Numbers
He is almost four, when he first begins to see the numbers. It starts out as pain, different from the ache that constantly permeates his malnourished body. It’s sharper, like shards of broken glass scraping at the insides of his mind, and his powers do not shield him from it. The pain dances across his eyes like the piercing glass claws of some mad beast. He can almost see the creature as it claws apart his mind with vast swathes of liquid pain. The darkness of his cupboard flickers in time with the scraping shards, and he would scream if he thought it would make the pain stop. Screaming never does, though.
The taste of iron fills his mouth. He must have bitten his tongue. He can’t feel it, can’t feel anything at all past the agonizing pain thrumming just behind his eyes. He’s sorely tempted to rip those traitorous spheres out of their sockets, and squash them for their complicity in his torture. But he knows that that is an illogical thought, fueled by the harsh, unyielding pain.
He clenches his fingers tightly into the thin, worn fabric of his blanket. His knuckles must be white, he’s gripping so hard. The fabric rips easily beneath the pain fueled spasming clenches of his fingers.
The whispers are so loud now, almost shouting out harsh wordless sounds. He can’t tell if they’re angry or worried or gleeful at the sight of his pain. He doesn’t much care.
It’s pulsing now, the pain inside his head, like the drums of some mad tantric ritual. He wonders for a moment through the blinding pain, if this is some new torment devised for him by the wand-wielding old man who placed him here. Has he been cursed? Is this meant to be his punishment for some unknown infraction? It grates on him that he so rarely ever knows the whys of things that happen to him.
But he does not think it is a punishment. It is both illogical and ineffective to punish him without informing him of what he is being punished for, exactly. Despite all of his flaws, Dumbledore has at least some semblance of logic, and doesn’t seem the type to waste his time on ineffective things. J highly doubts that Dumbledore would inflict potentially debilitating pain upon him unless he had a particular reason to do so. Thus he rules out enemy action, with a passably high degree of certainty.
These thoughts distract him from the pain for but a moment. Its intensity increases past the point he was aware was physically possible, and he feels wetness on his hands. He assumes that his nails have broken the skin. Then something changes, like a cascade of liquid dousing the raging pain. He can feel the sparks of his power burning along the invisible wounds inside his mind, but it isn’t painful. All that’s left now is the stinging memory of pain, which he notices is slowly fading. He’s tired. So very tired, both in mind and body. Which is curious because it has been quite a while since he has last felt exhausted enough to actually be tired. It weighs upon his small body like a thick blanket of lead, and he feels his muscles go limp, his fingers unclenching from their death hold on the now bloody fabric of his blanket. His eyelids are heavy,he allows them to slide shut, enjoying the feel of doing so without pain.
His mind is claimed by blankness.
When he wakes, it is gradual, as he fights through the thick and cloying blackness that holds him in the realm of sleep. His eyes are crusted closed. He wipes the substance away with his blood-crusted hands, and opens his eyes. He blinks rapidly to clear them, then looks around himself. He’s struck by how clear everything is. His cupboard is dark, as always, but he finds that he can make out every detail of every whorl in the wood grain, and the drops of blood on his blanket stand out in crisp definition. He marvels at his newfound vision for a moment. Even in daylight his vision had never been this perfect. In fact, he had even suspected that he would have had eventually had to rely on glasses later on in life.
He decides that the avoidance of such a fate is a distinctly positive occurrence. He also comes to the conclusion that the pain he experienced in his eyes had been some sort of side effect of the maturation of his powers.
He tilts his head back against his ratty pillow,and peers up at the cobwebbed stairs. It’s fascinating, being able to see in minute detail his spiders spin their delicate webs. It’s almost like a dance, he thinks, as the small creatures scurry from strand to strand, delicate silk trailing from their spinnerets. They also had the potential to be immensely useful, if one knew how to apply their natural attributes. When he had been younger, before pain had become a mere triviality and the minds of lesser beings became his to command, he had suffered their bites.
