Chapter 19. Struggle
"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" I admit, I never watched any of the movies from that series. What I watched were some short clips that seemed interesting. It was due to those clips and some fanfictions that I found out what an Obscurial was.
Obscurial, typically a young wizard or witch, who developed some kind of a magical parasite inside their bodies, or something widely known as Obscurus. I didn't really do much research on this particular subject — I really had better things to do... well not really —, but from what little I remembered, any Obscurus was a pretty powerful being of destruction and could only manifest in people that attempted to repress their magical abilities.
I had no clue if it could be killed, cured, or used, but Whitehall definitely knew more than I if he had one in his collection. Certainly not something I expected to find in my prison.
My wide eyes drifted to the girl's collar and I gulped, Well, that certainly explains the collar. It must somehow stop the dark entity from fully manifesting. Or well, maybe it just limits its power. Shit.
Instinctively I took a few steps away from the girl. "You are an Obscurial," I whispered watching as the small dark clouds of smoke danced around Zero's wounds.
As soon as I finished speaking, the girl winced and tried to retreat into her corner. Good job Logan. You just had to run your mouth when the girl finally decided to speak, I groaned internally.
Rising my hands slightly, I crouched down at the end of the mattress, "Look, I didn't mean anything bad by that", bullshit and you know it, "It's just not every day you realize that you were sleeping next to the host of one of the most powerful magical entities for gods know how long," Damn, and I did it again...
The ability to give someone a comforting speech definitely wasn't in my skill set. Thankfully something of what I said must have been enough because the girl stopped and gazed at me through the gaps between her fingers.
Letting out a deep sigh, I sat down as my wound definitely didn't decide to give me a break for this conversation. Now that I had the girl's attention again, I might be able to finally find out something more about her.
After all, no normal person could manifest Obscurus inside them and well, a name would be nice too. Calling her Zero probably wouldn't earn me any points with her.
"I don't know much about your affliction, but I understand how much you had to go through for an Obscurus to manifest," I spoke softly, not looking at the girl. It was much easier that way to focus on words that wouldn't make the girl outright hate me.
We sat there in silence for who knew how long. It wasn't as uncomfortable as I feared and so I focused my gaze at dim light from the single lightbulb that flickered on and off from time to time. It was the only thing to take my mind off the lack of reaction from the girl and the stinging pain coming from the cut on my stomach.
"No you don't," the angry murmur interrupted my well, nothing really.
I slowly turned to look at the girl a few feet away from me. Shivers instantly ran down my spine when I noticed the once again green-eyed glare. It wasn't pointed in my direction, but it definitely didn't make this situation any better. Who knew how much the collar could stand and I really didn't want to be in the same room as a rampaging Obscurial.
"They invaded our home and killed daddy without a reason," she seethed, making me flinch and avert my gaze, "I woke up face to face with the Doctor. He explained how I was special, magical," she spat the last word like fire, "They tried to force me to use this magic to be their next experiment as I later learned... But, anytime I began to feel this magic inside me, I pushed it back, hoping that they would leave me alone if they saw I was normal."
I flinched once again as the girl released a hollow laugh, "It was a mistake and a blessing at the same time. I got the Obscurus, the only thing that cared for me in return, but they chained it before I could release it to destroy this cursed place. I became their little indestructible doll, perfect for any experiment or test the Doctor could think of!"
Eyes wide, I once again looked at the girl. Her glare disappeared long ago and now her eyes grew wider and wider while her hands flew to her mouth. I lowered my head slightly as I realized that Zero probably finally became aware that she just shouted out her entire story to a stranger.
I had no idea what to do. The girl just erupted like a volcano and I felt like I had to do something, but what!?
Go and hug her like people always do in movies or fiction? Fuck no, Zero didn't even want me to touch her when I just tried to carry her to the mattress. She would scream and probably attack me if I attempted to initiate any physical contact.
Maybe I should just remain silent and go to sleep, especially after an outburst like that? No, that would take away my only chance at fixing my almost nonexistent relationship with the girl. I really wanted someone to talk to and maybe, just maybe the girl could help me with the escape from this place.
And so I continued to sit there, thinking how to fix this complete mess. Every idea I came up with was worse than the previous one and so in the end I settled down on the one thing that had the chance to make this situation either a lot better or worse.
"You are right," I finally spoke up, "I don't understand what you have gone through. All my life, I knew what I was, I was proud of my strength and abilities. I thought I could outsmart an organization that kidnapped magical children for almost a decade," I snorted, "Look where that arrogance and stupidity got me."
"But you," I continued, "You arrived here without knowing about the hidden world and survived. You are stronger than me and probably all that came before so remember that. After all, in lives like ours, survival is all that counts."
A motto that I always followed in my last life, but forgot over the time that I arrived here. The time had come to embrace it again and show the world that it would take much more than some Hydra fuckers to kill me again.
