As time was wont to do to most things, the peachy bricks and general dullness of number four Privet Drive had changed. Seven years ago, the street had been repaved, giving the pavement a brighter black sheen than the surrounding driveways. Two years after that, discussions had begun to expand the public transit system. This, like most public transit, failed to move quickly. Last year, most of this particular home's formerly immaculate garden had been destroyed by an infestation from an odd type of beetle. The shrubbery had since been replaced by large brown rocks and splotches of blue hosta.

Still, sometimes, the manner in which change occurred was more of a reversion. It was that type of a change which brought Dudley Dursley to move his then-wife, Colleen, and their two children, Darcy and Atticus, to live in what had once been his childhood home. The room which had once been Dudley's now belonged to his mother, Petunia. His parents' old room now belonged to him. The spare guest room was the same as always, and would occasionally house whatever relatives chose to visit. Atticus and Darcy shared the second, smaller bedroom that had once held most of Dudley's unwanted things. There had also been a point when it housed some famous wizard, but that was a matter none had meant to mention.

However, like many things which were supposedly meant to be, time would change that, too.

An ordinary night had fallen upon the humdrum Dursleys, who had been sound asleep by the standard time of ten. With the faint, innocuous humming of the air conditioner, it seemed that even the house itself was snoring. Only the hazy glow of a smart-phone camera dared creep across the hall. The stream of light lead back to a mop of brown hair attached to superhero jim-jams and the child currently inside them.

Darcy liked to think he knew better than to be scared of such things as darkness. Still, the stillness was as strange as his new home had ever been. Every story he'd ever read seemed to say there were few things monsters liked more than a perfectly normal place, and this house seemed plain as any.

Slowly, Darcy took a step out into the hallway. His toes settled against the floorboard, tiptoeing across the way. A "ggrk-rlmr-" gurgled beneath.

With a gasp to jolt him along, Darcy's shoulders scrunched up to attention. The light of his mobile phone followed suit, leaping to the ceiling. His breath lodged in his throat.

The hallway stared back as best a hallway could, utterly unfocused with no emotions or threats, merely a state of being. Darcy stared further all the same, waiting for something that, unless given centuries to do so, likely wouldn't bother changing on its own.

Slowly, Darcy's shoulders slouched back to their normal stance. He wrapped his second hand around the front of his phone, flipping the light back on. The beam cast across the hallway once more, showing the immobile walls and flimsy end table ahead.

"Nothing. It's nothing. Or Mike Wazowski," Darcy muttered, calming himself with the ridiculousness of one-eyed comedians hiding in closets when they could be on YouTube instead.

With trepidation in each step, Darcy crossed the grounds of his new home's tiny hall back to his bedroom. He pressed his shoulder against the door, starting to open it."Murghr-mm—" a gurgled moan called through the wood, louder than before.

For a second, Darcy pulled back, flinching. It took that second of squinted staring for him to recognize the sound. That gurgle had never been a floorboard. It was human.

A light shone beneath the covers of Atticus' bed, pointing upwards at about the point his head would have been. The orange cracks snuck out, barely illuminating the glow in the dark planets and star stickers that lined their bedroom walls. Halfway unpacked cardboard boxes scattered across the stained rocket-ship carpet. Legos and action figures strayed about, forming the usual plastic minefield of a well-played-in room. The toys' shadows stretched beneath Darcy's mobile as rushed towards the bed.

"Atticus-!" Darcy called, hushed, but nonetheless admonishing. "Stop it. You'll wake mum."

"Thrm—molm—eyes—" the mumbling grew louder still, to the point where it may have been a typical conversational tone if not for the giant comforter overhead.

"Att-"

Darcy grit his teeth, his foot having smacked against a lego. He limped through his last step over to Atticus' bed. He tossed aside the comforter and sharpened his eyes upon his brother. "Atticus—"

The light beneath the sheet cast across the entire room. The plastic stars turned sickly pale against the medium blue walls. Every box, toy and tattered book were as vivid as day. Again, Darcy flinched, not from pain, but surprise.

Atticus' voice called back to him, no longer garbled, yet distinctly abnormal. There was an echo in each word, as if they were speaking through tin cans and a megaphone all at once. "Break of chaos born from peace, they emerge from fold. Son of a skeptic, son of a savior, tied by love in blood."

