears just as flat as Crookshanks's, and hissing in a way that made Harry's whole spine shudder. There was quite a lot of spine, too. He could see the ribs under Mrs Norris's short dust-coloured fur, and her whipping tail. It was distracting, and Harry only realised he was following the swishing tail with his whole head, left, right, left, right again... when he felt dizzy on his paws. He dug his nose into the fur of his chest in shame. Some Animagus he was, ogling the butt of his comrade-in-claws, and in mortal peril to boot. Sirius would be *so* proud!
Professor McGonagall shot down from the desk in a whoosh of tabby fur and pressed up beside him as if to hide his smaller form. Harry's nose twitched at the sudden presence of her smell: pure aggression, adrenaline and a whiff of tuna casserole from dinner. He gave her side a lick without thinking, and admired the graceful triangle of her chin when she threw him an incredulous glare.
"Which one of you is Harry Potter?"
The figure in the doorway recaptured Harry's fraying attention, and he raised his head all the long way to the man's wand, aiming in an half-circle at the four... inhabitants of the room.
He had a sibilant, low voice that made Harry flatten himself against the floor reflexively.
His associates seemed to be made of sterner stuff. To his left, Professor McGonagall gave a veritable battle-cry of a hiss that made Harry pull his lips back from his teeth and tickled the fur at his neck awake.
The professor launched herself at the man's wand with a graceful, effortless jump, while Crookshanks, heavier and not quite as athletic, twitched his behind once, twice, and then fired himself into the Death Eater's stomach like a spitting, ginger canon ball. The man folded in half like a switchknife for a moment. Mrs Norris assaulted his left leg and began to claw at it, methodically and with bristling satisfaction.
Harry realised that he should perhaps contribute to the battle, and flattened himself for the jump, aiming at the man's unmentionables. Somehow his hind paws left the ground before his front ones, and suddenly he collided with the Death Eater's kneecap after a clumsy sommersault. With an aching face - having a nose this short meant there was a lot more face to hurt on impact - he slid down the folds of the Death Eater's robe, and collapsed next to Mrs Norris with a thud. For lack of better target, he began to claw and scratch furiously at the boot in front of him.
He saw Professor McGonagall dislodge from the Death Eater's chest and went cold as she plunged towards the floor. If she had been hit by a spell...
But she landed with a graceful curve of her back, and right on top of the Dark Wizard's wand she had pulled from his grip. She stretched out to her full length and lay right down on the wand, a decidedly cattish grin on her face.
Harry heard the Death Eater grunt as he pull Crookshanks off himself, and then the ginger tom impacted on the ground like a small meteorite, a considerable piece of robe in his mouth.
"I think that's quite enough now, Minerva," the Death Eater roared.
Harry's ears twitched in confusion. He'd never imagined Professor McGonagall being on first name basis with a minion of the Dark.
The Death Eater lifted his hands to his mask and pulled it off, revealing the furious face of Professor Snape. His lanky hair stuck out at weird angles, and there were red spots on his usually pale cheeks.
Mrs Norris, who had been peeing the hem of his robe, made a horrible choking noise in her throat and slinked away quickly, taking cover behind Harry's tail. Professor McGonagall seemed to be trembling as she rose to her paws and then re-transformed in a swirl of tartan house robes and long black hair. She spat Snape's wand into her hand and offered it to him with an insidious grin. She was still shaking with soundless laughter.
Snape looked down at his wand with disgust and opened his mouth to let loose what promised to be a foulmouthed tirade when Professor Dumbledore's face appeared behind him in the doorway. Snape's mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.
The headmaster stepped inside Harry's room and beamed down at him.
"Ah, my dear boy, you have managed at last. We thought that sometimes, if the mountain doesn't come to the wizard..." He bent down to scritch Harry's head. "I apologise for the fright we gave you, Harry, but sometimes that will trigger the transformation.
Harry plopped down on his hind paws and stared. Somehow his cat brain didn't seem to deal with surprise as quickly as his human one. He licked the fur on his shoulder blade three, four times in quick succession, without really looking at the headmaster. It would give him a cramped neck if he tried, anyway.
When a hand came down and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, he let out a meow that sounded far to plaintive for his liking. The hand was hidden inside a glove, but still smelled quite bad. Ugh! Eye of Newt. Harry gagged. He tried to struggle as he was lifted up - not helping his roiling stomach any - but the urge to just hang-in-there-and-don't-move was overwhelming. Great! His Animagus form came with an inbuilt genetic Imperius!
He ended up dangling right in front of Snape's huge face, and scrunched up his nose at the oily smell of the man's hair. Snape's teeth were even more yellow from this angle, and tuna casserole smelled *much* better on Professor McGonagall. Harry buried his nose in his fur.
