A/N: The beginning of this story was inspired by work by Edgar Allen Poe;
so inevitably, it's not all peaches and cream. I don't know what you guys
define as 'gory', but this is just a small warning if you do have a very
weak stomach and a good imagination. Please, PLEASE review.
Chapter 1: Going to, going from.
Beni sat on the train, alone. She didn't care though; it wasn't like she'd ever had friends. She sat staring out of the dusty window, at the constant landscape outside, not really sure what she was looking for. A change, an unfamiliarity maybe, meanwhile losing herself in her own thoughts.
Her eyes began to water, and she wiped away the tears. Freaky things like that often happened to Beni Montano. Before she died, her mother used to tell her it was because her powers were so strong. Beni used to believe it, but now, her mother had been gone for so long...it seemed like a load of shit.
Her father had been murdered too. Not in the standard wizarding way either. They had been murdered a muggle way. Beni began to relive the moment she had found her mother. She hated to remember. For weeks before she would not look at her crystal ball. She was too scared, she had known something was about to happen, but it still didn't prepare her. She had walked into her bedroom, bored and tired, letting her door swing shut behind her. She had flopped on her bed, squirming around to get comfortable.
She had ended up upside down, facing the back of her door. There was something on her door that was not meant to be there, something that had made her blood run cold and her eyes swivel around pathetically. She rolled over, vomiting blood all over her cream carpet.
Nailed and hung on the back of her stark white door, was the stabbed, bleeding, mangled body of her mother. Her face was rotting and blue, her eyes wide, wide open, one eye missing the pupil and iris. Her hair was ratty and crawling with bugs, and mould grew on her dis-figured legs. Beni had screamed and screamed, frozen...petrified...mortified. Nobody had come...two whole days had passed, and the neighbors had grown tired of her consistent screams. All that time Beni had stayed rooted to the spot, staring at her mother.
She had seen a councillor after that. Beni pulled her head in the train window, wiping the dregs of vomit from her mouth. She smiled at the thought of Bob Michael-Richardson, her wizard councillor. He had tried and tried with Beni, but nothing had worked to heal the scars left by that traumatizing event in her past. Eventually he put a memory charm on her, but Beni was special. Beni had told him that but he didn't listen to her. The memory charm had not worked. Beni could resist things like that. She didn't know why she resisted it. Maybe it was an involuntary thing.
But she had pretended that it had worked, just so that she could stop seeing Bob, who she did not particularly like. She had returned to school after that. She had attended a school for the dark-arts resistors, highly selective and crawling with enemies and spies, children of death eaters. Beni was however, the kind of person that school was made for. She was from a good family; she was both special and powerful, with a wish to conquer evil. Well that used to be her anyway.
She had returned home in a daze. The same daze she had been in all term. As she stepped onto her driveway she lost her vision. How many times had she walked up that driveway when she was a small girl? She walked right up to her door. She took out her key and jammed it through the keyhole. It was tougher than she remembered. She heard the click and reached out to turn the doorknob.
Suddenly her sight returned and she found herself face to face with her father's wide-open eyes, both the pupil and the iris missing from each glaring eyeball. There were stab holes all over his body, he had also been cursed and hexed. His legs and arms were broken, and hung at grotesque angles. She looked at his hand, the one covering the doorknob. She had touched that hand; she had even pushed her key through it. That must have caused a grinding sound, and the click when she broke a small bone. Beni turned and ran blindly, screaming down her drive way.
She knew she was next.
Growing bored and tired, a severe mixture of both, Beni moved off her seat onto the floor of the compartment. Suddenly she wished she had friends, and had impulsive contemplations of actually going and making some, but as always, she remained silent, suddenly drawn like a magnet to the thing she so often felt controlled her life. The crystal ball. It wasn't something she liked, but she didn't hate it either. It made her think crazy thoughts, sometimes even do or say crazy things, and then she would have to sit down and stare at it, no matter how much she resisted.
Her mother had had the same gift, although she said Beni had it stronger. Beni believed her too. It took less than a few seconds for her to see things, and it was very rare that a crystal should call the seer to it the way it did Beni. Suddenly the compartment door opened. Beni felt her stomach drop down, replaced with a sick, empty feeling. She had observed the following events in her life through the ball previously. It was the same thing that happened at her old school, and the same thing that happened all the time. She prepared herself for the inevitable. She had seen it all so vividly, so detailed; she even knew their names...one, right after the other.
Ginny Weasly walked in. She took one look around. She took one breath of the sweet, rich, poisoning evil aroma that Beni breathed out of her own lungs, took one look at Beni herself, gasped, and fled. Beni rolled her eyes. Who was next? She remembered, 'Ginny runs off to her big brothers now, and, here they come.'
