Summary: There will be 31 days of mayhem, but I'm not sure there will be 31 actual stories. That would require more brain than Corvus has.
Beta Love: Dragon and the Cold Water Bottle Torture, Dutchgirl01 the Busiest Bee that Ever Buzzed, Commander Shepard the Winter Soldier
A/N: Each story will be a separate chapter to feed my laziness and desire not to post that many new stories for the same event.
Dreams and Nightmares
Prompt: Sewing a nightmare was quick and easy. Dreams took months and cost a fortune.
Her parents weren't actually dentists.
Well, they were—
But they also weren't.
They were tailors, but not the kind that mended your trousers and dresses.
They had the clinic, and her father would tend the tooth-side of the business, while her mum would tend their "other" clients in their "real" business.
The business of weaving dreams and nightmares.
Sometimes her parents would switch and mum would get to do the teeth and dad would do the "real stuff" but on weekends, they teamed up for the really big projects—the dreams.
Nightmares were easy to craft—and they stuck with people for a long time. People wanted them for various reasons—often to, oddly enough, lose weight or quit smoking or stop eating greasy food or going to the pub so much. Nothing kept you on the straight and narrow like a nightmare—and the Grangers had the best nightmares.
Dreams, however—
Dreams were complicated and expensive.
Dreams didn't always stick because they were harder to believe. People rejected utopia as some kind of lie in waiting, so dreams had to be carefully constructed with higher detail. Dreams that fed career aspirations had to be realistic, and that required a lot of research to make them right.
The price for dreams was astronomical.
But one dream had paid for her entire college education before she was even two. Her parents said it was important to get a normal education to obtain a proper grounding for dreams and a taste of true nightmares. Only life could show her that—reality had its own sweet and bitter pills.
But she was only seven, and she was pretty lonely.
Kids didn't like playing with her. They claimed she either knew too much or else she had her head in the clouds.
Was it so bad that she just wanted a friend?
So, one day, she decided she was going to weave a dream for herself. She knew exactly what she wanted and what it would look like. How it would feel—how it would be. Her parents wouldn't be able to be with her all the time, nor did she expect them to, but—
She really wanted a friend.
So, she set to work.
She grabbed pieces of the swirling ether and sewed them carefully using the thought needle, using the silken string of determination to bind it all together. She filled the construct with her dreams—to have someone who understood and valued her as she could do the same.
It wasn't that she thought her parents didn't love her. She knew they did, but they couldn't be her friends. They were her parents. It was—different.
She sewed the paws extra carefully, making sure the claws retracted so they wouldn't catch on the carpeting. She gave it tentacles on its back so it could manipulate the world a bit easier and defend itself, crafting angry-looking retractable spikes on the end of the tentacles like the clubs she saw on the mediaeval shows on BBC.
She lovingly crafted the eyes because she knew that they were the windows to the soul, as her parents said all the time. She liked all colours, but she didn't want it to stick out, so she made it blacker than shadow with obsidian eyes—where hints of colour danced on the prismatic irises, subtle but ripe with hidden colour.
She carved out the shining teeth, careful to make them just right. Thanks to her parents, she knew what the teeth should look like. She didn't want her dream to not be able to defend itself. That wasn't fair.
She made the fur super soft because friends should always be perfectly huggable. She gave it a strong heart and stronger lungs so they would be able to run or climb with ease. She wanted them to be able to heal quickly and be resilient—she didn't want someone else's nightmare to try and take them out. She gave them strong bones to support the highest of leaps or, if it happened, falls.
She scribbled out a flow chart in crayon to make sure she didn't miss anything. She didn't want her dream to be defenceless or unable to cope with the world. She checked off all the traits, all the defences, all the possible problems they would have to face, but most of all, she gave them free-will because no dream could possibly be genuine without it—just hopefully, if it would only be so kind, please choose to stay with her?
She heard the door open and her parents returning, and she quickly rolled the work-board under her bed, covered and concealed by the pink bed ruffle. She hated the colour, but she didn't have the heart to tell her parents that her room was, at least to her, ugly. She closed the construct's eyes so it looked like they were sleeping, and moved the ruffle over, hopped into bed, and snuggled in for the night.
A few minutes later, her door creaked open as her parents checked to make sure she was in bed, kissed her goodnight, and then left, closing the door behind them.
Hermione was asleep soon after.
Soon, a deep green glow came from under the bed in the shape of two eyes, and a young displacer beast peeked out from under the pink bed ruffle. He padded out, shook himself off, sniffed the air, and then pounced on the bed, burrowing under the covers and Hermione's arm in a snuggle.
Hermione sighed contentedly, hugging him close and sinking into a deeper sleep as the magic between them flared and solidified.