Snape reached out to Harry's head, and Harry reflexively showed a pointy canine tooth at the thought of being petted by his least favourite teacher. But Snape just brushed his ears back and studied his head. "How predictable."
Harry glared and hissed.
"Accio mirror!" Harry's mirror, a gift from Hermione, flew into Snape's free hand. He stuck it into Harry's face, and Harry's ears flattened. He gave the insolent cat that stared at him a swipe with his paw, only to feel cold glass under his pads.
"Honestly, Potter," Snape sneered. "Try to get a grip on your instincts." He angled the mirror for Harry to study his reflection better. Harry saw black fur, the pink-tipped insides of his ears, and, in the middle of his forehead right below Snape's fingers, a white lightning-bolt of fur running down between the bright green eyes.
"Well, Severus, I think Harry makes for a very handsome tomcat," Dumbledore threw in cheerfully. He stroked the bridge of his nose. "Although that might not be the best term," he mused. "Not if you would put him down again so that he can transform back? We're all tired, I think."
Snape lowered Harry down to knee height and dropped him. The impact still reverberated through all of Harry's paws. He swished his tail angrily, but then sat down to concentrate.
All right, *change*!
Nothing happened.
With a panicky wail, Harry tried again. Still fur and tail. He stared up at Dumbledore in horror, and licked his paw.
"Oh, how typical, Potter!" Snape's voice grated in Harry's ears and tickled the hair on his back upright. "Merlin forbid that our resident celebrity would care for anyone's convenience as long as he can hog a few more moments in the spotlight."
Harry opened his mouth and let out an eloquent, furious hiss at Snape's knee.
"... you sadistic, greasy, smelly slimeball of a git!" he finished, out loud and staring right into the bastard of a professor's face. He was back in his pyjamas, standing barefoot on his red-golden rug.
Snape lifted an eyebrow, so smug that Harry felt an urge to claw - no, punch - him.
"It seems that with a little bit of incentive you're able to achieve some results after all, doesn't it, Mr Potter?" Snape's silken drawl flowed over Harry, before the git inclined his head to Professor Dumbledore. "Headmaster, if you'll excuse me now?"
"Of course, Severus," the Headmaster replied. "You might want to soak your robe before you go to sleep, though."
Snape snorted in disgust and turned towards the door.
"And twenty points from Gryffindor for insulting a Professor, Potter" he threw over his shoulder before exiting in a swirl of black robes. Harry snickered as Mrs Norris rubbed herself against his heels. He bent down to scritch behind her ears.
Professor McGonagall chuckled softly and ruffled Harry's hair. "And thirty points to Gryffindor for a flawless Animagus transformation. Very well done, Mr Potter."
"Indeed," the Headmaster added, with a smile that included the Professor, Mrs Norris at Harry's foot and Crookshanks, who'd gone back to sleep right there on the rug. "It looks as if the Order of the Feline has done an admirable job tonight."
- finis -
---------------------------------------------------
"They didn't empty Harry's room." for
switchknifeby Hijja (kennahijja@yahoo.com)
They didn't empty Harry's room.
Not of any of Harry's meagre possessions, not of any of Dudley's discarded toys.
When the owl taps its beak against the kitchen window in the middle of spring, they ignore it until the racket becomes loud enough to alert the neighbours. The feathery thing lands on the kitchen counter, sitting there increasingly flustered with its envelope tied to its leg. It is Petunia who goes for a pair of scissors, cutting the leather string, careful not to touch feet or feathers. Who knows what diseases the ruddy bird carries. She takes the envelope, trembling, but although it is parchment, it isn't red, or smoking, not this time. It is from that monstrous old freak Dumbledore, however.
Apart from condolences, it offers the details of the funeral, and a magical charm that would let them attend it at that infernal school place. They never even think about going. In fact, they never speak about him at all. All they tell the neighbours is that the ungrateful little miscreant has moved out. He would have been old enough to do so, and no one expected him to come back to Privet Drive after the holidays anyway.
Vernon walks up to the little room once, when Dudley is having tea at a friend's place, and it's Petunia's Bridge night with the neighbouring ladies. He stands right inside the door, and glares at the unmade bed, the messy room. Dudders is always orderly, although Vernon suspects that it might be Petunia's doing.
He has detested the little terror ever since he first laid eyes on the scarred forehead of that pitiful bundle on their doorstep. Unnatural thing!
No, even before that... He'd been so very close to breaking up his engagement to Petunia when he'd found out about her freak sister, and after once bumping into her hoodlum of a boyfriend and his gang. They had made fun of him, those monstrosities, fooled around with those sticks of theirs, and treated him as if he wasn't even fully human. And *he* had to bring up their brat. They should have kept the thing and raised it among his own kind. Perhaps then the first madman to walk up wouldn't have managed to kill him.
