VB137
One of the first things that J did upon his arrival at the safe house in Winchester was to take a warm bath. A long, luxurious bath complete with magical bubbles produced by a small bottle which apparently contained some sort of potion. He realizes now why bubble baths were so popular. He cannot deny that they were extremely comfortable,more so than he had imagined, as well as amusing. Watching the bubbles float around him reminded him of the spider and the webs he had them weave in his cupboard. He makes sure to pop every single bubble before exiting the bath, reveling in his freedom to linger.
The bathroom in the safehouse was practically palatial; the result of Lily’s proficiency with Expansion charms and her own fondness for long baths. The bath itself is large, with a diameter of several feet, and is sunken into the floor. He decides that he shall make good use of the room, in the future.
He’s surprised, more so than he should be, by how clean he is when he exits the bath. He’s always assumed that his skin was a tan color, but now he realizes that it was merely a covering of filth that Horse’s infrequent hose-downs of his person did not properly remove. He’s grateful for that now, not because he in any way enjoyed the cold short ‘showers’, but because the filth hid what seems to be more proof of his ‘otherness’. His skin isn’t so much white, or pale as it is translucent; almost as if it was perfectly smooth thin paper, stretched over some pulsing light source. There are silvery veins of light dancing across his skin like the lace of dragonfly wings. He isn’t sure how much of this is apparent to others, or if his own strange Sight was to blame. He knows that it isn’t normal, by any stretch of the imagination, and definitely eye-catching, so he calls forth his power and lets it dance across the surface of his skin, like a thin layer of liquid sunlight, and wills it to hide the pulsing light and the silvery glowing veins. He doesn’t want to take the chance that someone might see.
It’s quite an interesting development, he admits to himself, though he wonders how he failed to notice the silvery veins sooner, especially with his newly sharp vision. However, considering the events of the past few days he supposes he can forgive himself for missing it earlier.
The bedrooms, he finds are not anywhere near as grand as the bathroom, and are much more functional in design. He has very little need for an actual bed, seeing as he rarely sleeps, but he has always wanted a room of his own, simply because it had been explicitly denied him. It’s more a matter of principle to him, than necessity. There are three of them, all roughly the same size, so he takes the one whose windows looked out onto the back, and the small dark forest there. The floors are wooden, which reminds him of the floor of his cupboard and the bloody stains that marked it, so he drags his small childish fingers across the planks of his bedroom letting his power flow into it and wills them to live. Soon the floors are covered with green, bright leaves and unnaturally soft grass, fragrant and comforting beneath his bare feet. He breathes it in and smiles. In the back of his mind, Lily whispers her approval.
It had been nearly a week since J had received the memory transfer from lily, and two since he had made his escape to the House in Winchester. The memories were there, inside his mind which had accepted them as his own, because really they were since Lily was little more than an extension of his own will. She was a part of him and so were her memories. But she had twenty one years of memories, as well as a little over four years of memories of her existence after death, and he had barely four of his own.
Death had stripped the majority of the stronger emotions from the memories, and most of what he had felt at first contact with the ward was muted now, like a voice calling in thick fog. This was helpful in the assimilation of the memories, however the sheer quantity of information was almost overwhelming, even with a good week to sort through it. The majority of Lily’s episodic memories were of very little use to him, especially those of her early childhood. Those were mostly unsettling, seeing as he experienced the memories from Lily’s perspective. Strangeness aside,they did provide him with something to compare his own childhood experiences with. Which confirmed his suspicions of it being generally uncommon and most definitely not normal. Lily had appeared to have enjoyed her childhood, very much so and was provided all the basic necessities by her caretakers with little trouble on their part, even with the exhibitions of accidental magic she displayed. She had certainly not been ostracized or punished for her powers, though sometimes he thinks her parents had been worried for her. Which he finds is a decidedly strange thing to experience. Lily’s parents had been a kindly couple, elderly and deceptively harmless in the way that some adults were. Horse had appeared harmless as well, as a child, although that might have been the effect of Lily’s own fondness for her.
The early years of Lily’s memories did teach him one important thing; people treat cute children very nicely. Especially little girls. Lily had been an especially beautiful child, with her shining green eyes and bright red hair. Horse had been homely even then, with her spindly arms and pinched face providing a foil for her younger sibling’s cherubic perfection. And it was obvious, even to a child who had experienced a minimal amount of social interaction, that people had treated Lily better because she looked nicer than Horse had. Humans were extremely shallow creatures, he found. It would be a quality that could be exceedingly easy to exploit.
J is quite certain that he fits the cultural definition of ‘cute’ much better than Swine had, and thus according to this logic he should have been treated better than him. Lily reminds him that her sister’s family were just generally unpleasant people, who more likely than not had serious issues. He can do nothing but agree.
