...Dammit. I have no self-control. The point of building up a stockpile of chapters was so I would update once a week while writing on ahead. ...Scratch that. You guys get two chapters in two days. Happy Halloween '06, y'all.

The Adventures of Agoraphobe and Owl-Boy

Fen's eyes darted around. Finding nothing, he pulled himself up and tried to free himself from the tangled mess that trapped his legs but froze when something scuttled at the edge of his vision.

His head whipped around to watch the human hurriedly back out of the small, dimly lit room. He shrank back as well, so far that he fell out of the reclining easy chair and hit the wood plank floor. Thrashing, he got free of the blankets and cowered, clutching at the chair arm. His small fingers dug into the rustic texture of the orange and green cloth as he stared across the alien-looking living room at the doorway the stranger had disappeared through.

He was frightened out of his wits. It was the room that scared him most of all. The floorboards were dull, rough, and the large gaps between them were caulked with a mixture of dirt and grime. A wall-to-wall bookcase had shelves that slanted at sometimes near-vertical angles. The furniture was a mix-and-match affair of wrongly assembled pieces. More books had been shoved under table legs that were shorter than their stepbrothers. Every available horizontal surface was piled with dirty pots and books and stacks of a combination of the two. Dust ruled. The armchair's color was reminiscent of vomit. In short, the room was the most anti-Malfoy thing imaginable.

For the first time in his life, Fen wanted Draco Monster. Desperately.

Instead, he was saddled with the stranger as it came back into the room.

He peered over the puke-colored chair at the human, who stood and clutched at the doorframe, staring back at him. It was spindly wraith of a human that uncomfortably reminded Fen of a large spider that had lost four legs. It had long, feminine hands and a pointed chin. The chin was the only part of its face that he could see from under the mess of uncombed black hair.

It was sort of twitching.

Fen shrank back, and the human did the same.

"He—hello, there," it said in a male-sounding voice. Their standoff lasted for several minutes, but then the man spluttered, "D—done my duty. Kept you from being ea—eat…from becoming Were-food, now get back to your parents."

He looked away and all but ducked down under the chair. "Don't have parents, sir."

"Oh." The man looked like he wanted to sit down, but the only chair in sight was the one Fen was hiding behind. Neither of them was willing to take a step closer to one another, so they stayed where they were.

After a minute, Fen blinked. Was it just him, or was the man as afraid of him as he was afraid of the man?

XXX

They eventually called a sort of truce when hunger kicked in and cautiously retreated into the kitchen. The man made a large batch of what looked to Fen like very thick crêpes. 'Henry,' he mumbled his name was while awkwardly using a fork to flip his creations in the frying pan.

The Ex-House Elf didn't give the man his name. He didn't know how to. 'Dobbin' wasn't a traditional House Elf name, but it certainly wasn't human either. 'Fen' had always been a secret name, and he went pale at the thought of being called 'Fenrir.' So he just stayed quiet as Henry sat down at the opposite end of the very long kitchen table and pushed a laden plate across the table at him.

He stared at the plate when it slid to a stop before him. He wrung his hands uncomfortably. He hadn't known humans could cook. Apparently they could, and he was sure the thick, fluffy crêpe things were delicious, but it just didn't feel right. How could he eat something that a human had made for him?

He suddenly felt very tired. His entire world had been turned on its head. He was Tall when it wasn't Halloween, he wasn't frantically trying to clean the dirty room before the Malfoys saw it, and a human was serving him.

He got up and started to fix a quick breakfast. Everything was a little high for him, but he had been small for a House Elf too, so it wasn't much of a change. Eggs, fried ham, and a few experiments made from the leftover thick-crêpe batter ended up on two battered plates. He shoved the better quality of the two towards Henry from across the table and sat again. He ate quickly, eyes downcast as he desperately tried to ignore the fact that he was sitting and eating at the same table as a human.

He failed.

