Kestrels Seeker

Prompt: Incorporate the theme of 7 into your story.

WC: 2967

six.

"You'll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there."

Harry stared at this boy with his greasily slicked back hair and his perfectly curled sneer, the same kind of sneer those boys on the playground wore when they kicked him off the swings. He paused. "I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks."

Draco's eyebrows raised in astonishment. The look didn't fit his face, as if his features hadn't practiced that emotion before. Nobody had ever turned down his friendship. His father was Lucius Malfoy, for Merlin's sake. It was too bad that Potter was raised by Muggles.

So, it didn't work out that time. One of Time's many assistants, who called themselves Watchers, tapped zir watch with ineffable impatience. "It's been over three thousand years and they still haven't gotten on with it," ze huffed to nobody in particular. "Maybe a mistake happened in the Soul-creation Department after they got the instructions from Fate. Or maybe Fate was wrong. Maybe the strings got a bit tangled up there and ze sent down the wrong two threads. But no matter. This is the longest time it's taken for a pair of souls to get to Resolution, and I'm exhausted."

Ze stopped zir mumbling to grab two strings of thread out of a sparkling vortex. Millions of years of staring into spiralling strings had taken its toll on zir mental filter. "I'm going to put them back in."

four.

Harper spent every day the same. He woke up in his dormitory when sickly pale light shone through the clouds, through the window, and onto his pillow. He practically forced himself to fall out of bed since he dreaded going to class. He put on his uniform and prepared to learn about Homer and Aristotle and Alexander and all the great men the boarding school wanted its students to be. Harper hated all of it.

The only thing keeping him here was his friend David. David was shy, but Harper liked those kids. They often had more interesting things to say.

Harper's father was an owner of a new cotton mill up North. Ever since Britain had industrialized, the North had become a hotbed for new factories. Every time Harper hinted that he missed their little cottage in the country with their chickens, hinted that it felt like enough, his father would just say, "Be glad you aren't working in the factories. They get their hands chopped off by machinery, you know."

David also spent many late nights next to Harper shivering with anxiety about his father's expectations. His family came from a long line of noble blood, and while that didn't exactly matter anymore, his father still expected that his son go into speculation and add to his inheritance. David never felt smart enough. He always felt like there was something wrong with him.

"I'm just… I don't think I can do it," David would say in a hushed voice. Harper and David shared a room, and the tapestry they'd hung down from the ceiling in the middle of the room barely concealed any noises they made from each other. It was always something like a maths test, or a speech, or a meeting with his father. David would tremble and forget how to breathe.

And Harper would respond, ever patient. "Just remember our dream."

Their dream. A pasture with sheep. David wearing a sun hat to keep the heat off his neck. A dog bounding in the distance, hopefully a collie. Home-made jam in the kitchen made with berries picked near the barn. Blossoms in the front yard, fragrant and blooming. Buzzing bees and honeysuckle trees. Hills and hills of grass, as far as the eye can see… just green grass and blue sky into the distance, forever.

David would think about it, hold it tight to his chest. He cradled this dream like it were his child. He nourished it with hope. He knew deep down it would never happen, but he liked to think about it with Harper. He liked imagining a world where they could just be, just the two of them, far away from the world.

Their first kiss was sloppy. David had been lying down underneath a tree in the quad. It was evening; the sun was sleepily sinking behind the trees. Harper sat up next to him reading, pressed against the trunk. For a second, David was possessed by giddy contentment, which made him daring enough to turn his face and tenderly press his lips to Harper's knee. In the next second that ounce of courage left him, and he coughed and turned his face around again, pretending he'd accidentally bumped his face into Harper's knee.

Harper pretended not to notice then, but as they rounded a corner on the return to their room, he pushed David against the wall of the hallway they turned into. For a moment, he searched David's face, looking as if his mind were doing a million frantic calculations a second. David closed the distance, all teeth and shy enthusiasm.

They pulled apart laughing, but they returned to their room swinging clasped hands.

They were both expelled the next year. It had only taken a little while for people to start to speculate that their friendship was a bit closer than normal, and it had only taken one slip up for them to be caught. In adulthood, they turned each other into memory and shameful fragments of boyish mistakes.

five.

"Dad, catch!" Daniel hurled his arm forward as hard as he could. His dad at the time was very peacefully grilling hamburgers and humming young Johnny Cash's latest release and not at all prepared to be socked in the jaw with a baseball.

"Jesus Christ, Daniel!" Luke turned from the grill to give his son a look. "What was that for?"