They were poisonous, of course, just enough to cause him pain, but not enough to cause him significant harm. But that pain had been significant to him, as young as he had been, and still was, really. They showed him that the fact that something wasn’t human or larger than him did not guarantee that it wouldn’t hurt him. He knows that it was not done out of any malicious intent on the spiders part, he has touched their minds and knows that they are far too primitive emotionally speaking to harbor feelings of any kind, negative or otherwise. But that does not change the fact that they hurt him, trivial as it was in comparison to the pain inflicted by Walrus, or even Horse.
But J was a child with perfect recall who had little understanding of the phrase forgive and forget. He was entirely incapable of the latter and graciously declined to do the former. So while he was fully capable of understanding the creatures, and why they caused him pain, he was not above exacting his own petty revenge against them. So he made them his slaves, of a sort. They weren’t particularly sentient enough to be actually bothered by the fact that another being held complete and absolute control over their every action (they seemed quite content as long as they could spin their webs, actually), but it still gave him a small amount of satisfaction that he had done something to them. He is well aware that spider silk possessed tensile strength comparable to steel, and has a wide array of uses. So he has his little eight-legged minions (they aren’t really his minions in the truest sense of the word, but he quite simply likes the way the word sounds) spinning yards of gossamer silk for him. He has actually built up quite the collection of spider silk, hidden away in dark corners until he has some use for it. He isn’t quite sure what he intends to do with that much spider silk, but he’s certain that he’ll figure something out. For now, he simply basks in the satisfaction of quite possibly being the only person in the world, or at least Britain, with his own vast hoard of spider-spun silk.
He is broken from his tangential line of thought by the resounding thud of Walrus making his rather ponderous way down the stairs. Dust displaced from the ceiling of the cupboard by the vibrations coats the spider-silk in white, like tiny ash-covered pathways. J narrows his eyes at the crack in the door, which let in a feeble ray of light.
The cupboard door is wrenched open with a violence that appears to be characteristic of Walrus’s each and every action. J is honestly surprised that the hinges haven’t broken by now. The red and disgustingly rotund face of Walrus glares down at J, who is struck by a slight moment of regret of his newfound vision because it means that he must view each and every grotesque detail of Walrus’ face; from his wobby double chins, to his twitching whiskers and the rage-induced sweat constantly beading on his greasy forehead. J feels slight nausea at the vision before him, but continues to stare impassively at the repulsive being before him. Walrus grabs the back of J’s shirt and hauls him up. J is reminded again, just how small he is.
“SO YOU’RE FINALLY AWAKE YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING FREAK!” It bellows loudly at him. Walrus seems entirely incapable of speaking at any other volume, J muses as he subtly dodges the spittle flying from Walrus’ nearly frothing mouth.
“THOUGHT YOU COULD LAZE AROUND SLEEPING FOR THREE WHOLE DAYS DID YOU BOY? JUST LIKE THE USELESS LITTLE DELINQUENT YOU ARE, YOU--”
J tunes out the rest of Walrus’ mostly redundant rant to consider the fact that he has apparently been asleep for three days. It is rather worrying, considering the fact that he usually requires less than four hours of sleep a week. Whatever transformation that his powers induced must have caused his body to become dangerously exhausted. He finds that troubling, if the only result is his improved vision. While useful, he doesn’t really see how it would warrant three days of unconsciousness. His attention returns to Walrus, as he continues ranting about J’s uselessness and general delinquency.
It is then that J notices the Numbers. They are red, like freshly spilled blood, and float innocuously above Walrus’ head. The number has ten digits, which are counting down as he watches. Above the number is the name Vernon Dursley, which he recalls is what Walrus calls himself. The letters are vibrating, twitching and blurring in and out of focus as if they don’t quite want to spell out that name. J is entranced by the numbers, as they count down, second by second.
Then Walrus decides to emphasize one of his points by slamming J’s head into the wall next to the cupboard. J allows himself to fall into a crumpled heap as he feels the blood drip down his scalp.