He isn’t really sure where he falls on the hypothetical scale of culturally perceived ‘cuteness’, but as he understands he has a few more years until he has to worry about his overall physical appearance. He is still very young, and he is aware that his size is smaller than the average four year old, which he believes to be a product of his unique physiology and lack of proper nutrition for the years he was imprisoned. The majority of humans who are unaware of his past, muggles, the stick-wielders called them, would be inclined to treat him nicely on account of his small size alone, which according to what he could piece together from Lily’s memories and his own readings would engender some sort of maternal protectiveness on the part of the majority of adult females, and a protective leniency of sorts among adult males.
Of course, a child of his age and size, alone in public would arouse concern and suspicion, which would draw attention to him and generally be counterproductive. Despite the gap of years between the image disseminated in the Wizarding World and his present appearance, he is still extremely recognizable among the stick-wielders. But if he changed a few basic identifying characteristics, such as gender, hair color or his scar, the probability of discovery by the stick-wielders would be greatly decreased. As far as he is concerned cross-dressing is a viable option for disguise should he ever feel the need to appear in public. Combined with the glamours that Lily had known, he feels confident in his ability to go undetected in public.
While he knows that Lily is incapable of betraying him, J feels that he must prepare for all possibilities if he is to ensure his freedom for the next several years. Because while he is free of his primary captors, he knows that they are just pawns, and the Chessmaster is a man to be feared. The dark shadow of the possibility of recapture haunts the corners of his recently expanded mind. He is powerful, yes, but he lacks experience, he lacks the knowledge of how to use his power. And the people searching for him are powerful as well, with the ability to erase his memories-obliviate, Lily whispers--it would be so easy for them to take him back there, make him forget that he ever left. It frightens him, this possible desecration of his mind, because his mind is the only thing that’s really and legitimately his aside from his power. Lily assures him that her presence would prevent that possibility, she protects his mind from intrusions, as do his powers. But J still fears. It latches on like some terrible creature, black and corrosive like acid burning a deep wound into his mind because there is always some part of him that doubts his own knowledge. There are endless possibilities, and being convinced that he is actually safe from some of them means that he won’t be prepared for them. He refuses to entertain the notion of not being prepared. He sees an image of a scarred man with a electric blue eye spinning in a metal socket across his connection with Lily. Mad-eye the memories in his own mind inform him. He was also always prepared. He was a soldier, and he survived where others perished. J cannot help but approve of the man.
Lily had been seventeen when she graduated from Hogwarts with top NEWT scores, and began working towards her Charms Mastery. She had achieved it in seven months, making her the youngest Charms Mistress in the last century. Her marriage to James had occurred shortly after, which the Horse had been invited to but did not attend. A few months after the wedding, she had been approached by the Department of Mysteries. She accepted their offer of a job, enticed by the knowledge that would be available to her. James had been told that she was conducting ‘independent research’ funded by a small Charms development company.
There were a few disturbing blank spots in her memories of the years she spent researching in the DoM. Lily assumed that they were side-effects of the many experiments that she took part in, as it was standard procedure for the researchers to be obliviated after the particularly sensitive ones. Apparently remembering them would have been detrimental to the Unspeakables’ continued sanity, which would have greatly decreased their overall usefulness to the DoM. J found this suspicious, but at the moment there was little he could do about it.
The house was apparently a remnant from her time as an Unspeakable. Working as one apparently fostered a healthy sense of secrecy and paranoia. She had set it up as a safehouse, should the worst come to pass. Lily had warded it herself, using wardstones that she helped develop in the DoM, as part of a larger experimental project. She never had the chance to use it, as James didn’t know about it and had been convinced that the house in Godric’s Hollow would be safe enough under the fidelius. He had been wrong, obviously.
The safe house, which he has decided to refer to as VB137, was hidden from both ‘muggle’ and ‘magical’ eyes. The wards Lily had developed worked as a sort of derivative of the fidelius, and were the only ones currently in use, seeing as they were still experimental. When Lily died, J had become the secret keeper, and the knowledge remained hidden inside his mind until Lily had told him of the safe house, allowing him to access the information. The house had been bought the muggle way, with British pounds from a bank account Lily had opened under a fake identity. It was new enough that no extensive records existed, and those that did exist had been strategically ‘misplaced’. The land it was built on was of very little interest to anyone but the most eccentric wildlife enthusiast, and even to them the wards dulled their interest, subtly deflecting anyone’s notice of the house or its grounds. There were no records of it in the magical world, and the wards placed around it prevented the Ministry from detecting anything other than the natural ambient magic. The wards were for all intents and purposes invisible to them.
