AN: Here comes my new story, which i hope will be great, and it is edited by the Steel Magnolia.
Also, if you know any song that goes with this chapter, do tell. The only criteria is that it's gotta be loud and punkish.
Oh, god, I don't think that I've ever felt this bad before. My head is pounding and stomach churning.
What's my name again? Doesn't matter, I just need more sleep…
The raw pounding in my head increases.
…and an aspirin.
The sun is starting to leak through the windows. I'd always hated the glaring sunlight, especially on a morning with a hangover and a freakish—
Ah.
Could that've really happened?
Just to make sure I'd only been dreaming, I sit up and check my chest for burn marks. There aren't any.
I lay down again and curl into a ball.
Even the though the sun is shining, I'm glad at least that it's autumn and not spring. I hate spring, and the weeks before spring. Just before winter melts away my mood slips and my grades drop.
I pressed my head deeper into my pillow, craving more sleep. But that wasn't possible at this point. Sounds traveled to my room from all around me and I could practically feel the whole house stirring, and it was all going directly to my pounding head.
I don't even have to check to know that mom, dad, the siblings, and the old people were eating breakfast in the next room. I craned my neck to check the clock.
"Jesus, that's early," I breathed and double-checked just to make sure. It was only eight a.m.
I need an aspirin.
I sat up, throwing the blankets off myself, and saw that I'd slept in my clothes again. Amazing. Grandma was going to have my head on a platter. And then there's that puddle of vomit somewhere in my room too. I couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I could smell it. It stank, like old socks.
I went to the bathroom and grabbed the aspirin bottle off the shelf in the cabinet and noticed that it was almost empty. Just shows how many headaches I've had in the past two weeks. I can't go to sleep without having a nightmare or wake up without getting a headache, and I've only gotten drunk once. And that was yesterday.
Congratulations Ben, you've got a constant migraine and it's not because of teenage drinking. Stupid.
I felt dizzy and suddenly wanted to go back to my room. I closed my eyes...
...and found myself standing in the center of my room.
Weird. Like that dream...and every other dream I've had since my recent birthday, not including the nightmares.
I squeezed my eyes shut. My head hurt to much to think about that now.
I could already feel the aspirin soaking in, so I simply fell back onto my bed and went back to sleep.
A blonde woman stood there, in a cave with several cave openings to other caves, looking around, and shouting :"Tempus? Are you there?"
"Tempus? You confuse me with Tempus?" A steel-like voice echoed.She didn't seem to see from where it came, and then she shriveled away as if time had moved forward.
I wanted to die. It was time to die.
I could see a beam of blue fire coming towards me, feeling it scorch me and then the heat intensified, as if I was about to be blown to bits. I screamed.
Beaten by a fetus, was my last thought.
Someone roughly shook me awake. I opened my eyes, and saw Mom standing there.
"'kay?" she asked in her usual too-short way with her obnoxious voice.
My poor ears.
"Yeah. Fine. Why wouldn't I be?" She looked at me as if I was some sort of bug. A very strange bug, for that matter.
"Blue bags," she stated, and once again I wondered why in the fucking hell Dad married her. So, you sorta liked her for a while, but seriously?
"Sure," I muttered, picturing her carrying a couple of blue bags in her hands.
"No," she corrected me as she shook her head.
"No bags? What are you talking about? Murder? Rape? Suicide?"
She chuckled. "Eyes."
"Oh." I suddenly felt stupid as I turned to face the wall. "Got it, Mom. I need to sleep."
"Stench?" Mom asked.
I hadn't answered before Dad walked in. "God, Ben, what have you been doing in here? Are you hiding a corpse in your wardrobe?" Unlike Mom, Dad talks. A lot.
"I don't know, but please get the hell out of here," I told them irritably, thinking about how much fun it would be to watch them accidentally step in the vomit.
"Clean up the need to be cleaned, right Ben?" Dad asked.
I wondered if that was supposed to be a joke. And it also was really easy to misunderstand. I didn't have a need to be clean, I just needed to sleep. The frustrating part was that I had no idea how I was supposed to do that.
I have a friend named Gina, who's of the very strict belief that when you wake up, you're up, and when you get so tired that you fall asleep standing, it's time to sleep. She's lost a lot of sleep and missed just as much school for that reason.
It felt like I'd laid there for an eternity before I got up, intending to finally leave my room, only to find myself face to face with a man in a suit, with electrifying blue eyes like my own, and brown hair.
"How'd…you get in here?"
My stomach turned suddenly, and the urge to vomit became irresistible. And so I decided to let it go, and the bile flew in his general direction.
I couldn't help but inwardly laugh at the irony.
