The Core Project
= Future Slash =
A/N: to those of you wondering about a certain owl - Hedwig, that'll unravel later in the story.
I do not own HP or YGO
Chapter Four
The first thing to greet him was the sound of a worn wood suddenly creaking under the weight of his sudden appearance. The air was thick and musky, the lobby was barren - it could have done with fresh air circulation. He stood, stock-still to slowly take in his surroundings. Harry was admittedly disgusted, there were cobwebs in every corner and cranny he could see, the Victorian wallpaper was worn and faded, the whole place looked to be in a worse state then Grimmauld had been.
Swallowing, he glanced up and nearly gasped at how high the ceiling was - the lobby was the size of the smallest bedroom he stayed in at the Dursleys - in width, and height was outmatched totally. After initial disgust, his first thought was how there was some very old spell-work that was keeping the foundations and structure of the house in un-aged, tip-top condition, and some sort of weak ward system that must have been keeping squatters, looters and general unwanted house visitors out - because it was totally uninhabited with some signs of furnishings. Old, outdated, antique furnishing that would probably be sold for a pretty penny too - hell, he even had a victorian styled sofa, except he was pretty sure there was probably something living in it.
There was a creepy atmosphere as all that broke the silence was the sound of him walking over the floorboards, disturbing inch layers thickness of dust as he went, his trunk of belongings rolling behind him as he stood infront of a staircase. As if scared that the creaky wooden floorboards would creak under him and collapse, he slowly ascended up the steps, heaving his trunk up them and breaking dust and cobwebs as he did. He heard the sound of shuffling critters and cringed as he saw a nest of half dead, half alive, puffskeins at the corner of the upstairs hallway. Harry paused and sniffed the air - something smelled bad, not revoltingly so, but distasteful enough for him to pull a face. It reminded him of the roadkill beside the park back in Privet Drive.
Upstairs were a series of doors, several bedrooms, a master bedroom and what was probably a bathroom. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a painting and turned toward it. If he was lucky, maybe it was a talking painting like the ones in Hogwarts?
"My word! Do my eyes deceive me?" the painting appeared to be talking to itself, or rather, the sword that had been painted with him. It was a knight, with no helmet and sporting thick silver armor on from the neck down. There was nothing else in the picture - no background, no life, no nothing.
"Excuse me?" asked Harry hesitantly.
"-all these centuries, I've never hallucinated before. I've even saught the company of those little puffskein creatures, nearly taught them English you know! Half of them died though, sad really," rambled the painting.
"I'm not a hallucination. I don't even think painting's can hallucinate," said Harry bluntly, cutting off the somewhat unhinged knight.
"...Quite right! I should hope not anyway," said the knight, nodding enthusiastically.
"I'd hate to think I've gone mad," he mused.
"Well...it's been centuries since anyone's entered this house my dear boy! What with wards and whatnot, I should take it since you could enter, that you're one of my descendents? Who are you? Tell me, what year is it? Is that awful war still on? With that Grindelwald fellow and that, that German wreck? The chancellor with the queer mustache?" the painting fired off.
Harry's head spun with the amount of questions bombarded at him so suddenly.
"It can't have been centuries, lots of years, yes, you... you aren't on about the second world war are you?" asked Harry slowly "-I'm Harry Potter, I... well, are you one of my ancestors? "
"I'm Godric Gryffindor," beamed the portrait "-co-founder of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, do you know it?" asked the knight.
Harry stared in disbelief, first of all - the insane portrait was claiming to be one of the greatest wizards in British history, second of all, he was asking him of all people if he knew about the school as if it was an obscure corner shop! Squinting closely, he realized the sword the knight had been chatting too was familiar - it looked like the one he'd wielded in second year against the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. It was Godric Gryffindor's sword and no one but a true Gryffindor could wield it, and who would randomly paint such a rare piece with an arbitrary knight?
"Bloody hell you really are Godric Gryffindor," muttered Harry.
"Of course I am! Who else in Circe's name do I look like?" snapped the portrait "-Merlin? Youngsters these days," he grumbled.
Harry blinked owlishly at the moodswing but rationalized it to the portrait not being able to talk to someone properly from years of isolation.
"Right, now that one of my descendents has so graciously decided to bother with an ancestral property," sneered the knight "-I should warn you that dead puffskeins are not the worst thing you have to worry about!"
"What do you mean?" asked Harry, making a grab for the wand he'd brought of the Knockturn market.