The kitchen was stocked with enough food to last an adult human for several years; the cupboards had expansion charms placed on them, and the food was placed under a stasis ward which would theoretically preserve it for centuries. Lily had forgone the purchase of a house elf since she personally found the practice of keeping sentient beings as slaves barbaric. J thought this was a prudent decision seeing as a House Elf could create a potential breach of security. Part of him was also capable of empathizing with the beings, who from what he had seen in Lily’s memories, were an extraordinarily powerful race who had been forced into subjugation through trickery. No one was certain of the exact circumstances of the first covenant between the races, but it was implied that it had began as a more equal relationship which had been twisted beyond all recognition by the human stick-wielders. It reminded him much of his own circumstances.
J had little reason to leave the safety of VB137’s wards, as he had everything he needed to survive there. So for the next few weeks he stays within the wards, which extended a good way into the forest behind the safe house. He spends much of his time simply reveling in the intoxicating feeling of freedom. Having spent much of his life confined in a small house and its small backyard, the area that the wards encompassed is practically gigantic to his own senses. He enjoyed exploring the woods, which were apparently home to some of the lesser magical beings such as bowtruckles and small faeries, which had some sort of strange fascination with him, and were constantly stealing strands of his hair.
They seemed to be weaving something out of it, but he could sense no malicious intent from the creatures, so he decided to leave them to it. They liked him, after all, and he saw no purpose in changing that. They also reminded him a bit of the mice and the voles he had entertained himself with at the Dursleys, and restrains the urge to pet them. He leaves out small bowls of honey, and milk for the creatures, which he tells himself is because he simply likes to watch them. He wonders if faeries had a language, and if he could learn it. He’s sure he could, and it could be useful. Such small creatures would make wonderful spies, more so than bugs or small mammals since they were significantly more intelligent. He pops a strawberry in his mouth and hums thoughtfully as he watches the little beings flit around him on iridescent wings.
The constant hunger which had plagued him during his imprisonment was somewhat alleviated by the highly nutritious food that the health-conscious Lily had stocked the safe house with. He finds the fresh fruits such as strawberries and apples to be especially delicious; there was something wonderfully satisfying about biting into the tender red flesh. There was no chemical aftertaste or cloying thickness left in his mouth like the Dursley’s food would have. He ate almost constantly, snacking on a handful of cut fruit or berries as he wandered the grounds. Had he actually been the human child that he appeared to be, the food would have sufficed. But he wasn’t, and the hunger still lingered like the smell of smoke. It was a hunger that could not be assuaged by physical means, and ran deeper. He had lived with it for almost the entirety of his life, so it was a simple matter to ignore it. But even as it caused him no great physical discomfort, the hunger reminded him that he was not adequately acquainted with his needs as a nonhuman being. Lily had no knowledge of beings similar to himself, and she had had the knowledge of the Department of Mysteries at her disposal. J considers the possibility that the snakes had been correct when they had told him he might be entirely unique. After all, neither one of his parent had any creature blood, so whatever he was had to have resulted from the combination of the ritual Lily had used the night the Speaker had attacked and the actions of the Speaker himself.
There was always the possibility, however that he shared some traits with some of the more esoteric beings. It was quite common in nature, from what he had read. Convergent evolution, he believed it was called.
Lily had received high scores in her Care of Magical Creatures class, but she was by no means an expert on the subject. Which meant that it was a good thing that she had stocked VB137 with a small reference library. Seeing as Magical Creatures and Beings were not her areas of specialization, there were only three reference books on the subjects, a rather weighty tome titled Creatures Strange and Wondrous , a leather notebook titled The Ilk of Shine and Shadows and a smaller book called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them, which was apparently one of Lily’s old textbooks. He wasted no time in reading them, and found several quite interesting. Despite the snakes dislike for cats, he found himself interested in purchasing a kneazle for himself. Their ability to sense untrustworthy people had potential to be useful to him. None of the creatures in the books seemed similar to him at all, although several of the beings mentioned sustained themselves by consuming blood, energy, or even souls. He suspected that he would eventually need to consume something similar. He found nothing similar to the silvery veins in his skin, either.
The sight that he had gained, which seemed similar to a rare ability Lily called ‘Mage Sight’, had stabilized and over the course of a few weeks he grew used to the constant eddies of power that swirled within his vision. It did not seem that he could deactivate it, so he went about discovering its uses. The energy he saw seemed to be a combination of something which equated to ‘life energy’, and the ambient energy, or magic, that came from the Earth itself. He had not made contact with any humans yet, so he was unable to test whether or not he could see the names of all of them, as well as their lifespan. He was quite curious if the names he saw were the names that they self-identified as or if they were their ‘legal’ names, which would be honestly quite confusing for him. Names were internalized by people, who gave them powers by doing so. He was operating under the assumption that his eyes showed him some sort of quality inherent to humans, but seeing as he didn’t see names or lifespans for animals he supposed it was possible that there was some sort of system set up to regulate and record the names and lifespans of humans. The ramifications of that were somewhat worrying. He decides that he shall have to be especially careful while experimenting with the Numbers and Names.
