A/N: Hello again, this is Chapter 2. It's a Work in Progress and I just need to know an audience for this kind of story exists. There's a very small romantic arc in the story, but I don't know whether or not I want to keep it going. Enjoy.


Waking Seamus Finnigan
by: Mauvais Sang

Chapter 2: Perquisites of a Half-Blood

"Wake up Seamus. It's nearly noon."

I felt a hand, moist and cool, smooth my forehead and muzzle the sides of my head and my greasy hair. It was Saturday, if she was still at home to wake me up so late in the burgeoning day, but it didn't matter to me: every day was a Saturday, or Friday evening, in the summer. Days and hours became irrelevantly interchangeable and what became worthwhile to keep track of would only depress and limit one's propensity for living out a summer for what its worth, for the spectre of September inched nearer and nearer until you faced it from a fraction of a millimeter away and felt drained, fatigued, almost excited (or dreading) at the prospect of old faces, but surely shudder at the thought of being in the chilled Potion's dungeon beneath the school.

I wasn't completely sure: whether I had created so soft a feeling in my romantic half-drunk grogginess or whether it was simply so gentle that the touch hadn't registered above my feeling threshold. Either way, I know I heard a voice sweetly urging me to awaken and informing me that noon had arrived sometime in my slumber, it set off a chain of events that would lead me to awaken in only a few minutes. I remained in my bed, that warm, all-encompassing safe place where retreat is the same as combustion, with a blanket, warmed by my body heat from the night just passed (and half a morning as well), over my shoulders, gently overcast over my fatigued body. Hazy over the eyes, they refused to cast awake and in a sinful, corpulent rebellion, I remained still, glued, a mossy stone in a fogged, gray sea cliff, salty waves crashing but still snoring, asleep, inanimate.

Some indiscriminate number of time passed again, where I don't remember recording any particularly important thoughts, before I was disturbed by another sound. It was not my caring mother, but an irritating rap, rap, rap, permeating shrilly through my dormant room. Rap, rap, rap, it wasn't the sound of a construction site, as I know for a fact that there weren't any such things in the residence, nor was it the forgivable clattering of metal pots and pans and searing of vegetables and peppered meats my mother would be captaining in the kitchen beyond my tanned wooden door. It was something, something else that I understood and was familiar with, but could not pin a name to, that curious sound ringing in my ear drums.

I kept my eyes shut but I was fully aware the sound drumming against my ears and bouncing off my walls, windows, and desks. A hollow, crisp rapping in three times or more in rapid succession resembled the sound of Hogwarts' Owlery in the early autumn when the birds would get restless and solicitous of one another, pecking at the wooden posts, flapping airy beats against their sides, and sometimes a burst of feathers, a dirty spectacle, would materialize out of what seemed like the thin air and you would realize one of the birds were spooked and, in skittish cantering, spread his wings and took flight only to be stopped abruptly by that brick wall we commonly call our faces.

Now I was simply committing the Christian sin of Sloth. I no longer had sommeil(1), but I lay there in spite, in resentment, in defiance of that sound, that infernal rap, rap, rapping and I shouted, "You don't have the power to steal me from my humanly pursuits, I can and will do what I wish, and what forces of nature want to defy me I so will defy them back and stand from the fray with its severed head in my arms." I spat at the sun and called down the Heavens. However foolish the deed was, the act of remaining asleep when one obviously cannot and body will not, it seemed to make sense to me in that moment as I wished to defy my physiological processes in order to yield the wishes of my selfish desires. Beneath my eyelids was a bright orange shade that told me my face was directly in the sun. I wanted to sleep, I was tired, and ill to the day, and didn't want to venture out, and be cold. This rap, rap, rapping won't let me and I was enraged, I was furious, I didn't like the fact that I could not control my body.

I gave up, submitted myself to the devil of noise, and awoke. Sitting upright, bare feet slapped on the wooden floor below, I rubbed off remnants of the hardened glue that cemented my eyelids together and yawned. Being a teenage boy, I was susceptible to that idle morning curse which plagued my thin fabric pajama bottoms. I sat in my bed and waited for the tent to subside, blood rushing out and back into the rest of my body creating a sort of adrenaline rush, before I got up to search for that noise which put me in this predicament to begin with. Looking around for the rapping, I turned to the window, to the door, to my closet, and to my shelf. I found nothing. The rapping had stopped. By now, I had forgotten that incurable rage I felt in the warmth of my bed and remembered the world around me. There were things to do, drinks to toast, people to meet.

I abandoned the formal sleep attire sometime in the beginning of hot, sweaty, summer and was clothed in as minimal clothing as was personably possible while still remaining in good manner and custom with the civilized world. The thin threads of my attenuated undershirt fractured with the weight of my increasingly ballooning muscle beneath it and in the back felt moist in the sweat of a summer's evening. My cool, permeable bottoms comfortably swished as I walked downstairs to breakfast, or lunch, or brunch, or whatever it was now called in this time of day.