Three, two, one. The door slid open. The two boys gawked at her, entranced by her unique appearance. She looked at them.
"Hello." She said, mechanically.
"Freak!" one of them exclaimed loudly, and murmurs of laughter could be heard from behind him. She looked at his twin helplessly, pleadingly.
"Fuck you, ya queer." He spat at her, and then he turned smirking, and found himself face to face with Draco Malfoy.
As the twins walked away, Beni got a strange impulse that the boy staring at her right now hated the last two. Then why had one of those twins clapped him on the shoulder as if to say, 'go for it'? She looked up at the pale sneering boy standing in the doorway. He was different to the last two. He felt...authoritized, domineering. He was writing something on his thumb with a beautiful golden quill. Looking up at Beni every now and again, smirking. Suddenly, he strode into her compartment and knelt down in front of her. She saw a few people poke their heads in the door for a better view.
"My name is Draco." Said the boy. Beni, although she hated the rushing feelings of attraction she felt for this boy, she wanted to lean over and kiss him, just to feel the warmth of his body against the coldness of his heart.
"I know." Beni whispered. Draco leant forward and grabbed her chin, pulling her face towards him. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, getting closer and closer to him. She felt his other hand on her forehead, getting closer and closer still. She could feel his warm breath of her lips, and the pressure on her forehead, harder, harder...
He pushed her away, screaming with laughter. She shut her eyes. How much was she meant to endure in her life? If she had friends would this even happen? The crowd moved away. Beni knew the worst was over, but the hate was still to flow in. Three more to go. She reached into her roughly sewn bag and pulled out her crystal ball, and began to gently remove the white bandages she had used to keep it from shattering. She placed it on it's low stand on the floor of the compartment and touched it, vibing and probing her current feelings of despair and depression into it, making the familiar black light penetrate the ball and surround it's outside like an aura.
She looked at the outside of the crystal, at her reflection. She squinted; there was something on her forehead...words. She leaned forward: "I had my dick removed." Was stamped across her forehead. It was what Draco was writing on his thumb, what he had pressed on there when she thought he was going to kiss her. She concentrated on her appearance while scrubbing the words off her forehead. She had long, long black hair, with silver at the top of her part. Some of her hair was wavy, some was straight and some was curly. Some was in little twists and some bits were teased and knotty. Her eyes, they were silver too. She liked them, they had a kind of white glow to them, and when she cried they turned red. Her other features were normal, plain almost to a point of being drab. Beni was not a beautiful girl, nor was she weird or scary looking, and by no means was she ugly. She was just...indescribable. She was disgustingly thin, bordering on anorexia, but it was not her fault. She ate normally and only ever threw up when she thought of her mother, which she tried not think of often. It was just the way her body did things. Beni wore lots of black. It was a good colour. Grey was gross, and Beni just didn't like anything bright and happy. It made her feel even more displaced. She also felt more comfortable, more secure with chains padlocked around her neck, not tightly but not loosely. At her old school, a boy had grabbed onto the back of her chain intending to strangle her, but his hands had burst into flames upon the first touch of the chains, and had never healed. He was cursed, doomed to walk around with hands of black, rotting, dripping skin for the rest of his life. Things like that often happened to Beni Montano. She sighed; the ink would not come off her forehead. She would just walk around with it until someone lifted it. After all, it wasn't a dramatic addition to the way she already looked.
She stared into it. Images began to swirl, faster and faster, they began to slow down and then settle into precise visions. The compartment door slid open yet again. She twisted around sharply, as three tall figures entered. She searched her memory for their names. She remembered them from a vision she had of a class...potions it was, and the teacher hated them. Weasly was separated from Granger...that was what happened, and then there was another...she couldn't remember. She turned her attention to the three people blocking the doorway.
"Can I help you?" Beni asked as if they were wasting her time.
"Yes you can as a matter of fact. You can tell us who you are and what you're doing here and why the entire school is talking about you." Said the girl. Beni didn't like her. Maybe it was her hair, it was feral and looked as though she hadn't washed or brushed it for a month. She contemplated telling the girl, but decided against it.
"We want to be your friend." Said the tall boy; with the black hair and the scar...Beni had learnt about him at school.
"Potter." She muttered.
"Yes?" he asked, surprised at her bitter tone.
"You don't need to know who I am, or why I'm here. If you hear anyone talking about me, tell him or her to shove it up his or her ass. And I don't want you as friends. I don't like you." Beni said in a low voice.
"Fine." Said the red-haired boy that hadn't spoken yet, and followed the girl out with a scoff. Potter stared at her for a few seconds, confused, and then left with the others, shaking his ugly head.
