A/N: Thanks for your encouraging response! Hope you continue to enjoy this story. As requested, some adventure is coming up.
Brynn
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Chapter Four: Cubs vs. Moonyx
"…and she said that now that the war was over, we could get back together," Harry finished his long-winded, wine-addled explanations on why girls made no sense whatsoever.
"You told the Doc you loved her, though," Alex pointed out. It wasn't that hard to imagine the situation – Sabina did carry quite a torch for him still – but at least he wasn't in love with her. She was a good friend, but not a potential lover. Bonus points, she didn't have an older brother to smash in Alex' face for breaking his little sister's heart.
"I do!" Harry exclaimed, unnecessarily loudly. "I love Ginny. I really do."
"Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself." Alex considered himself lucky that he wasn't a part of a society that expected eighteen-year-olds to get hitched as soon as they finished school and start producing sprogs nine months later. The idea of marriage scared him – like it scared all of his peers, Harry included.
"Ron and Hermione are already engaged," Harry said instead of confirming or denying Alex' suspicion, which was as good as a confirmation anyway. "Ron's mum keeps hinting that she wants me to ask Ginny but…"
"You don't want to."
"Not yet," Harry amended. "It's too soon. Way too soon. I want to finish the school and see the world and not become an Auror-"
"Auror?" Alex tasted the unfamiliar word.
"Law enforcement officer. Works differently than the police. Everything's so different."
Alex would say so. He had experienced sharp relief when he discovered that the bathroom actually did have running water, contrary to what the dilapidated interior of the house promised.
Alex judged the amount of wine in the bottle. If Harry was an inexperienced drinker – which all signs pointed to – then he was quite out of it by now. Not incoherent, obviously, but he would be unsteady on his feet if he attempted to stand up, and he was most likely in the state when suggestion worked well on him.
"We should probably go to bed," Alex said, searching for a clock. There was none, so he glanced at his watch – it had stopped at ten. He was fairly certain it was well past midnight, so it must have stopped. "You've got the time?"
Harry lifted his left hand. Then his eyes widened – he probably realised he wasn't wearing his watch – and he let his arm down into his lap. "No, sorry. What time do you need to get up?"
Alex shrugged. "Whatever I feel like. You got any pressing engagements?"
"Nothing I'd have to wake you up for," Harry replied and, painfully, lifted himself upright. "I'll show you to the guest room. It's – habitable."
Not a glowing praise, but Alex did not much care. He had slept in a jungle, in snow, on a plane full of terrorists and hostages… well, pretty much anywhere except underwater… no, even underwater. Harry made it sound like there was a room and a bed and at least an illusion of privacy, which in combination Alex considered to be luxury.
"Lupin won't be worried about you?" Alex asked as they ascended a red-carpeted staircase. There was something that looked like shrunk heads (he honestly intended no pun) mounted to the wall, and it was disgusting even from afar, so Alex concentrated on not looking that way. Hour by hour, he found the 'community' to be more and more repulsive.
"It's Full Moon today," Harry replied as if that explained everything. Then he realised that Alex was 'normal' and flushed. "I mean, he'd be otherwise occupied."
Alex could have pictured Lupin dancing naked around a bonfire, but in the interest of his sanity he refrained.
"Here we are," Harry announced on the second floor. He opened a door that was identical to all the others, and let Alex have a look around. It was quite a poky room but surprisingly tidy, with a lighter spot on the wall where a picture used to hang (Alex recalled Dorian Gray, but he doubted that Harry was an old amoral monster of a man hiding behind such an average façade – he got a good laugh out of that) and a trio of lit candles on a candlestick, which was a cause for concern, since they were freshly lit (the tops were not yet completely melted) and Harry sure as hell hadn't been the one to light them.
"'s there anyone else in the house?" Alex asked, scowling at the little flames.
"Oh… uh… there's a servant. He sort of comes with the house, and retirement's like a curse-word to him so I… uh… let him work. He wants to."
Harry sure seemed ashamed to have a retainer; Alex, on the other hand, was nervous. There was someone creeping through the house, someone who knew that Alex was there and was going to stay the night, yet someone whom Alex had not had the chance to assess… It wasn't going to be a peaceful night, for sure.
Alex was doubly glad he had not drunk too much.