Scooping a little bit closer to the girl, I leaned my back against the cool wall, "So you see, I might not understand what you really went through and probably never will. But what I do understand is that we both want to survive and get out of here. And that's exactly what we are going to do."
My eyebrows raised when the girl snorted, "Good luck with that. They control our lives and we can do nothing about it. And didn't you say that it was arrogance that got you into this situation?" scowling, she looked straight into my eyes, "Well, it seems you haven't learned anything."
What do you know, now she is talkative... Still, with how I worded it, she isn't wrong.
Sighing I raised my arm and summoned a very small ball of light in my hand. The ball began to dance in every direction, changing its intensity with each move. It wasn't anything special, but enough to catch Zero's attention, who now watched the ball with a wary gaze.
"And that's where you are wrong," I said and changed the colors of the small ball, "I underestimated them previously, but now it's going to be the opposite. They don't know that I can use magic without a wand and they definitely can't expect me to have any knowledge of runes," I finished, extinguishing the light with a clench of my hand.
"Wand? Runes?" she asked after a while, her voice finally missing its previous anger.
Opening my hand again, this time the light shimmered and formed into a few different objects. A short stick radiating a brown light and a few runic symbols that just floated above my palm.
Nodding to the light wand, I explained, "Most wizards don't know how to focus magic without a wand. It gives them the control required to perform spells, but I? Well, I never liked to be overly dependent on a tool and so I learned how to control my magic without it. Oh, the wand is still very useful, but I can manage without it."
The wand exploded in sparks of light and this time I motioned to the symbols, "My teacher always called runes the language of magic. There are many different runes in the world and though I'm no specialist, I'm pretty sure that I can mess with the ones on your collar enough to at least weaken it."
Zero's hands immediately flew to the accursed garment, "You really think you can do it? That weakening my collar will help us?"
Shrugging, I slowly stood up and sluggishly trudged towards my mattress. Lying down with a groan, I propped my head on my elbow and smiled at the girl who watched me like a hawk.
"It might take weeks or even months to find the right moment, but if we manage to overpower the collar when a window appears then your Obscurus might be able to do most of the work for us. I'm just not sure how the change will affect you... So what do you think, Miss Obscurial, want to fight for your freedom?"
Not the best of plans, I created it during the walk towards my mattress so there was still a lot of room for improvement. I fucked up once, but this time I would create the perfect plan... Or as perfect as a plan could be when you had to consider so many unknowns.
"I do," Zero's quiet voice again echoed through the room. As my gaze again landed on her face, for the first time since I met her, something resembling a smile stretched across her lips. "And it's Laura," she added after a moment.
I grinned, "Laura huh? Let it be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
28th of February, 2008, Location: Unknown
Weeks probably passed since my awkward heart-to-heart with Laura. The time spent with the now-talking girl quickly proved that my presumptions about her were quite wrong. She was still the scared, small girl that I first laid my eyes upon when the gentle guards dropped me like a bag of potatoes into the room, but now I understood much more about her.
First of all, she wasn't a few years younger than I, only one. That little fact definitely made my blood boil a bit. Obviously the experiments, strain from being a host of Obscurus and the rough living conditions, made the girl seem younger than she actually was. I wasn't a good guy and I knew it, but even I had some morals. Never in my life would I wish Hydra's treatment even on my worst enemy, much less on a girl that spent almost a year in this hell.
I went through some tough situations in my last life, but this was definitely beyond anything I endured. They continued running their experiments and while some would benefit us in the future, they had one thing in common. Each test, each operation made us feel worse and worse. Wounds began to take much more time to heal right after an operation, our bodies barely had any time to recover, and my magic and Laura's Obscurus worked at their limits to keep us alive.
The only thing that saved me from exploding in accidental magic was the fact that Laura explained how her treatment looked before my arrival. Whitehall would run some tests and a small experiment on her from time to time, but it never got as awful as it did now. No, the pace only began to speed up after our first large operation those few weeks ago.
I had no clue what the mad bastard did to us that day or really any day — we were always unconscious during the operations —, but the effects became visible pretty fast. Apart from the wounds that came from a particularly nasty experiment, I now healed much faster, almost as quickly as Laura. Also, I might be a bit delusional from all the chemicals they injected into me, but I was quite sure that my magic had become a bit more potent.
The chemical drugs, or whatever the shit was, had my head spinning every time. Headaches of magnitude that made me almost wish that my brain would just explode and be done with it. Recognizing what the drugs did wasn't even hard. Hazy mind upon injection? Almost complete loss of touch with reality if my Occlumency wasn't in place? Yeah, that and watching some weird videos quickly proved to me that the attempts at brainwashing me just begun.
