Title: Incubus
Author: Abacus
Summary: AU. For five boys, their past comes back and hits them full in the face. As memories flood back they return to that summer fifteen years hence at Hogwarts, back to a time of youth, friendships, and death. Idea based on Steven King's, "IT" H/D
A/N: Certain elements of this story will be like the book. A lot of this story will obviously be very unlike the book as well ("IT").
Part One: He Returns
Azkaban sat on the middle of the ocean on a giant rock that only few people could see.
Giant tides with the crest towering a couple of feet up crashes, in a repetitive fashion over the rocks, in a monotone beat- a repetitive whoosh, whoosh, unvarying enough to drive even the most patient man, mad. The rock was an impressive figure that loomed a hundred feet into the air. It is a small island standing amass an ever stretching ocean. On top of the that sat a building. A giant structure that seemed to stretch towards infinity.
One time, there was a man by the name of Otis Camille who pledged that he would not rest, or come down until he reached the peak of the building. Now, thirty years later, Otis Camille's graying fiancé, still lights a candle vigil at the bottom of the rocks. She remains adamant that her long lost fiancé, Otis, will one day return to her.
This building appeared to be in the process of decay. So rotted it looked that rumor went: if you simply took an ice pick and drove it into a crack on the building, everything will come a tumbling down.
This, of course, was untrue. The decayed appearance only served as a psychological device meant to break down the spirits of the inmates- it was purely for aesthetic purposes. In truth, the building was made out of the toughest most durable steel known to man. Anyone who tried to crack it with a ice pick would soon find themselves with one or two shattered arms. Doing so, was not recommended.
The institution was well publicized for the fact that they currently held the coveted position of the "most secured prison of the west". Something that the wardens of Azkaban were rather proud of. Dementors swarmed the steel caged vicinity and anyone whom the soul-sucking beings suspected to be planning to escape, paid the consequences dearly.
These dementors would, without warning, sweep up to the perpetrator, and delivered him the dementor's kiss. Even for a hard pressed prisoner with years of pent up sexual frustration, the dementor's kiss was not something they wholly welcomed. Not many people attempted to run- many who did soon found themselves three quarters short of a soul.
Outside, the rain beat hazardously on the walls of Azkaban. Like a snidget on sugar quills, a hyperactive owl zoomed through the sky in a burst of speed. He carried a crisp purple envelope with him that swung back and forth, back and forth, with the Hogwarts insignia stamped on the front.
Recognizing the mailing owl not as a threat, the building let him through without further duress. Skippy, the mailing owl, zoomed through the confines of the building, past the waiting room, through the halls, under the hovering death eaters and into one of the millions of cells in Azkaban.
An inmate laid on his bed. He stared at the sooty ceiling above him. His face remained set in consternation thinking only Merlin knew what. His hair, light blond when he was younger, now darkened to a more brownish tinge. Over his left "eye", he wore an eye patch. However even with one eye, emotion shown through so thickly and intensely, that one lone gaze from the man sent you plunging into an ocean of wild water- engulfed in a torrent of haunted thoughts and madness.
After Skippy flew close enough, he dropped the envelope onto the blonde man's bed. Surprised, the man grabbed it. He never got mail. The man sat up and fingered the front of the envelope. The familiar Hogwarts insignia was emblazoned over the front of it. The man ran his fingers over the elaborate address. To Draco Malfoy, the letter said.
"What's this?" the prisoner breathed. A wave of memories and images of a green eyed boy, gushed like water from a broken dam and flooded through his mind.
He remembered.
***
Seamus began shaking violently. "What did you do to me, you damn.."
He doubled over as the sharp pain began taking over his body, he desperately searched for some support. Opting to hold himself up on a table he swept all the potions of the counter and it all flew off and onto the floor with a watery and shattered clang. He buried his face in his arms, breathing deeply . Thinking to himself that this would be the end. Nearly praying to whoever is up there, that he will be good for now on- if only he would get another chance to live. However, Seamus was never one to make false promises so therefore, he kept his mouth shut and his eyes screwed tightly bracing for the inevitable.
He began yelling, screaming, falling to the floor with tears streaming down his face- his bones seemed to creak, his head was pulsating to a steady, pressured, beat. Oh god, oh god, what the hell was happening to him?
A lot of the pain, seemed to extend to his face now. He felt his facial bones shifting. He felt his mouth and eyes, twisting. Through the pain, Seamus groaned. He realized now, that he probably was not going to die. It was worse, the bitch was doing something with his face!