"I hope you'll be alright," Harry said after a pause. "Do you need anything? There's a fresh towel in the bathroom, and the bedside drawer should have a nightshirt in it – I know, but this house doesn't exactly carry spare pyjamas."
Alex had no qualms about sleeping in his trousers. His suits were MI6-supplied, after all.
"I'll be okay," he assured his nervous host. "I'm quite capable of surviving a few hours on my own."
Harry didn't look convinced, but fortunately he accepted Alex' claim. He imparted instructions on how to get to Harry's own bedroom (in case of an emergency), said a quick 'goodnight' and left.
Alex took off his shoes and stripped his shirt. He laid down into the bed and worked on putting together the multitude of clues and hints Harry had dropped during the drinking and story-telling. Alex had not indulged much, so his mind was quite clear, but it didn't seem to be helping him at all.
What he was certain of was that Harry's community consisted of people quite disturbed at best and criminally insane at worst, with cretins somewhere in the middle of the scale. Compared to them, Harry was, as he had professed earlier, quite well, and definitely not able to see himself as someone in need of psychotherapy.
Their kids were all concentrated in a boarding school that was a cross between a training camp and a prison, unless the student in question had an especially influential close relative, in which case they could do pretty much whatever they wanted. In this school teachers of dubious credentials taught the children how to use the weapons they carried on them wherever they went. Some tended to overstep their authority and assign their students detentions that bordered on torture…
Alex had often thought that high school was hell, but he had to admit, faced with the image he had constructed from Harry's 'vauged-down' reminiscences, he believed that he had been extremely lucky. Even Brooklands, which had chucked him out about two years ago, was a walk in a park.
Therefore Alex fully expected to stumble upon something extremely dangerous when he snuck out of his bedroom nearly an hour later. Harry would have been fast asleep, and so would the invisible servant at this inhuman time – Alex guessed it was about two a.m., but he couldn't be sure, since his watch was busted and he could see nothing through the heavy sheets of rain outside. He did make an attempt to check his phone, but it was off and refused to turn on no matter how hard he pressed the start button. His battery should have lasted at least two more days, but complaining didn't help at the moment, and Alex felt perfectly in his element slinking out of the creaky door and down the corridor, footsteps muffled by a moth-eaten carpet.
Candles were lit along the wall; notably, there were no puddles of melted wax beneath them. Since the house was absurdly large for London proper, Alex had to prioritise. He decided to by-pass the many bedrooms on the second and first floor. He gave a brief thought to the attic, but his experience guided him to the underground part of the house. Harry wasn't a bad guy, Alex firmly believed, but people tended to hide things low rather than high.
Sure enough, he found a padlocked door from behind which came growling and whining.
To Alex defence, he did pause and consider if breaking in was a good idea… for about half a minute. Then he tried to improvise a lock-pick, but his skills were rustier than he estimated, and his effort failed. Eventually, he stuffed a piece of Smithers' bubblegum in the keyhole and pressed his back to the wall, waiting for it to do its job. The metal hissed; a part of the hallway briefly lit up with the pale yellow flame and the padlock half-melted.
Alex waited for it to cool down before he ripped it off and finally caught a glimpse of Harry's siren secret.
It looked an awful lot like a pair of yellow eyes staring from the depths of darkness.
There was a brief silence of mutual surprise and then the beast growled so low that Alex could barely hear it. Two rows of sharp teeth glinted with reflected candlelight. Alex backed away and slammed the door shut. He moved to put the padlock back into place, but it fell apart into useless pieces of metal the instance he touched it. He pressed his shoulder against the two-inch thick layer of solid wood and focused on brainstorming.
Alright… his curiosity had gotten him into deep shit before. He survived. What now?
The creature inside the cellar hit the door at full run, and Alex didn't stand a chance. He fell and caught himself on his hands before he kissed the floor. He had no hopes of keeping the door shut – in physical strength he was woefully outmatched by the animal. Within seconds Alex was on his feet and running toward the stairs. The beast broke loose; its four paws hit the carpet and it slid sideways and bunched up.
"Vinculo!" Harry's voice shouted.
Gold light flashed, but Alex didn't look back because he was currently running for his life. He passed Harry, who was mysteriously present, standing on the bottom-most step, with a wooden stick gripped in his right hand and pointed into the obscurity behind Alex' back. The boy was completely transformed: in ridiculous red flannel pyjamas and sleep-mussed hair, he looked far more dangerous than he had looked ever before.