At least, I took solace in the fact Laura never went through this process. That could end very badly, I thought with a grimace as I took a quick peek at the sleeping form of my roommate. I would rather not have a Hydra-controlled Obscurus running around the world. MCU and Harry Potter had enough monsters already...
Of course, there was also the possibility that the dark entity would protect Laura from the drugs, but you could never be sure.
I shook my head lightly and banished those thoughts from my mind. They didn't help me at all and only made me remember how shitty my situation currently was. Better to focus on something that just might help us escape, I mused with a quick look towards the collar that was barely visible behind Laura's hair.
Each day that I had the required strength, I studied the collar under Laura's leery gaze. At first, I just tried to find some way to just shut this entire artifact off. After all, who knew if Whitehall expected any of his prisoners to even try messing with it. Evidently, he did and after a week or two I just gave up on this particular plan. The collar was probably secured by some spell or activation sequence that I had no chance of finding out with my current knowledge.
That of course didn't mean that I was completely hopeless in my plan to sabotage the artifact to some degree. No, even with my complete lack of understanding of most of the runes on the collar, I found a few areas where if I changed some things then the power of the garment would go down quite nicely.
After that everything was in Laura's hands. She had to somehow build up enough emotions to let the Obscurus out even with the collar partially active. Not an easy task as we found out in the last few weeks.
Like with her rant when she first began speaking, Laura was capable of getting quite angry and frustrated to fuel the Obscurus. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to unleash the dark entity back then and it wasn't enough to do it now.
Oh, the progress was still clear as a cloudless sky.
Once I "fixed" the collar, the Obscurus could heal Laura a bit faster, and when we tested her enraged state, the dark cloud began to seep all over her arms. Sometimes I feared that the Obscurus would try to use its limited freedom to attack me, but for whatever reason, it and Laura had some sort of working relationship. To be honest I was pretty sure that it shouldn't be possible...
Whatever doubts I had, quickly disappeared when the rustling of clothes reached my ears, "Feeling better?" I asked, throwing a look at my roommate, who was currently rubbing her eyes.
"A bit," Laura whispered back, "Do you have any idea why I feel like shit while you only received another scar to add to the collection?"
Snorting, I shook my head, "Only one, but it isn't really a good one."
Laura dragged herself to my mattress and looked at me with her big eyes that reflected everything the small girl went through, "I will take whatever I can."
Ruffling her hair a bit, I smiled when Laura leaned into my hand. It certainly was interesting how quickly the girl warmed up to me after seeing that I meant her no harm and wanted to help. I didn't know if this was a normal reaction or if Laura just decided to grab onto the first positive human contact in years, but I was glad for it.
I would lie if I said that the whole Hydra treatment didn't affect me. It really did, but I got pretty good at burying and hiding my true emotions over the years.
Even then I welcomed Laura's change of heart with open hands. It was much easier to survive through this new life of mine with someone by my side, with whom I could share my pain... Not that I would ever admit to taking comfort from an eleven-year-old girl when I was two times her age mentally.
With a shudder, I wisely decided to drop this subject and give Laura an answer, "I think that they took something from me and gave it to you. That would explain why I'm only tired and you had to sleep almost two days to recover. Of course, this is only a theory I pulled from my ass, but at this point, I won't be surprised if that is the truth."
"Why would they do that?" she asked, her head tilting a bit to the side.
I shrugged, "Honestly? I don't know. Any operation they performed on us was supposed to make us stronger. Our improved healing factor, slightly increased strength or reaction time. This? This doesn't make any sense. I have nothing that you don't have."
Well, anything apart from working magic, but Whitehall never attempted to mess with our magic again after the first operation. Why? I again had no clue and honestly, this ignorance would probably give me gray hairs before we escaped.
"You think our plan is going to work?" she murmured after a long moment of silence and I had to ask myself if it indeed would.
I pretty much weakened the collar as much as my knowledge allowed me. My magic while growing a bit stronger during my stay here, was far from enough to break us free. So yeah, if by some miracle we found a way to completely release the Obscurus from Laura, then our escape might be possible pretty soon. And if we couldn't then our future looked pretty bleak...
"I hope so, but," I softly laid a hand on Laura's shoulder and smiled, "Even if it doesn't work, then I promise that I will find a way to get us out of here... Now get some more rest, it is obvious you are barely keeping your eyes open."
She tried to argue like she always did, but a large yawn betrayed her yet again. Scowling Laura quickly laid down on my mattress and it took no time for her breathing to become slow and regular.
Smiling lightly, I took the dirty blanket we received a week ago and laid it over Laura. The girl really needed to rest if she wanted our plan to even have a chance of success.
And I?
I just kept sitting there against the cool, gray wall, thinking of plans and ways to escape. I made a promise and this was one of the few I wanted to keep.
Because, I thought as my gaze again drifted to Laura, Even though I'm not a hero, she of all people deserves a chance to enjoy freedom.
Have a good day/night.