He is glad the boy is gone, of course. But he had to go and have himself murdered, hadn't he? He couldn't just have run off to his freak world and never show his face again. Inconsiderate to the last.
Dudley waits until his parents are asleep to go and reclaim his possessions. It's not that he'd take anything that isn't *his* anyway. The little creep took all of his freaky stuff with him to that school of his, every year. Dudley knows, because he's sneaked in to look for something that might do magic for him once he was gone.
The room is dank and dusty, and Dudley's old toys are piled along the far wall. An ancient camera, his old broken TV, the playstation he short-circuited when the new model came out. Piles of stupid books he never looked at. In one corner sits a cardboard box he dumped his few surviving stuffed animals into after Piers said that thing about only little brats and fairies playing with stuffed toys. There is that large stuffed dog that mum and dad got him in the most expensive toy store in London for his sixth birthday. The little freak never showed anything like jealousy for Dudley's things, but he'd loved that dog with all his dumb heart, staring at it whenever he thought that Dudley wasn't noticing. So Dudley had dragged it everywhere, just to watch that hurt longing on the scrawny freak's face. When he got tired of it, Dudley ripped off one of the floppy ears where his cousin could see, and locked the dog into the far back of his closet so Harry would never get at it. He'd tiptoed downstairs afterwards to hear the wimp sobbing into the pillow of his cupboard.
Dudley pulls the stuffed dog out from under the pile of animals in the box, and turns it in his big fists. It looks stupid, with that ear missing and the stuffing coming out. How could the freak like something so childish?
He'd always known Harry would come to a sticky end, going to school among all those monsters. And they are monsters, Dudley has seen it when he chased those Dementoid things off two years back. Who'd go and kill a kid his own age, just like that, if not monsters? Not that he is a kid, of course. He's a man, but Harry... the little shite *has* been a kid, playing with his magic toys and only trying to be one of the big boys when he had that stick to wave around. He deserved a good beating, but to murder him... freaks, no doubt about it.
He carries the stuffed dog over to the bed and puts it on the pillow, hiding the ripped ear against the wall. His parents will never see - they don't come in here.
Petunia comes in only to clean, because this is an orderly household, and you just don't leave any place to go to the dogs. And the boy has always left such a mess; she won't have anything rotting inside.
Her eyes travel over the dilapidated nightstand. When the boy was home from that horrible school of his, she sometimes came in when he was working in the garden, or going on those night walks. Just to make sure he wasn't practising anything unnatural in here. At least in his cupboard, he'd not had enough room to get up to any mischief.
During the holidays, there always was one of his abnormal pictures on the nightstand, of his parents and himself as a baby. It was terrifying, the way the people inside moved and waved. They didn't wave at her, of course. Once, Lily had given her a shy little smile, and Petunia had screwed up her face in disgust and walked out.
It was the last time she's seen her sister, and so wrong that it hurt. Lily is *dead*! She has no place smiling and waving at Petunia as if she was still alive. It is sickening, *impious*. They are all dead and should behave like it, Lily and her freak of a husband. And now their son as well. Petunia is just glad she doesn't have one of those bewitched photographs of the boy, mocking her as well.
Oh, she should never have given in to that terrible old sorcerer when he forced that child on her! But he'd been so terrifying, screaming at her from out of that burning letter, and just after having heard that another of his ilk had murdered Lily! Petunia is only a defenceless woman, without any of those monstrous powers, and he could just have killed her as well, couldn't he, and what would have become of Duddikins and poor Vernon then?
The nerve of him, expecting her poor little family to shelter that boy, after telling her that God knows how many of that Voldimort's henchmen were still about. That little freak has hung over her family like a cloud of doom, all his life. She so wanted to be normal, and every time she looked at him, it had been a reminder of her sister, and of the murderers who might come to her door any day.
And after burdening her with all that, that horrid old man left Lily's son to die just like he her sister, taking them away and using them for his plots. Powerful enough to threaten a frail Muggle woman, but not able to protect her sister, or her nephew!
Petunia kicks the nightstand and watches it fall over with a crash, with wet eyes and deep satisfaction. She just wishes the photograph was still there, and could fall with it.
The stranger knocks at their door on Halloween night, startling all three of them.
"Those ruddy brats!" Vernon barks. "Always aping those stupid American habits!"
The stranger looks done up for All Hallow's Eve, with those girly robes the freaks wear, and a hooded cloak over them. The hood is down, and the light of the outdoor lamp glints on red hair.
I thought we'd seen the last of them freaks, Vernon thinks.
