Revelations
It wasn’t terribly difficult for the snakes to find the stick wielders. Their power had a certain taste to it, like static electricity as compared to their hatchling’s storm. They follow the little streams of energy that the stick-wielders constantly leave in their wake. They didn’t seem to really understand their power very well at all, letting it drift off all over the place like that. Quite sloppy, really. But it made the snakes’ objective easier, so they would not complain.
While it wasn’t terribly difficult, per se, it was rather tedious. The trails twisted and turned and meandered and sometimes ended abruptly, probably from when they did the popping jumping from place to place thing that they were so terribly fond of. The snakes think it is annoying, and terribly inconsiderate of the humans to leave them hanging in such a way. They follow the trails through the disgusting gray streets of the stone city the humans referred to as ‘London’, until they find a street that smelled strongly of books and static. A large number of the trails converged there, at some sort of human dining establishment. It was hidden by a veil of the stick-wielder’s static power, but otherwise rather obvious. It relied heavily on the concealment provided by the veil, which really only worked on other humans. The majority of humans were half-blind to begin with, so the snakes didn’t really think much of the stick-wielders attempts at hiding themselves. They were such amateurs, really.
And so the two snakes managed to find themselves inside a rather dingy building with a sign proclaiming it to be The Leaky Cauldron. (The smaller snake had taken it upon itself to learn the basics a few of the human languages, and therefore had a rather rudimentary knowledge of written modern english.) They follow the flow of static trails to a slab of energy which desperately tries to convince them that no, it isn’t a formless mass of energy, it is really a rather solid brick wall which requires a certain password to open. The snakes point out that it is actually rather obvious that it is not, in fact, a brick wall, but reassure it with promises that they won’t tell anyone. It is a rather despondent ‘brick wall’ that grants them passage. The smaller snake thinks it might be having what humans call an “identity crisis”.
They slither within the shadows, out of view of the stick-wielders who they have found hold a rather unflattering view of their noble race. (Simply more proof that they are filthy heathens. Imagine. Not liking snakes.)
It is called Diagon alley, and the stick-wielders swarm in unholy concentrations within its confines. The snakes’ senses are almost overwhelmed by the thrumming mass of energy surrounding every building and human. The stench of human sweat was not very helpful either. They think they might hate this place, but the large crowds are vital to the process of gathering information, and so they wait, and they listen. The larger snake was visibly shaking from the effort required to restrain itself from biting any humans. Its mouth was practically dripping venom.
The smaller snake guides its companion to one of the human book stores. While the larger snake could not read any human language, the relatively deserted shop would provide a welcome respite from the seething crowd of humanity. The smaller snake slithers around the shop as discretely as possible, while its companion curls up in a dark corner and tries to stop dripping venom. The smaller snake drifts through the section which appears devoted to history. Many of the books there seem devoted to something called the Goblin wars. It knows of the Goblins, and considers them worthy warriors. They also had fangs, which was always a good sign of character as far as snakes were concerned.
A section of the History aisle also seems devoted to notable stick-wielding humans, most of whom the snake has never heard of, or simply does not care about. There are several books by some strange human named Lockhart who seems to sparkle more than is strictly healthy. But they are snakes, and are by no means experts on human health or physiology, so it could be perfectly normal. There is an entire shelf of books dedicated to someone called The-Boy-Who-Lived. The snake doesn’t really understand why living would be considered such a monumental accomplishment as to warrant an entire shelf of books dedicated to the child, but decides that it would be useful to have information on someone that the stick-wielders hold in such high esteem.
Upon opening the first book (of course it was capable of opening books. It’s a Snake. It would be a dishonor to its noble race if it couldn’t) the smaller snake is greeted with a moving image. The stick-wielders are inordinately fond of the ghastly things. It tilts it’s head to one side curiously at it regards the image.The dark haired child seems terribly familiar for some reason. The child in the image opens its eyes, and if the snake had vocal chords capable of it, it would have gasped. With a growing sense of dread, it turns the page and continues to read.
Twenty seven books later, the snake and its companion leave the crowded stick-wielder shopping district. They have a report to make.
J has decided that tending the garden is by far his most tolerable chore. He would venture to call it ‘fun’ even, were it not something assigned to him by Horse. He refuses to refer to anything she assigns to him by any obviously positive adjective, simply out of principle.