Beni sat and shrieked with laughter.
Chapter 1: Going to, going from.
Beni sat on the train, alone. She didn't care though; it wasn't like she'd ever had friends. She sat staring out of the dusty window, at the constant landscape outside, not really sure what she was looking for. A change, an unfamiliarity maybe, meanwhile losing herself in her own thoughts.
Her eyes began to water, and she wiped away the tears. Freaky things like that often happened to Beni Montano. Before she died, her mother used to tell her it was because her powers were so strong. Beni used to believe it, but now, her mother had been gone for so long...it seemed like a load of shit.
Her father had been murdered too. Not in the standard wizarding way either. They had been murdered a muggle way. Beni began to relive the moment she had found her mother. She hated to remember. For weeks before she would not look at her crystal ball. She was too scared, she had known something was about to happen, but it still didn't prepare her. She had walked into her bedroom, bored and tired, letting her door swing shut behind her. She had flopped on her bed, squirming around to get comfortable.
She had ended up upside down, facing the back of her door. There was something on her door that was not meant to be there, something that had made her blood run cold and her eyes swivel around pathetically. She rolled over, vomiting blood all over her cream carpet.
Nailed and hung on the back of her stark white door, was the stabbed, bleeding, mangled body of her mother. Her face was rotting and blue, her eyes wide, wide open, one eye missing the pupil and iris. Her hair was ratty and crawling with bugs, and mould grew on her dis-figured legs. Beni had screamed and screamed, frozen...petrified...mortified. Nobody had come...two whole days had passed, and the neighbors had grown tired of her consistent screams. All that time Beni had stayed rooted to the spot, staring at her mother.
She had seen a councillor after that. Beni pulled her head in the train window, wiping the dregs of vomit from her mouth. She smiled at the thought of Bob Michael-Richardson, her wizard councillor. He had tried and tried with Beni, but nothing had worked to heal the scars left by that traumatizing event in her past. Eventually he put a memory charm on her, but Beni was special. Beni had told him that but he didn't listen to her. The memory charm had not worked. Beni could resist things like that. She didn't know why she resisted it. Maybe it was an involuntary thing.
But she had pretended that it had worked, just so that she could stop seeing Bob, who she did not particularly like. She had returned to school after that. She had attended a school for the dark-arts resistors, highly selective and crawling with enemies and spies, children of death eaters. Beni was however, the kind of person that school was made for. She was from a good family; she was both special and powerful, with a wish to conquer evil. Well that used to be her anyway.
She had returned home in a daze. The same daze she had been in all term. As she stepped onto her driveway she lost her vision. How many times had she walked up that driveway when she was a small girl? She walked right up to her door. She took out her key and jammed it through the keyhole. It was tougher than she remembered. She heard the click and reached out to turn the doorknob.
Suddenly her sight returned and she found herself face to face with her father's wide-open eyes, both the pupil and the iris missing from each glaring eyeball. There were stab holes all over his body, he had also been cursed and hexed. His legs and arms were broken, and hung at grotesque angles. She looked at his hand, the one covering the doorknob. She had touched that hand; she had even pushed her key through it. That must have caused a grinding sound, and the click when she broke a small bone. Beni turned and ran blindly, screaming down her drive way.
She knew she was next.
Growing bored and tired, a severe mixture of both, Beni moved off her seat onto the floor of the compartment. Suddenly she wished she had friends, and had impulsive contemplations of actually going and making some, but as always, she remained silent, suddenly drawn like a magnet to the thing she so often felt controlled her life. The crystal ball. It wasn't something she liked, but she didn't hate it either. It made her think crazy thoughts, sometimes even do or say crazy things, and then she would have to sit down and stare at it, no matter how much she resisted.
Her mother had had the same gift, although she said Beni had it stronger. Beni believed her too. It took less than a few seconds for her to see things, and it was very rare that a crystal should call the seer to it the way it did Beni. Suddenly the compartment door opened. Beni felt her stomach drop down, replaced with a sick, empty feeling. She had observed the following events in her life through the ball previously. It was the same thing that happened at her old school, and the same thing that happened all the time. She prepared herself for the inevitable. She had seen it all so vividly, so detailed; she even knew their names...one, right after the other.
Ginny Weasly walked in. She took one look around. She took one breath of the sweet, rich, poisoning evil aroma that Beni breathed out of her own lungs, took one look at Beni herself, gasped, and fled. Beni rolled her eyes. Who was next? She remembered, 'Ginny runs off to her big brothers now, and, here they come.'