He watched Henry cautiously poke at the eggs before hazarding a bite. Any reservations the man had disappeared, and he began shoveling the food into his mouth. Fen swallowed. He had only given Henry a plate of what he had made to be polite. He hadn't expected his host to actually eat it. It was House Elf food, not human food.

Fortunately, the human didn't seem to notice the difference.

He decided that what Henry didn't know wouldn't hurt him. And it wouldn't hurt Fen either. The boy finished his own plate, and finding himself still hungry, rationalized that it would be rude not to accept what a human had given him. He took a bite of the thick-crêpes—and blanched.

He had been right. Humans couldn't cook.

XXX

Surviving and delighting in each other's cooking respectively, Fen and Henry retreated outside to where they could put more distance between themselves. They sat on opposite ends of a rickety back porch while an ax chopped wood by itself at a nearby log. It unnerved Fen. He had hoped that Henry was one of those Muggle humans that were always running around, ones that didn't know about elves of any variety. He knew he looked human enough to fool most everybody, but he also knew his pointed ears would be dead giveaways to a wizard. For the first time in his life, he was glad they were small and safely hidden in his wild hair.

As he sat and watched the ax—and tried not to think about it chopping him up for Potions—he supposed that it had been fairly obvious that Henry was magical. The man had talked about Weres, after all, and it would take magic to hold his ramshackle house together.

Henry caught him staring at the ax with bulging eyes. "You aren't Muggle, are you?" he asked, and Fen watched in alarm as he reached towards a pocket.

Fen shook his head. "No, no! Wizardkind." He swallowed the lie, but was glad to see Henry put down his hand. That pocket had a dangerous-looking lump in it. Fen looked out past the small clearing at the dark woods, the place of monsters and nightmares. And screaming. He tucked his knees under his chin.

"Not in the floo network," he heard the man say distractedly. "D—do—I can't apparate…erm. And there's nothing for miles. No roads. No people."

No more humans. Fen was relieved to hear that. Henry was more than enough.

XXX

The morning sun rose higher, peeking over the thinning, silver-leafed trees. For a long time they sat in uncomfortable silence; neither was brave enough to speak first, so it only stretched longer. Then, suddenly, it ended. Henry went from his seat to a crouch before it and asked, "What is that?" with a dangerous, sharp focus in his black eyes as he scanned the woods. Fen scuttled back away from the edge of the porch, instantly nervous. He gaped at Henry as the man pulled out what looked like an enormous wand from underneath his chair and aimed it point blank at the tree line.

A feral growl escaped the human's lips. A thunderclap sounded from the overlarge wand. Fen closed his eyes in a wince and clapped his hands over his unfortunately sensitive ears. It was a complete surprise when he was dive-bombed in the chest. He fell back and slammed against the wall in a heap. He clenched his teeth, bracing himself for death.

Much to his relief, it never came. Cautiously, he cracked open one eye, only to gulp. Sitting on him with her blazing yellow eyes three inches from his was an absolutely murderous, seething mad, owl.

She looked hungry.

XXX

It was a boy, a roughly school-aged boy in the middle of the Forbidden Forest. If his name wasn't Fenrir Albtraum Svartálfar, it was going to be or he was going to be dinner. She had searched the entire forest looking for him, except for one place. She had given that place a wide berth because she had almost been killed there too many times to count. Then the process of elimination just had to prove that the boy was in that one hated place.

Her searching was over. This boy was going to Dumbledore. If the wizard said it was the wrong child and that she had to do a second sweep of the forest, she would just kill the old fool, take his place as headmaster, and sign a law forbidding Hogwarts to teach students from the Forbidden Forest.

"Oh no, not you again!"

She whipped her head around to face the speaker. It was him, the wizard with the boom-stick that shot metal. Her eyes hardened.

XXX

Fen stared as the owl launched herself at Henry and started pecking at him furiously.

'Fiend! You planned this, you vile, rancid pile of owl pellets. You knew I'd have to come here!'

