Harry sat upon a large metallic cot while Jean dug around in a large
cabinet for something to fix his face up with. While not bleeding
profusely as before, the cut was still open and in danger of becoming
infected. As she continued her rummaging, Harry once again took the
opportunity to look around freely without being watched.
Again, the sheer technology threatened to overwhelm him. Computer monitors were abound, with large steel poles standing almost to the ceiling with bars snaking out every set amount of space on them scattered about the room. From these bars various medical instruments hung, and Harry had no idea what most of them were even used for.
Jean turned around with a clear bottle three quarters full of a similarly clear fluid, some cotton swabs, and a large white bandage. "Brace yourself Harry," she said while dabbing some of the fluid onto a cotton swab. "This is going to... sting."
She applied the swab to his gouge, and it didn't sting at all. In fact, he thought, it 'burned like all hell'. To his credit, however, he didn't cry out, just let the pain flow through. He found it much easier to deal with pain if he didn't fight it, and instead just let it ride. After a time, when Jean must have decided that it was about as disinfected as she thought it would get, she applied the bandage to the side of his face, trying to keep the large rectangular bandage as much out of his eye as possible.
"There you go."
He opened his eyes to look into the maternal gaze of Jean, but not really knowing what it was, other than the fact that before the whole fiasco of a week ago, Molly Weasley had looked at him the same way. Giving her a confused glance, he turned to the side where there was a mirror. The cut was completely covered by the white bandage, and while it did stick out like a sore thumb, it did cover his cut and would hopefully help it heal. It didn't look as wide as it did when she pulled it out of the cupboard, however, and it only covered the necessary part of his face. No more, no less.
He looked back to her, and spoke a quiet, yet sincere "Thank you."
She smiled, and threw away the bloodied cotton and the latex gloves he hadn't noticed her put on. "Come on, I'll show you to your dorm and introduce you to your dorm mates. They will help you learn your way around the school."
Harry nodded, and jumped off the table, before noticing that he still was wearing the dirtied, smelly, and frayed robe he had pulled off of one of his guards. "Do you have something I could wear? I imagine that not only do I stick out, but It must be unpleasant, if not painful to smell me at the moment...." He trailed off, not knowing how to ask for anything without getting yelled at for it.
Jean, in response, walked over to a shelving with large amounts of gray sweats in varying sizes on it. She put her chin in her hand, seemingly weighing choices, before pulling a pair of sweatpants and a similar hooded sweatshirt and handing them to him. "There is a screen over there you can change behind." She said, pointing to a far corner of the room with another of those curious smiles.
He walked over to the corner and took his robe off, and the prisoner clothing he wore under that off. Pulling on the sweats, he absently noted that on the back of the sweatshirt read 'Xavier Institute for Gifted Children' in black print, with a large black 'X' over his heart. He went through the pockets of the robe, and transferred the wand to the pouch in the sweatshirt over his stomach, and the golden galleons and silver sickles went into his pants pocket. He padded over to jean, his prisoners boots left behind with the other clothing, and she immediately noticed. She went over and grabbed some socks, tossing them to him, and said "We don't keep any shoes in this room, I'll have to find you some on the way to the dorm. Ready to go?"
Harry nodded again, and gestured in a sweeping arc with his right hand towards the door while giving a slight bow at the waist. "After you." He said in a slightly playful tone, her caring actions helping him become more at ease. She chuckled a bit shaking her flaming red hair around her face as she shook her head, and replied "Why thank you good sir." She left the room with Harry following her.
XXXXXX
"On your right is the physics and mathematics classroom, and up ahead on your left is the history room." She said, trying to give him a jumpstart on learning his way around. They turned a corner in the hallway, and the dark maple boarding and white plaster walls were already seeming like home to him. "Up here is the garage for mechanics, and directly ahead, is the gift training room. No one is allowed in there alone, and until you show enough control, only teachers will be allowed to bring you in there.
He looked to the end of the hallway, and there was a large X in a circle that he assumed opened up somehow. It seemed to be a fairly secure room, and he could understand the rules that were in place over it. Something that was bothering him earlier was brought back to his attention at that moment. "Jean, er... Dr. Grey? Do you know what exactly my gift is?"