"I believe there's a boggart issue in the master bedroom," sighed the portrait "-and...well, we used to have house elves. I suspect that's what you smelled when you came in," said Godric, grimacing at the boy's horrified and repulsed expression.
"I'll leave my trunk here then," he left it standing crudely in the hallway and casted the cleaning charm more times then he could count, to get rid of the cobwebs that claimed ownership over a majority of the house. The wand responded stubbornly and the task took twice as long then it should have, he almost felt burned out. With some degree of revulsion, he casted a vanishing charm on the puffskein corpses, leaving on lone puffskein huddled in a corner.
"Evanes- " Harry paused mid-vanishing spell - the furry thing was doing no real harm, and it's whole family had already died in it's nest, so he softened and let the puffskein stay. The puffskein glared at his hand, then looked up at Harry, and bounced over to sniff his hand as if it was measuring his character. Then, it slowly inched into his open palm and nervously nestled into it, soaking into the warmth and tickling Harry's hand with his soft furry, fluff.
It let out a noise akin to a purr that almost felt like a little vibration or low little motor as it welcomed itself into the wizard's grip.
"-Going to keep him, I take it?" asked Godric.
"Yes, he's not doing much harm, is he? Besides, it seems to like me well enough and it was just sitting in a nest of it's dead family. Pest or not, I feel a bit sorry for the little guy," murmured Harry as he looked down at the little ball of fur.
"Well, you should name him then. You do name your pets, right? Or has that gone out fashion these days?" asked Godric wryly.
"Well he's the first of the little bugger's I've ever seen with teeth," said Harry quietly, in deep thought. Silence reigned for all of five minutes before the wizard decided on a name.
"Snapple," he said seriously "-his name is Snapple,"
"Why Snapple?" asked Godric, baffled and amused at the same time.
"The teeth," laughed Harry lightly.
"Perhaps you should get onto moving the house elf bodies, then the boggart," said Godric seriously, breaking the light-hearted air almost immediately.
Harry's expression darkened noticeably "-O..kay.."
Eventually the sky darkened and evening came, Ryou's sleep was difficult. How could he sleep with the golden sharp prongs of the Millennium Ring, stabbing into his chest persistently? The gold seemed to warm against the fabric of his clothes and his skin so much that he wondered if he would be burned from it. Never had the Millennium Ring had such a powerful, visceral reaction and it glowed so brightly that he didn't look down to see it.
He stared up at his ceiling, willing it to stop. It was starting to pain him and he couldn't ignore it or block it out and against his will he mentally called for the malignant entity of the Ring to get it to stop.
All he recieved was a mocking laughter pounding in the back of his skull as he picked up a pillow from under his head and put if over his face to muffle the sounds of pain as his chest began to ache from rhythmatic breathing.
His hands clawed deeply into the pillow as he squeezed his eyes shut against it and felt warmth behind his eyelids. He wanted to cry out, it was starting to hurt too much that his resolve not to make a sound was crumbling.
Finally, the entity answered him - but with the same, mocking, seemingly all-knowing non-answers that served only to terrify Ryou about whatever was to come or what the entity would do the next time he took over.
"Host." It addressed him "-the power is here, somewhere here, in this whole country," the way he said it - the source of power could have been at the opposite corner of Japan but was so great that mere entry over the border had sent a ripple effect of it's sheer immense magnitude to the Ring.
The Ring spirit hungered for it - Ryou could feel that. The messed up, ball of rage, confusion, evil and utter darkness had switched from mockery and vengeance to sheer hunger. Like a vampire for bloodthirst or a cannibal for flesh, Ryou could feel the urge to be consumed by this hunger - just to be close to that kind of power.
It terrified him.
He felt his hands bound by his sides, pillow discarded to the floor, feeling the power of the Ring sit on his chest as the glowing began to cease, and the hunger began to fade - as if tamed by the entity. The body demanded it's sleep, and was trying to shut down whether Ryou felt like it - or whether the Ring spirit wanted it to or not. So he grudgingly let his useless host sleep.
Ryou's last thought before drifting off, was how he didn't want the Ring spirit near that kind of power in any way shape or form. It terrified him to think of what could happen if the spirit of the Ring came into knowing contact with it.
And the chilling words of the last time the Ring spirit spoke to him, still haunted him.
"You will be irrelevant soon,"
It seemed the Ring spirit hadn't quite left him to his devices, as it added it's own two cents before the boy could truly sleep.
