Searching for Snakes

Between the five times that Harry had accidentally set the washing water to a boil, the seven times he had disappeared to a different location, and the one time he had been caught resting his head on Tom’s thigh, Sister Mary’s hate for him wasn’t ceasing anytime soon. Rather, it grew and festered like an infected dog bite, a bite that she poked and prodded incessantly.

She targeted Harry, and exclusively Harry as she had soon learned that Tom wasn’t one to wage war on. Sister Mary had once attempted to punish Tom beyond withholding dinner, the key word being attempted. The morning proceeding the day she had stuck Tom’s palms several times with her cane after his fifth consecutive desertion of prayer, she had awoken the next morning with several concerned letters in the mail from the local residents of London.

Tom had left the orphanage and made a rather convincing display at the nearest hospital in front of a number of patients and now Tom was left untouchable—lest Sister Mary be evicted for cruelty.

The trick was only workable once, as soon after, Sister Mary had taken the younger children, too old to walk nor speak, hostage in her punishments. “Should another child make a public scene,” She said, “I will personally take it upon myself to make this orphanage a living hell for the rest of you,”

As if it wasn’t already.

She gave Harry faulty darning needles and the worst pile of clothing under the order that he wouldn’t receive dinner if he didn’t finish by sunset. Harry received moldy bread for breakfast and though he nibbled around the worst parts, he was still bedridden with a stomach bug for days. Harry felt as though she wasn’t here to spread the word of God but rather her skeletal body.

During prayer, she had him remain for an extra hour to “repent for loving that boy, lest the devil come and steal your soul!” Harry thought that if one of them was soulless, it certainly wasn’t him.

Harry might have been more inclined to retaliate as well, but to some degree he felt he deserved the extra punishments they may have been accidents but the curtains, clothing, and garden were ruined in part because of him. And if she stopped being terrible to him, what would come of the other children? Harry wasn't a hero, but he also wasn't a complete prat like Sister Mary.

He woke up hungry and went to sleep hungry, curled into his thin sheets and wishing Tom would let him get in his bed. The other boy wasn’t any help in lessening his anxiety, as apparently, Harry’s nerves were setting if off as well. Tom’s cold rage at the situation wasn’t ebbing—he still had scarcely anything to eat and scarcely any time, to boot—and as a result, Tom was curt and often rude in responding to Harry’s attempts at conversation.

Usually, if Harry felt unstable or emotionally tense, he visited the orphanage library and selected something to read. His go-to had been The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but unfortunately, Sister Mary had filled every shelf with a copy of the Bible, and Harry would be damned if he read that stupid book one more time.

It was another Sunday when Harry Potter snapped.

***

“On your knees! On your knees now!” Sister Mary called in that dreadfully high pitched voice of hers. Harry slowly bent his legs and knelt on the floor, the imprint of the stone tiles already tattooed to his knees. Sister Mary, sitting on the armchair she had installed in the dining room on the first day, began to read from some testament. Which was less a testament to the Word of God and more a testament to her insufferable voice.

He silently seethed, thinking of Tom’s newly indifferent persona and his refusal to pray. His knees hurt, his head hurt, his stomach hurt from sheer emptiness. And worst of all, the buzzing of restless magic was like sitting on a bed of needles ready to impale him at any moment. ‘No magic, no magic,’ He chanted under his breath.  

“Harry!” Her voice, oh her voice! If someone set a timer, Harry could probably go on for at least three hours about her it. Not only was it the crackly, warbly sort, but it came out with a breath that sounded like someone had put her vocal cords in a box and shook it around—a human rattlesnake. 

But Harry supposed it was unfair to the snakes to compare such a dreadful woman to them, if only her voice.

He looked up from the ground, gritting his teeth. The pounding headache refused to go away, and now the painful pulses were synching up with his heartbeat. She towered over him at a solid 6 feet and whatever inches of pure bone and skin. Was she anorexic? Did she need medical help? He wondered, trying to keep his mind busy.

