Blood Counts
Everything happened at once, it felt.
Two cracks sounded in the air.
Snape flew backward, looking too surprised for the action to have been under his own volition.
He screamed, too, sounding pained and surprised and enraged – a mix Harry had never heard before, and the smell of blood suddenly broke into the ones Harry had now been used to know as “home”.
And, automatically, after all the reminders given by Grandpa George and Cousin Jenny in various occasions, Harry sprayed the cloud of peppery water at the intruder’s face.
He dropped hard onto the not-so-forgiving ground and sprained an ankle, then, but it’s better than unwillingly flying not under his control!
The pepper spray was still clutched tightly in his hand, too. So he staggered forward a little, just close enough, and sprayed Snape once more with the weaponised liquid. There’s nothing like an overkill, after all, as Grandpa George had once said firmly to him, and Harry wasn’t returning to Hogwards, anyway, for better or for worse, so Snape wouldn’t be able to retaliate to him for this in class.
Only later, as Grandpa George then Cousin Jenny rushed to him and hugged him snuggly, did he realise that shock might have played a role in his decision, too. Because, even after an hour in which Dobby had been trying to ply him with attention and food and drink after bonking Snape unconscious with the side of a wrought-iron skillet, he was still shaking and hypervigilent and clutching his pepper spray in one hand.
He’d never been shaken before. Not like this. Not for long. There had been just nightmares, and who in the universe had no nightmare in all their life? But he was still shaking, now, after however long it had been, and he couldn’t stop shaking, though he was now on Cousin Jenny’s lap and wrapped in her arms like a child smaller than Kayla while listening to Grandpa George order people round.
He’d faced somebody drinking blood from a corpse while alone in a dangerous forest deep at night. He’d burnt someone alive with his literal hands – in self-defence or not – while totally alone in a room deep under the castle. He’d nearly fallen and been bludgened to death by a malfunctioning flying car and an angry willow, with only a fellow twelve-year-old as company and help. He’d faced school-wide persecution for months with only a handful of people on his side while still a twelve-year-old. He’d been nearly eaten alive by a horde of giant, talking spiders while, again, only in the company of a fellow twelve-year-old. He had also nearly died by the lethal poison of a monstrously sized snake while alone deep under the castle where no one else could follow while being taunted by a life-sucking wraith just months ago. And he hadn’t shaken, then. So why now?
`I’m safe. I’m safe,` he told himself, not for the first time, but he still couldn’t stop shaking.
It only got worse when he knew just why they’re all in this situation, after Grandpa George and his – previously unknown to Harry – team of house watchers that were a handful of off-duty air-force personnel had interrogated a woozy Snape, all tied up and weaponless on the back porch with bullet-grazes on his thigh.
He shouldn’t have asked, perhaps, shouldn’t have begged, but he’d needed to just know: Why’s Snape here, how, why only now, why not through the official channels, and what’d happen next.
And, after much hesitation, Grandpa George had caved in, had ushered Harry and Cousin Jenny into the kitchen and sat them down, had told them.
Albus Dumbledore – Harry’s former headmaster – had apparently taken and kept a sample of Harry’s blood among his knick-knacks. Harry’s absence had apparently been known only on the first of September, when the boy had not shown on Platform Nine-Three-Fourth, and this had generated panic as well as a country-wide search among the British Wizarding World. Dumbledore had then tasked Snape to “fetch the boy” using a devise that – Snape had claimed – contained some of the blood sample, but it’s not easy doing the search without alerting the greater community to what had been going on, although Snape was versed enough in “Muggle ways of doing things” and apparently well-invested in bringing Harry back to Hogwarts for a yet-to-be-unearth reason. And here Snape was, in a hurry to go back to the school after a week-long search, which Dumbledore had excused as a week-long conference in new potions and poisons.
And here Harry was, too: wrestling with all his might not to throw up, not to freak out too much, not to burst into tears. Because the Headmaster somehow had his blood, and had used it to track him down, while he hadn’t thought – hadn’t wanted, after the first kindness shown to him as a boy instead of a celebrity – to be tracked down.
