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angel_gidgetTitle: Nightmarish Stasis
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 823
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Done for commentfic on LJ: Anita Blake/Harry Potter crossover with the prompt "Nightmares". Some liberties taken with both characters.
He's a kid. Kids--even teens--wake up screaming in the night sometimes. But not like this. Not every night.
"My couch can't be that uncomfortable, kiddo. Why don't you get up and I'll fix us some cocoa?"
He nods, and then proceeds to make the couch. Like a bed, fluffing the pillow and neatly folding the sheets. How sweet is that? And how unfair...
The really bad stuff always happens to the nice ones.
She found him on a job. She was called as a consultant on some nasty voodoo mystic-mix-up. The scene of the crime didn't reveal jack, but when one stupid civilian touched one tiny piece of evidence, the whole place exploded into a whirl of ghostly caped figures who left her feeling colder than dead (and that was saying something) before they scattered, leaving a shivering fifteen-year-old clutching a long twig sitting on the top of the police chief's vehicle.
He'd somehow ended up going home with her.
She clears her head for a moment as she tracks down the cereal. He digs around for the milk and they eat in silence. She doesn't consider her mothering instincts to be anywhere near top-notch, but she notices he's thin and resolves to have something more substantial for lunch.
You'd think after that kind of a day, it would have been over. But it wasn't. A call from an old college friend quickly turned into a vampire hunt. She's scrambled for a moment, trying to figure out what to do with her new "friend" while she went to check it out, but he'd just looked at her with those sad green eyes and said...
"I can help. I think... I think I can handle vampires."
He could. He'd waved his stick, muttered some Latin, and froze the undead where they stood. It was actually rather impressive. the cavalry came, and then it was time to go home.
It's kind of an unspoken thing now that he needs to go back to wherever he came from. It's also an unspoken thing that neither of them have a clue as to how to make that happen. Since she can't fix that, she'll try to fix something else.
"You wanna talk about it?"
He puts his bowl in the sink and pauses.
"I'm not... I'm not afraid of much... I don't think, but do you remember those wraith-like fellows that materialized with me?"
"They were cold." It's significant somehow.
"Dementors. They... they suck out everything. First your happiness, then everything else. They're not supposed to go that far, but these are, um, out of control."
"What do they--"
"Me. I'm pretty sure they want me."
But there's nothing to really be done. There may be vodoons and wiccans and whatnot in Anita's world, but there are no true wizards. Nothing that has the specific power and know-how to really help. It's a matter of watch-and-wait.
But neither of them are the watch-and-wait sort, so they buck up and create a new day-to-day.
He's good with more than vampires. Zombies, psycho-goths, rogue necromancers... the kid's gifted. One day, they're headed back home when he turns to her with a smile on his face and says that this must be what being an Aurorer is like. She's not sure what that means, but his happy little sigh gives her a clue.
It's a humid night. And as she inspects the scene, there's something off about the bodies. They're still alive. Breathing and coma-like with nightmares stretched over their faces, frozen in the nothing. It's then that she realizes it's cold. Cold coming from the inside of her gut like a physical force that pounds with a disjointed knock at her memory.
She'd let him sleep in that morning. He'd promised to check on her in the middle of her inspection. Join her for coffee (In his case, tea.) She realizes she hasn't seen him. But Joe was going to be his ride, and Joe's car is here.
He should be here. And it's cold.
She runs. She disrupts some of her co-workers with the frantic searching, but she's checking every angle of the building until she goes for a nearby alley, because of course if there were a skirmish, he'd try to keep the civilians out of it...
It's a humid night. But it's cold, and when she sees him, too-thin with green eyes behind black rims with that crazy scar... she realizes his stare is blank. He's hollowed out, trapped in those nightmares that used to plague him so. They sucked out all his happiness and then they sucked out everything else.
She bites her lip until it bleeds before pulling out her Smith & Wesson and cocking it. It's just the first step of the burial.
The shot rings out of the dingy street for all to hear, but it doesn't mean anything.