It probably had something to do with the ice-cold eyes half-hidden behind glinting glasses and the down-turn of the corners of his lips that would have made a lesser man regret all the sins he had committed over the course of his mortal life.
"Come on, Moony," Harry spoke in a low, mocking voice, putting himself bodily between Alex and the animal. "You don't want the muggle, do you? Don't I smell so much better? Come here…"
Before Alex could make a wisecrack about Harry's suicidal tendencies, the candles in the basement corridor flared up all at once, illuminating the most monstrous creature Alex had ever seen. It was easily as tall as an average man's chest even while crouched on all four. Long, uneven fur was splattered with what he tentatively identified as blood, and it seemed like there were bites along its forelimbs – it must have been mauling itself, confined into the cellar.
Alex felt the predatory yellow eyes assessing him as prey.
"Forget him, Moony," Harry spoke up, drawing the creature's attention to himself, and stepped forwards. "Come taste me."
Then Harry took three more steps, and Alex finally noticed how pale the boy was, and how the hand with the stick he had stretched out in front of himself shook. There was guilt – he had put Harry into mortal danger – but there was also wonder and awe at just how stupidly courageous his new acquaintance was. Alex was fine with scaling the London Eye, but a fight one on one with the beast…
"Impedimenta!" Harry shouted at the same time as the animal sprang. A flash of light shot from Harry's stick to the beast, and then was reflected off its fur into the wall, where it cracked the paint.
It didn't impede the creature's motion, and Harry would have had his head ripped off had he not fallen to the floor and rolled just beneath four sets of lethal-looking claws.
Alex gulped and his right hand subconsciously palpated around the small of his back. No luck, though. His gun was at home, locked in his uncle's desk drawer.
"Come, come, Moony," Harry mocked, regaining his feet.
The creature – Alex could now distinguish a wolf-like muzzle – skidded on the floor, turned and howled. The sound made blood freeze in veins and Alex was petrified on the spot like the greenest rookie ever.
"You want to taste me, don't you?" Harry made certain that the beast's focus never wavered.
It gave chase, and Harry led it straight back into its cell, narrowly avoiding several swipes with claws. A crack rent the air, and Harry was suddenly standing in the hallway again and aiming his stick at the door.
"Reparo! Colloportus!" Harry shouted. Amazingly – though Alex wouldn't have been shocked to find he had hallucinated the entire encounter – the broken pieces of the bar fit together, the padlock re-created itself and flew upwards to secure the door, and everything was decorated by pretty flashing lights.
Alex wasn't aware he had consumed any drugs (apart from the hardly significant amount of alcohol). His rational mind was twisting upon itself to avoid the word 'magic.'
Harry, stiff from his bare toes to the top of his head, turned and faced Alex, who for once felt like he should be sinking to his knees and begging for an apology, and said: "I should have let you die. You would have deserved it." He walked past Alex and started up the stairs, staring forwards. "I only ever met one person who was stupid enough to break into a locked room with a changed werewolf inside. There is a measure of irony in the fact that they had been saved by my father."
"Werewolf," Alex repeated. His tunnel vision was slowly retreating. He had faced a shark, a bear, a pack of dogs and a tiger, but none of those had been half as… as vicious, as bloodthirsty, as dangerous as this creature.
"Yes." Harry gave Alex a look that was a step-up from the one he had at times given Dr Willowcrook. There was a potential friendship lost in that look. "I imagine you're one of those muggles who think they've seen everything and know everything about the world. Well, newsflash, Alex. Your little playground is pretty walled-off."
"And you know everything," Alex sniped back, going on autopilot like usually did during the critical parts of his missions.
"No," Harry refuted. "But I know my own turf. And now you're supposed to start laughing at me or proclaiming me insane… or demanding proof."
"I just almost got eaten by a werewolf!" Alex exclaimed, and shivered at the soul-searing howl that came from the depths of the house. "I'm trying to digest that. I should be ready to think by the morning."
"Oh, goody. Sarcasm," Harry said sarcastically.
Alex snorted. "You know it."
Harry sighed and shook his head, pausing on a landing. "Seriously, go back to your room and stay in there. I'm not getting up again tonight to save your hide, and if I find you dead in the morning, it's no skin off my back." He yawned, stuck his stick into a contraption fastened to his forearm, and walked off further up the stairs.