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I’ve found myself developing an increasing dislike for Daphne Greengrass’ face. Every time I wander into the vault, be it to make a few jogging laps around the inside, or just to sit on a pile of coins and skip them across the expansive vault, she feels the need to look at me. Its growing quite tiresome, I must admit. I mean sure; at the beginning, those hazel eyes and the smoldering gaze would bring such an intense joy to me. The resentment she had etched into the very pores of her face brought with it a certain power. The thought that; with all of her haughtiness, I was possibly the first person to ever inspire such a look, was intoxicating. And then it just got old.

“Stop looking at me.”

“Why should I, you bastard?”

“Because I said so?” How does she not realize that’s the reason why she should do what I say? It’s not like she has any other hope of getting out of here besides me. But of course she doesn’t. So there she sits, continuing to stare blankly at me. I really don’t like her face. “Look, Daph, you’re not going anywhere for a while. It would be a lot easier on the both of us if you just did what I said. You’re at my mercy while you’re in here, and so far I’ve been very nice. I gave you a bathtub. A bathtub made of gold! How nice am I?” I’m pleased with myself, I have been a very nice person, and its time she appreciates me.

“I’m being held prisoner in a vault in an abandoned bank. I’m surrounded by money, when all I want is information. I have an idiot for a captor. An idiot who made me a solid gold bathtub, and has no intention of ever providing me with water to bathe in it!”

She’s got me there. I really have no desire to leave her to bathe in there. “Can’t you just hurry up and develop Stockholm Syndrome already? All this waiting around is making me antsy.”

She has this condescending look on her face. Like the idea of her falling for me, her “idiot captor”, is beyond blasphemy. I have the sudden urge to lob a handful of galleons at her face, and I have to physically restrain myself from doing so. “That’s not going to happen, Potter. I prefer my men to have the mental capacity of at least an ape, if not an actual human. You’re still swimming around in the sea, looking to grow legs.”

“And I prefer my women to…um…Fuck off, Greengrass.” She smiles smugly, and I can’t help being less than bothered by that. Admittedly, I had several rebuttals I could have made to that, but I instead chose to concede it, simply because it allowed me to observe.

The vault was taking more out of her than I thought it would. Her skin was pasty looking, her hair matted and her eyes looked sallow. For the most part, she had lost every ounce of that cool-and-collected aura she held back on the mainland, and it was precisely what I had been waiting for. Well, that and the point where the vault became hot enough that she elected to remove her shirt. The latter still has yet to come, and I’m fairly aware that it never will now that my humanity has chosen to reappear.

“I’m letting you out of the vault, Greengrass.” She sputters for a moment, and then affixes me with a look that clearly says that if I am teasing her, there will be hell to pay. Lucky for me, not only am I being truthful, but I also have absolutely no fear of her anywhere in my body. “You’re about as ready as you’ll be.”

“Wait…what?”

“Call this a magical decompression chamber. You have been on the outside for years now. Your body was not at all suited for this place. If you walked around out there as you were for too long, your body would go into immediate magical withdrawal, and you’d be lucky if you made it a day before your body started showing the signs. Before we had to revert to truly drastic measures just to keep your magical shock from shutting your body down.” The shock etched on her face is quite cute. Or would be if there wasn’t a tint of horror meshed tightly over her hazel eyes.

“Yes, Daphne, I didn’t lock you in here because I’m a heartless asshole. I saved your life. You took coming here so lightly, but it’s not something to walk into unprepared. It would be like living your entire life below sea level, and suddenly having to run a marathon atop Mount Everest. Your body wouldn’t be able to cope. This vault acted like an…introduction back to the island. Your time in this vault, is about equal to what you’ll feel when you get out of here. But if I’d let you wander around, reeking of the mainland and its magic like you would have wanted on your first day here, the very air would have tried to suck the life from you. It would have been many, many times worse.” Her gasp was quiet, but it echoed. “Welcome fucking home, Daphne.”

Some part of me wants to believe, the magnitude of the world she fled from, has finally clicked to her. As she stands up at my motion, she stops and looks at me. There’s an apology, buried just beneath the surface, but her pride keeps it just hidden away. But I can make it out, and that’s all that matters, I suspect. I don’t feel the need to degrade her by making the words leave her mouth. A simple nod will suffice in letting her know I know.