Seamus' breathing was labored, his vocal cords were raw but suddenly, he felt his bones stopped moving. The pain was still there, but it was subsiding. "Gods…" Seamus breathed. It was over.
Seamus sat on the floor, still shaking. Suddenly, Seamus remembered that he was in the middle of the living room, alone amidst stacks of newspaper and piles of beer bottles. He felt like breaking down, sobbing, but he did nothing. He simply looked at the paper on the side of the table but he did not bother to pick it up. He knew it was his ex-wife and he knew what she had done to him.
A week ago she threatened to cast the "reflection" curse on him. No doubt now, she was actually serious about the threat. His ex-wife has been trying to get him to admit that he was depressed for a long time now. Seamus simply shook her off, and smiled at her to prove his point- indeed, he looked very much the happy person that he assured her he was.
Although Seamus was convinced that he was happy, she however, was not.
Was he, Seamus, really unhappy?
The reflection curse is not really quite as bad as one would suppose a curse to be. It was simply a spell- albeit an irritating one that was extremely difficult to remove- that reflected on the outside, what a person feels on the inside.
Evidently, his ex-wife wanted to prove a point.
Groaning, Seamus got off the floor. He went to the other side of the living room, where his desk was. He sighed and pulled a drawer open. Inside was a mirror. He pulled it off and brought it to his face.
What he saw there, reflected in the mirror was himself- except not. It was a rotted face. With pus oozing out from the pores and worms slicking in and out. His eyeballs ruptured and his teeth was a black stump embedded in his gums.
Slowly, Seamus put the mirror down.
His face was not actually rotted. The effects of the reflection curse could only be perceived through his own eyes. If Seamus kept his mouth shut, his ex-wife would not even be able to see if her curse succeeded. The effects of the curse were not physical, but mental.
A rotted face. Huh. So that meant he wasn't happy.
Deep down inside, he could not honestly say he was surprise.
Seamus walked to his bed completely absorbed within his own thoughts. So absorbed was he that he failed to notice a hyperactive owl- Skippy, flying through his window and dropping a letter on his coffee table.
He just went to sleep.
***
Ron has been seeing some freakin' strange things, lately.
Unusual and fantastic things that had absolutely no ground with reality.
Within these past five months of gut-wrenching delusions, Ron has been reduced to a pile of raw nerves and rags. A couple of months ago he would have been at home with his wife and children, pigging out on turkey and steak. Now he is all alone, away from all his family and friends and sleeping on the park bench with people throwing money at him.
But he could not go back home. Never.
- because Ron could not imagine what he would do if he woke up one morning to find the mutilated bodies of his wife and children scattered around the living room floor. Ron had a twisted imagination and with the images that have been cropping up in his mind lately, Ron could not risk having it manifesting from something imaginary into something real (or at least real in his mind.)
Five months ago, Ron would have labeled himself as sane. These visions had only come recently. It had all first appeared one day while he was playing chess at the old retirement home. Like every other Sunday, he volunteered there.
The old man he had been playing with was named Sergio. At that moment, Sergio, an ancient, beefy man who had indulged in food a little too much in his day, had nodded off. It was not terribly uncommon for a man, of eighty years of age, to fall a sleep in the middle of chess. Therefore, Ron was not too offended.
It was around noon, and the summer heat from the outside had somehow seeped into the retirement home. Even the air conditioning did not appear to be strong enough to bat off the effects of the heat. Ron himself, was beginning to feel rather drowsy.
Ron yawned as he slid his pawn away from one of Sergio's pieces. One out of every three times he played chess with Sergio, he ended up playing by himself. Lazily, Ron listened to the weeeeer, weeeeer, weeeer of the air conditioner and stifled another yawn. Too tired to even think, Ron pushed back his chair and stopped playing all together.
Ron grabbed his gym bag beside him and unzipped it open. He fished out his notebook and put it on his table. It was his old art book. Something he had just found yesterday when he was cleaning through his old stuff.
He had been meaning to look through it for a while now. Now seemed like the perfect opportunity. Checking to see if Sergio was still asleep (he was), Ron flipped to the first page. What he saw there was a stupid drawing of a cat on a quidditch broom. Next, he saw an amateurish watercolor of a hooknose man dressed in an old woman's dress. Ron snickered.
As he flipped through more pages, he noticed that his drawings began to get more realistic, more clean cut. They began to gain intensity.
