Son of a Dragon
Chapter 2: Horror Dreams and Cold 'Accidents'
Summary: Scorpius has to deal with, among other things, a portrait portfolio, a New Age ghost, the Malfoy Internal Spy System, cruel instigator/dumb blond stereotypes, crippling food allergies, and the Murderer's Map (not to be confused with the Marauder's Map.)
Do you know what your father did to my Dad? A sneering voice asked.
No, sorry, Scorpius said, not understanding any difference. That was until he realized that whoever had asked him the question had not done it in tangible words. The voice he heard resounded through his skull, it echoed through the chamber of his ribcage, through the twisted ivory tunnels of his marrow.
No surprises there, Malfoy. Do you know what your father did to me? I guess you don't, you wimpy spider. Well, here's what he did; he body bound my father, threw and Invisibility Cloak over him, and beat him nearly to the point of death. What makes me think you'll be any different?
Why is everyone like this? I'm NOT my Dad! Scorpius thought with all the vehemence he could muster, finally able to voice his thoughts, or, well, to think his thoughts to another.
Well, Skorpy, the voice said, full of mock pity, you can't HELP it, can you, you widdle inbred person. Your Malfoy family has been inbred for several generations. Like look at your family tree. How many lines cross? Cousin to cousin, brother to sister, mother to son.
Hey, that only happened once! Scorpius protested, knowing that, too, was a lie.
You Malfoys have been conceited since the beginning. Rather have kids with your sister than another person, a non Malfoy. And now, you've trapped yourself in your conceit, you idiots. Do you have the brain cells to change your beliefs? I doubt it. What other defects do you have, besides sheer arrogance to the point of alarming stupidity?
Well, Scorpius said, my little sister Placida is blind. My grandmother was not born with two feet, although she hid it well. Even Dad has- Scorpius stopped.
I'm in a dream, aren't I?
Yes, the voice said. How did you know?
Everything's shaky; my words seem to be tilted slightly, I don't know how to describe it.
The voice, improbably, raised its nonexistent eyebrows; Scorpius could just tell these things. Well if it were up to me, the voice said viciously, you'd never wake up. However, I can only do this. Scorpius felt his own hand rise up (he had forgotten about any part of his body other than his mind until then) and punch him in the nose.
Take that, scum. I only hope that you'll waste your life as soon as possible. I'll be waiting.
Who are you?
I think you know who, Scorpius, the voice said, filling Scorpius with a fear that came from far away. Scorpius heard it from far away, felt it coming closer. He couldn't run though, but if it hit him, he'd be over.
That's right. I've been waiting to catch up to you for a while now, the voice taunted, words tempered as sharp as steel, searing as liquid iron.
So have your precious stay at Hogwarts, it mocked, enjoy it while you can. A dark shadow shaped like a hand…
"Wake up, you oaf!" Rose practically shrieked in his ear. "I've been trying to wake you for ten minutes! You really need to change right now! We're almost here! And what happened to your nose? When I came back, it was bleeding."
Scorpius looked at her, touching a hand to his nose. He pulled his hand up. Blood parted company with his afflicted body part, joining his hand. He frowned, almost crying for some inexplicable reason.
He went to the bathroom, and changed into his robes. He saw a familiar gray rat. He picked it up, careful to handle it around its middle rather than its tail.
"Prewitt? Oh great, I should return you to Lorcan."
He said a hurried goodbye to Rose and headed to Lorcan and Lysander's compartment.
Scorpius opened the door, and saw Mungo just barely scraping the ceiling, having grown over five feet since he saw it last.
"My god, Lysander, what is with that thing?" Scorpius asked, not so much frightened as worried for the sake of the Hogwarts castle. Would it be rolled over by a giant Puffskein comparable to King Kong in Tokyo?
Mungo grinned and winked, revealing sharp teeth.
"Are Puffskein even supposed to have-"
"Prewitt!" Lorcan cried gratefully, snatching the rat out of Scorpius's arms.
"Why do you keep on running away? I missed you!" He gave the rat a kiss on the nose. Scorpius snorted with a smile.
"I mean. Sarcasm! Misanthropy! Apathy! Wahoo wah! These are my favorite life values!" Lorcan said hurriedly.
"Hey, James, have you met Scorpius?"
Scorpius rushed out of the room, almost tripping over his robes. Where to go? Where to go?
He couldn't go with Rose; that would be the first place they'd look. He opened another random compartment, saw who was in it, and shut it, running away even faster. However, a hand grabbed him and pulled him back into the compartment, and more specifically, into her arms.
"Scorpius! Where were you?" She asked in characteristically hoarse voice.
"Oh, I've been around," Scorpius said, staring at the ground.
"Well, you should've told me!" She yelled, her bushy eyebrows contorting her face into a fearsome expression. She smacked him in the shoulder. "We have some catching up to do!"
"Yeah, we do," Scorpius hurriedly agreed, shrinking from her.
"Like for one thing, you asshole, why you pretended to be sick every time I came over! You're making me look so stupid! Well, that's gonna be different! Now on, we're gonna be best friends, right?" The last sentence she said softer than the others. However, Scorpius was just as intimidated. She was the one, he knew, to blame for him being timid as a rabbit; she bossed him around constantly, scared him from Day 1, but his dad didn't let him fight back, just because she was a girl. He didn't see anything soft or feminine about that fearsome face, plump body, and wiry-haired arms full of fat and muscle.