As she turns away, she speaks. “What did you mean by drastic measures?” Her mind is quick. I’m sure she’s realized that whatever I would have had to sink to, to save her life in an emergency, the more desperate would have taken to doing long ago to take the edge off.

“You don’t want to know.”

She answers quickly, the words barely leaving my lips before hers meet my ears. “You’re right, I don’t. But I need to.”

I can’t begrudge her this. I know how terrible it is to go into a situation without all the facts. I’d just been in that position when I took my trip and picked up a tag-along. “You didn’t come back to follow your lab rat home, Daphne. This is a battlefield. One littered with the dead and the wounded. And scattered throughout are the living, who must; every day, decide whether they’ve reached the point where they must scavenge off of the dead and dying to stay alive for a day longer. If that one day of doing something despicable could mean help arrives and they survive.

“But people seem to be forgetting that such actions will likely lead to them spending the rest of that long life, regretting that one day.” The fact that I know from experience is telling by the bitter tone I can’t quite bite back from saying that. She turns to look at me out of the side of her eye, her profile displayed for just a moment before she looks away again. She’s seeing what I mean, but she’s not feeling it yet. Which means I need to be a bit blunter with what I mean. “People have taken to harvesting other humans. I’ve told you about the use of blood to power ward schemes and the like. But it’s also being used like…magical adrenaline. Medically, it can save a life. Ingesting can do quite a bit for recovering from ill side effects of magical depletion.” I can feel her disgust, but I know it will just get worse. “Some of the worst cases require much…quicker solutions. Which is, of course, becoming very popular among the…less moral of our little society of chaos we have here. Guaranteed power boost, anytime, anywhere.”

“Have you ever…” I don’t take it personally, because they don’t know me. They’ve spent so long researching me, but not looking at who I am. To them I’m an anomaly, but still an anomaly who lives here. How different could I be?

“No, I don’t particularly fancy the thought of hard-lining someone else’s blood, for the benefit of making one of my spells just a bit brighter in color, or being able to blast one of my pursuers just a bit further.”

“I have to admit that if I was in your position, as sick as it sounds, I probably would.” She turns to look at me fully as she says this, and I can tell that she’s ready to have a conversation now. And of all the ones to have, it’s a moral one. Morality…something neither of us likely have any right to debate. And to think, it’s what will finally lead to open communication between us. “There have to be so many people out there after you, there must be. And for all you know, that extra boost in power could mean the difference between dying and living.”

“I am forced to defend myself almost every time I step out of those doors, Daphne. Always someone out for their next fix, looking for the most powerful person they can find to steal from. And I represent a huge target, and I know that. But I already kill to live. At what point can I maintain a moral high ground if, everything they do to kill me, I do right back to stay alive? Every bad they put out, I put out as well in an attempt to counterbalance it, just to be making it worse? I need the separation, so I can continue looking down my nose at them all.

“Besides, the way I’ve learned to fight, the power boost isn’t really needed. It’s all well and good to have a nice, strong Cutting Curse to fire. But how much does the size of it matter if I’m capable of severing the jugular, while moving, with a Cutter the size of a razorblade? The most powerful people I fight against, also tend to make the biggest mistakes. The feeling of power is something I have tried to avoid for years now. Because feeling yourself strong, makes you feel the need to act it.” I’m starting to get long-winded, and it’s time to wrap this up as succinctly as I can for her.

“It’s a drug, Daphne. Every drug comes with a price. I’m not going to sacrifice my humanity for power. And I’m sure in the hell not going to allow myself to become so convinced of my own strength that I end up defeating myself.

“Now…would you like to get out of here and get yourself a bath and some clean clothes?”

She holds back a smile, just barely, and heads to the door with no preamble. I guess she really wants to get out of here. For the best, before I end up saying too much. She’s very easy to talk to, but there are lines I can’t cross. One of them is explaining the actual reason why I have no intention of ever injecting the blood of another human into myself.

Some things, once said, just can’t be taken back.

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Pansy Parkinson has named a spell after me.