Mostly though, he finds the time useful for his training, and preparation for his future vengeance. He takes particular joy in exercising his powers, even though he knows in that strange way of his that he is nowhere near powerful enough to execute an effective escape. Yet. But he has little else to do other than think and plan and train. He has no one to talk to, other than the snakes, and their visits are few and far between. He knows that Horse assigns him chores beyond the capabilities of normal three year old children with the hopes of breaking him, and making him too weary to get up to any of his ‘funny business’. (Their insistence on using euphemisms to refer to his powers amuses him greatly.)
But J had found that as his mastery of his powers grew, his need for sleep diminished greatly. He simply did not feel tired, anymore. There was no weariness tugging at the edges of his consciousness at night, nor did his body seem affected by the manual labor he was forced to perform. He calculates that on average, he sleeps three hours a week, and even then it is barely a light doze. His body seems unaffected by his lack of sleep, and is as healthy as he can reasonably expect it to be, in his situation. He is by no means strong, but his body seems somewhat more resilient to strain. This does not, however, prevent Walrus’s gratuitous beatings from being any less painful. It just means that the comforting darkness of sleep that has previously claimed him afterwards was much longer in coming.
And so he lays in his cupboard, nursing his bleeding wounds, and considers the fates of the creatures he lives with. The whispers grow louder.
He is always healed by the dawning of the next morning, the only outward evidence of his pain the dark stains on the inside of his cupboard, and the sound of Horse’s almost desperate scrubbing. But inside his mind, an even darker stain grows. And it festers.
Each day in the garden, he plays little games, because for all his cold calculation and intelligence, he is still a child. He’s never played games with anyone else though, that he can remember, anyway, so he comes up with them himself. He has no possessions that he can truly call his own; no puzzles or toys or picture books. So he plays with his power,the only thing that’s really and truly his, in a purely whimsical way. He likes to move things, small rocks and leaves,bend them to his will and make them dance in the air like some invisible specter has decided it would be amusing to do so. He enjoys making things dance, it’s a pleasant change from being the one tossed around.
Sometimes, he reaches out and summons all the little lives that he can feel. They are little sparks, not as strong or bright as his petunias, in his mind’s eye, but there. His power connects to them for just a brief moment, hundreds of tiny tendrils touching hundreds of tiny lights, but it is enough. His tendrils give a little pull, and then all the little creatures are his to command, for a time. He cannot yet control anything with a mind more complicated than an insect’s, but for now it is enough, and he draws them forward and has them enact great battles and tragic defeats, great feats of strategy and classic blunders. And at the end his little game, their shattered corpses lay across the miniature battlefield, wing segments partially detached and fluttering silently in the gentle breeze like some sort of morbid standard. J folds their tiny bodies into the dark loam at the base of his petunias’ roots. He can almost feel the flowers purr at the edges of his mind.
It is there, as he buries the remnants of yet another glorious battle of tiny soldiers in chitinous armor, that the snakes find him. He is pleasantly surprised, at first, when the smaller snake tells him that it has more information about the stick-wielders for him. It first tells him the little things, the basics of what the stick-wielders are and what they think they are.
“They call themselvesss wizardsss,” it begins, “and their sticksss, wandsss.”
J almost winces, at that horrible confirmation.
It proceeds to tell him of how the snakes found a place called ‘The leaky Cauldron’, ‘Diagon Alley”, and a wall that wasn’t quite what it seemed. The larger snake interjects, here, with complaints about the overwhelming stench of stick-wielders, and their disgusting propensity to crowd. The larger snake doesn’t even snap at its companion.
“Do you remember,” asks the smaller snake, “the ssstick-wielding Speaker I told you about, who fancied himself a god?”
“Of course. You said he ‘wreaked great havoc upon their world’.”
“Yesss. Apparently he brought them War, which they were ill-equipped for. Many of their kind perissshed, and they dessspaired. But the Speaker was vanquissshed, two human years ago.”
J began to have a horrible suspicion that this had something to do with him, or at least his suspicious memory blank.