The image which greeted me as I walked down the hall and towards the kitchen surprised me. My father sat at the table, puffing on a pipe, small circular glasses slid low on the bridge of his nose, a Daily Prophet spread-eagled in his hands:

Hogwarts Contemplates Closure
Headmistress McGonagall speaking with Scrimgeour

I looked at the headline, and took note with myself to pick up the newspaper after my dad had finished. Not only was that headline a strange greeting but seeing my dad home at all at this time was surprising as well, even if it was a week-end. I pursued the matter as I pulled back a chair and flipped it around so that its back was closest to the table edge, its legs screeching against the ceramic tile, competing with the sound of mum crackling strips of bacon at the stove.

"Dad, why aren't you at the accountancy office?" I asked as I straddled the chair, arms folded at its top.

He puffed for a while, pretending not to hear me, before he answered. I always surmised it was more of a Muggle habit than a Fatherly habit, but I never really had much experience with fathers to compare it to.

"Paid vacation started Friday. Darling, you really should read this article here." He said more to my mother than to me.

"Hmm? I'll get around to it." Mum replied, still at the bacon.

"Are we going to do anything this year?" I asked, interceding in his conversation with mum. I was hoping to see a professional quidditch match or two this summer.

"Probably not," He said, not looking up from his paper. "I don't want to risk going out there. Darling, it says here that this Voldemort character is still terrorizing victims. Can't you catch him with your magic and wands, or something?"

An abrupt burst of laughter escaped my chest, and I quickly stifled myself.

"It takes much more than magic and wands to stop him," She said, returning to the table with a plate of bacon. "He's very powerful. It's like trying to catch a criminal which has all of the intelligent resources in the world to keep him from being seen, or tracked. The Ministry has to be two steps ahead. Seamus, don't sit like that. You can't eat that way."

I got up and turned my chair around with one arm so that it was in the proper seating arrangement, and sat down.

"The Ministry's doing a bum job of keeping him in check, then." He said, observantly noted.

"It's a hard job!" She answered, heatedly. My heart beat a little quicker as the sound shrilled in my ears and echoed as afterthoughts in the room.

"I'm sorry darling. It's just beyond my capacity to understand how these things work." He replied quietly, setting the newspaper aside and picking up his fork to dig into the potato.

We each ate in silence then, just me, my father, and my mother. The clang of metal forks against the ceramic plates was the din of dining, and we occasionally, one would reach for their glass and have a sip. It was like this for a long time before my mother broke the quiet.

"Do you have any plans today, Seamus?"

"I might fit in a game on the pitch with Dean. Ron too, maybe." I answered, dissecting my bacon.

"Where?" She said, trying hard to conceal her nosiness. I knew what she was getting at, though.

"I dunno," I stuffed a strip into my mouth. "Probably around his house."

"Not going to Diagon Alley again, are you?" I knew it would come to that.

"I'm not a child, mum!" I said. I was unaware of the added force I put to my words, because it silenced her for a while. I felt hot in the face, and almost ashamed.

"Of course you aren't. Look at you. Hair all shaggy and blonde like those boys in California, a beard that'll make you look homeless, and a few spots here and there. Of course you're not a child now." She said, scathingly.

I had enough. I dropped my fork onto the half-finished plate, and got up, left the kitchen.

"Seamus!" She shouted after me.

I ignored her, walking quickly, face and ears blushed red-hot, and retreated into my room, slamming the door to vocalize my frustration. All alone, I jumped onto my bed, now cool and refreshing against my skin, and forcefully sighed. I was angry with her for mentioning that one incident she caught me at Diagon Alley when I had told her I was with Dean. In fact, I wasn't with Dean. But I was with somebody else.

I pulled the pillow from behind my head and I put it over my face, screaming into it. I lay there for a while, the room muting out until I was left by the tone of my own ears ringing into themselves.

And then I heard it again. That sound: shattering my meditation, my mulling and brooding, my self-destruction and implosion. I heard that infernal rap, rap, rapping, that pestered me to awaken and play out the drama with my mother and father just two minutes before. I got up, more curious than angry, and looked around to follow the sound. Rap, rap, rap. Where were you? What were you doing here?

And then I found it. It was perched at my closed window, a beautiful, snowy owl sat patiently a ledge, pecking earnestly at the barrier that kept it from delivering its message. I quickly moved toward the window, excitement beating in my chest, and nearly stumbled over a stray book in getting it opened. The bird crawled in, waddling strangely on its two narrow feet unused to solid ground, and dropped an envelope onto my desk.

My name was on the envelope. And it was addressed from him, Harry. Harry Potter.

-

(1)Means "sleepy" in French

A/N: Oh, I hope people are reading this at all.