Disclaimer: All characters belong to J.K Rowling

Chapter 2: Satanic Signs

Beni sighed agitatedly as she picked herself up out of the puddle of mud and brushed the dirt and grass out of her eyes. As she had gotten off the train, several people tried to curse her and make her fall over, but Draco Malfoy used his shoulder to knock her flying face first into the dirtiest, smelliest, gooiest puddle of slimy, wet mud. She wondered why people had to be so mean. Why couldn't they just leave her alone? What was stopping them from just letting her be invisible, un-noticed – the lost, neglected shadow on the wall that nobody wanted? That was who she wanted to be, after all.

A teacher told her that she was in Slytherin, which Beni gathered to be one of the four houses. Then she instructed her to go to the great hall for the feast, but there would be no need for her to join the Sorting ceremony, whatever that was, and then up to her dorm. Beni ridiculed her expectations and scared a younger student into telling her the way and the password to her dorm.

She flopped onto her bed, and enjoying the falling sensation, picked herself and flopped down again. She curled around and picked up her dark black crystal ball, which radiated a strong sense of doom. She scoffed. Why should she even bother with it? All it did was bring trouble. Even when she saw the horrible things that people were going to do to her in the future, it didn't prepare her for it and she couldn't change the future either. She wrapped it up in bandages again. Once again, she was going to resist its calling to be seen. Could she do it this time? She had tried before but…

A door slammed in the distance. Beni sprang off her bed and threw the ball into her trunk roughly. Although it was made of the most fragile glass, she knew that all the disgusting, depressed, heavy feelings she had poured into it were what it thrived on. It would not break, no matter how hard anyone hit it.

* * * * *

"Hi. You must be the new girl. I'm Parvati, and this is Lavender." She said indicating the other girl behind her, who Beni had not seen. Parvati spoke as if she thought Beni was a huge joke, and shot a look at Lavendar that said much the same thing. Lavender however, looked petrified. Beni glared at them.

She suddenly felt a burning desire to make friends with them. Would they mind her joining their little company of two? Would she feel left out or invasive? Would they dump her when they found out what everyone else thought of her? Maybe not. They were both smiling sweetly at her, after all.
"My…my name is um, it's Beni. Beni Montano." Beni struggled with the simple words, feeling her insides tearing themselves apart. Why did this always happen? Beni forced a smile. And then -
"And I don't give a fuck who the hell you to are, so get the fuck away from me before I scratch your eyeballs out!" Beni said aggressively, the words now flowing out uncontrollably. She examined and twirled her fingernails for an extra dramatic effect. Parvati and Lavender fled.

* * * * *

Beni traipsed down the corridor towards the dungeons, distantly following Potter and his friends so she would know where she was going. Once she entered the dungeons, the fear of getting lost ceased, and she began to feel strangely at home. It was the damp eeriness, the stone and the coldness, and the steady beat of the drip drip sound coming from…everywhere. Beni liked it. The setting calmed and soothed the massive storm of anger and hate that constantly raged within her stomach.

She had potions. She had never taken that as a subject before. At her old school it was things like 'how to spot a death eater,' and more commonly, 'how to kill a death eater,' or 'what to do if you meet a death eater' and 'deep studies of the dark mark'. It did get a bit much in the end, but well, somebody saw a point in it, though it was full of children of death eaters, so the point had failed. Dramatically.

She hovered a little away from the rest of the class, not wanting to be noticed, but there was always someone who wanted to destroy her intentions. A girl in Slytherin walked up to her menacingly, but Beni stood her ground. The class turned to watch, and somebody whispered, "Pansy, be careful!"
"Did anyone ever tell you that you're a screwed up freak?" she asked Beni in a deadly sweet voice. Beni glared at her; she could feel her eyes burning, turning blood red.
"You're so weird, you're so lost, you friggin loser!" Pansy's voice began to turn aggressive, but still Beni said nothing, just simply stood there staring at her. "Look at her eyes! They're turning red! What a freak!" Pansy yelled to the class.
"You dickface, look at you, you're so queer, no one likes you! Why don't you just go back where you came from and fuck around there?!?!" She screeched, her voice rising constantly.
"Is that the worst you can do?" Beni asked her quietly. Beni had had far worse and insulting things said to her before. Pansy was obviously the seventh-grade's-bitch, but in Beni's opinion, it really wasn't working for her.