Henry growled back, "Come back to torture me some more, you blasted bird? You won't get away this time!"

Apparently, they knew one another. They spoke different languages, but they still managed to rant at each other fairly well. Fen watched them with his mouth ajar.

'Beast!' She powered her wings and clawed at his face.

"I'll rip you apart!" He tried to hit her with the enormous wand.

'Snake!' She pounced on his hand, making him drop his weapon.

They kept going at it, neither managing to get the upper hand—or wing. Finally, Henry caved. "Fine!" he shouted and ripped something off the bird's leg. It was a letter. Then he looked back at Fen. "This isn't my name." He turned the letter and stared at the seal affixed to it. "Hogwarts?" he asked aloud. "In November?"

"Hogwarts?" repeated Fen in the same tone of confused disbelief.

"Look for yourself," the man said and tossed the letter to him.

The owl used the distraction as an opportunity to peck Henry soundly on the forehead. The pair's epic struggle started up again, giving Fen some interesting background noise as he stared down at the letter.

Mr. F Svartálfar.

Svartálfar, it was an Elfin name. Could it be his name? Fenrir Svartálfar? He suddenly felt a chill. These people knew his name. They knew more of his name than he did. What else did they know? Trembling, he turned the letter over. He recognized the great wax symbol from other letters, ones that had said what Draco needed to go to school. Dread filled his veins. "Oh, no," he whispered. How long would his disguise last while surrounded by hundreds of Wizarding folk? How long would he last with Draco Monster? "I can't go there," he gasped.

The sounds of the owl attacking Henry stopped. Fen threw up his arms just in time to avoid being maimed by her talons. 'You little beast!' she screeched. 'I hunted through the whole forsaken forest to find you, and you say you're not going? Think again! You're going if I have to eat you and cough up your pellets on the headmaster's desk!'

Fen gulped. "Please don't do that," he said hurriedly. "I don't want to be owl pellets."

She froze and tilted her head to one side at an unnerving angle. 'You can hoot Owlish?' she asked.

He nodded dumbly.

'Oh, thank Archimedes! Quick! Tell Boom-Stick Man that if he'll sign a waiver, the post owls won't ever go near him again!'

Fen only stared at the owl until her glare came back, and then he blurted, "She says if you sign a waiver, the post owls will stay away. Who's Archimedes?"

"Merlin's owl." She started hopping excitedly on him as Henry stared at them both. 'Hooh, I could…well, you're too young for that. Just go to Hogwarts. I would hate to kill you.'

"But I can't"—his eyes flew open—"I'll go! I'll go!"

She removed her beak from its position two millimeters from his left eye. 'I knew you'd see it my way, Nestling.'

Henry gaped at him. "You can speak owl?"

'Owlish.'

"Owlish," Fen parroted.

"...Ah."

XXX

Fen sat on the floor of the living room as the owl dictated a letter that he passed on to Henry.

"'…understand that this is irreversible. Now take me off the mailing list, you'—Nibble don't call your Mast…Boss that! …Just write 'Please take me off the mailing list.' And sign it."

Nibble hooted excitedly from the rafters, 'Hooh, this is so much fun!' She went on about giving someone called Dumbledore an earful.

Henry stared at Fen sympathetically as he folded the notification letter. "M—must be hard, hav—h—having that bird talking your ear off." Now that the anger had left his system, his nervous stutter was back.

'Tell him I'm gonna puke mouse remains on his head.'

Fen blanched more at the thought of telling Henry that than at the image itself. He still didn't like the image. "Wear a hat, sir," he suggested. Henry glared up at Nibble. She glared back.

They did that a lot.

Fen glared down at the Hogwarts letter. Two days ago, life had been normal. Now he was a fugitive masquerading as a different species, sitting in a cramped room with a homicidal owl and the Anti-Malfoy, about to be shipped off to a school dungeon full of snaky Draco Monsters.

He sighed.

He needed a butterbeer.