"It was Harrison's idea," Daniel said with a nonchalant shrug. He shared a sly sideways glance with his next-door neighbor. The two of them had been inseparable ever since Harrison had dug a very unwelcome hole under the fence and had knocked on their back door expectantly covered in dirt.

Daniel's first words to him were, "You couldn't have used the front door?"

Of course not. Harrison never took things the easy way. He drilled into rock instead of going around it, sometimes. Daniel was the opposite. He liked lazy days spent swinging in the hammocks between their two huge oaks, hated the rain, and soaked up enough sunshine to fuel a city. He liked the path of least resistance.

Surprisingly, they fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Where Daniel was lacking, Harrison made up for it in bounds. Where Harrison was weak, Daniel filled the gaps with strength. They were convex and concave, always shifting and growing in the way children do, but always together. They passed springs and summers playing ball in the park with the neighborhood kids. They passed autumns and winters sort of kind of maybe doing homework and really just goofing off. Years flew by.

A love existed between them but went unsaid. It didn't always hang in the air. They were rough with each other sometimes; they fumbled with emotions and vulnerability. But sometimes, in the silence when all you could hear was pencil scratching on paper and the creak of the kitchen chairs, Daniel felt it. He felt a lingering something. It scared him a little. It felt like a sheet of fog had been pulled over the path of least resistance.

When Harrison with shaking hands and a quivering lip had told Daniel that something felt wrong inside him and that ever since a year ago he'd felt warm sparks tingle all over his body when they wrestled in the backyard, it was no surprise that Daniel said, "My dad won't let you hang out with me anymore if he knows," and then nothing else.

Daniel went off to college. Harvard or something. Maybe it was Hanover. Or Hofstra. Harrison didn't particularly care. He moved to The Castro as soon as he graduated in pursuit of what he felt was an authentic life. No more hiding. No more shame. He reinvented himself as Harry and cut Virginia from his identity like it were a rotting limb. A decade later, he watched half his friends drop dead. Good people, healthy young men, withered into husks before his eyes, and he never knew which one would be next or when. A year into the crisis, Daniel fell ill himself cities away. Harry never even knew about his funeral.

two.

His parents buried him at an unmarked grave. They didn't dare name him; children died of pox or measles too often, and they were afraid to love someone they were destined to lose.

one.

Decimus was aptly named, as he was his father's tenth child. His father was a high ranking military official and was therefore well respected in town. But what could one do with a tenth child? And further, what could one do with a bastard?

His father was nothing if not efficient. Decimus was another mouth to feed, so he was whisked off to the academy almost as soon as he could pick up a sword.

He was never very good at sparring, or running, or throwing discus, but he had something of value. For Decimus, there was only one way out of the army, and that was death. The army could use people who were prepared to die because they didn't have anything else. Decimus had nowhere to go if not to battle.

The first time he tried sparring, he'd only been training for a few months.

"Come at me," his opponent snarled, though Decimus could tell it was all show.

"You wanna talk shit?" Decimus muttered to himself, his face hidden by a helmet that was a little too big. Something in him trembled. The other guy was about half a foot taller, and Decimus could barely see out of his helmet.

All the boys were watching, separating each other into the strong and the weak. It was almost a rite of passage, the first sparring tournament. Decimus really felt like a decimus. The runt of the litter, the youngest, the one nobody really cared about. Nobody cared about a Decimus as much as a Primus. But he didn't want anybody else to know that.

He swung his blade forward with a grunt. It was still a little heavy, and his arms shook with the effort.

His opponent blocked it easily and made a swing of his own. Decimus was able to scramble out of the way, but he quickly lost his center of balance. By the time he regained it, he'd exposed his back to his opponent and received a heavy blow.

Both of them were inexperienced and clumsy. Their swings at each other were sluggish and uncontrolled. Yet, when their blades met, the clang echoed through the square.

Decimus felt his arms tiring, but he couldn't give up. Underneath, he knew who he was. He knew he was weak. He disappointed people. Even his own father didn't want him. But in this moment, he wanted to be the kind of person that a first son would be. He landed a solid thwack on the helmet of his opponent.

After a few more minutes of stumbling around, a draw was called. Decimus nearly collapsed, but he tried to saunter casually over to the side and sat down on a tree stump. He faced away from the crowd of boys, mulling over the duel and soaking in a sinking feeling of failure.

"Hey."

Decimus took off his helmet, and his neck felt cooled even though the sweat dripping down his hair and face didn't dry under the hot sun. He looked up.