Her partner was dead before she arrived on the scene.
f.i.n.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 823
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Done for commentfic on LJ: Anita Blake/Harry Potter crossover with the prompt "Nightmares". Some liberties taken with both characters.
He's a kid. Kids--even teens--wake up screaming in the night sometimes. But not like this. Not every night.
"My couch can't be that uncomfortable, kiddo. Why don't you get up and I'll fix us some cocoa?"
He nods, and then proceeds to make the couch. Like a bed, fluffing the pillow and neatly folding the sheets. How sweet is that? And how unfair...
The really bad stuff always happens to the nice ones.
She found him on a job. She was called as a consultant on some nasty voodoo mystic-mix-up. The scene of the crime didn't reveal jack, but when one stupid civilian touched one tiny piece of evidence, the whole place exploded into a whirl of ghostly caped figures who left her feeling colder than dead (and that was saying something) before they scattered, leaving a shivering fifteen-year-old clutching a long twig sitting on the top of the police chief's vehicle.
He'd somehow ended up going home with her.
She clears her head for a moment as she tracks down the cereal. He digs around for the milk and they eat in silence. She doesn't consider her mothering instincts to be anywhere near top-notch, but she notices he's thin and resolves to have something more substantial for lunch.
You'd think after that kind of a day, it would have been over. But it wasn't. A call from an old college friend quickly turned into a vampire hunt. She's scrambled for a moment, trying to figure out what to do with her new "friend" while she went to check it out, but he'd just looked at her with those sad green eyes and said...
"I can help. I think... I think I can handle vampires."
He could. He'd waved his stick, muttered some Latin, and froze the undead where they stood. It was actually rather impressive. the cavalry came, and then it was time to go home.
It's kind of an unspoken thing now that he needs to go back to wherever he came from. It's also an unspoken thing that neither of them have a clue as to how to make that happen. Since she can't fix that, she'll try to fix something else.
"You wanna talk about it?"
He puts his bowl in the sink and pauses.
"I'm not... I'm not afraid of much... I don't think, but do you remember those wraith-like fellows that materialized with me?"
"They were cold." It's significant somehow.
"Dementors. They... they suck out everything. First your happiness, then everything else. They're not supposed to go that far, but these are, um, out of control."
"What do they--"
"Me. I'm pretty sure they want me."
But there's nothing to really be done. There may be vodoons and wiccans and whatnot in Anita's world, but there are no true wizards. Nothing that has the specific power and know-how to really help. It's a matter of watch-and-wait.
But neither of them are the watch-and-wait sort, so they buck up and create a new day-to-day.
He's good with more than vampires. Zombies, psycho-goths, rogue necromancers... the kid's gifted. One day, they're headed back home when he turns to her with a smile on his face and says that this must be what being an Aurorer is like. She's not sure what that means, but his happy little sigh gives her a clue.
It's a humid night. And as she inspects the scene, there's something off about the bodies. They're still alive. Breathing and coma-like with nightmares stretched over their faces, frozen in the nothing. It's then that she realizes it's cold. Cold coming from the inside of her gut like a physical force that pounds with a disjointed knock at her memory.
She'd let him sleep in that morning. He'd promised to check on her in the middle of her inspection. Join her for coffee (In his case, tea.) She realizes she hasn't seen him. But Joe was going to be his ride, and Joe's car is here.
He should be here. And it's cold.
She runs. She disrupts some of her co-workers with the frantic searching, but she's checking every angle of the building until she goes for a nearby alley, because of course if there were a skirmish, he'd try to keep the civilians out of it...
It's a humid night. But it's cold, and when she sees him, too-thin with green eyes behind black rims with that crazy scar... she realizes his stare is blank. He's hollowed out, trapped in those nightmares that used to plague him so. They sucked out all his happiness and then they sucked out everything else.
She bites her lip until it bleeds before pulling out her Smith & Wesson and cocking it. It's just the first step of the burial.
The shot rings out of the dingy street for all to hear, but it doesn't mean anything.
Her partner was dead before she arrived on the scene.
f.i.n.
