The Value of Me
By Rey
Chapter 2: I Make Do, Always
6.
1st August 1985
"…You, freak!"
The thin woman drags the scrawny little boy out of his cupboard – no, she yanks him out of there – without any warning whatsoever. Caught unawares and torn harshly out of a for-once deep sleep, the boy flounders in her grasp, choking for breath as her bony fingers clench round his neck.
The sharp smell of fresh blood permeates the air between them.
Then their eyes meet, blue on green.
For the first time in his life, the boy sees the woman's eyes gleaming with silent tears, overflowing down her bony cheeks.
For the first time in his life, also, he sees only cold, bitter hatred of him in those eyes, so alike Dudley's and yet not.
Somehow, that look totally crushes him.
Worse, she then snarls, in a wavering but nonetheless biting tone, scorching like vinegar on raw burns, "There's no longer place under my roof for you. Be gone! I should've never taken you in!" She pitches him out of the front door, and the little boy's bony frame skids painfully on the gravel path.
The loud slamming of the door muffles her loud, ragged sobs, somewhat.
The scent of fresh blood vanishes with her.
The little boy hears it, feels it, faintly, and his own sobs rise up from the depths of his tiny, heaving chest, thick with confusion and loss and raw-raw-raw.
Something snaps through the early morning air, like when Dudley snipped one of the clothelines and blamed him for that. Instead of lashing out at him, however, it wraps itself snugly round all parts of him, like a cocoon that he once saw wrapping slowly round a caterpillar.
It smells of fresh blood, but unlike what he briefly caught in the woman's visinity. Familiar blood. It doesn't feel like anything he can describe or pinpoint or compare with, but it's there, and it is intimately familiar.
`Get up. Go away,` it whispers, or seems to, and he obeys.
His feet are bare, and he is down to just a pair of old, oversized undershorts, given the stifling heat of summer nights in the cupboard, but he obeys. He does not know where to go, what to do, why he must obey, but he obeys.
Jabbing gravel turns into rough pavement soon enough. A while afterwards, it turns into asphalt.
It is the farthest the boy ever is from his cupboard, from the house, from the family of three that was his entire world until quite recently. It is the longest time he has spent walking, as he was rarely let out of his cupboard for anything. The sights and the smells and the people overwhelm him, but he keeps putting one bare foot before the other. He slinks in and out of foot traffic, hunkering into himself and trying his hardest to be unseen, unheard, untouched, just like when he lived in the house. The cool, dewy morning breezes whip at him mercilessly every so often, but he goes on.
He has to. He has to obey.
Afternoon brings with it a constant, scorching heat all round. To the boy, it feels like being continuously drenched with boiling water from head to toe. His palid skin, the result of spending too much time indoors to avoid notice by the neighbours, is now red all over. It looks and feels raw, especially when bathed by copious amounts of sweat as it is.
He doesn't know how many times he has fallen onto all fours from sheer exhaustion. He doesn't know, either, how many times he has hauled himself back up again by sheer will, with increasingly longer and longer time in between spent sprawled on the baking surface – pavement, asphalt, dying grass, cracked dirt, or gravel. The soles of his feet are twin masses of blisters, by now, with grit and tiny chips of gravel thrown into the pus-ridden mix. His knees, elbows and hands have long been scraped bloody, and they are now red from the wounds that bleed rather copiously.
People shy away from him, exclaiming in disgust – and some, pity – whenever he nears them. Oh, he knows that. He hears them. His hearing is good, unlike his sight, after all. But then again, even the man and the woman who shared living space with him till this morning were always disgusted and angry with him, so this situation is actually not quite a new experience for him.
If only he were back in his cupboard now. The air in there might be stale and hot, but it must be at least a little bit cooler than out in the open like this.
But it has been quite a while since he foolishly believed in wishes. He cannot start now.
No, he does not – cannot – wish, now. He believes he will get better, and he will do anything to get to that point.
The resolve does not come crashing on him like the woman's hot frying pan bonking his head. It does not trickle in like syrupy honey in winter, either. Instead, it flows softly but steadily, unintrusively, like the scene of a mountain brook he once spied on the telly while cleaning the living-room round the man and the woman. It carries him in an ever-quicker, ever-larger, ever-stronger current to a destination he is yet to know, but one that he believes is better than the life he has been thrown out of.
Better than this torture, too.
7.
2nd August 1985
Albus Dumbledore frowns at the delicate contraption currently laid right in front of him. The steady puffs of little red clouds that it has always emitted since nearly four years ago has somehow… changed; not diminished, but altered in a way that he still cannot fathom, let alone try to return to normal. It is quite a pity that the portraits in the Headmaster's office it's placed in never noticed this change before he did. It is even sadder that he knows he couldn't have possibly brought the thing with him to the latest week-long ICW meeting, which was wrapped up barely hours ago.