Lily! Petunia's heart stops for a second when all she sees from behind Vernon's back is red hair, before she takes another step and realises it's a young man.
He looks like one of those beasts who hexed my tongue, thinks Dudley.
"Go away! We don't want one of you monsters in our home!" Vernon orders.
The stranger just steps inside, moving as if the Dursleys aren't really there, and neither Vernon nor Dudley work up the courage to actually manhandle him out. He might hex them, or worse. Petunia just retreats into the doorway to the living room, trembling.
He walks up the narrow staircase to the upper storey, with its flowerprint-wallpaper and creaking stair, and stops in front of Dudley's second bedroom as if he knew the house's layout by heart. Of course he might have been here before. They tramped through the house before, those freaks, insolent as if they owned the place, with no regard for other people's property. He just stands there, in front of the door, unmoved by Vernon's bark and Petunia's shrill protests, and Dudley wonders if he even hears, or sees, any of them.
Then he opens the door, very softly, and goes inside. The Dursleys follow, at least until they hover nervously in the doorway, unwilling to lay a hand on him, but equally unwilling to let him meander through their home unwatched. He's one of the monsters - who knows what he might do?
The red-haired freak just stands there in the middle of the clustered room. He doesn't turn his head when Vernon switches on the bare lightbulb overhead, which illuminates the messy bed with it's ridiculous stuffed dog, the boxes full of broken toys, the fallen nightstand.
He just stands there, and then he throws his head back and screams, without a sound but with a force that it makes the Dursleys wish he'd scream aloud so they could at least put their hands over their ears to shut it out.
A small whirl of air starts to dance inside the small room, although the window is barred up and the door lets in no draught at all. It gushes over the Dursleys' faces, increasing rapidly until there is a man-sized wind hose forming around the motionless stranger. It tugs at his cloak and hair, but gently, belieing the force that builds up around him. The wind - magic, it has to be magic - doesn't just pull at the contents of the room, it turns dark as with an infusion of ashes, a grey, then black swirl that dissolves whatever it touches. It consumes like black fire, but it remains cold.
The Dursleys flee the doorway and retreat to the back wall of the corridor outside, terrified but unable to tear their eyes off the soundless destruction. The storm tears into the bedclothes, then the mattress, throwing bits of cloth everywhere, then digs through the wood of the bedstead, the nightstand, chair and small cupboard, tearing and ripping until nothing is left but tiny wooden splinters, nail-sized bits of cloth and metal, and paper scraps littering the floor. Even the lightbulb shatters at last, raining down in a shower of irridescent glass dust while electricity crackles over the bare installation wires.
The readhead just stands there in the middle of the destruction he's wrought, and there's nothing in his face to suggest he sees any of it, even less the Dursleys, huddled together in the corridor.
Oh God, just make him disappear without doing anything worse, Vernon prays silently.
Dudley just watches and can't figure out how his sullen, antisocial cousin could inspire such elemental rage, alive or dead.
And Petunia looks at the young man with her sister's hair and eyes as dark as the black storm he's conjured up, and thinks that there should be tears in those eyes, because this dry, ripping pain is painful to watch, even in a magical freak.
When he takes his stick out of his robe they whimper in fright, huddling together with their eyes shut tightly, but there is only a popping noise, like a car backfiring in the distance. When they dare look, he is gone, and nothing is left but the room, empty and littered with scraps.
No hint is left that a boy called Harry Potter, who might not have been just an ordinary boy, has ever lived in this house.
And that, the Dursleys quietly agree as they bolt the door again and return to the living room and their quiet, *normal* evening routine, is just as it should be.
- finis -
---------------------------------
Oh, and just in case someone should need an excuse to drabble, here are a few of my own
"Dead end, Potter!"
Bloody Snapping Woodcress!
He's leaning against the battered wooden door of the Shrieking Shack and watches me approach with a barely suppressed smirk on his face.
I never found out how he brought you back.
The fourth toast to the memory of Great Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore and the defeat of the Dark Lord at the hand of his Boy Who Conquered, and Lucius Malfoy was looking for a way to slip away from the party.
Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, was driving him slowly, persistently mad.
"You bloody undead piece of shite!"
"Harry Potter has given Biddy a hat!"
"Now, Lucius, I'm sure you don't want to insist on compensation for your... act of generosity," says Albus Dumbledore, eyes hard and distinctly untwinkling for once.
So you want to go to Hogwarts?
Emotions were still running high when Hogwarts' students poured into the Great Hall for the evening banquet after one of the most violent Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch matches ever.
Hermione cursed under her breath as she attempted to wrestle a furiously struggling MONSTER BOOK OF MONSTERS back into her bag after Care of Magical Creatures.
It's a night that mirrors her state of mind.