Jean stopped, looking at him with shock. He stopped not more than two step later, noticing she wasn't walking still. "You mean you don't know?" At his head shake in the negative, she continued. "Well, I'm sure the professor can help you out with the memories of your unlocking to figure it out." She began walking again, and Harry fell in step behind her. "Its not like we can hook a computer up to you and get an instant answer, everyone's gift is different, and there is no way to tell for sure exactly how the X gene has affected you. You'll find out soon enough I imagine, as you will need to get some control on it quickly."
The entire time she was talking, they had turned to the right up a staircase embedded into the wall which turned a full ninety degrees over two turns at equal points up the stairs, into what Harry assumed was the dormitory area. She quickly assured him that his assumption was correct. "These rooms are the dorms of the Institute. This is a Co-ed dorm, so some semblance of honor will have to be maintained, understood?"
Harry blushed at the insinuation of her statement, and she chuckled again, shaking her head as she did so once more. "Ah, here we are." They had stopped in front of a door with a plaque that read "Room D-4" on it. "Room number four, there are already three other boys living in here, and," she checked her watch, "They should all be in for the night already, and we can get you introduced right away."
She opened the door, and inside sat a blonde boy with blue eyes at a desk, reading a book and writing in a notepad, a black haired boy playing with a zippo while staring off into space, and a boy with yellow eyes and blue fur covering his body perched on the back of a couch watching TV
The blue furred one immediately started trying to put his watch on, but was panicking so bad he couldn't seem to get it onto his wrist. Harry immediately walked over to him. "Hi, my name is Harry Potter." He said holding his hand out. The other boy blinked in astonishment at him for a few seconds before tentatively smiling and grasping the outstretched hand with his own three fingered appendage. "Kurt Vagner." Harry smiled at him. "Nice to meet you Kurt." He turned to the others in the room, who were also staring at him unbelievingly. He instinctively looked down, to see if he had dropped something on his clothing, then running a hand around his face to feel if there was anything there. Finding nothing in either search, he looked at the three of them. "What? Do I have something on my face?"
Kurt put a hand on his shoulder, and he looked over to him, noticing that Jean had already shut the door and left. "Doesn't the vay I look, you know, bother you?" Harry looked him in the eyes, and could tell that he didn't like the way he looked at all. The bespectacled boy shrugged. "Should it?"
Kurt's tentative smile widened considerably while he shook his head. "No, no of course it should not." He sat down on the couch heavily, slouching over, before turning his head back up to look at him. "It does make most people look at me oddly though."
"I'll say!" said a voice from behind him. He turned to see the blond boy walking over to him. "It took me a good couple of weeks before I got used to it, well, after he stopped using his watch. I'm Bobby." He said while holding his hand out for Harry to shake. "But you can call me Iceman." Harry shook his hand. "Iceman?" he questioned. In response Bobby let go of his hand, held his own palm up, and a stalagmite made of Ice shot up out of his hand. Harry looked at it, then back to Bobby, then back to the Ice, before breathing out, "Wicked."
He smiled before dropping it into a garbage can. Over there is Johnny, he said, pointing over to the boy with the medium length black hair. "You can call me Pyro." He said, not getting up from the recliner he was in. "Why Pyro?" Johnny lit the zippo and pulled the flame from it, enlarging it to the size of a baseball before casually tossing it back and forth between his hands. "I like to play with fire" he replied with a smirk.
Just then Bobby's opening words finally finished their processing. He turned back to Kurt. "What about a watch?" Kurt smiled sheepishly, ruffling the hair on the back of his head. He slipped the watch he was desperately trying to get on a few minutes ago onto his wrist, easily this time, and pressed a button on it. He flickered for just a second, before his image changed completely. His blue fur had vanished, leaving a pale skin behind, and instead of his yellow eyes, they were a dark blue, almost black irises. The hair on his head had also changed to a black similar to his eyes, real enough if you were just glancing at it, but if you were actually looking, it looked to be dyed from a different color. Not much, but it still just didn't look right.
Instead of the pajama bottoms he had on before, he now had a full set of clothing on. A pair of faded jeans, a white undershirt with a tan overshirt unbuttoned draping over it. His tail was nowhere to be seen. Harry looked him directly in the eyes. "Turn that silly thing off."
When he made no move to do so, Harry felt he had to elaborate. "This isn't you Kurt. Granted, I've only known you for a few minutes, but the person I'd like to make a friend out of isn't contained in a watch. In closing," he said with a mischievous smirk, and exaggerating his hand movements in a poor parody of a politician, "Turn that silly thing off."
