Creation
J had not been lying when he had told the boy that he had been born human. For while he himself had no recollection of the first eighteen months of his life, Lily remembered his birth and the subsequent months quite well. It was rather strange, remembering his birth from Lily’s perspective, but the knowledge that it was not actually his own memories afforded him some distance from the images of her distended gut and the squalling purple and red creature that emerged from between her legs. He knew that the creature was in fact a past version of himself, but he found it nonetheless somewhat disgusting. As small and fragile as he was now, he had been even more so then, with eyes swollen unopened slits and pudgy, weak arms that insisted on flailing aimlessly. He is glad, as much as he is capable of being glad, that he does not remember the weakness and terror that inhabiting such a pathetically weak body would have surely caused.
Lily had cradled his wrinkled, splotchy body to her sweaty bare chest, and smiled at him as she felt the faint spark of his very human magic from within the chest of his infant body. He doesn’t understand her desire to hold such a revolting creature in her arms, nor her fondness of it, and seeing as death has stripped all accompanying emotion from her memories, he is quite certain that he never will. He supposes that some of the emotional attachment could stem from the fact that she essentially created him, carried his parasitic being within her own body for nine months as it slowly gained the ability to sustain itself outside of her womb. Yes, he can see how such an investment of personal effort in his creation could foster such an attachment. As his effective ‘creator’ (for what else could Lily in truth be called) she likely felt some sort of responsibility towards him. A bond between creator and creation, which he understands quite well. He himself is rather fond of his own creations, especially the flowers which he had put so much effort into. He had of course created them with a specific purpose in mind, which they had fulfilled spectacularly, but he supposes that the basic idea is the same.
From the memories of the-Lily-that-was he knows that he was born human. A weak and squalling human infant. And he had remained so, as far as he could ascertain until the night of October 31, 1981. The date of both his progenitors deaths. Or murders, really. (Perhaps he should look into revenge…)
The reason for his metamorphosis from human into something other lay in Lily’s memories. Or to be exact, what she was missing from them. It was of course possible that some of her remaining memories had been altered, as Lily had never been the most proficient in the Mind Arts, despite being passably skilled in them. But it was beyond the skill of any but a master Occlumens to distinguish between true memories and subtly altered ones. So at the moment it was beyond his ability to determine if that was indeed the case. What he did know was that whatever Lily had been working on for the Unspeakables had been the key to his current state of existence. Some of her memories of the night of her own death were missing as well, large swaths of blankness that he knew held the answers that he sought. The memories of her actual moment of death remained, the looming image of a pale figure with eyes a glowing red, inhumanly slit and then a strangely high voice and green light that haunted J’s dreams in his early childhood.
It was true, that the Killing curse was painless. Lily had barely noticed the transition between life and the limbo she was now trapped in. The part of her that was an Unspeakable couldn’t help but note the fascinating sensation of being parted from her body. She had wondered at the time, if that was how ghosts felt at the moment of their creation.
Lily had been a remarkably brilliant witch. He supposes that’s why she hadn’t run; she understood that doing so would only prolong the inevitable. She stood instead, and fought, like the gryffindor she had been in life. He still isn’t sure how to feel about that, so he does not ponder over long on it.
In her memories, he also witnesses the death of the man he might’ve called father, in another world. He watches as fear passes across the man’s face, followed by something he thinks might be determination, listens to the muffled shouted as the memory of the man fights off the looming figure that J knows to be the Speaker. He watches as the man dies. He feels very little attachment to the man, despite witnessing more than seven years worth of Lily’s interactions with him. He himself will never personally know James Potter, and it serves no purpose to dwell on futures that will never be.
Beyond Birthday’s existence is peculiar, to say the least. J is quite certain that Beyond, and all the other orphans who live at Whammy’s are non-magical and completely human. They lacked the glow that all magical beings had within his sight. Their numbers were also perfectly ordinary for non-magical humans. At first, Beyond’s ability to see the names and numbers had made J think that perhaps the two of them were similar beings. But Beyond possessed an eidetic memory, much like himself, and could not remember a time that he had not been able to see the Names and Numbers.
While not being very skilled in Occlumency, J had quickly become proficient at his approximation of Legilimency. While not exactly like the Legilimency performed by Wizards and Witches, J could capably sift through the thoughts and memories of humans without detection. Really, the core principles of both techniques were quite similar. So he could, in fact, definitively say that Beyond was nothing like him, based on what he had seen in his memories. The Dark energy that pulsed around his head like the grasping tentacles of some horrible being seemed to be the source of Beyond’s paranormal ocular ability. It appeared to be some sort of parasitic energy construct, which was not damaging enough to render Beyond nonfunctional, but different enough for it to be obvious that it was not really a part of the boy. The energy did not seem to be overly affecting his cognitive capabilities; as his intelligence was entirely natural, but it did seem to be leaching off of what J had decided to term the boy’s ‘life-energy’, for lack of a more properly descriptive term.
Beyond’s life-energy was unique, not in composition but in consistency. The life-energy of non-magical humans generally floated around their bodies in vaporous streams of wispy light, drifting off in streams behind them, eventually losing vibrancy and finally disintegrating altogether upon the person’s death. The life energy of the few magical humans and beings that he had seen since gaining his own ability was generally more cohesive. There was a sort of order to the brilliant wisps of light, resembling shining webs of spider silk almost constrained entirely to the magical being’s physical body. Even upon the being's death the web of light that represented their life energy did not disintegrate, but faded in a most peculiar way that seemed more like phasing out of the current plane of existence than ceasing to exist. Beyond’s life energy is neither loosely held-together like that of a non-magical being, nor completely contained within his physical body in the way that a magical being’s life energy would be. It is rather a combination of the two, which J finds fascinating. Sometimes he renders himself invisible entirely, and just sits next to Beyond and watches him think. The boy truly has such a complex mind, full of twists and weaves and swirling masses of thought that exist just beyond the horizon of true madness.
On the days that he does not spend sitting next to Beyond, mostly in silence, and watching the glowing red digits, he explores, and he watches. Whammy’s House, he finds is a peculiar institution, not in that he himself finds it strange but in that it is singularly unique. It strikes him as something a government would arrange, a training institution for brilliant children, still young enough to be molded to their own purposes. The founder, Quilish Whammy, billionaire, inventor, war-veteran. He’s interesting, powerful, and potentially useful. That is a possibility that he will have to explore much later.
The other boy that Beyond had mentioned, L, was slightly more difficult to find than the other children J occasionally followed. At thirteen, the boy is not the oldest orphan at the institution, but he is certainly the most active. He is often gone, accompanied by the founder, on what J knows to be cases. He apparently liked to be close to the action.
Because of the boy’s frequent absences from the orphanage, it takes three days of wandering the halls of the institution for J to encounter him. He finds L is in his room, which unlike the other children he has to himself. It is large, with empty white walls illuminated only by the light of the many screens that L has set up. It is the middle of the day, but the sunlight is hidden behind thick blackout curtains. J pays little attention to the streams of data constantly updating on each screen, and approaches the thin figure crouched in front of them. He moves slowly, carefully, in order to avoid the many trays and delicate containers filled to the brim with delicacies and sweets. L is steadily eating nonpareils from a heaping platter sitting next to him on a low table. L bites each sweet in half, almost viciously, like an animal ripping flesh from felled prey.
Does this figure also feel the gnawing hunger, gripping at edges of his mind? Perhaps he does, but J knows that the child is human, regardless of his gragoyle-like posture and unblinking black eyes, and so his hunger is less than his.