“Bloody useless.” Walrus mutters to himself, then turns towards the kitchen. He glances back at J. “You’d better not get blood on the carpet, boy.”
By the end of the day J found that Horse and Swine also had names and Numbers floating above their heads, relentlessly ticking down in front of his eyes. The names floating above their heads also had the same strange twitching quality that Walrus’ did. It is terribly distracting for J, who finds himself unable to look away from the Numbers as they count down. He has a suspicion as to what exactly they are counting down to.
He spends most of the day in the garden. Horse had thrown a small piece of burnt toast at him for his breakfast, then locked him out there with orders to ‘make sure everything was perfect’. He supposes she’ll have some of her friends over later, to boast about her perfect garden to, and gossip about the neighborhood with. He’s usually locked into his cupboard during these meetings, so he’s always close enough to hear everything that they say. It is from these meetings that he learned of the strange woman named Mrs.Figg. The housewives had tittered in amusement as they discussed the strange woman and her fondness of cats. He had known for a while at that point that his assigned watcher had been the woman with cats, who the snakes informed him was a squib, but he had never before had a name to place with the still faceless woman. As far as he could tell the woman was not a terribly attentive watcher, more concerned with her precious cats than monitoring her charge. It was almost insulting to be watched by someone who was so horribly ineffectual. But it was useful to J, in that it would make his eventual escape so much easier. It would probably be months before she even notices that he was gone.
He considers this, as he tends to his petunias. His newfound vision could be useful, but he does not want to use an untested power without understanding all of the ramifications. He will train it later, he thinks, when he is free. He does wonder though, what it means that he can see their names and their Numbers. What does that make him, if he is really able to see the counters of people’s lives?
He touches his mind to the energy matrix of the petunias’ collective consciousness, feeling the darkness that roiled within it. It is immensely satisfying to be able to witness the growth of his creation, he thinks as he sprinkles water about their bases. He feels an itch in his eyes for a moment, and rubs at them with the heels of his palms. When he opens his eyes he is almost blinded by a blazing sea of light. Squinting, he makes out a dark web shimmering around the petunias. It pulses, like the heartbeat of a living being, and he finds himself reaching out to touch it. His hand passes through it. It must be their magic, he realizes, then looks around. There is a great barrier of light, brighter than the wispy swirls and eddies of energy that he noticed filled the air. It surrounds his prison like an enormous glass cage/, and for a moment he feels almost like some specimen of rare animal, trapped inside an observation tank. Which he realizes after a moment, he is. He scowls at that.
It is powerful, the barrier, and he wonders if Dumbledore placed it there to keep him in. Curious, he reaches out a miniscule tendril of his power, thin as his spiders’ silk, to touch it. He is struck by an overwhelming flood of sensations, a myriad of positive emotions belonging to the barriers creator. He’s never experienced any of these emotions before, and it frightens him even though he knows with utmost certainty that the barrier would never cause him harm. He is frightened because he knows that the emotions are directed towards him, and he knows that no matter how hard he tries, he will never understand how or why someone could feel such a thing for him. There is an ache in his chest, and he rubs at it with one of his dirt-covered hands. It doesn’t go away. He frowns and stares vacantly at the rippling wall of light. It makes him think of happiness, somehow, even though he can’t really ever remembering experiencing it. He feels a sensation of warmth, almost as if someone’s breath was ghosting across his cheek, and through the connection with the barrier he receives a flash, an image--a memory, or perhaps both of flowing red hair and bright green eyes that blazed.
And then he knows, despite his lack of education on the subject of the stick-wielders’ magic, that this barrier, this ward that’s tied to him is nothing remotely normal. There is something bubbling inside him, an emotion of some sort and he doesn’t know what it is. He reaches out a hand, which he detachedly notices is trembling finely, and places it against the barrier.
He closes his eyes and whispers to it, “Lily.”
He can feel her smile.