A Strange Encounter

A woman stood over a brunette toddler with a wand in her hand. The woman was unnaturally beautiful, but had a maniacal look in her clear, blue eyes that ruined her perfection.

"Here baby, this'll fix those eyes of yours. Now mommy needs you to take off your glasses," she said sweetly.

The toddler frowned, "But I can't see wifout my glasses."

"Mommy's going to fix that. Now take them off." As the last word left her lips, she roughly snatched the spectacles off of her child's face, making him cry out in pain. She saw the angry red lines that her long nails had left on her son's face, but she felt a strange apathy at the sight of tears falling from his grey eyes.

"Here, baby. Let me do this," The woman smiled at her child and muttered a few spells under her breath. As the last burst of magic left the end of her wand, her son screamed in pain.

A blond boy burst into the room and looked at the toddler.

"WHAT DID YOU DO?" he shouted, scooping up his younger brother and trying to pry the boy apart from the fetal position he'd forced himself into.

When he got him to let go of his face, he accidentally dropped the small boy, causing him to cry even harder.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY BROTHER?"

"I did nothing! I was trying to fix his damned eyes!" The woman defended, pointing at the little boy without casting him a glance.

"Is THIS helping him?" The older boy pulled his younger brother by the arm to stand in front of his mother. She gasped and fell to her knees at the sight of her baby's eyes.

One of them had turned from grey to blue, like her own eyes. The other, however, was bleeding; the iris having turned a horrible shade of red.

"…I…I can see mommy's soul…" Was all the little boy muttered before everything went black…

Balisk awoke with a start on the train from his nightmare to find himself lying comfortably on Fred's lap while George leaned against the window. Both of them were asleep so had not seen the tears he had cried while unconscious.

"It was a dream…Just a dream." Though, as he touched his right eye, he knew it wasn't a dream.

He quickly dried any of the remaining tears on his face and made himself presentable so he didn't get any questions from his friends. He hadn't wanted to have this particular conversation with the twins. It hadn't gone very well the last time.

"Mmmm…Balisk? What're you doing, mate?" George asked, stretching and hitting his twin upside the head to wake him.

"Ouch, hey! What was that for?"

"You weren't awake yet."

"So you couldn't tap me like a normal person?"

"Of course not."

"WALL." Balisk interjected between them by putting a hand between their faces as they argued.

"Fine fine…Hey, Balisk, you look kind of shaken. Did you have a bad dream or something?"

"No," Balisk answer too fast, turning when he felt the train grind to a stop, "We should get going, yeah?"

"Yeah, sure."

Balisk, Fred and George slowly made their way from the train. Balisk winked a couple of second year girls that passed by them and they giggled before running off to find the carriages.

"Do they even know the chances of you fancying any of them is zero?" Fred asked his friend with a smirk, earning one from Balisk in returned.

"Of course not, they're only second years. They have yet to hear of my complete greatness because no one passes this information on to the first years."

"Why would they?" George asked, "That would just destroy their innocence."

As they continued down the walk way, Fred and George noticed Balisk's jaw tighten and his face become hard. Before they could ask what was wrong, they heard muttering coming from the group of first years.

"Look at his eye…"

"Bloody hell, what happened to him?"

"I heard his mum went nuts and tried to curse him into oblivion because she couldn't stand the sight of him."

The last was said by Draco Malfoy, a little louder than the rest. Balisk's eye twitch and he calmly walked over to the younger boy.

"Draco," He muttered. Suddenly, Draco found himself being lifted by the front of his robes with Balisk's face mere inches from his own. He couldn't hold back the shiver when he saw the intense glare his older cousin was looking at him with, "Do you have some sort of issue with me?"

"N-No…" Balisk dropped him and turned away.

"Coward."

Neither of the twins said anything when Balisk went back to walking towards the carriages. From the time of his encounter with Draco and when he climbed into the carriage, he continually muttered things about "Dumbass blondes," and "Bloody gits" that needed to "mind their own fucking business".

"Muttering's bad for you, Balisk," Lee said, climbing in after Fred and George, "Mum always tells me that I need to talk things out if I'm upset."

"You want me to talk? Fine, I'll talk. My cousin's a git and anyone I meet hardly looks past my fucking eye. They all think I'm some sort of freak."

"Balisk you know that's not—"

"Really, Lee? What was the first thing you asked me when we met?" Balisk put his hand to his ear, as if he were especially interested in what the other boy had to say.

"…I asked what happened to your eye…" Was the barely-heard response from Lee.

"Exactly, and has anyone that I hadn't known prior had anything to say upon meeting me that wasn't about me eye?"

"Well, technically—"

"Lee!"

"No, I'm sorry!" Lee flinched, as if expecting the blond boy to hit him. Instead, Balisk just glared and stood (albeit, awkwardly) in the carriage and jumped out of it. He stumbled slightly upon landing since they'd been moving, but he quickly caught himself before he fell.

"Balisk, the carriage is still moving!" Fred yelled out the open door.

"I'm walking!" Balisk shouted back, directing an obscene hand gesture at them before pulling out his wand, "Accio broom!"

Balisk caught the object the zoomed towards him and mounted the broom. As he flew to the castle—careful to keep at more or less the same rate as the carriages so he didn't show up at the doors too early—all of his anger slowly melted away into nothing. He shook his head and resolved to apologize to Lee later, but he knew he wouldn't.

Despite being his friend, Balisk didn't apologize. He just didn't. It wasn't like he didn't want to, but he wasn't raised that way. His father was cousins with the Malfoys, they never bowed out. God bless Molly, she'd tried her best to re-raise him, but at that point it just wasn't something he could control. He himself was a bit of a force to be reckoned with. Uncontrollable and easily set off.

After all, wasn't his mother the same way?