He wanders around the safe house, watching the flows and eddies of energy. They were bright and thin which reminded him of spider-silk. (He had brought his hoard of silk with him, but left the spiders. Their purpose was better served left to torment the Dursleys.) He has decided that he likes the way the house smells, like wood and old books. It was a welcome change from the sharp smell of chemical cleaner, sweat and rage that saturated the Dursley’s. He is struck by a brief pang of regret that he did take the chance to lace the Dursleys’ food with those chemicals that they loved so much. All those wonderful chemicals, most were poisonous, and some lethal in sufficient quantities. It would have been a painful death. But no, that would have been a horribly mundane way to punish the creatures; he’s got so many wonderful ideas he has been wanting to try after all. The deep festering darkness inside his mind quivers with glee, at the thought.
The wards around VB137 were nowhere near as bright to his sight as Lily was, which was meant that they were considerably weaker than she was. Their form was fascinating, however, and he studies the intricately laced patterns of energy that form them. He can feel the intent that Lily had woven into them, and he finds the precision and the complexity beautiful. Elegant, efficient, effective. It was a work of art, and he wishes he were more capable of appreciating it.
He tosses the marbles he holds in his hand, letting their gentle clinks lull his mind into a meditative state. It’s nice, to let his mind rest like this, but he finds that he has had enough of rest, and now was rapidly approaching the dangerous territory of boredom. He had never really had this problem at the Dursley’s, as he was always kept alert and watching by the sharp tang of paranoia that always crept at the edges of his mind. He felt it less here, it was muted as if someone had tried to smother it to death with a pillow, but failed, and it clung stubbornly to its metaphorical existence within his mind.
He decides that regardless of his other skills, the one thing that he absolutely no skill in is human relations. He had lived in a cupboard for three years with minimal human contact. That in no way prepared him for normal human contact, which was a problem because failure to blend in due to a lack of social skills would draw attention to him. It would be suspicious, and he would very much like to avoid that. Because he knows that he cannot stay in the safety of VB137’s wards. He’d drive himself mad. If he wasn’t already, which he would rather not think about.
He decides that it would be advantageous to observe human children of his same approximate age, and briefly recalls that there is an orphanage nearby. It should suit his needs.
Whammy’s is an imposing structure, all old stone and steel. There is an iron gate at the front, black and sharp and distinctly unfriendly. There are security cameras there as well, high quality, which suggested it was a well-funded orphanage. It is muggle, of course, with only the barest of wisps of energy dancing around the building. The Forest separates their property from his, so he simply walks through it to reach the back of Whammy’s. There are children there, some are playing a game involving a ball of some sort. He is unfamiliar with it, and simply watches from the shadows he has hidden himself in.
He fiddles a bit with the hem of the long shirt he is wearing, plucking at the thread as he watches the red ball bounce back and forth between the children. He isn’t wearing a dress, but his hair is long enough to pass as a girl, and he has glamoured his eyes and his skin. He considers it sufficient for a disguise. The youngest of the children appear to be about his age, but for the most part they seem uninteresting. They all look to be normal humans, no real energy to speak of. Some of the older children seem stressed, with dark circles under their eyes. A good number of them are reading books; thick tomes and what appear to be textbooks. He thinks he could attempt to talk with them, it doesn’t seem too terribly difficult seeing as most of them weren’t doing much of it. But they were boring, and he didn’t really want to. So he scans the sea of glowing red names and numbers again, studying the interactions between children. Some were playing some sort of team-based game he supposed was meant to foster a feeling of camaraderie among the children. A smaller group of children were chasing a single child, who was grinning maniacally. He thinks it is a game of tag, which he had heard of but did not really understand the point of. How was having multiple people chase you fun? Or perhaps it was some sort of speed and evasion training, cleverly disguised as a mere game? He thinks that that must surely be the case.
Then he notices a disturbance among the eddies of energy. There are dark wisps of energy floating from the other side of the yard, where a small figure is crouched beneath a tree. It is a boy, with dark hair and prominent bags under his eyes. J estimates that he is four or five years older than himself. He is hunched over a jar, which was filled with some sort of jam which he was scooping out with his fingers. He had very long fingers, pale and spidery like that of a corpse. The dark energy seemed to radiate from his eyes, which glowed the same red color as the Numbers that floated above his head. The tendrils seemed to caress the boy, clinging and possessive as they danced around and across his too-pale skin.
J flicks his eyes up, above the numbers. Beyond Birthday.
What a terribly strange name to have. J decided that he liked him.