Grass for his Pillows
Chapter One – Moustached Men
Twelve-year-old Harry Potter brushed his bangs away from his eyes and wiped the sweat trickling down his brow. Leaning down beside a small stream, Harry splashed water over his face, demonstrating a useless attempt at resisting the summer heat.
While Harry enjoyed spending his time in the outdoors, it had been nearly four years since he had been without a roof.
It still mystified Harry how he had managed to survive for so long on his own. At first, the ability only manifested itself when Harry was in dire need but he could now activate it when he willed it hard enough. Harry was grateful for his strange ability to make food and tools appear when he needed them but he had no idea how he was performing the feats.
On the most part, Harry performed his daily activities manually but was slowly beginning to rely on his powers. Using his special ability of making things appear taxed him to a certain extent.
Harry hypothesized that the talent would get better as he exercised it but in the back of his mind, he was always slightly paranoid that the magic would leave him as easily as it had come to him.
Banishing his doubts, Harry lighted a fire and conjured up a pot. He threw in some mushrooms he knew were edible after testing them on some wild animals. He added some skinned rabbit and watched as the mixture thickened and turned into stew.
"I wonder if I'm the only with this ability to make things appear out of thin air," Harry wondered aloud, his voice slightly hoarse from lack of use.
As he waited for his stew to be ready, Harry slumped down onto the grass and looked up. His view was blocked by the thick foliage of the trees but once every while, rays of sunshine would insinuate themselves between the leaves and warm Harry up.
"Wandering here and there," Harry murmured to nobody in particular, his head propped on his arms. "I wonder when I'll settle down."
Harry had almost fallen asleep on the grass when a brown owl shot out of the trees, scarlet droplets following in its wake. The owl was injured and the package it was carrying was dragging the bird to the ground.
Shortly after, the bird had hit the ground and was lying there, it's wings spread out in a bizarre angle and its package a few feet away.
Harry walked up to the brown owl and saw that it was still breathing despite its torn wings and broken legs.
"You're pretty badly torn up," Harry said as he surmised the damage. "I was like you once and wished for someone to stop the pain."
Harry put his hands around the bird's frail neck and snapped the bones.
"Here you go," Harry said to the dead bird he was now burying, "you're lucky you had me around to end your suffering."
After washing his hands in the stream, Harry went back to watching his stew. As he pondered on what could have attacked the owl, Harry's gaze wandered off into the direction of the package the owl had been carrying.
It wasn't a particularly large parcel and the strings attaching it had been tied meticulously. Harry picked up the package and managed to untie the strings. Inside the brown paper was a small leather book wrapped in silk cloth.
Looking through its pages, Harry was surprised to see that the yellowed pages were empty. Absorbed as he was into analyzing the meaning of an ancient empty book, Harry failed to hear the approaching steps of two men.
They were mere meters from discovering Harry when the latter finally came to his senses and quickly dove in between a set of plants with particularly large leaves as well as thorns.
Harry was scratched up but he knew the thorns would deter anyone from looking deeper and thoroughly.
"Where could that damn owl have landed?" exclaimed a man with a black moustache. "It couldn't have flown that far, the cutting curse and bludgeoning curse I sent it were accurate."
"The trail of blood ends around here so keep looking," said a man with dark muddied boots standing right in front of Harry's hiding place.
The two men were still in the clearing and the trunk of a large tree hid Harry's backpack and his stew, but at the rate they were searching, it wouldn't be long before they discovered Harry's stuff.
Harry did not want to confront them. He avoided confrontation at all costs. He didn't want people knowing about his existence ever since that night he had coldly dispatched of his relatives in a fit of resentful despair. Harry did not regret his rash act, not in the least, but being a fugitive was what he had to pay to be left alone. Harry did not want to be caught and put under someone else's thumb ever again.
Looking beyond the leaves and the thorns, Harry saw the two men heading towards the stream, where Harry's bloodied hands had dripped all the way. He now had a small window of time in which to destroy all evidence of his presence.
Crawling out of his hiding space, Harry quickly vanished the pot with a touch of regret for the lost stew. He extinguished the fire and willed the ashes to cool down.
"I can't make all of it disappear but I can make it look like this was a fire from days ago," Harry thought rapidly.
Hearing the two men stop splashing through the water, Harry quickly incinerated any traces of paper and wood. He swung his backpack onto his shoulder and, still holding the leather notebook, made a mad silent dash towards the bushier section of the forest.
In his haste, Harry slammed into the side of a tree and scared the many birds that had been sitting on a branch.
The noise of flapping wings and the sight of the birds flying away prompted the two men to run towards Harry. They hadn't seen him, but they knew someone or something was up.
"YAXLEY, OVER THERE!" the man with the moustache yelled.
"Shut up, Macnair!" the man named Yaxley shushed. "You don't want to alert them to our presence."
"Too late for that, Yaxley," Macnair smirked and ran towards the source of the disturbance and managed to catch a glimpse of Harry's dark messy hair.
"Hey you! Come back here!"
Unnerved that he had been seen, Harry speeded up and refused to look back. His plan, for the moment, was to outrun them. Fighting the adults at the same time was suicide. If he did have to make a stand, he'd rather fight one after the other. But first, he had to run and separate the two.
"So the owl was carrying something important after all," thought Harry as he ran between trees and dodged low branches. Clutching the leather notebook in his sweaty hand, Harry jumped over a log before regaining speed again.