There’s no use for hair and eye disguises, now they all knew. Changes to those wouldn’t change anything. Because he couldn’t change his blood. Not if he didn’t want to change himself. Not if he didn’t want to be somebody else in truth. Not if he didn’t want to lose his biggest, most intimate tie to his dead parents – the parents he’d only ever known in rare snipets and no-doubt-exaggerated-and-one-sided stories, the parents whose blood literally ran in him and got used to track him down like a deer being hunted.
He felt trapped, unclean.
He felt violated.
And worst, nobody had a solution of how to overcome this problem, because they couldn’t go toe to toe with Albus Dumbledore, who was not only the headmaster of a school but also the equivalent of the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Head of a House in the British Parliament, even if they would… and Grandpa George and Cousin Jenny and everyone said they would, somehow, despite that.
And they proved it, all too soon, when witches and wizards from Magical Congress of the United States of America suddenly popped in on the property and decided that Harry either had to go home to the United Kingdom or go with them, and “the no-mags” would permanently forget him either way.
Harry James Potter, also Henry Howard Hammond, previously already much shocked and distressed, snapped.
He screamed, with his throat and his mind and his magic, and something exploded outward from him.
He knew no more, afterwards.
But, when he woke up again, with everything in and on him pounding in tandem with his heart, though thankfully he’s still in his bedroom in the Hammonds’ house, there was no magical being left on the property.
No human magical being, in any case.
Or at least, Harry thought the being was not human but even more powerful than Dumbledore, somehow.
The person who stood at his bedside alongside Grandpa George was tall, almost as tall as Hagrid, but well-groomed and androgynous and – the eyes….
Their eyes were brown, but something was different about those seemingly ordinary orbs, and they seemed to see many things – things in addition to sight – and something in him reciprocated.
He felt perfectly justified, then, when he declared – well, croaked out, rather – “You aren’t human.”
Something like approval that wasn’t his own brushed his mind, bypassing his usual senses entirely, even as Grandpa George snorted then reported, “This is Odesha, Harry. They responded to your… magical call for help. They brought friends and got rid of the other magical people, and they asked to stay here till you’re conscious and able to talk to them.”
“I didn’t call.” Harry latched to the most troublesome part first. He didn’t want to make Grandpa George think he’d gone behind the old man’s back and brought more magical beings to the property!
This time, it’s Odesha who spoke, and their voice was as androgynous as their face when they slowly but firmly said, “You did, and we were glad you did.”
“But… I was here… and you were… somewhere else.” Harry gawped, confused.
“Mind calls far, child,” Odesha returned, solemnly, “and soul calls even farther. When it is amplified by one’s power, it calls even farther. And the flavour of yours is… distinctive, to various individuals, both good and bad.”
`Mind. Soul. Power. Distinctive.` Harry could barely wrap his mind round the concepts, separately, forget tying them together, let alone comprehending them all at once.
Fondness, sorrow, relief, regret and faded fury not of his own brushed his mind, then, and Harry’s eyes widened.
“Is that….”
“Soul-to-soul communication, child, as we once did, when you were in your mother’s womb.”
“My mother? You knew–.”
“Not in your current incarnation, child.” And the image of an alien with blue skin and red eyes appeared in Harry’s mind, along with the sensation of kin-fond-sympathy-admiration. “And, what we did just now, it is a mixture between mind-to-mind and soul-to-soul communication.”
Harry’s head hurt, even more than before, and it’d already been aweful when he’d woken up.
“Just… get to the point, please?” he pleaded, and Grandpa George chuckled, but the sound was rather flat, and it made Harry regret ever asking, even before Odesha proved it.
“This is your second incarnation, child,” they said, just as slow but firm as before. “Before that, as you will ever be, you are the womb-child of Laufey Bergelmir-childe, Monarch of Ýmirheim. I am here to help you in any way I can, to serve you as I serve your mother.”
And all Harry could think of was, `Oh, hell!`