Kurt turned off the watch, reverting to his 'blue' state, before grabbing Harry in a rough hug. He pulled back quickly, trying to wipe away a few stray tears without anyone noticing. "I vould very much like to be your friend, Herr Potter." He said with a small smile on his face. "Well then, Herr Vagner, I accept. But you're waking me up for breakfast tomorrow!" he smiled playfully, wanting to break the almost palpable tension that had built up despite his best efforts. He began walking towards the four beds in the adjacent room, figuring the one that was still made was for him.
"You do know that his name is Wagner, right? Not Vagner, that's how he pronounces it with his accent." Came a call from Pyro back in the sitting room. Harry looked at him incredulously. "Did you ever stop to think that perhaps you are saying his name wrong? I mean, it IS afterall, his name. I think that he of all people should know how to pronounce it."
Johnny looked angry, but didn't argue the point. 'Okay,' Harry thought to himself as he lay down in his bed, 'Fire-boy has a temper. Not too surprising, and if I can handle Ron, I can handle anything'. Thinking of Ron, though, brought up all the things he hadn't been thinking about since he got on the jet with Dr. Grey and Ms. Munroe. He had lost everything that had been his life for the last five years. Everyone he had placed trust in had turned on him, and practically damned him to death. He doubted he could have lasted a week with the dementors influence on him before he either went insane or just plain old died. That was unforgivable. As he drifted off to sleep, he fantasized about the wizarding world finding out the truth, and begging him to come back. He'd tell them to 'fuck off', just like he told Dumbledore he would, and then some people, like Lupin and Weasley, Sr., would sit down dumbly, and the women would cry. He would take particular pleasure in making Ginny feel guilty about the new scar he was sure to have.
XXXXXX
Meanwhile........
Albus Dumbledore sat down heavily at his massive desk in his office at Hogwarts, looking at a paper amongst many but not actually seeing it. His mind was off somewhere else, thinking about how he just sentenced a not even sixteen year old boy to hell on earth. A boy, mind you, that was like a grandson to him, despite the slight falling out they had at the end of last term.
If the prophecy was correct, he had perhaps just doomed the entire world to dominion under Voldemort.
He was interrupted from his musings when Alastor Moody barged in through his office door, making it slam against the interior wall with an echo that reverberated throughout the room. "Potter's escaped!" he barked at him, his disappointment evident in both his tone and expression. The magical eyeball was no longer zooming around the room, but locked on the headmaster's face as was his 'good' eye.
"Please shut the door, Alastor. Now what happened?" After Moody had shut the door, he walked back and dropped himself into a chair in front of the headmaster's desk, the weariness in his body apparent. "When the detail that escorted Potter to Azkaban didn't report back in, the ministry sent out a second detail to find out why. I was invited to come along. We found all six of the detail collapsed on the ground, suffering hypothermia from the rain. Potter had run off, and we tracked his magical signal some three kilometers down the road before it just.... vanished. He has with him one of the Auror's robes, and his wand. Fat lot of good it will do him, though. It'll only work half the time, at best."
Albus, for his part, was under conflicted emotions. He worried that someone who had murdered and attempted to murder yet another had escaped, but on the other hand, he had some hope that the Dark Lord might be defeated. Unless...." Did you find out what made the Aurors collapse? It wasn't Voldemort, was it?"
"No, Albus, it wasn't. There wasn't a trace of magic on them." he began, shifting uncomfortably. "At first, we thought they had simply been cursed with a stunner or other such thing. It wasn't until we couldn't ennervate them until we portkeyed them to St. Mungo's." here he trailed off. "And?..." Albus prompted. "They were discovered to be extremely dehydrated. In the RAIN, ALBUS! How the hell can you dehydrate someone, in the rain no less, without magic?"
Albus, who already was burdened with a full load, was given yet another thing to worry about.
XXXXXX
"Harry, Harry, wake up!" Kurt pleaded, trying to gently wake him with a rocking of his shoulder. Harry, however, having had one of the best nights sleep in.... well in memory, had no intention of getting out of bed. "G'way, neeeed sleeepy." He gestured with his arm in a 'Go away' motion, without moving his head from where it was buried in his pillow. Kurt, however, was not to be deterred. "Bobby!" he yelled.
Bobby turned from in front of his closet to see what was going on. "Wassup Kurt?"
"I think that our new roommate needs some help waking up. Remember how you, er, helped me get up my first morning here?"