Three, two, one. The door slid open. The two boys gawked at her, entranced by her unique appearance. She looked at them.
"Hello." She said, mechanically.
"Freak!" one of them exclaimed loudly, and murmurs of laughter could be heard from behind him. She looked at his twin helplessly, pleadingly.
"Fuck you, ya queer." He spat at her, and then he turned smirking, and found himself face to face with Draco Malfoy.
As the twins walked away, Beni got a strange impulse that the boy staring at her right now hated the last two. Then why had one of those twins clapped him on the shoulder as if to say, 'go for it'? She looked up at the pale sneering boy standing in the doorway. He was different to the last two. He felt...authoritized, domineering. He was writing something on his thumb with a beautiful golden quill. Looking up at Beni every now and again, smirking. Suddenly, he strode into her compartment and knelt down in front of her. She saw a few people poke their heads in the door for a better view.
"My name is Draco." Said the boy. Beni, although she hated the rushing feelings of attraction she felt for this boy, she wanted to lean over and kiss him, just to feel the warmth of his body against the coldness of his heart.
"I know." Beni whispered. Draco leant forward and grabbed her chin, pulling her face towards him. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, getting closer and closer to him. She felt his other hand on her forehead, getting closer and closer still. She could feel his warm breath of her lips, and the pressure on her forehead, harder, harder...
He pushed her away, screaming with laughter. She shut her eyes. How much was she meant to endure in her life? If she had friends would this even happen? The crowd moved away. Beni knew the worst was over, but the hate was still to flow in. Three more to go. She reached into her roughly sewn bag and pulled out her crystal ball, and began to gently remove the white bandages she had used to keep it from shattering. She placed it on it's low stand on the floor of the compartment and touched it, vibing and probing her current feelings of despair and depression into it, making the familiar black light penetrate the ball and surround it's outside like an aura.
She looked at the outside of the crystal, at her reflection. She squinted; there was something on her forehead...words. She leaned forward: "I had my dick removed." Was stamped across her forehead. It was what Draco was writing on his thumb, what he had pressed on there when she thought he was going to kiss her. She concentrated on her appearance while scrubbing the words off her forehead. She had long, long black hair, with silver at the top of her part. Some of her hair was wavy, some was straight and some was curly. Some was in little twists and some bits were teased and knotty. Her eyes, they were silver too. She liked them, they had a kind of white glow to them, and when she cried they turned red. Her other features were normal, plain almost to a point of being drab. Beni was not a beautiful girl, nor was she weird or scary looking, and by no means was she ugly. She was just...indescribable. She was disgustingly thin, bordering on anorexia, but it was not her fault. She ate normally and only ever threw up when she thought of her mother, which she tried not think of often. It was just the way her body did things. Beni wore lots of black. It was a good colour. Grey was gross, and Beni just didn't like anything bright and happy. It made her feel even more displaced. She also felt more comfortable, more secure with chains padlocked around her neck, not tightly but not loosely. At her old school, a boy had grabbed onto the back of her chain intending to strangle her, but his hands had burst into flames upon the first touch of the chains, and had never healed. He was cursed, doomed to walk around with hands of black, rotting, dripping skin for the rest of his life. Things like that often happened to Beni Montano. She sighed; the ink would not come off her forehead. She would just walk around with it until someone lifted it. After all, it wasn't a dramatic addition to the way she already looked.
She stared into it. Images began to swirl, faster and faster, they began to slow down and then settle into precise visions. The compartment door slid open yet again. She twisted around sharply, as three tall figures entered. She searched her memory for their names. She remembered them from a vision she had of a class...potions it was, and the teacher hated them. Weasly was separated from Granger...that was what happened, and then there was another...she couldn't remember. She turned her attention to the three people blocking the doorway.
"Can I help you?" Beni asked as if they were wasting her time.
"Yes you can as a matter of fact. You can tell us who you are and what you're doing here and why the entire school is talking about you." Said the girl. Beni didn't like her. Maybe it was her hair, it was feral and looked as though she hadn't washed or brushed it for a month. She contemplated telling the girl, but decided against it.
"We want to be your friend." Said the tall boy; with the black hair and the scar...Beni had learnt about him at school.
"Potter." She muttered.
"Yes?" he asked, surprised at her bitter tone.
"You don't need to know who I am, or why I'm here. If you hear anyone talking about me, tell him or her to shove it up his or her ass. And I don't want you as friends. I don't like you." Beni said in a low voice.
"Fine." Said the red-haired boy that hadn't spoken yet, and followed the girl out with a scoff. Potter stared at her for a few seconds, confused, and then left with the others, shaking his ugly head.
Beni sat and shrieked with laughter.