"I told you to dump it on the bushy-haired menace, idiot, not us!" Sirius hissed at Wormtail.
"I tried, Padfoot!" Peter whinged. "Something hit me in the gut and sent me flying into the dung heap!"
Sirius looked at him with disgust and stormed off to the shower.
Only something tripped him up, and he landed on top of a pile of stanky dead ferrets, got tangled in the line of the ferrets hanging for preservation, and ended up upside down hanging from his ankle covered in shite and dead ferrets.
A gaggle of witches pointed and giggled at him. "Ewwwww!"
Glowing eyes bored into the back of the skulls of the rampaging pranksters as they congratulated each other on a job well done.
Hermione, soaked to the bone with slop and dung, stood rigid in the middle of the mass of muck. Tendrils seemed to grow from her body as her eyes took on an eerie glow and her hair writhed. An aura of malice pulsed from her body as her form jerked and twisted. The smelly muck and dung burned off her body. Transformation tore through her once-smaller form, and what was once an unassuming bookworm of a witch out of sheer Dark wrath.
The new female displacer beast roared, tearing after the bullies, and immediately, and in front of witnesses who had been giggling and heckling with them, those tormenting boys turned into panicked animals.
Hermione's lips pulled back from her shiny, pristine teeth, and she pounced on the stag's back and sank her fangs into his neck, and the sound of her teeth grated against skin and bone as she located his spine, soon followed by a sickening CRACK.
Her legs pistoned backwards and her claws raked the stag's back as her head clamped hard around his neck and slammed his body to the ground.
As a black, shaggy dog leapt on her and started to bite her face—
Blood—a mixture of crimson and green—oozed from her torn face as she dropped the stag and faced the dog.
The blood, however, was having an odd effect on the dog.
He yelped and tried to shake his head to rid himself of it, but his face was steaming—burning—seething where the blood had touched him—and he had swallowed.
His body jerked as he yelped and whined—and a fat rodent tore away from his head and tried to make a break for it!
Only the crowd of panicked witches saw the rat, and after seeing the battle of the beasts, they all cast as many spells as they could at it, leaving a smouldering crater where the rat tore across the green.
Only a charred body of Peter Pettigrew remained, and the witches screamed even louder.
Crack!
Crack!
Crack!
Apparates sounded off just outside the gates of Hogwarts as someone yelled, "By authority of the Department of Mysteries Section Three, Paragraph Eighteen, I, Amelia Bones, order this gate open!"
The gate flung open with a protesting creak, and people clad in pure white with snarling, pseudo-daemonic masks walked in, followed by a woman dressed in scarlet robes and sporting a dour expression of total annoyance.
A shadowed figure bounded up to Hermione—a familiar feline shape—and he rubbed up against her, head-bonking her jaw and entwining his tentacles with hers.
Amelia scanned the scene as the Unspeakables tended to the wounded and the cratered Pettigrew, and one of them hissed something to Amelia, pointing to the boy's arm.
Perhaps the only part of him that wasn't charred was his left arm, where a damning Dark Mark lay pristine, having protected its bearer only where it decorated the skin.
Amelia gritted her teeth as Albus and his staff ran up—
"Arrest them all. Check them for Marks. I want their brains in a Pensieve by yesterday. I want every sin they have ever committed since they shat their first nappies. I want to know if they are also Marked and if that one influenced them in any way! And—get them to a healer so they don't DIE before it can be done!"
"Ma'am!" the Unspeakables answered, hastily taking the "animals" away.
Hermione sat down, looking into Amelia's face with a feline look of baffled confusion.
Amelia sighed softly and knelt to touch Hermione on the head. "You, young lady, never do anything small. Your friend summoned me to help you when he saw you were going to shift."
Hermione blinked, looking at her dream companion made form.
Amelia smiled. "He's not a dream, child. He's as real as you. He's a bit of a rebel. He left his parents early and refused to leave your side since he found you—until today, when he came back to fetch me."
Hermione gently licked Amelia's hand, her rough rasp dragging against her skin.
"I fear you are going to have to come home with us, now," Amelia said gently. "I do not believe the Headmaster is prepared to deal with two displacer beasts."
Albus shifted uncomfortably. "I will allow it," he said as if giving her permission.
Amelia waved toward her remaining Unspeakables. "Please see young Hermione to her new home. And Severus?"
The other young displacer beast cub stared up at Amelia with wide eyes. "Good work."
Severus seemed to relax, and he nuzzled Hermione gently.
We'll be okay, now.
Hermione's eyes widened.
I'm with you, and you're with me, now.
Hermione nosed him, whiskers twitching. Promise?
Always.
Hermione's tail poofed like a bristle brush, but she gave Severus an affectionate lick.
She was ready for the next adventure—with her best friend.