"Macnair, we have to catch the boy," Yaxley yelled as he approached Harry from another direction. "I saw it in his hand. He has the diary! Run ahead!"
"Diffindo! Stupefy!"
Harry felt the tendrils of power zip past him. The first flash left his cheek bleeding but served as a warning for him to duck under the second one. "What was that—?"
Seeing that his tactic of running to separate the two men was successful, Harry slid out of view behind the large trunk of a tree and waited for his first pursuer to catch up to him.
When Macnair passed by Harry, Harry jumped onto the adult's back and quickly conjured a frying pan. Leaving no time to think, Harry swung the metal pan, which crashed into the side of the man's face, near the temple.
The man collapsed and Harry rolled over his shoulder.
"How embarrassing," thought Harry as he lay on the ground, holding a bloody pan, "taken down by a frying pan. I seem to be channelling Aunt Petunia's ghost today."
Harry looked down at the unmoving Macnair. "I've got to be careful with the other one. They're not ordinary people."
Slowly changing the pan into a sharper object, Harry stayed on the lookout for the second man.
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When he reached Macnair, the first thing Yaxley saw was a young boy with messy black hair slashing his unconscious partner's throat open with a small knife.
"One moustached-man down," the boy said, holding Macnair's head up as if he were showing off the man's bleeding neck. "One to go."
Snarling, Yaxley raised his wand and pointed it at the boy. "So you've killed my partner, brat. Don't think you can get me the same way."
The boy stayed silent and appeared to be examining Yaxley's wand.
"Give me that leather book in your hand, boy," Yaxley said, beginning to be slightly unnerved, "and I might spare your life."
"Tell me why the book is so important," replied the boy as he stared down the older man, "or I might just incinerate it."
To Yaxley's surprise, a corner of the book caught on fire.
"Stop that this instant," gritted Yaxley. "Hand it to me and I will tell you its importance." His wand still pointed at Harry, he stuck out his other hand.
One corner of the boy's lips lifted up as the centre of the book began to emit smoke. "You might want to rethink your actions, moustached-man number two."
"I'll tell you," Yaxley said, slightly panicked. "But don't do anything stupid to the book."
In pretence of giving in to the boy, Yaxley lowered his wand and held up his other hand in a sign of peace. He could always kill the brat after he got his hands back onto the precious diary. Macnair was a fool to have been caught in the brat's trap; Yaxley was not a fool—or so he thought.
"Well?" intoned the boy, interest obvious in his voice. "What does it do?"
"It's not a weapon or anything that you can use," Yaxley quickly said. "In fact, it could potentially suck all your power. You'd better give it back before it causes you any harm."
"Lovely speech," Harry said in a bored tone. "Did you really think I'd believe you cared about my well-being?"
"From your little display of wandless magic, I'll assume you're a fellow wizard, boy," Yaxley said through gritted teeth. "Didn't your parents ever explain to you the danger of magical objects?"
"I'm a wizard?" the boy repeated, raising an eyebrow. "I see. That explains some things. You still haven't told me what the book does exactly, though."
"It's a soul container," Yaxley finally said. His patience coming to an end, he muttered an intestine-ejecting curse at the black-haired boy.
The boy was only able to avoid the curse by dropping and rolling, losing the diary in the process.
Yaxley, seeing the book free from the clutches of the boy, began to rain a multitude of spells on the boy. He would get rid of the threat the brat presented before retrieving the diary.
In an unexpected turn of events, the boy avoided the curses, rolled to the side and managed to recover the diary. He then unexpectedly threw the diary at Yaxley's face.
In an attempt to both catch the book and stay clear of the boy, Yaxley lost his footing and fell on his knees. His hands were wrapped around the precious diary but his wand was lying two feet away.
As he was about to grasp the wand, Yaxley felt his fingers break and pulled them back in pain. The boy had jumped on them.
"SHIT!" Yaxley said, holding his hand close to his chest. In that moment, he lost track of the boy's position and found himself alone in the clearing.
Looking both ways, Yaxley was about to crawl to where his wand was when the boy appeared behind him and slashed his Achilles' tendons, right through the man's boots, with the same knife used on Macnair.
Yaxley emitted a cry of pain and rage before falling onto his stomach. He helplessly watched as the black-haired boy walked up to his wand lying two feet away and snapped it in two.
The boy approached Yaxley and kicked the downed man before stabbing him in the stomach.
"Gut wounds are awful, I assure you," the boy said quite seriously. "They take forever to heal even if you do survive past them."
Yaxley felt light-headed as he continued to lose blood. If he tried to apparate, he would surely splinch himself and the boy would be able to wreck whatever havoc he wanted to the body parts Yaxley would leave behind.
"You see, my dear Yaxley, what is potentially dangerous to me will also be potentially dangerous to someone else," the boy said as he pried the diary from Yaxley's fingers. "This could be highly useful so I think I'll be keeping the book."
Yaxley lay on the ground, panting heavily. If he could only muster the energy to apparate whole, he might survive.
The boy walked to the Macnair and picked up the deceased man's wand between thin fingers. Imitating what he had just seen the two men do, he pointed the thin end at Yaxley.
"What were the words that other man used on me?" pondered the boy as he slowly traced the thin dry line of blood on his cheek acquired from his flight from Macnair.
Yaxley eyes widened in fright when the black-haired boy pressed Macnair's wand under the older man's jaw.
"That's right," the boy's eyes lighted up, "the word he used was DIFFINDO!"
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TBC