Author's note: …..my readers spoil me. Seriously, I love you guys. The overwhelming positive response the first chapter got made me decide to post this chapter a day sooner than I planned. So, until my schedule really changes, this story will update every Thursday and Saturday. :)
The first thing Harry did on waking was yawn, loudly and widely, a jaw-cracking sort of noise. His next action was to rearrange his body somewhat, brace his back against the floor of the pod, and slam his feet through the black glass, shattering the pod and tearing the carefully marked tape along with it. It wasn't the smartest thing Harry could have done—some of the shards hit him as they fell, slicing into his skin—but it was satisfying as hell. Sitting up in the wreckage of what had been his prison, Harry proceeded to stretch muscles which, without the cryo-sleep, would have atrophied, until he felt at least marginally more relaxed than he had before.
He didn't stand, not at first. Other than the fact that his legs were still a little weak, there was also the distracting instinct to take in his surroundings. One hand toying absently with a blunter bit of the glass, Harry did just that.
The pod he had lain within was neatly centered within a mid-sized room—or, as Harry looked to the metal walls and corrected himself, some sort of large storage container. There were no other pods in the room, nor any other people. Harry sat alone in a dimly lit space, which might have been pitch-black had the door of the container not been jostled slightly open to let in the faintest touch of bright sunlight. Wherever he had—Harry paused, looked at the crumpled metal walls of the container and the fine trail of sand along the compartment's floor—landed, it was daylight still.
Strewn along the floor of the container were a series of incongruous items. Harry made out bags at first, most of them ripped in places with burnt clothing spilling out. A shredded teddy bear lay just beside Harry's pod; whatever ship he had been on had held children. By contrast to the household objects, though, there was also a bulging bag of what looked to be rusting weapons, a metallic trunk which was open to reveal stored letters, and even what appeared to be a sarcophagus. "A cargo ship," Harry said aloud, to test his voice, which came out as more of a croak than anything else.
Observations complete, Harry carefully raised himself out of the wreckage of glass. After a moment of swaying on his feet, Harry's legs remembered old lessons and adjusted for balance, holding his weight rather than sending him tumbling back down. Harry's first few steps to the edge of the pod were precarious, like the steps of a child. By the time he had reached the edge of his former prison and levered himself over the side, he was moving with an echo of grace, suggesting that an ease of movement would return to him with just a little more practice. He stepped outside the pod with steady feet and, looking highly satisfied with himself, brushed the fragments of glass off his shirt and trousers, sprinkling bright dust to the ground below.
The first thing Harry looked at was the sarcophagus, mostly because he was bored and it seemed interesting. Inside, though, he found only bottles upon bottles of liquor. "I could get drunk," Harry rasped, amused at the notion—but no, he needed to be sober at least until he understood what was going on. Besides, the air felt hot inside the container, and would be hotter outside under the sun. The last thing Harry needed to do was dehydrate himself with alcohol. He closed the sarcophagus, took a second to wonder what strange person would hide antique bottles of liquor inside an elaborate coffin to begin with, and then turned and looked for something more useful.
"Weapons," he said, and ambled over to them, movements mostly smooth except for one near-fall on a particularly sandy patch. There was no shortage of them—spears, blades of all lengths and shapes, knives, shields, and even what looked to be a blow pipe. What was lacking was quality. None of the weapons looked to be less than two or three hundred years old, which meant they were all suffering from blunt edges and coats of rust. Harry ran his fingers along edges without cutting himself, and found the balance off on every weapon he chose to heft. "No," Harry said, and discarded a spear. A promising sword fell away with another, "No." A repeated negative, until the weapons were one by one eliminated. Five, maybe ten minutes into the process, Harry gave up and retracted his arm.
"Useless," he croaked, even as he turned and promptly fell over a blade.
Harry landed on the scabbard, smacking himself in the ribs painfully; on instinct, his fingers curled around the sheath. He stood again, scabbard still clutched in his hand, and looked down at the weapon in irritation. Then the irritation went, leaving wide-eyes and a quirked eyebrow in its place. "I can't be that lucky," Harry said, and drew the sword.
He was. The sword he drew was two feet in length, with a slim, tapering blade which seemed to owe its origins to the older Roman gladius. It was not beautiful, because it had not been made for beauty; no gems decorated the blade, no intricate metalwork stretched along the blade. The sword was short, functional, and almost entirely free of rust. Harry held it by the hilt and felt it fall into his hand as though it belonged there. The touch of a finger proved it was still sharp. The blade seemed to almost hum when Harry's blood trailed a thin red path along it. "I s'pose he meant it when he said you would follow me anywhere," he informed the sword, which hummed more strongly before falling quiet in his grip. Harry sheathed the sword with a smile.
The sword belt, of course, hadn't been so kind as to trail him into space as well, so Harry had a few interesting moments of fumbling about with the sword and scabbard, trying to find the best way to secure the sheathed blade to his body. At last Harry gave up and scavenged through the clothing of the other passengers. Harry wasn't fond of stealing, quite honestly, but he didn't have much of a choice. "Besides," he said aloud, voice still little more than a rasp, "they could all be dead anyway." Cheerful, no—practical, yes. Harry wound up finding a black belt strong enough to hold against the weight of his sword, though he had no idea what it was made of; it was long enough to wrap twice around his waist before buckling. He slid the scabbard in, examined it, and nodded in approval. From the bags he also liberated a few spare shirts and pants that looked as though they might fit him, and all these he placed inside the most intact of the canvas bags he could locate.
Harry did a sweeping second check of the storage container, looking for anything useful he might have missed. He'd half hoped to find his wand, or any wand at all, but there was no sign of any sort of magic within the compartment—neither he nor the other passengers seemed to have any tie to magic, which meant he would have to be careful using what few spells he had mastered wandlessly around survivors. No water appeared either. When Harry exited the container, he did so with only himself, his sword, and the clothes he had located. "Still better than I entered it."