The skin around Iceman's eyes scrunched up in his smile, his pale blue eyes sparkling. He reached out his hand to where Harry's form lay, and he dropped his smile to concentrate. In a matter of seconds, the temperature of Harry's blankets dropped from reasonably warm to somewhere around the freezing point of water. Harry yelped, and started kicking and pushing the ice cold blankets off of him as fast as he could. Just as he had gotten out of the frosty embrace, he fell of the bed, landing on his back with a loud 'thud'. His legs were propped up in the air, resting against his bed, while he just splayed his arms out to the sides, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling trying to get his breathing back under control.
"That," he began, but stopped to wet his dry lips and take a deep breath, "was the most cruel thing anyone has ever done to me to get me out of bed." He still hadn't looked away from the ceiling.
"Bobby cringed at his tone, and Kurt was in the middle of preparing himself for a panic attack. It may not have been the best idea to prank someone out of bed, especially someone who welcomed you openly without reservations, something only Professor Xavier had done.
Surprisingly, though, Harry started laughing out loud. He quickly uprighted himself, and grabbed his sweatshirt top to pull on, trying to fight off the chill of the room. "We have GOT to do that to somebody else."
Kurt breathed a sigh of relief, and Bobby laughed outright. "Man, I thought you were really pissed for a second there." "Naw, but you have just gotten yourself into a prank war. I hope you realize this?"
Even though they didn't know what his power was, there was something about the maniacal gleam in his eyes that neither boy was quite comfortable with. "Er... well, y'see,... ah, its like an initiation right, right Kurt?" Bobby turned to Kurt with pleading eyes. Kurt completely understood where this was going. Turning back to Harry, he said "They did the same thing to me on my first morning, Harry."
Harry nodded, letting the matter drop. Pulling on his trainers, he made for the door, and the three headed down to breakfast. "Just so you know, I am going to get you both back. I don't get pranked without payback." Both other boys tensed up, but Harry patted them both on the back, from where they were on either side of him. "Relax fellas. It's not going to be on my first day here, and it definitely won't be something that will be dangerous."
"Great," Bobby muttered, "Now I'm going to be jumpy for however long it takes for him to get us back."
"That was a great idea Kurt." Bobby said while trying to smack Kurt in the back of the head. Kurt disappeared in a flash of smoke and brimstone, reappearing much the same way ten feet down the corridor just before Bobby made contact. Harry just laughed. It felt good to have friends again.
Again, the sheer technology threatened to overwhelm him. Computer monitors were abound, with large steel poles standing almost to the ceiling with bars snaking out every set amount of space on them scattered about the room. From these bars various medical instruments hung, and Harry had no idea what most of them were even used for.
Jean turned around with a clear bottle three quarters full of a similarly clear fluid, some cotton swabs, and a large white bandage. "Brace yourself Harry," she said while dabbing some of the fluid onto a cotton swab. "This is going to... sting."
She applied the swab to his gouge, and it didn't sting at all. In fact, he thought, it 'burned like all hell'. To his credit, however, he didn't cry out, just let the pain flow through. He found it much easier to deal with pain if he didn't fight it, and instead just let it ride. After a time, when Jean must have decided that it was about as disinfected as she thought it would get, she applied the bandage to the side of his face, trying to keep the large rectangular bandage as much out of his eye as possible.
"There you go."
He opened his eyes to look into the maternal gaze of Jean, but not really knowing what it was, other than the fact that before the whole fiasco of a week ago, Molly Weasley had looked at him the same way. Giving her a confused glance, he turned to the side where there was a mirror. The cut was completely covered by the white bandage, and while it did stick out like a sore thumb, it did cover his cut and would hopefully help it heal. It didn't look as wide as it did when she pulled it out of the cupboard, however, and it only covered the necessary part of his face. No more, no less.
He looked back to her, and spoke a quiet, yet sincere "Thank you."
She smiled, and threw away the bloodied cotton and the latex gloves he hadn't noticed her put on. "Come on, I'll show you to your dorm and introduce you to your dorm mates. They will help you learn your way around the school."
Harry nodded, and jumped off the table, before noticing that he still was wearing the dirtied, smelly, and frayed robe he had pulled off of one of his guards. "Do you have something I could wear? I imagine that not only do I stick out, but It must be unpleasant, if not painful to smell me at the moment...." He trailed off, not knowing how to ask for anything without getting yelled at for it.