“You’re not praying properly,” The old crone interrupted her own reading for the thousandth time to mock him.

She wasn’t actually that old. Her hair still retained some color, silvery streaks giving the hair a shimmery sort of quality. If she covered her torso, her legs, feet, arms, hands, and face with various garments and just left the hair, she might have looked nice.

“Yes Sister,” He replied, making a small, negligible shift to his position. One of the younger children—Harry thought it was Emma—began crying then, wailing that her legs hurt.

Sister Mary ignored her. “Your arms need to be more outstretched,”

“How’s this?” Harry asked, tiredly doing as he was told.

“No.” The thin cane she kept came and wacked down onto his shoulders and Emma cried louder. The thing about Sister Mary was that she never yelled—what she lacked in vocal cords she made up in punishments.

The magic pulsed once, buzzing in his ears.

“How, exactly, do I assume correct posture, Sister?” He asked pliantly, patiently.

“Not like that,” The cane slammed down again, and this time Harry’s hands slipped out from under him and his jaw hit the ground. Hard.

His magic pulsed twice and the buzzing in his ears became deafening, like the roar of the sea. Harry squeezed his eyes shut.

He was so tired, so weak, so hungry. Harry had thought that the influence from the Dursleys had faded to nothingness, but here it was again, written in his soul. It emerged like a shadow, demanding supplication, demanding him to apologize, to beg.

“Stop,” Harry whispered, eyes shut tightly, the hands pressed against his ears doing nothing to deafen the roar of magic within him. He wasn’t the weak little boy from the Dursleys—he wasn’t! Harry began to feel stronger, the resolution steeling his resolve, the thin lines between pain and rage bleeding over.

“Speak louder, boy!” The cane came down then, three more strikes in quick succession.

“Stop it,” He growled to his magic. It had begun to leech out of him, making the air buzz with power, filling the room like a thick, deadly fog. Sister Mary was the least of his problems.

“Speak up!” Sister Mary rose her cane again. Emma was screaming now, and, Harry assumed, spurred on by her bravery, so were the rest of the little ones. Harry’s eyes were still tightly closed, hands wrapped around his head and tremors running up and down his body. He stood.

“B-boy! What are you doing!”

Harry ignored her—a feeling of wonderfulness was returning, flooding his bones with power. It was a strength missed since the air raid; radiating over his body with warmth, the overwhelming euphoria he was experiencing drowning out the screams that Harry subconsciously felt were getting louder.

And louder.

“Devil! Demon spawn!” Sister Mary was screaming too. Sister Mary never did that.

Logic and rationale slowly returned to Harry, who felt fantastic. Why was everything so loud?

“HARRY!” Was that Tom’s voice? So he was finally talking to him now? Tom, who as of late had been more silent than Wool? As if Harry would forgive him for the last two weeks when he had needed him most.

“HARRY!” The yelling, again! And just when everyone else had stopped screaming! So LOUD! So ANNOYING!

“SHUT UP!” Harry screamed in frustration, hands gripping his hair and finally opening his eyes.

A pair of terrified amber eyes looked back at him. When Harry tried to look away and to the side, Tom’s hands came up to grip his head.

“Reign in your magic!” Tom was saying. Why should he? He was feeling better than he had in months!

Tom grabbed his arms and turned him around.

And then, Harry, horrified as the blood rushed to his head and his heart skipped a beat, fell to his knees.

It was a playground of corpses. A magical playground. Of corpses. Motionless bodies littered the floor: the bodies of Sister Mary, Emma, Billy, Eric, Amy, the entire orphanage. Harry’s magic frantically retracted from the bodies, chased back to the host by Tom who emitted waves of power; dragged back to the culprit by Harry who reigned it in.

“What happened.” Harry breathed once the room had been cleared.

“You lost control,” Tom replied. Harry turned to look up at Tom frantically.

“Are they dead?”