The sun shone bright as Harry stepped into it, leaving the shade of the container's doors. No—that wasn't right. Two suns shone in the sky. Harry stopped, looked again, and was forced to accept something even more implausible. "Three suns?" He shaded green eyes with one hand and looked around, taking in the trail of destruction and remnants of the main body of a ship even as he did so. "What kind of planet needs three fucking suns?" The oxygen levels were low too; Harry felt as though he'd half-lost a lung and was unlikely to find it again any time soon. All the world, save for the obvious human intrusion that was the wreckage, seemed to be sand dunes and glaring reflections of the sunlight.
Harry sighed, rubbed his eyes, and said, "I'm getting too old for this."
What he was definitively too old for was sulking. Ten years before—by his body's count, anyway, if not by the actual years passed, and wouldn't that be confusing?—he'd had a great tendency to do just that. He refused to do it now. Setting his bag more comfortably over one shoulder, Harry stepped back into the cooler, shaded area of the container's doors and thought.
"Most likely place to be survivors is at the center of that wreck," he predicted aloud. "Who would have survived, though? Criminals, ordinary civilians, military? Could be dangerous either way, especially if any of them know my name." Unconsciously, his hand came up to clench at the dog tags hidden under his shirt; they clacked together as his fingers folded around them. After a moment, he continued, "Won't use my name, then." Whether or not he would go was really not a question at all. Being marooned on an alien planet without any information either on the planet in question or even the date, let alone any resources like water, was not a comfortable situation to be in. Harry would have to find someone living, or else his time on the planet would be a little more interesting than he wanted to consider.
The final choice, then, was whether to walk or see if he could manage a wandless Apparition. A little physical exercise was good for a body, no doubt, but Harry didn't think that a trek across hot sand and inferior air would do much of anything for his newly awoken body except dehydrate and exhaust it. On the other hand, though, Apparating to places he'd never seen before was hardly a walk in the park, and this would be a damned annoying place to splinch himself. Picking up pieces of himself from sand dunes was not a good way to start a morning. It would all depend, then, on his magical reserves.
Harry looked out at the overly-bright, overly-warm world and considered the easiest way to test his supply of magic. Sand was hard to work with, everyone knew that, and unless he felt like attempting transfiguration, it wasn't going to do him much good. Turning, he looked back inside the container. Nearest him was a pack of clothing he had already looked through. Harry looked at it, then said, "Yeah, I could do levitation."
Magic with a wand, though, was different than without. A stick of wood, a proper channeling core, swish and flick and two words of four syllables each, and then an object was aloft: things weren't quite so easy when the wand was taken out of the equation. Harry had been trained in wandless magic, though that had been a long time ago by conventional standards. Seeing as most everything Harry had done had occurred in that long ago time anyway, he wasn't overly worried. His body remembered what to do even before he did, and was already pooling his magic in his core before he thought to ask it to. The secret to wandless magic was a concentration of magic within the caster, using his or her own body as the channel, effectively making the human body into a wand substitute. Wands, however, did not have organs, or sensitive internal processes that would take badly to a sudden influx of magic, which was part of what made wandless magic difficult. If used improperly, it could literally send a person's body into shock, sometimes fatally so. It was a nuisance at times, the caution required to safely use the magic; Harry didn't even attempt it until he was sure he remembered the route his magic ought to follow through his body. After that he merely had to set it into movement along that route, which he did—wandless magic was easy once the internal factors were taken into account. With a swish and flick of his wrist for accuracy's sake, Harry focused on the shirt and said, "Wingardium Leviosa," and felt the magic leave his fingers.
Everything went wrong then. It was simple magic, one of the first charms Harry had learned, one of the first he'd mastered without a wand, and so it ought to have moved smoothly. Instead it fought, twisted and wrenched within his grip, trying to escape back into his body. It was almost, he thought, stupidly, as though it was running from something.
And then it hit him and Harry knew it was, the magic was running. He didn't know what from, couldn't explain in words, but there was something that had reared up when he cast, something old and angry and very very hungry that came from the planet itself—maybe it was the planet, or maybe it was even older than that—a consciousness, unpleasant sentience that found the power so kindly offered and hooked in and bit and bit and would not let go. Harry jerked his magic back towards his body, determined not to have it eaten, and engaged in a demented tug of war. Pull and pull and pull and pull, with claws-fingers-teeth catching and pulling back, trying to drag his magic away, trying to drag it downdowndown into depths Harry couldn't see with his eyes. Pull and pull and something tore. A bit of his magic, dragged away and gone, lost to Harry; the consciousness crooned in delight and ate it as it went, and Harry could feel it go, it hurt—before the thing could come for him again he tucked his magic back inside himself and closed off his barriers, locking his magic deep inside his form where it could not be touched again.
Harry fell to his knees and gasped. His magic would survive, but it was injured. He had a headache. His whole body was in pain. "Oh, fuck," he said emphatically, dragging in deep gulps of the planet's thin air. It was too much.
In a storage container, some small distance from the wreckage of the Hunter-Gratzner, Harry James Potter closed his eyes and collapsed, unconscious, to the sandy floor.
Trala. Please continue to be as amazing as you were last chapter. I loved every review I got, and responded to each of them (save for my two anonymous reviewers, and I adored your reviews too). Thanks also have to go to everybody who alerted or favorited this story. As ever, any feedback I get is appreciated, so drop a review if you've the time. :) I hope you enjoyed.
Next chapter: What has our favorite serial killer been doing whilst Harry was getting himself knocked unconscious?