Jean, in response, walked over to a shelving with large amounts of gray sweats in varying sizes on it. She put her chin in her hand, seemingly weighing choices, before pulling a pair of sweatpants and a similar hooded sweatshirt and handing them to him. "There is a screen over there you can change behind." She said, pointing to a far corner of the room with another of those curious smiles.
He walked over to the corner and took his robe off, and the prisoner clothing he wore under that off. Pulling on the sweats, he absently noted that on the back of the sweatshirt read 'Xavier Institute for Gifted Children' in black print, with a large black 'X' over his heart. He went through the pockets of the robe, and transferred the wand to the pouch in the sweatshirt over his stomach, and the golden galleons and silver sickles went into his pants pocket. He padded over to jean, his prisoners boots left behind with the other clothing, and she immediately noticed. She went over and grabbed some socks, tossing them to him, and said "We don't keep any shoes in this room, I'll have to find you some on the way to the dorm. Ready to go?"
Harry nodded again, and gestured in a sweeping arc with his right hand towards the door while giving a slight bow at the waist. "After you." He said in a slightly playful tone, her caring actions helping him become more at ease. She chuckled a bit shaking her flaming red hair around her face as she shook her head, and replied "Why thank you good sir." She left the room with Harry following her.
XXXXXX
"On your right is the physics and mathematics classroom, and up ahead on your left is the history room." She said, trying to give him a jumpstart on learning his way around. They turned a corner in the hallway, and the dark maple boarding and white plaster walls were already seeming like home to him. "Up here is the garage for mechanics, and directly ahead, is the gift training room. No one is allowed in there alone, and until you show enough control, only teachers will be allowed to bring you in there.
He looked to the end of the hallway, and there was a large X in a circle that he assumed opened up somehow. It seemed to be a fairly secure room, and he could understand the rules that were in place over it. Something that was bothering him earlier was brought back to his attention at that moment. "Jean, er... Dr. Grey? Do you know what exactly my gift is?"
Jean stopped, looking at him with shock. He stopped not more than two step later, noticing she wasn't walking still. "You mean you don't know?" At his head shake in the negative, she continued. "Well, I'm sure the professor can help you out with the memories of your unlocking to figure it out." She began walking again, and Harry fell in step behind her. "Its not like we can hook a computer up to you and get an instant answer, everyone's gift is different, and there is no way to tell for sure exactly how the X gene has affected you. You'll find out soon enough I imagine, as you will need to get some control on it quickly."
The entire time she was talking, they had turned to the right up a staircase embedded into the wall which turned a full ninety degrees over two turns at equal points up the stairs, into what Harry assumed was the dormitory area. She quickly assured him that his assumption was correct. "These rooms are the dorms of the Institute. This is a Co-ed dorm, so some semblance of honor will have to be maintained, understood?"
Harry blushed at the insinuation of her statement, and she chuckled again, shaking her head as she did so once more. "Ah, here we are." They had stopped in front of a door with a plaque that read "Room D-4" on it. "Room number four, there are already three other boys living in here, and," she checked her watch, "They should all be in for the night already, and we can get you introduced right away."
She opened the door, and inside sat a blonde boy with blue eyes at a desk, reading a book and writing in a notepad, a black haired boy playing with a zippo while staring off into space, and a boy with yellow eyes and blue fur covering his body perched on the back of a couch watching TV
The blue furred one immediately started trying to put his watch on, but was panicking so bad he couldn't seem to get it onto his wrist. Harry immediately walked over to him. "Hi, my name is Harry Potter." He said holding his hand out. The other boy blinked in astonishment at him for a few seconds before tentatively smiling and grasping the outstretched hand with his own three fingered appendage. "Kurt Vagner." Harry smiled at him. "Nice to meet you Kurt." He turned to the others in the room, who were also staring at him unbelievingly. He instinctively looked down, to see if he had dropped something on his clothing, then running a hand around his face to feel if there was anything there. Finding nothing in either search, he looked at the three of them. "What? Do I have something on my face?"
Kurt put a hand on his shoulder, and he looked over to him, noticing that Jean had already shut the door and left. "Doesn't the vay I look, you know, bother you?" Harry looked him in the eyes, and could tell that he didn't like the way he looked at all. The bespectacled boy shrugged. "Should it?"
Kurt's tentative smile widened considerably while he shook his head. "No, no of course it should not." He sat down on the couch heavily, slouching over, before turning his head back up to look at him. "It does make most people look at me oddly though."