Instead of hitting him, the vomit fell straight through him and splattered all over the cover of a book on the floor. I look at the book and saw it was Arithmancy.
When I recovered I turned to glare at him, and my eyes grew hot with rage. I tried to blink, and it burned as if someone had poured hot lava over my eyes.
"You have absolutely no control of your powers, do you?" He watched me interestedly as a big burn hole in his stomach glowed, and disappeared. WTF?
"Powers?"
Grandma decided to interrupt the moment, by poking her head in through the door. "Get to cleaning, it stinks."
Good ole grandma, never beating around the bush.
And as soon as she'd poked her head in she poked it out and I heard her trailing down the hallway.
"Why didn't she see you?"
He gave me a perplexed look. "You saw me all the time?"
"Yeah, sure. You were right there," I replied. "What did you mean by powers? And you owe me a book by the way." I began to understand why John cares so much about books, and not girls—I still think he's gay though.
"Come up with a spell," he drawled. "You're a witch."
"I don't speak Latin," I protested.
"A spell is like a poem," he explained. "Just say it out loud."
"Okay, eh…let this disgusting mess…"I started lamely. "…go poof as I wish…to have my book cleaned…"
Surprisingly enough, it worked. The vomit disappeared immediately, and the book looked sparkly and vomit-free. I picked it up to see if it was still intact and saw that the spell had cleaned the text as well.
"…and let the text be there."
Even better.
"I'm surprised that that worked," the guy told me.
I looked up at him. "What did you say your name was again?"
"I didn't, though it's Cole Turner."
"I'm Ben. I'm a witch. I just found out."
Cole Turner smiled, as if he actually thought that my joke was funny; but it wasn't a friendly, it was cynical. I tried at least. "Do you know what powers you've got?"
"Powers? Why can't I just have one? Does this come with a responsibility?"
"You're powerful, therefore you have more than one power. And yes, it comes with a responsibility, and the only thing you actually have to do is to stop drinking. You're what, fifteen?"
"Close enough," I said quickly. "You know which power I've got?"
"I have a guess on what powers you've got. Telekinesis, the ability to move things with your mind. And possibly pyrokinesis."
"In which category does seeing people die fall into?"
"Premonitions. The ability to see the future."
My mouth grew dry.
"But...I don't want to see the future," I whined, sounding like a baby. "I don't wanna see nothing."
"You could also be seeing the past, though you usually start with seeing the future."
"That's just great, I'm a freak in the world of the freaks! Go. to. Hell."
Cole erupted in flames, which seemed to shock him; he disappeared without leaving behind a spot of ash.
Great, I thought. No more messes to clean with crappy spells.
I went to the bathroom to get another aspirin and found Jimmie there, peeing in the toilet. Joanie was watching fascinatedly from the doorway, looking a if she might touch him at any moment.
"Joanie," I told her. "If you really want to suck him off, I doubt that he'd mind."
Grandpa came in then, his eyebrows was singed off as usual. He'd probably tried to fix the dishwasher again.
"You use that language in front of ladies?" he asked.
"Course I do, what other sort of language would I be using?"
Raised his eyebrows and turned back in the opposite direction, grunting some incoherent remark to himself.
I stepped around Joanie, grabbed the aspirin bottle, then sauntered out and headed to the kitchen. When I reached my destination I took one of the pills out of the bottle and swallowed it down with Fanta, pocketing the bottle as I did so.
Some basics about my house: it's two stories, the first consisting of the kitchen, living room and toilet. The the second story include a tiny cupboard we call 'comfy, homey room' that's my room, then there's my parent's room, my grandparent's room, and then there's Jimmie and Joanie's room. Jennifer, the newborn baby banshee, lived with Mom and Dad.
Jimmie, Joanie, Jennifer, and…Ben.
If you wonder why my name doesn't start with a J, it's because I'm adopted.
I went back to my room and put Disturbed on my stereo, cranking the volume up as high as it could possibly go—just how I like it. It wasn't long before an angry mob—also called 'family'—invaded my room.
Grandpa threw a shoe at the stereo. Mom just pressed her hands to her ears and screeched. Grandma and Dad tried to voice their protests over one another, and Jimmie did the sensible thing of pressing every single button until the music stopped.
I'll never understand why they don't like Disturbed; their rhythm is much more enchanting than that blues they like.
At that moment Cole appeared in the corner of my room in sparkles. The others gave no indication of seeing him. His invisibility to everyone but me was probably another fucking thing that I knew absolutely nothing about.
"Okay, first off, this is the tiniest room in the whole house, you can't just barge in. If you want something, you ask, or better yet…knock!" As my anger rose my desk was randomly put on fire.
The siblings started crying as Mom and Dad cleared out of the room; I guess they were tired of the small fires that I pretty much always caused.