“You burrowed into my life, and when I pulled away from you, I just found out it was too late and you had become a part of me.”

“That’s really sappy, Parkinson. Do you have a fever or something?” I walked over to check her temperature, and she slapped my hand away with a scowl on her face. Or at least, that was the first thing she did, before pulling me down to sit on the bed next to her. She’d decided that she had the need to be back in her bed again, and I am really starting to believe she does it for appearances when I am around.

“I made this because of you, and for you, Potter.” She looks up into my eyes, and there’s some kind of truth in her eyes that makes me decide against writing off her little tinkering in magic. “It’s a counter to a shield.”

“There are plenty of spells that go through shields, Pans, but they either require too much power, or simply aren’t worth it to cast.”

“Shut up. This one is different. It doesn’t go through the shield, Potter, it becomes part of it.”

“…What?” Nothing about what she was telling me matched with my understanding of spells, and to further the effort of preventing Harry Potter from making a fool of Harry Potter, I deemed it time to shut up.

“Shields die quickly since the whole Hogwarts thing, right?” It was rhetorical, but I nod in spite of that. “Well, someone who uses a shield to defend can do one of two things. They can dispel the shield and allow the air to sap the magic from the shield and dissipate it. Or they can take the connection to the shield from their magic, and pull what magic it has left in it, back into themselves. Now, obviously the latter sounds like the better solution in the case of an extended fight. But that’s what The Harry Potter banks on.”

“What do I bank on, Pans?” She rolls her eyes, but it was an easy joke to make, one I’m fairly sure I will be making entirely too much for my own good in the coming times, assuming she feels the need to teach me this spell.

“As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, ahem…What was I saying…” She glares at me before catching her train of thought at the next station, if you will. “Oh, yes. So, the spell banks on the shield’s caster pulling the magic back in. It burrows into the shield, and stays there. The spell itself is simply the burrower. When the shield’s caster pulls the magic back in, the spell within the burrower follows. The theory states many spells could be put into the burrower, but the only one I’ve been able to add in is the Stunner.

“Not bad, but not perfect. The only real weakness beyond the target’s natural resistance to whatever spell you place in The Harry Potter, would be if the caster just dropped the shield instead of taking it back in. Then, it does nothing outside of waste the magic you spent casting it.”

The implications of this are endless. If you really could place other spells into my magical namesake, then dispatching the shield-dependant people who attack me could become a lazy afternoon exercise instead a bad relapse of The Department of Mysteries, daily.

She teaches me the spell, and I take some measure of pride in hearing her tell me how to properly use “her Harry Potter” with proper effectiveness. The blush that crawls along her cheeks, down her jaw and along her neck as I point out how comfortable she sounds being possessive of me, looks eerie on her pale skin. It’s not attractive at all.

She looks like she has a rash.

I realize as I stand to move away from the bed, that I apparently have come to like Pansy when she is in control of our banter. The times I catch her off guard, or the times I maintain the upper hand, I always find her less attractive. Frazzled, off-balance Pansy can’t possibly hold a candle to haughty, holier-than-thou Pansy.

Note to self, never embarrass, or win a back-and-forth with Pansy again.

“Thank you, Pans. This could very well save my life. Or at the bare minimum, speed up my transit time.”

“Transit time?”

“Yeah. Every time I leave home to come here, I end up in at least one fight.” Her right eyebrow raises at this, and it’s the Pansy Parkinson Seal of Interest, as it were. It was her way of showing her “regal approval” of you carrying on with your story. I hate her right eyebrow. I’ve considered shaving it off as she slept, once. “Not to sound overdramatic, but let’s just say it’s a fight for my life any time I come over here. So the least you could do is show some enthusiasm when I walk in the door. Maybe even some tickertape. At least a round of applause.”

She regarded me with her head cocked to the side, and I felt this urge to brush the hair that fell in her eyes out of her face. As soon as I did that, I knew it was a terrible idea. “Get your teeth off of my hand, Parkinson!” She shook her head, which felt very unfortunate given her oral grasp on my fingers.

That sounded a lot more perverted than the situation was. Especially since it hurt, with her sharp little teeth gnawing at my skin.

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