"What?" Darcy squinted through the light, struggling to see what his eyes would let him. Had Darcy reason to believe his eyes, he'd have sworn the beams of light were spurting from every hole on Atticus' head.

Darcy grabbed onto his little brother's arms, trying to pull him to attention. Atticus' head flopped limply, no more sturdy than a doll's, but that didn't stop his distant words.

"Both of just mind, neither near age," Atticus' voice echoed against nothing.

An increasing panic froze Darcy's thoughts to a single need. "I'm calling mum!"

Again, the threat failed to stop the words-at least half of which Darcy had never heard his six-year-old brother use in his life. "One born to others' glory which his heart seeks to claim. One risen from improbable places his mind seeks to know."

Atticus' shoulders shook in Darcy's hands. He turned towards the door. "Mum! Dad!"

Darcy wished he could hear footsteps rushing towards him, yet, for now, all he heard was his brother's recitation. "Both sensing treachery among others' light. Only united can they overcome the era time demands. But only through one's death may the other's peace stand."

Darcy felt his brother's wrist for a pulse, which, thankfully, was there. He pushed down upon Atticus' shoulder, pushing him to lie sideways along the mattress.

"The future of history is at their behest. Renaissance of heart. Revolution of mind."

Darcy's unsteady fingers clutched at his phone, tapping by the lock screen. He typed straight nines in, switched to speaker and waited for an answer.

"Nine-nine-nine, what's your emergency?" a calm voice answered.

Darcy hunched closer to the phone, enough so that his words very well might have been muffled, too. "My brother. He's. Not answering. Babbling—a seizure? I think it's a seizure!"

All the while, Atticus kept on. "Or fall of all we call mankind. For the one thing that cannot stand is nothing."

The dispatcher tried to speak "Do you know your address? Are your—"

"Four Privet Drive, Surrey," Darcy interrupted.

The dispatcher paused, possibly to enter the address in their system. The silence, which may have been hardly a second, stretched on for a mortified eternity—not because Darcy could imagine his little brother dying beside him, but because that second was the one where Dudley slammed against the door.

"Dad, I—" Darcy meant to explain, yet, again, his breath found its way up to the highest shelf of his throat. He knew so little of whatever this was, he could have hardly explained it better than a dream.

As soon as the door gave way to the scene, a look came over Dudley. Again, Darcy wasn't sure he could have described it, but he inherently understood what it meant he should do.

Darcy pushed his mobile towards the top corner of the bed and scooted to the side, barely leaving a foot on his brother's mattress. He hovered by the edge to watch as Dudley approached. His father's shadow momentarily engulfed him.

Possibly having not noticed the speaker, Dudley picked up the mobile phone. "Kid thinks he's funny. My son. Ignore him." He spoke sternly into the receiver, and then ended the call.

On any other night, at any other time, Darcy would have had a thousand questions to ask. A few great ones still came to mind—why would his dad lie? Did he know what was happening?—and yet that one look meant none of it would matter. Instead, Darcy filled the silence with the one part he knew he could believe. He clutched his brother's hand.

Atticus' words repeated around them both, identical even in their inflection. "At the break of chaos born from peace, they emerge from the fold. Son of a skeptic, son of a savior—" They sank with the same weight as an unwilling silence, all-encompassing and hauntingly wrong.

Had he been a bit older, perhaps Darcy could have seen the conflict cracking through his father's expression. He imagined it when he remembered the day, yet he was never really sure it had happened. All he could state with certainty was that Dudley had crouched beside the bed, hoisted up Atticus' limp body with the amount of effort someone smaller might need to fling about a moderately sized bag of flour, and marched out the door with five stern parting words. "I'm calling your uncle. Sleep."

There'd been no need to specify which uncle, of course. There were plenty of adults who had told the boys to call them uncle, but there was only one that their father encouraged them to.

With his typical lack of obedience, Darcy stood still, holding his ground in the center of the bedroom. He counted through his father's footsteps until he had finished the stairs, and then laid down beside the door, pressing his ear straight to the crack between the wood and frame in hope of catching a spare word. Hardly half an hour later, he heard the door open. Within two, he'd fallen asleep on their rocket ship carpet, worried and confused as he'd ever been—and as he would be for the next six years.