Does this merit a trip to Privet Drive number 4? Because he knows, yes he knows this much, that this particular gadget is tied to Harry Potter's residence. He put a blood ward round the dwelling of that child hero almost four years ago himself, after all, and built this specific spindly, fiddly thing to monitor it from afar.
But the ward is still there. The little red clouds still puff away steadily, if not in a normal pattern.
A brisk knock sounds on the oaken door of the office, distracting him from his private conundrum, and his eyes reluctantly stray to another contraption nearby.
"Come in, Minerva. – Lemon pastille?"
"No, thank you, Albus. But can you believe the trouble…."
The decision is already made for him.
8.
20th October 1985
Yelena Sergeivna Romanova makes do with what she has, always. She was born twenty-five years ago today to a world that looked down – still does – on her parents, who had been a pair of Russian-descended refugees from East Germany – or Russian-born, maybe? She has never found out, even now that she is an adult in her own right.
They were refugees with special gifts; gifts that have been handed down to her on the moment of her conception; gifts that mark her as different from other children, but sadly do not automatically guarantee her a spot in any special school catering to those gifts, for various reasons.
People in Great Britain call her a witch, and call her gifts magic. She has it; her parents have it; but they are never sure if her grandparents, whose bones were sadly abandoned in East Germany, had it. Hence, she is the daughter of a pair of "Muggleborn" – those who do not have a long line of ancestry of magic wielders in their family trees.
The daughter of Muggleborn foreigners whose home country is hostile towards this country; who have nonetheless always been proud of their ancestry, despite their abandonment of their inhospitable homeland. A second-generation Muggleborn – or is it first generation Pureblood? – in a hidden community that look quite unfavourably on Muggleborn, too.
Her parents didn't have enough money to send her to Hogwarts, the biggest school for those bearing magic in the United Kingdom, although she did get the acceptance letter to go there. She didn't merit a scholarship, either, since she was not an orphan or in abject poverty. And since her parents are all Muggleborn foreigners who had neither root nor connection in Great Britain, they could not lobby for her to somehow still make her way there.
And with the Cold War still going on fast and intense, while her name, dialect and even looks suggested that her blood belong to the opposite block of the mostly nonsensical near-global conflict…. It was like being pinched between a rock and a hard place, since the Muggleborn community, whose connection with each other was even more fragile and hidden than that of the magical community at large, suspected that her parents were just going to make whatever magical knowledge she gained into a weapon for the Eastern Block. Worse yet, her family couldn't uproot themselves and go to France in hope that she could enroll at Beauxbaton, Hogwarts' rival, since the people there were even more hostile to anything and anyone German or Russian at that time, or even till now. And of course, enrolling at Durmstrang, the last of the famous schooling triad in Europe, would be impossible given her status as the daughter of two Muggleborn.
She ended up being tutored by her parents, in between work: hunting down, restoring and reselling furniture and knick-knacks of the magical and mundane kinds, and making those themselves on the side. However, given the fact that neither of her parents had had sufficient education, both of magical and non-magical subjects, and they had both little time and energy to devote to matters other than their work, she ended up learning mostly about transfiguration, charms, runes, enchantment, some arithmancy and a tiny side of potions; in other words, skills that could let her lend a hand or a wand or a rune grafter in her parents' antique, knick-knack and repair shop.
Despite everything, she did her best to study all the facets of magic she could get her hands on. She dreamt of enrolling in formal magical education, still, and was in the opinion that the dream would not be moot until she was seventeen years old, the age of magical adulthood in Great Britain. The moment "the Department of Mysteries" was brought up, in a passing conversation that her fifteen-year-old self overheard while shopping on Diagon Alley, only cemented her resolve to get her diploma, to attempt to work in that mysterious department as… something, anything. She and her parents had come across many odd and wonderful – or wonderfully nasty – things, after all, in their line of work, and she was a curious and meticulous person by nature, so she thought it would be a good job for her.
Well, she had dreams, but she knew reality, especially when, the year after that chanced conversation, while horrors began to rain in the magical patches of Great Britain and even spilt into its Muggle side and surrounding countries, her life got turned upside down.
The Death Eaters, the people responsible for the havoc wreaked across the hidden community of magical United Kingdom, practically stumbled on the shop her family ran, and noticed the power the three of them carried in themselves, despite their inadequate magical education. The black-robed, white-masked men and women – and a few teenagers, even, as she suspected from the voice quality of some of them – tried to appeal to the little family's marginal status, to their poverty, to their curiosity, to their safety, to her safety….
"We keep her safe," was what Sergei, her father, said to the leader of the bullies when they began to threaten his only daughter's life.
In the next full moon, the bullies made a mockery of that promise.
She was still sixteen.
She is twenty-five, now, and makes do with what she has, always. The last nine years of her life haven't been easy on her, even compared to the ones before, but she perseveres. With her heightened senses and stamina outside of recovery time after the full moons, she takes up all the scoping-out jobs, leaving her parents to deal with the shop-front. After all, if any customer from the magical community sees the evidence of her life-changing alterations, she could be in more trouble.