"Holy hell!" Grandpa exclaimed.
Grandma heaved a sigh and used the comforter off my bed to put the fire out. Then she looked at me and narrowed her eyes and looked me up and down suspiciously. "Did you sleep in those clothes, boy?"
I gulped.
"Not at all, grandma," I answered.
"Then where're your pajamas?"
"I changed."
"So why are your clothes rumpled?"
"Because they were made that way."
"Hmph," she grunted. She gathered the comforter in her arms and made her exit with Grandpa. "Punk," she muttered and I had a good mind to yell at her and say that Disturbed wasn't punk. She thinks she knows everything.
"You slept in your clothes?" Joanie asked, filled with awe for her amazing big brother.
"What do you think?" I whispered. Her smile was a few miles long, and then she got the great idea of burning up Jennifer's tiny little jumpsuits.
Yeah, I'm not the only kleptomaniac in the family.
When they had left, I closed the door, and tried to remember the poem I had used earlier to get rid of the vomit.
"Banish this mess…that I caused…return it to…it's former glory…"
Not the exact same poem, but this one also worked.
Cole inspected his fingernails. "You could write it down, so that you won't have to come up with a new spell every time something like this happens."
I nodded, and wrote it down on the back of a paper from school, and then put it up on the wall.
I heard the bed creak behind me, so I sat down on the chair and looked back at Cole who was now sitting on the side of my bed.
"What does it mean? Being a fuckin' witch? I don't even want—" I cut myself short and started pushing the buttons on my stereo, just like Jimmie. When Disturbed started blaring again, I lowered the volume a bit.
"It's understandable that you don't want to be a witch," Cole said. "But I can't take your powers away. The basics o—"
"Then I won't be a witch anymore, it's as easy as that," I snapped. "You want me to send you away again?"
"Ben, there's two sides in the magical world. The evil side, the demons, and the good side, the leprechauns, most of the witches, gnomes, whitelighters and more. At the rate you're going, you're going to end up on the evil side. The side that kills."
"But I wouldn't do something like that," I protested.
"I thought so too—when I was five. Ten years later I killed my mother. The good side's biggest con is their hypocrisy."
"And you're evil, which means that I'm evil, right?"
"I'm neutral, on neither side."
"Great for you."
From the kitchen downstairs I heard Grandma call out: "Lunch!"
Yeah, I have great hearing too.
"We'll talk more later," Cole told me.
As it turned out lunch was Grandma's concoction, looking like the usual clay-soup one might be forced to eat as a child in daycare. You get used to the daycare food after a while, because when you're old enough Grandpa gives you some whiskey to make the food taste like something other than burnt socks.
After lunch there was dessert, just a fancy way of saying: 'raid the kitchen for junk food.'
So, I went back to my room munching on some sort of chocolate, though my dentist says that if I eat more candy I won't have any teeth left.
Who gives a fuckin' fuck?
When I opened my door, I already knew that Cole would be laying on my bed reading the book on Arithmancy.
"Is it a power to know where everybody is?"
"Yes, it is. Do you believe in this stuff?"
"No, but I like math," I told him.
He gave me a funny look. "Don't use those spells all the time. There's this thing called personal gain, which has an ugly way of back-firing. Do you have a paper?"
"I'll add it up to you. Name?"
"Phoebe Halliwell." I couldn't find a clean paper, so I added up on the desk. "She's a one. Your wife? Or maybe lawyers only have slaves?" As you might notice, I don't like lawyers, solicitors or barristers.
"Ex."
"Then we add that up with yours, and that's six. Check number six and see what it says."
"It says: 'Six represents harmony, friendship, and family life. Sixes are loyal, reliable, and loving. They adapt easily. They do well in teaching and the arts, but are often unsuccessful in business. They are sometimes prone to gossip and complacency.' Heart number, vowels."
"That's four and one, I think. Together it's five."
"Very funny. It says that we're instable."
"Together, yeah. It just wasn't meant to be. Social number is..." I quickly add it up. "Six and four. I've always thought that fours' are supposed to be soldiers."
"I'll take that as a compliment." he closed the book and sat up again. "You are a witch, which comes with a responsibility. You have post cognition, pyrokinesis and sensing. Expect demons to come running whenever. I'll show up when you need me, and I've left you a book. It was written by a demon, and is quite racistical, but it has always helped me out." He disappeared in glitter and I was left by myself.
I glanced down at the book and saw that it was not a book, it was a damned bible.
I had to get out of here. Somewhere, but I—
This, was all a joke. It couldn't be true. Just, hangover hallucinations.
Everything has got a logical explanation.
I'm no Harry Potter, how could I have ever thought that?
AN: What do you think? Please review