"I'll say!" said a voice from behind him. He turned to see the blond boy walking over to him. "It took me a good couple of weeks before I got used to it, well, after he stopped using his watch. I'm Bobby." He said while holding his hand out for Harry to shake. "But you can call me Iceman." Harry shook his hand. "Iceman?" he questioned. In response Bobby let go of his hand, held his own palm up, and a stalagmite made of Ice shot up out of his hand. Harry looked at it, then back to Bobby, then back to the Ice, before breathing out, "Wicked."
He smiled before dropping it into a garbage can. Over there is Johnny, he said, pointing over to the boy with the medium length black hair. "You can call me Pyro." He said, not getting up from the recliner he was in. "Why Pyro?" Johnny lit the zippo and pulled the flame from it, enlarging it to the size of a baseball before casually tossing it back and forth between his hands. "I like to play with fire" he replied with a smirk.
Just then Bobby's opening words finally finished their processing. He turned back to Kurt. "What about a watch?" Kurt smiled sheepishly, ruffling the hair on the back of his head. He slipped the watch he was desperately trying to get on a few minutes ago onto his wrist, easily this time, and pressed a button on it. He flickered for just a second, before his image changed completely. His blue fur had vanished, leaving a pale skin behind, and instead of his yellow eyes, they were a dark blue, almost black irises. The hair on his head had also changed to a black similar to his eyes, real enough if you were just glancing at it, but if you were actually looking, it looked to be dyed from a different color. Not much, but it still just didn't look right.
Instead of the pajama bottoms he had on before, he now had a full set of clothing on. A pair of faded jeans, a white undershirt with a tan overshirt unbuttoned draping over it. His tail was nowhere to be seen. Harry looked him directly in the eyes. "Turn that silly thing off."
When he made no move to do so, Harry felt he had to elaborate. "This isn't you Kurt. Granted, I've only known you for a few minutes, but the person I'd like to make a friend out of isn't contained in a watch. In closing," he said with a mischievous smirk, and exaggerating his hand movements in a poor parody of a politician, "Turn that silly thing off."
Kurt turned off the watch, reverting to his 'blue' state, before grabbing Harry in a rough hug. He pulled back quickly, trying to wipe away a few stray tears without anyone noticing. "I vould very much like to be your friend, Herr Potter." He said with a small smile on his face. "Well then, Herr Vagner, I accept. But you're waking me up for breakfast tomorrow!" he smiled playfully, wanting to break the almost palpable tension that had built up despite his best efforts. He began walking towards the four beds in the adjacent room, figuring the one that was still made was for him.
"You do know that his name is Wagner, right? Not Vagner, that's how he pronounces it with his accent." Came a call from Pyro back in the sitting room. Harry looked at him incredulously. "Did you ever stop to think that perhaps you are saying his name wrong? I mean, it IS afterall, his name. I think that he of all people should know how to pronounce it."
Johnny looked angry, but didn't argue the point. 'Okay,' Harry thought to himself as he lay down in his bed, 'Fire-boy has a temper. Not too surprising, and if I can handle Ron, I can handle anything'. Thinking of Ron, though, brought up all the things he hadn't been thinking about since he got on the jet with Dr. Grey and Ms. Munroe. He had lost everything that had been his life for the last five years. Everyone he had placed trust in had turned on him, and practically damned him to death. He doubted he could have lasted a week with the dementors influence on him before he either went insane or just plain old died. That was unforgivable. As he drifted off to sleep, he fantasized about the wizarding world finding out the truth, and begging him to come back. He'd tell them to 'fuck off', just like he told Dumbledore he would, and then some people, like Lupin and Weasley, Sr., would sit down dumbly, and the women would cry. He would take particular pleasure in making Ginny feel guilty about the new scar he was sure to have.
XXXXXX
Meanwhile........
Albus Dumbledore sat down heavily at his massive desk in his office at Hogwarts, looking at a paper amongst many but not actually seeing it. His mind was off somewhere else, thinking about how he just sentenced a not even sixteen year old boy to hell on earth. A boy, mind you, that was like a grandson to him, despite the slight falling out they had at the end of last term.
If the prophecy was correct, he had perhaps just doomed the entire world to dominion under Voldemort.
He was interrupted from his musings when Alastor Moody barged in through his office door, making it slam against the interior wall with an echo that reverberated throughout the room. "Potter's escaped!" he barked at him, his disappointment evident in both his tone and expression. The magical eyeball was no longer zooming around the room, but locked on the headmaster's face as was his 'good' eye.