“The Speaker, whose name the stick-wielders refuse even to print, was defeated by a young child, after the Speaker had killed both of the boy’s parents, who were active members of an Order which opposed him, with some sort of ‘spell’ called the Killing curse. He apparently attempted to use the same curse on the child, but it backfired, rendering him to mere ashes. The stick-wielders proclaimed the child as the Boy-who-lived, and hailed him as their hero. A great number of books have been written about his supposed exploits in the time since then. The majority of them seem to be mere speculation and blatant fantasy. The stick-wielders are under the impression that the child was placed in a safe, secure location, where he would grow up in comfort.”
The snake looked away, for a moment, before saying, “I believe you to be that child. Your resemblance to the images are unmistakable, and you bear the mark on your forehead from the killing curse.”
J could not deny that deep down he knew that all of this was true. He felt a brief spasm of resentment for that part of him, because there was nothing he wanted more than to be able to deny what he had just heard, if only the briefest of moments. But he couldn’t, so he considered the ramifications of the report that the snake had just given him. His parents weren’t criminals. They had not violated any obscure taboo, or broken any of their people’s laws. They had died as soldiers, as heroes, giving their lives in the battle against a worthy foe. They were people to be respected, to be honored and revered. His entire perception of who they had been was overturned. The whispers grow agitated.
And he himself, had been instrumental in the fall of the man who had murdered not only his own parents, but countless others as well. He could hardly even recall anything of that night, but he realizes now that that night was the subject of his dreams. The screaming that he had tried so desperately to ignore had been his mother. But none of that explained what he was doing in his prison. He wasn’t being punished for any familial sins. The majority of the wand-wielders were not even aware of his suffering. They thought he was somewhere safe probably being pampered like the hero they revered him as. But whoever had placed him there must have surely been aware of how he would have been treated. He was important to their world, and regardless of any blood relation he had to the creatures the stick-wielders would have surely investigated any home before placing him there. Which meant placing him with people who were certain to abuse him served some other purpose than punishing his parents’ bloodline. But who would have the authority to place him here? He narrows his eyes as thought occurs to him.
He returns his attention to the smaller snake, who was watching him cautiously.
“This Order, that you mentioned my parents being a part of--who was the leader of it?”
“An old, powerful human with a name that is far too long; Albus Dumbledore. He is the headmaster of their school, as well head of one of their governing bodies. He is highly regarded, and seen as the leader of the Light-aligned faction of their society. The Speaker was the leader of the Dark-aligned faction. Whether or not Dumbledore is the ‘magical guardian’ of the Boy-who-lived is the matter of much speculation. But there are very few other candidates for your guardianship, only two actually, and one of them is currently in their prison for supposedly betraying the location of your parents’ safe house to the Speaker. No one knows where the other one is, but it is speculated that he was declared unfit to assume your guardianship for some reason or another.”
This Dumbledore character must have been the one to place J here. It made sense, considering that J would have a large degree of influence in the stick-wielders society when he was older. He is perhaps seen as an even stronger symbol of the ‘Light’-faction than Dumbledore. He was a possible threat to Dumbledore’s power. By keeping J in an abusive environment, Dumbledore was attempting to create an ignorant, easily moldable pawn. He probably hadn’t factored in that J would turn out the way he had. It gave J a certain pleasure to know that he was creating a mess of the man’s plans. He would not be a pawn, to be subject to the whim of another, and sacrificed as they saw fit. He would have to be careful, though. The man was powerful, and had probably had some sort of surveillance on J since the day that he had been placed there. He was certain that no one was aware of his displays of power, so whatever type of surveillance it was it wasn’t intended to monitor his every movement, only ensure his continued presence with the Dursleys.
Which meant that they had done something with their power to watch him, or had assigned a person to watch the house to ensure that he did not escape. Neither was a pleasant prospect.
“Are there any of the stick-wieldersss living near here?” He asks the snakes.
“No, but there isss one that carriesss the smell of their kind, but not the power. She livess in the nesst of disssgusting four-legged creaturesss called ‘catsss’. We had barely essscaped the vile creaturess when we first met you. It iss but a few housesss that way.” It indicates a direction down the street with an inclination of its head.
That must be his watcher, then. Once he has determined whether or not he is under any other type of surveillance, figuring out how to evade his watcher should not be too terribly hard.
He looks at the snake, then smiles.
“Thank you.”
It’s the most sincere thing that he can ever remember saying.