"Yeah, of course, Maxima." He tried to reason with himself. Even though she scared him, she really did like him, or liked ordering him around, at any rate.
He heard the steam whistle sound, loud as a gunshot, only more persistent and less shocking.
Time for the rest of his life to begin.
What life?
Scorpius shut out further horror dreams, and went outside, knowing he was near Hogwarts. He just had to ride a boat to get there, he'd heard about this. It was supposed to be very beautiful, seeing the home of his next seven years slowly come into glorious view. Maxima Goyle, with pincer-like arms that could probably put any lobster to shame, grabbed onto him.
"Let's go into the same boat!" She said, happily, her cute, child-like voice sharply contrasting her vise-like grip that threatened to splinter Scorpius's bones.
Lorcan and Lysander, laughing, took pity on them and joined them too, along with a slightly familiar-looking boy with green eyes and pin straight black hair.
"Hey, Scorpius, this here is Al. Al, this is Scorpius Malfoy."
Al ruffled his pin straight hair with his fingers; Scorpius had to restrain himself from pointing out that such straight hair would just fall exactly back into place. In two milliseconds, he was proven right in that hypothesis.
Al smiled at him, as though he didn't hate Scorpius. Scoprius frowned in return. He didn't want to be beaten up by James for being friends with him! He sighed.
"Where's Mungo?" He thought to ask.
"Mungo's in here," Lysander said, patting his pocket. He pulled out Mungo, who could fit in the palm of his hand.
"Wow." Scorpius said.
The boats started moving by an unknown force, skimming across the water. Scorpius, while he would never admit it, was beginning to feel sick and quaky already. However, as his dad always told him, "Show no weakness." He showed a lot more weakness than his dad, but he would not openly display his flaws to a group of his father's enemies' children.
The boats picked up speed, and the wind whipped at their ears. It howled like a mangled animal, and Scorpius's ears were turning red, clearly offset by his pale skin.
Meanwhile, Lysander was patting Mungo, the small kitten perched on his shoulder like another furry head somehow attached haphazardly to his shoulders. Lorcan, on the other hand, had Prewitt on his shoulder, and Günter was currently jumping up like an excited dog that looked like a disease-carrying rodent.
Al, on the other hand, was far more quiet, looking out in the distance, searching for a sight of Hogwarts. Scorpius, on the other hand, looked back for a second, watching everything else fade, becoming gray and insubstantial.
Maxima punched him in the shoulder, and he struggled to regain the balance before becoming closer to the choppy water in the boat's wake.
"Yeah, this is gonna be sweet, huh man?" She said in her throaty voice.
Scorpius wanted to whine 'You almost knocked me off,' but didn't want to look like a girl, especially in front of the manliest one he knew.
He turned around to the side, and heard the students in the boats next to him oohing and aahing at the sight of a distant castle manifesting itself from out of the gray twilight. He slowly turned around, wondering what he would see, and he felt someone push his side, and he toppled headfirst into the water.
The water was cold. It was paralyzingly cold. His body tingled enormously, than seemed to freeze. To move his arms even a little bit seemed a giant strain.
As though the world was ending around him, he saw slowly Lorcan and Lysander run to the side of the boat. He couldn't hear their murmurs clearly, but what he heard clearly was Maxima:
"Swim, you idiot!" He sighed. She was so annoying. Out of the corner of his eye, when the waves were at their trough, not their crest, he could see a castle approaching rapidly.
He looked at Al, who smiled at him in a way that seemed a trifle less sincere than it should be, given that he was drowning. Scorpius stuck his tongue out at him, and Al just grinned.
All of a sudden, Scorpius felt his feet against something. Scrabbling frantically on whatever surface had just appeared, his legs gave out, but somehow the surface rose up to meet him- and it didn't stop. The surface was soft, slippery, with an almost rubbery quality to it. He noticed all of a sudden that he was sitting in a sucker of some giant limb of a giant sea monster. When that became clear, he tried to jump off of it, but the suckers seemed to be holding him firmly in place. The limb rose out of the water, and when it was a foot above the boat, he was dropped unceremoniously back onto it. He stared, and saw the head of a giant squid rise out of the water. Lysander stared at it with a frenetic interest of a naturalist, but Lorcan stared at it with this crazy look that was akin to a form of love.
Maxima stared at Lorcan. After the squid left, Lorcan smiled to himself, and it never quite left his face.
"It's SO adorable!" He exclaimed to Lysander, Al, and Scorpius. "Did you see it's little beak?"
"Little?" Scorpius asked.
"And its arms! They were such a nice shade of peach!"
"Arms?" Al asked.
"Yeah, they're actually not called 'tentacles.' Well, two of them are, but the main eight are called arms."
"Well, learn something new every day, dontcha!" Maxima said, who actually sounded interested.
"Yeah, isn't it-" Lorcan continued.
"Lorcan! We're almost there! Stuff it! I don't want you to talk about squid anatomy when we first go to Hogwarts!" Lysander said, for once sounding slightly less gentle than a newborn kitten. "He's always loved squids, thought they were the coolest, along with rats and other weird things, so a REALLY BIG SQUID is like amazing for him. I, on the other hand, have normal pets, like Veil here!" He gestured to the kitten. Meanwhile, Mungo swelled to the size of a bowling ball.
Scorpius loved irony, and he burst into a swell of laughter that lasted until they reached the shore of Hogwarts.