“Barely alive,” Harry’s hands were trembling as Tom pulled him to his feet—it was then that Harry realized that Tom was shaking as well. “Let us hope they remember nothing,”

***

2 hours after Harry and Tom had levitated each unconscious body up to their respective beds and nearly 24 hours since Harry had been unable to cry, stewing in a self-made hole at the edge of his bed, Harry glared at himself in the mirror.

Angry red welts had appeared along his neck—apparently, he had clawed at his skin during the incident—and gave him the appearance of a feral creature. It wasn’t the welts, though, that completed the look. His eyes were now an even brighter green, his black hair blacker and slightly longer as it brushed along the back of his neck. Harry narrowed his eyes in disgust, noting the changes and knowing they were the direct result of the children’s energy.

Harry stormed out of the bathroom and promptly returned with a pair of garden shears. He raised the rusted blade to the long strands, fully intent on destroying whatever evidence he could of the incident, before pausing. He looked at himself in the mirror again, coldly gazing into his own eyes that now held a lifetime’s worth of tragedy.

Harry left the shears on the sink—he would bear the mark of his failure for as long as it lasted.

***

Throughout the week that the orphanage slept, Harry and Tom managed the repercussions of the Incident on their own. They alternated days of taking care of Wool, answered the door to two women inquiring about the best dates to organize charity events, and carefully watched over the sleeping children.

When they finally awoke, they didn’t remember anything at all mainly because this terrible author doesn’t know how to resolve that problem if they did. Harry checked with each of them regarding their health, and all had looked at him strangely before responding that, no, they were fine.

When Harry had asked Bobby how he was feeling, the older boy had responded with “I’m feeling like it’s about time you shut up,” and so Harry was certain that the affected kids were all back to their original liveliness.

The orphanage woke up without noticing anything out of ordinary…except perhaps for the drastic changes in Harry that had seemingly occurred overnight. Several orphans had commented on his hair and eyes as they awoke with regained strength, and Harry had just smiled rather sadly and given them empty answers.

Sister Mary was the last to awake, and she did so in a fit of panic, mainly because Harry sat at the foot of her bed, swinging the cross necklace around on his fingers.

Throughout the week, Harry had quickly come to the realization that he had a problem, and it started with an S and ended with a y and was composed of the remaining letters “i,s,t,e,r” and “M,a,r.” The moral of the story was that his tolerance of Sister Mary had run short. Harry had had a plenty of time to internalize all of the resent that he carried and had promptly determined that the first course of action was to be rid of her.

So now, he perched at the end of the bed, idly looping the necklace back and forth between his fingers: a good scare was in order.

“Boy! What exactly possessed you to enter my room? And with that hair,” She gasped then, clutching her hand over her heart, “I told you to cut it—you looked like a girl—but then you went and you grew it?”

“I’m not sure possessed is a word you should be using,” Harry smiled, and then stopped toying with the cross, “Words have meaning, Sister,” At this last word, Harry allowed his magic to invade the room. After successfully expelling his magic the night prior, his control over it was better than ever.

Harry’s eyes began to glow then, his hair floating upwards to frame an exaggerated smile, a mockery of the smile she had arrived with.

“Daemon,” She breathed shakily, backing up against the headboard.

“Now, I have but two requests, Sister,” Harry leaned forward until he could smell the decaying reek of her mouth. “First, you take this cross and leave immediately,” He pressed the necklace into her hand then, digging it into the tender flesh of her palm. “The second, that you find Mrs. Cole and reinstate her back here,” Sister Mary’s eyes flickered with a mysterious hate then, but quickly disappeared when Harry narrowed his eyes. “Are we clear?"

Sister Mary whimpered then, nodding frantically. “As you say, Daemon,”

“Good,” Harry replied, standing and striding towards the door, which banged open without his influence. Harry didn’t need to look to know that Sister Mary had visibly flinched.

“Congratulations, Daemon. You’ve expelled Hitler from Orphanage School and single handedly started World War III,”

Harry walked right past Tom, who stood outside the door. “I’ll deal with that when it comes to it,”

They turned to walk side-by-side to their original room, the last dorm on the corridor.

“I cannot fathom why you didn’t do it sooner,”