"I talk with the palm's of my hands, Montano, not my mouth." She said threateningly. Beni raised her eyebrows. It was a strange statement; she played the words over in her mind, finding less and less logic and sense in them.

Suddenly, Pansy's hand flew out of nowhere, smacking Beni across the cheek, bright red nails cutting into her eyeballs and the sensitive skin around her eyes. Beni staggered from the force of the hit, and from the pain. As blood spurted from her eye and face, she began to feel sorry for herself, but then she heard Pansy's cry of anguish. It was a kind of muffled scream. She opened the eye that was not surrounded by quickly clotting blood, what she saw made her take a step back, nearly losing balance again.

A hand, long and disgustingly thin, covered with tattoos of satanic symbols, with the fingernails painted black, had crept up Pansy's throat from inside her and was crawling out of her mouth. Beni recognized that hand. In a panic, she looked down. Both of her hands were still part of her body…what the hell was this hand? She looked back a Pansy. The hand had stopped creeping outwards, and hung limply out of Pansy's mouth.

The arm was still blocking Pansy's airway, which explained the way she was thrashing her body around blindly, tears of acid poured from her eyes and burnt her cheeks, making black and blistered streaks down her face.

A voice shouted in the distance, footsteps came running…closer and closer. Beni shut her eyes in confusion. She felt another hand connect with her face, this time much stronger and much more powerful. The thump knocked her to the ground. She stayed there. She liked the ground. She looked up to see Draco Malfoy towering over her, shaking with…something. Fury, aggressiveness – insanity perhaps. He swung his foot back and planted a heavy kick in her stomach, and then moved away. She looked up at the rest of the class through humiliated, hating red eyes.


They were filing into a classroom, Pansy was leaning against a wall, arm-free,
but the acid tears had kept her face very burnt and very…blind. The headmaster,
whom Beni had met in her interview and acceptation into Hogwarts was bending
over her, with the nurse. Then they took her off somewhere, to the hospital wing
probably. They both ignored Beni, who now sat up, and threw up blood all over
the stonewall in front of her. Bits of it splattered backwards and hit her in the face,
mouth and hair. Things like this often happened to Beni Montano.

There was a low, steady droning sound in her ears, mingled with muttering. The blood disappeared from the wall, and vanished from her face, her eye, the taste from her mouth and the streaks of it in her hair.
"Get up." A sharp voice snapped at her. Shakily, she rose to her feet and turned to face the speaker. It was a man, about a head taller than her. He had longish black hair that fell into his dark, cold black eyes. He wore high-necked robes, like Beni, although his robes swept along the ground and flicked around corners. His skin was pale, but his features were quite normal.

Beni supposed he was the teacher. "You are a mess. Do not attend this class." He said, and stalked into the classroom. "Parkinson, see me after class. You've just cost Slytherin 20 points." Beni heard the same man say sharply into a startled silence. She began to move off to the closest bathrooms.

But then it happened. It was time. There was no resisting, no way to stop it. Beni ran and ran, she probably tripped over herself, but it was not something that sank into her memory. What she remembered was her screaming. And the blood. She screamed and screamed, for at least 20 minutes until she reached the ball, and in all those 20 minutes she did not once take a breath, just one long, mortifying, continuous, chilling scream. And as she ran, her footprints left blood on the ground, just as they would if she were running with mud on her shoes.

It all stopped as soon as she touched the ball. She became sane, and ashamed of what had just happened. She knew she would have disturbed other classes. She quietly carried the crystal ball down to one of the dungeons. She liked it there, excluding what happened earlier. She sat cross-legged on the floor, quite comfortable despite the hard, cold, rough surface of the stone.

She peered into the ball, and the images began to form. "What are you doing?"

Beni looked up, shocked. She'd placed a very heavy locking charm on the door, how could anyone be here? In the reflection from her crystal ball, she saw the potions teacher. She twisted around to face him. He came and sat across from her, and peered into the crystal himself.
"Do you want to talk about what happened outside my classroom today?" he asked her tentatively.
"No." she answered shortly, wondering what the hell he was doing. Maybe it was his room. They sat in silence for a minute or so, him staring at the crystal and Beni staring at the top of her eyelids.
"What do you see?" she asked him, staring at the glowing black ball and breaking the silence.
"I don't see shit." He answered. She used the crystal to find information about him…something she could use to her advantage.