"Good effort. That other guy was bigger, but you didn't give up."

Decimus put his hand up to his forehead as a visor and squinted against the light and blinked back surprise. "Thank you for your praise, your highness. I can't help but feel undeserving of it."

The guy standing there gave him a soft smile. "Keep it up."

Prince Hector hit Decimus on the back with a friendly pat as he walked back to the crowd. Decimus almost fell off the trunk from the force of it. He turned around and watched Prince Hector's retreating back. The prince's muscles rippled with each step, and he stood out among the boys because of his height. Black curls slick with sweat covered his forehead, and his smile was wide and genuine. No wonder all the boys clamored for his attention.

Then, Decimus thought of himself, his scrawny arms and his stick-like legs, and he grit his teeth.

He spent his years within arms length of the greats, yet at the same time so far away. Though he'd always found the prince kind and courageous, as a foot soldier he never got to meet Prince Hector again before Decimus's death at age seventeen.

seven.

Hakim stood on the platform waiting for the bullet train to pull into the station. With a sigh and a quick flick of his eyes, his pulled the train schedule up on his glasses. The train was ten seconds late, which was strange. He had a job interview in a floating room in the city, and he couldn't afford to be late. There, an interviewee and an interviewer would talk business and pretend that they didn't both want to jump out of that bubble hovering over the rest of the work buildings. Hakim had done thirty of these just in the past two weeks, and he felt his tiredness in his bones.

Ah, here it was.

The train whooshed into the station so quickly that it would've blown the hat off the heads of anybody standing out there, which is why all of the passengers were crammed behind a glass separation.

"Coming through, beep beep." A swisher bot crawled across the wall, whirring and washing the fingerprints off the glass.

The doors opened, and Hakim stepped into the station. Light seemed to stream through at every angle. Just for a moment, he stopped and took it all in.

Brown faces blurred against white floors and white ceilings.

A poem from a thousand years ago unfurled in his mind. The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound, 1926.

Someone bumped into him on his way to the train. "You better move, buddy. The train's leaving in, like, five seconds."

Hakim eyes made contact with blue ones. He shrugged with a smile.

The stranger blinked and turned to get on the train. "Whatever," he said under his breath.

The doors closed, Hakim still rooted in spot. For some reason, he wanted nothing else but to smell petals on a wet, black bough. He turned around.

three

Hai Fan bent over in the sun. His back ached, and his fingers raisined. Something about this life seemed inevitable. His parents named him Hai Fan after their wish for him. They wanted him to see the sea and to unfurl a sail and be free from the rice paddies.

His father had wanted to be an adventurer. Always unconventional, he bounced his infant son while whispering of tales of faraway lands. Eli-fants, knived warriors who moved as softly and quickly as night, people with hair like wheat and eyes like dragons.

His mother was the opposite. She spread her roots deep under her. She wanted the apple to tumble close to the tree. Sometimes it felt like his mom loved him completely and then not at all. It was like she saw the fire in her son's eyes for something more, and she pushed him away to encase her heart in armor as each year passed and Hai Fan became more a man.

But life moved as quiet as a blistering hot day when not even the cicadas had the energy to croak. Hai fan raised a family in his little town and cared for his aging parents. He never left, but he was content. Happiness and contentment are different things, but he went to sleep without a fight.

six, 2.0.

By now, Harry's Watcher had had enough. "God, it would've been such a good story if they'd found Resolution the sixth time around," ze said. "I mean, Harry had been a war hero. He deserves peace at this point, don't you think?"

The other Watchers around zir nodded absentmindedly. After listening to zir narrate the lives of zir humans for millennia, they barely paid zir any attention.

"I'm going to put them back," Ze said after some thought. Ze dipped two fingers into the water and turned them counter to the swirling vortex. The vortex splashed, sloshed, then slowly calmed and started to turn backwards. With careful fingers, ze dipped the two strings into the light and watched as they swirled further and further away until they become nothing.

"You'll soon find out that the Wizarding World has a lot of fun stuff to see. Ever seen a dragon in real life before?"

Harry shook his head. Hagrid was off getting his textbooks for the year, and he felt so small in this big shop of wonders.

"Want me to show you around? There's an ice cream parlor around the corner. Do you guys have ice cream?"

"Of course we have ice cream," Harry said. Then he added quietly, "I never really get to eat it, though."

Draco put his arms down after the tailor got his measurements. "Wanna go?"

Harry's eyes crinkled as he smiled. "I'd like that very much."