"Please shut the door, Alastor. Now what happened?" After Moody had shut the door, he walked back and dropped himself into a chair in front of the headmaster's desk, the weariness in his body apparent. "When the detail that escorted Potter to Azkaban didn't report back in, the ministry sent out a second detail to find out why. I was invited to come along. We found all six of the detail collapsed on the ground, suffering hypothermia from the rain. Potter had run off, and we tracked his magical signal some three kilometers down the road before it just.... vanished. He has with him one of the Auror's robes, and his wand. Fat lot of good it will do him, though. It'll only work half the time, at best."
Albus, for his part, was under conflicted emotions. He worried that someone who had murdered and attempted to murder yet another had escaped, but on the other hand, he had some hope that the Dark Lord might be defeated. Unless...." Did you find out what made the Aurors collapse? It wasn't Voldemort, was it?"
"No, Albus, it wasn't. There wasn't a trace of magic on them." he began, shifting uncomfortably. "At first, we thought they had simply been cursed with a stunner or other such thing. It wasn't until we couldn't ennervate them until we portkeyed them to St. Mungo's." here he trailed off. "And?..." Albus prompted. "They were discovered to be extremely dehydrated. In the RAIN, ALBUS! How the hell can you dehydrate someone, in the rain no less, without magic?"
Albus, who already was burdened with a full load, was given yet another thing to worry about.
XXXXXX
"Harry, Harry, wake up!" Kurt pleaded, trying to gently wake him with a rocking of his shoulder. Harry, however, having had one of the best nights sleep in.... well in memory, had no intention of getting out of bed. "G'way, neeeed sleeepy." He gestured with his arm in a 'Go away' motion, without moving his head from where it was buried in his pillow. Kurt, however, was not to be deterred. "Bobby!" he yelled.
Bobby turned from in front of his closet to see what was going on. "Wassup Kurt?"
"I think that our new roommate needs some help waking up. Remember how you, er, helped me get up my first morning here?"
The skin around Iceman's eyes scrunched up in his smile, his pale blue eyes sparkling. He reached out his hand to where Harry's form lay, and he dropped his smile to concentrate. In a matter of seconds, the temperature of Harry's blankets dropped from reasonably warm to somewhere around the freezing point of water. Harry yelped, and started kicking and pushing the ice cold blankets off of him as fast as he could. Just as he had gotten out of the frosty embrace, he fell of the bed, landing on his back with a loud 'thud'. His legs were propped up in the air, resting against his bed, while he just splayed his arms out to the sides, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling trying to get his breathing back under control.
"That," he began, but stopped to wet his dry lips and take a deep breath, "was the most cruel thing anyone has ever done to me to get me out of bed." He still hadn't looked away from the ceiling.
"Bobby cringed at his tone, and Kurt was in the middle of preparing himself for a panic attack. It may not have been the best idea to prank someone out of bed, especially someone who welcomed you openly without reservations, something only Professor Xavier had done.
Surprisingly, though, Harry started laughing out loud. He quickly uprighted himself, and grabbed his sweatshirt top to pull on, trying to fight off the chill of the room. "We have GOT to do that to somebody else."
Kurt breathed a sigh of relief, and Bobby laughed outright. "Man, I thought you were really pissed for a second there." "Naw, but you have just gotten yourself into a prank war. I hope you realize this?"
Even though they didn't know what his power was, there was something about the maniacal gleam in his eyes that neither boy was quite comfortable with. "Er... well, y'see,... ah, its like an initiation right, right Kurt?" Bobby turned to Kurt with pleading eyes. Kurt completely understood where this was going. Turning back to Harry, he said "They did the same thing to me on my first morning, Harry."
Harry nodded, letting the matter drop. Pulling on his trainers, he made for the door, and the three headed down to breakfast. "Just so you know, I am going to get you both back. I don't get pranked without payback." Both other boys tensed up, but Harry patted them both on the back, from where they were on either side of him. "Relax fellas. It's not going to be on my first day here, and it definitely won't be something that will be dangerous."
"Great," Bobby muttered, "Now I'm going to be jumpy for however long it takes for him to get us back."
"That was a great idea Kurt." Bobby said while trying to smack Kurt in the back of the head. Kurt disappeared in a flash of smoke and brimstone, reappearing much the same way ten feet down the corridor just before Bobby made contact. Harry just laughed. It felt good to have friends again.