He stopped flipping pages abruptly when he saw the next picture. It was a charcoaled rendition of a boy with a mischievous, confident smile. What struck Ron most, was the eyes. It appeared that he took a green crayon and scribbled furiously over the eyes again and again.
Ron furrowed his brows. As he stared hard at it, the green scribbles began to move and merged into a solid color. A blurry black started to appear in the eyes, and it got clearer and clearer. The boy's face began to change as well and twisted with a look of mortification. He looked like he was screaming and suddenly, Ron could hear the screams.
The black the got larger and it appeared to draw closer and closer to the boy. The black thing now encompassed the whole of the boy's eyes and appeared to have eyes of its own. Violent, red eyes. Suddenly it just went through the boy's eyes and looked to come out of the picture. Ron couldn't move. He was so entranced with what he was seeing, he did not even stopped to breath.
Suddenly, it made a lunge at him, and Ron snapped his head back barely avoiding getting his face gouged out, feeling, with horror, the claws nicking his chin. As it made another lunge at him, he jumped out of his chair, screaming.
"Boy!"
Ron felt a hand grab on his arm. Ron looked to see that Sergio was now awake and looking at him with wide-eyes, "Are you all right?"
Ron was still breathing heavily, and his heart, continued to beat at a rapid pace. He turned to stare at his art book but the black thing was no where in sight. The boy with the green eyes was back to normal and once again, stared confidently out at him.
"I…I got to go," Ron grabbed his gym bag and quickly made an exit, far off, he could hear Sergio yell, "You forgot your notebook!"
After that, things went downhill from the there. The visions plagued him night and day and it even, after going to a psychologist, continued to haunt his life.
Ron now laid on the bench, with a lady beside him, chattering amicably. Something fell and hit him on the head. He looked up and saw an owl hovering over him. With a simple "whoo" at Ron, it flew away. Ron looked down at the floor and saw that it was an envelope, with the words, "Ron Weasley" labeled on the front.
That was strange. An owl, sending him mail? How funny. Ron looked around to see who had told the bird to give him the letter but aside from the lady and the cars zooming by on the road, there was no one else around him.
Curious, Ron ripped open the envelope and slipped out the letter. What he saw there, made his eyes widen in shock. Tearing his eyes away from the letter, he grabbed the woman by her shoulder, stopping her in the middle of her story.
"Can I borrow your cell phone?" he asked.
Surprised, the woman lent him her pink Motorola. Ron punched a couple of numbers and when the person on the other line picked up, Ron gave the man the address of where he currently sat. When he was done, he gave the cell back to the woman.
"Who did you call?" the woman asked, curious.
"The cab," Ron said simply.
He was going back to Hogwarts.
***
As Neville Longbottom reached his shack, he pulled the door open and stepped inside. He just came back from the Owl Post at Hogsmead and had left four envelopes in the inbox to be sent. He hoped Skippy did a good handling it.
Neville felt anxious.
A Ravenclaw had recently been found dead in the forbidden forest. Judging from the claw marks and teeth indentations over her corpse, the headmaster and the others believed that one of the creatures had gotten her.
But Neville knew better.
He made his way across the hut, breathing deeply and attempting to not pay too much attention to his surroundings. "Don't think," he whispered to himself with his voice, shaky.
Gulping, he took a seat in his chair. He picked up a book from the coffee table and began reading, trying hard not to think and with all his strength to not let his mind wander.
This was going to be a long night, Neville thought. He prayed to Merlin that the others would come quickly.
They were running out of time.
***
To be continued…
A/N: I labeled this an AU because there are some differences to the regular story line. One, Voldemort had never re-risen and two, no one is aware that there even is a "boy who lived." Also, Harry is not raised by the Durselys.
I have a question and the fate of my story will solely depend of you, the reader (makes you feel important, eh?):
"How old would you want Harry and Co. to be in the flashbacks? Twelve or Fifteen?"
I'm undecided about this because both ages do have their advantages. At twelve they're more like children- meaning their imagination and childhood has not yet left them completely. Whereas at fifteen, I don't have to limit the H/D action to clumsy kisses and sappy hand holding. Fifteen, I have more room to er- elaborate on their relationship. :D
The future of this story depends on you. :p
Next Chapter will feature:
-Flashback to "How it all began"
-The Present situation
-I will elaborate more with Neville (Unfortunately, he didn't have much of a scene in this chapter. .)
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*points at review button*
Hehe. Review please. O.O