Her dream job in the Department of Mysteries is long gone by now, like her life pre-Greyback, but it does not mean – it never means – that she will give up enjoying her life to her best ability, that her family will be ruined, just because they refused to participate in a madman's bloodshed parties and various other horrors.
And then, her nose literally leads her into a one-of-a-kind find….
9.
20th October 1985
Autumn is setting in, fast. The tiny, scrawny no-name boy wandering all round the town has found a tatty, nearly soleless pair of trainers – at least four sizes too large for him – to protect his bare feet, by now; from one of the many rubbish bins scattered at the side of the various roads, streets and paths he has been haunting, of course, since he daren't step foot into an actual second-hand shop to nick even that much, which freaks like him do not deserve. But still, without any socks to layer the insides of the trainers, the weather is barely bearable. It doesn't help that, thus far, he hasn't found clothes – or at least a shirt – small enough for him to wear, to go with the Dudley-castoff undershorts he happened to be garbed in when he was thrown out of that house. He really does not know how he has survived thus far, bare-chested as he has been since that day in the summer, but he has been too occupied with finding food, water and shelter to bother with the fact, anyhow.
Well, food, water, shelter, and bullies.
The other street dwellers usually ignore him. Maybe they pity him; maybe they think he has nothing of value on him – which is actually true – or that he is too meek to create trouble for them. He is thankful of the fact, all the same. But still, there are exceptions to that.
Big, loud, mean, weapon-wielding exceptions, who just like to beat little children up for the enjoyment of such a thing.
They happen to share the same favourite haunt, and the little boy only noticed that after he had escaped the bullies twice, by sheer luck.
`Never again,` he thought, when, in their last encounter, the smallest, sneakiest bully belonging to the gang managed to give him a long, deep, painful cut on his left shoulder with the edge of a rusted blade. He was thankful that he managed to find an undisputed public toilet with clean running water to treat the cut, but the wound had bled copiously before that.
So now, when he encounters half of the gang, which sadly includes the sneaky member, he is ready with a shield of rubbish-bin lid. His shoulder is still feeling raw, since that fateful encounter happened just a short while ago, so he cannot try to climb up the nearest building to avoid them, and defending himself on the ground like this forces him to improvise to make up for his tiny, scrawny built.
Unfortunately, the raucous clanging created by the rusted knives banging against the rubbish-bin lid attracts some unwanted attention.
"Bobbies!" the gang's lookout shouts from his vantage point on the roof of the shop across the street. The four combatants on the ground below jerk to a brief stop, hearing that.
But the little boy's opponents recover far quicker than he does. It doesn't help that the boy is thoroughly exhausted by now, having to haul about the heavy rubbish-bin lid while dodging three much-larger boys at once.
He got jammed into the rubbish bin whose lid he borrowed without much struggle, as the result, and his makeshift shield got replaced on the bin with the accompaniment of hoots and sniggers courtesy of his erstwhile opponents.
The policemen the gang spotted pass the rubbish bin without noticing anything, although the little boy is struggling mightily to free himself from the smelly, slimy pile inside, losing his oversized shoes amidst the rubbish in the process. It is perhaps a good thing that the bobbies don't notice him, on one hand, since he has been threatened with vicious orphanages and merciless police forces in all his recallable memory; but on the other hand….
Well, he just needs to visit the public toilet again, after this, to wash his still-healing cut, and meanwhile hopes madly that the said cut will not be infected. The thoughtless cruelty of the bigger boys tugs viciously at his eyes like the cut does his shoulder, but he knows tears will be futile for anything, let alone this situation. Retaliation will be a stupid decision, too, though his blood boils at the injustice of it.
But firstly, he must free himself from this tiny, dark, awefully smelly thing. It smells far worse than his cupboard when he was locked inside there for days! It really doesn't help that he can barely move now, with his limbs trembling and feeling like Dudley's jellysticks.
And then…
"Hello? Who in there? You a cat?"
…If the boy could laugh, he would. The woman on the opposite – better – side of the rubbish bin sounds kind, curious and amused – and, on top of all, funny. He has never encountered such a person before, and her tone – her foreign tone – does make him want to laugh, somehow.
He has never laughed before, as far as he knows, and there has been little to no reason to laugh anyway. He is not about to start now, oh no. For one, he feels too exhausted to even smile; and for two, he is trying with all his might not to inhale too much of the stench permeating the rubbish bin, which he suspects would be defeated by laughing.
He tries even harder to break free from the rubbish heap and its container, though. The woman on the other side does sound kind, so maybe she will not mock him or immediately run away from him like the others if he asks her for help. She doesn't sound English, but why would he care about that?
The lid of the rubbish bin slides away with a metallic scraping sound, and a narrow face leans in, framed by autumn daylight. "Hello? Ah, a boy! Come, come. Let me help you. Poor boy."
Her scarred, tired face is the best thing that the little boy has seen since time out of mind, in his exuberant opinion.