"I thought you might have. Occlumency and all…you seem the type." She looked up to see his reaction, but there was none.
"Many a time have I tried, I am not a crystal reading person. What do you see?" he asked Beni. She frowned and concentrated, not that she needed to, it just seemed appropriate to act.
"Sometimes it is best not to see things. It makes you scared of the future, you know. I see the things people do and say to me before they happen. But there is still nothing I can do to change the future." She answered, afraid of telling him what she really saw.
"So what do you see?" he prompted. Beni let out an internal sigh of frustration. All she could see was people humiliating her, how on earth was she supposed to describe that to him?
"I need time." She said, searching rapidly for excuses. But the man held out his hands as if to say, "Go on, I have all the time in the world.' She glared at him, and then at the ball.
"I see…um." She began, flicking through the various images that flew past until she could find a suitable one to describe to this stranger. "I see tomorrows quidditch match, Griffindor versus Slytherin, the players in green are flying into the players in red and they all look like they are insane. Some time later…" she skipped the vision forward a little. Beni never took any interest in quidditch. "Some time later, Potter grabs the snitch, and hits Malfoy in the crotch at the same time, so Slytherin get a penalty or something and end up winning the match." She finished, knowing that the win over Griffindor would please him.

"Interesting. Is that really what you see?" he asked skeptically, "Or what you want to happen?" Beni just raised her eyebrows at him.

It turned out that Beni's prediction was precise, if so, more than precise. After her conversation with Snape, he invited her to come to his next lesson, and suggested she came a little bit later to avoid any…unnecessary circumstances. Beni nodded and quickly returned to her dorm. The other girls had left to go to dinner. Beni wasn't hungry; she figured that she'd eat later. She used the crystal ball to find the way to the kitchens.

While everyone was at the celebration feast, Beni once again crept down to that same dungeon with her crystal. It was time again. She sat, and finally looked in and performed her first proper seeing since she had arrived here.

She saw them all whispering about her. She tuned into what they were saying. "She's so weird! Her eyes are always red. Did you hear about her screaming? Who the hell is she anyway? She scares me. She's a freak. Did you hear about what she did to Pansy? I heard she's way older than all the seventh graders. So what's she doing here? I dare you to ask her. She'll probably murder you. I'll get that fucking cunt for what she did to Pansy."

Beni shut her eyes. How did they find out she was older than everyone else? At her old school, she spent one and half years in each grade, instead of the one year like in Hogwarts, so while all of the seventh graders at Hogwarts were seventeen, Beni was twenty. She looked in again. Images flashed by, and one did so continuously. She hated those. It happened with the time her mother died, and with her father. She had never watched either of these visions, so she wouldn't watch this one either. She spent a little while watching the present, the people she disliked the most, trying to find their weaknesses.

She decided to find an image of Snape. She saw him walking around the dungeons. Why wasn't he at the feast? She saw him walking towards a door, and she heard the footsteps…tap…tap…tap…tap, tap, tap!"

Tap, tap, tap! Beni frowned. What was going on, this had never happened before. She heard the noise inside the ball and in real life. She jumped up and opened the door as she realized what had happened. Snape walked into the room and glanced at the crystal ball, images of him standing in the room flashed across its smooth surface.

Beni snapped the door shut. "Sorry to disturb you." He said.
"No problem."
"I thought you might be here. You weren't at the match."
"I already knew what was going to happen."
"Or at the feast." He pointed out. Beni thought it was either a very stupid statement or some kind of question.
"Why would I want to go to the feast?"
"For the food?"
"Nah. The socializing." She said sarcastically. He smiled at her. She looked at him curiously, and then at the crystal ball. She was about to tell him what she was seeing, he was in the image after all, and the picture would have shocked her, had she not been so resilient to surprises.
"Why don't we meet here again sometime?" he asked her. "I'd like to learn how to see." He indicated the crystal with a nod.

"Yes, we will meet here again, and many times after." She said, gazing at the ball, "But you won't learn how to see. It's just not going to work for you."