"You all will,"
Maybe Harry had run out of strength and was burning himself out too quickly - especially with the bootleg wand, a majority of the house was sorted and restored save for the boggart, but eventually, he'd stretched his magical core to a point of exhaustion and even Godric willed him to stop.
Stubbornly, he did not, not if he wanted to sleep soundly - alone in that strange place with only a portrait and a puffskein for company. It was a creepy, scary house that he'd yet to add a warm touch to. The house elf corpses hadn't helped either, he'd thrown up and had to vanish that too. He could easily have thought of Dobby like that and it made him ill.
Then he made the mistake of opening the wardrobe in the master bedroom, and saw his boggart.
But it was not a dementor as he expected.
The sound of the painting's comfort was drowned out by the sound of masculine cries, all that was in the master bedroom room apart from the bed and open wardrobe, was Harry, sitting on the floor, knees to his chest and eyes wide open, and his boggart.
His boggart mimicked him on the floor, staring back with morphed, quasi-human green-red eyes, that looked like they were stolen out of a badly made doll. It looked like Harry, but it wasn't. It looked like Tom Riddle, from the memory in second year - the horcrux. But it had his iconic scar.
But he was covered in what looked like crusted blood.
Harry couldn't muster words to dispell it.
They didn't even attack each other, they waited for the other to make a move.
Harry knew what he was staring at.
He felt his power stretch out- he willed the being to get away from him, physically - to go back into the hellish depths of that wardrobe and never come out. The thing was surprised and let out the most ghastly noise as it was flung into the open wardrobe and doors shut as Harry willed them to. He grabbed the wand and vanished the entire thing even though it hurt his core to do so at this point. He was exhausted.
Harry slumped against the leg of the master bed and remained on the floor, panting, with only the squeak of his puffskein and the concerned calls of Godric wafting in from the hallway.
His power - which didn't put a stretch on his magical core, called for his trunk as he weakly stretched out his hand that didn't have the puffskein in it.
The trunk slugged into the room, Harry was too exhausted to even concentrate on bringing it in properly as he pulled out the photo album and put it on the unfamiliar bed, the puffskein bounced off his hand onto the bed as Harry raised it, and he focused the last of his energy gently pulling Godric's portrait out of the hallway.
"-What do you think you're doing?" was the panicked call until the painting saw Harry was bringing him in with his powers and was too exhausted to pick him up manually.
"I don't think I can sleep soundly in this big place alone, would you mind being moved here and about until I can get more paintings for you to jump into? I could do with the company," and that was Harry's way of saying he felt scared and lonely.
The portrait of the wizened founder understood, and smiled at the boy.
"I'll show you this when I have more energy," yawned Harry, referring to the photoalbum "-it's my parents and some of the Potter family,"
"Thank you my child, I'd love to catch up on the latest additions and changes to my lineage as of late, yes, I have a lot of questions for you young Harry, but they can wait until morning - you look like Death just warmed over," said Godric, as he was hung on another wall nail overlooking the bed.
"Charming," snorted Harry, feeling weird to be bantering with a founder of Hogwarts.
He watched Harry curl up - he didn't open the photo-album and merely curled up with it and his puffskein - just so he didn't feel so out of place. Godric then realized that Harry had come with no one else - and his age was likely young. Did he have no one?
He felt a slight bit of pity as he watched young wizard try to sleep, curled up to a household pest and an inanimate book.
"Goodnight Mr. Gryffindor,"
Godric had never seen a person so young look so alone.
Harry realized he didn't know anything about the country he was in. He hadn't found a currency exchange, there was no sign of magic anywhere - his manor seemed to be plonked on the edge of a muggle town, and his dreams were filled of struggles and insecurities.
He was a little bit scared of going outside and getting lost.
There's spells for that.
His mind told him.
What if the Order find me?
They won't have the sense to look outside of Britain, realized Harry - and none of them had the power to access his property lists.
Then he realized he was scared of talking to people. They were people of another country, nobody knew him, he didn't know them and he needed to get his bearings -fast.
Godric looked quizzically as Harry smiled in his sleep. His dreams were filling of plans, big plans. Not nightmares.
School had been sluggish affair, Ryou had barely got through it. He hadn't gotten much sleep - eventually he just quit the day halfway through and went home to sleep. The Ring hadn't done much and for that he was thankful.
Whatever the power was, it hadn't been Shadow Magic, but it was so strong it could have suffocated with ease.
Then, something strange had happened.
On his way out, to pick up some things to stock the fridge up, he'd bumped into a rather handsomely clueless looking fellow.
And the Ring seared.