2/3

Luckily he didn't seem to be feeling any more of the effects for now. They seemed to come and go, but he had little doubt that when they moon was fully exposed and not hidden by the clouds, he would be a vicious killing machine in the coming months unless he escaped from this world he had been sent to.

Gaara got changed and got into the comfortable bed he had slept in just under a week ago and went to sleep.

Gaara's dreams were plagued by demons of his past and, ironically, a demon of his present. He felt glad he when he was awoken by Draco Malfoy walking into the room with a ghostly pale face. He spotted Gaara's open eyes and as soon as he sat down on the bed opposite to Gaara he started to talk about how someone had attacked some people called 'Crabbe' and 'Goyle,' which Gaara realised were probably the names of the boys he had beaten half to death not more than an hour before. After a few more minutes of the one sided conversation Draco too got ready for bed and turned off the magical lights.

Gaara was just happy he didn't have to use his sand to explain why he was in that room. It seemed that the ring leader had a bit more sense than the goons. Or at least enough sense to check the door for his name.

As he drifted off again, Gaara couldn't help but laugh silently at the irony of what Draco had told him regarding the attack earlier. The teachers had declared that the two brutes had had a fight and knocked each other out. Gaara was just hoping that they wouldn't rumble him when they awoke, otherwise he would have a difficult time explaining what happened without revealing everything. He was already an oddity even in this bizarre school, he didn't need the extra attention that declaring a demon lived inside him would bring.

Again his dreams were haunted by evils better left unexplained until he woke in the middle of the night. This time there was nothing to cause this awakening other than the horrors of his mind and the sudden blood lust that seemed insatiable at that point. He had woken with the same grin on his face that he had sported earlier that night, except this time the only thing he could direct his fury at was the sleeping teen in the next bed. He reached out one hand to uncork his weapon but as his finger tips grazed the dry material he suddenly came to his senses and withdrew his hand.

Once again he tried to go to sleep but wasn't able to, for fear of killing the sleeping boy in the other bed whilst unconscious. He decided to stay awake all night and play with his sand, it had been a while since he had been able to and he needed a little practice otherwise he might have gotten rusty.

Whilst he toyed with the form of the almost liquid sand he started to think about his family and friends back in the elemental nations. He hadn't given them much thought whilst he was stuck in that foreign world, it was too painful. But now that he did, he wondered what was happening, if they were looking for him, if they were okay.

Gaara continued his thoughts long into the night whilst he practiced his control in more ways than one.

OXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

The next morning found Sabaku no Gaara still sitting on his bed playing with a small measure of his sand. The only sign of the rising sun came through the submerged windows at the side of the room showing the dark murky water that was beginning to light up into a shade of green that seemed to fit the room precisely.

Over the night Gaara had almost gone on a killing spree twice more but had been able to fight off the urge. He had tried to think of places he had seen that could hold him, even without his sand, but all of the doors looked too flimsy and he could easily find his way to people within the school.

It wasn't much longer, after the sun had risen, that Gaara was disturbed from his peaceful thoughts by his roommate. "How are you doing that?" Draco exclaimed excitedly, having seemingly woken a few seconds prior and had watched the new redhead manipulating his sand without the use of his wand. Draco pondered on whether this could be the reason the mysterious new boy had been admitted to the school three years into the usual line of education and had been taken to buy supplies with the new defence against the dark arts teacher. He obviously had no relation to the scruffy man, by the looks of them and the way they held themselves. Gaara's demeanour was not unlike his own, in the sense that both of them held a large air of confidence and superiority and something else he couldn't quite place yet.

Gaara was startled when he was interrupted by the, now awake, blonde boy who had wide eyes like a child looking at an item of extreme interest. Gaara, with a flick of his hand, sent the sand back into the gourd and re-corked it before turning to the intrigued roommate. Slowly he nodded.

Draco was baffled. A nod wasn't what he had had in mind; surely the boy could communicate in some manner. But he didn't want to press the matter, the last thing he needed was an enemy for a roommate. Also, Gaara was a great deal scarier than his normal company despite his size and handicap so he didn't want to anger him this early on.

Gaara decided now was as good a time as any to get out of bed. For once he was glad that he was practically immune to sleep deprivation as he walked down to the showers and washed off the grime from the day before, along with the blood on his hands that he had picked up before bed, fortunately no one had noticed the red stains. He then re-entered the room to find Draco had also left, presumably to either shower like him or to check up on his henchmen, but he was almost certain it wasn't the latter; Draco didn't seem like that kind of person.

By the time the towelling-off-Draco returned, Gaara was ready for the day, he just needed to strap his sand to his back and he'd be ready for anything, unless it involved running, because whilst wearing the school uniform he doubted he could run much faster than the average person.

After they were both ready, Draco said he'd take Gaara to the Great Hall for breakfast where they would also get their timetables for the following year. True to his word Draco led his roommate to the great hall to eat. Draco, as he walked in front of the mysterious teen, noticed that Gaara had brought his big sand… thing with him.

When they arrived, they earned more strange looks than Gaara had the night before as he walked in, carrying his gourd and looking even angrier than before, if that was possible. The visible unintentional and undirected malice had been caused by the mostly sleepless night Gaara had to endure the previous night. He could survive and function without sleep but his mood rapidly worsened when he went without sleep.

They sat in the same seats as the night before, or close, it was a bench so it wasn't really exact. The biggest difference was this time Draco sat on the other side, with Gaara, as he'd seemingly taken a shine to him, as well as Carbbe & Goyle still being in the infirmary, and the wizarding nobility couldn't very well sit on his own as far as Draco was concerned.

They ate with a relative silence between them, until one Harry Potter entered the great hall. Draco took time out of his eating to call a few insults over to the Gryffindor table regarding the famous teen's fainting spell on the train the previous day. Gaara tried to ignore the childish behaviour but was soon roped in when Draco had turned back around and started to jabber about how the 'idiot' was also a wimp and such. He asked for the newcomer's opinion and being the kind and meek boy Gaara was… he uncorked his gourd allowing the sand to flow out freely. A ball of sand the size of a football was formed before the cork was replaced. By this point he had most of the people in the great hall staring at him or the ball of sand a few feet above him. Draco was among the many students staring wide eyed at the orb.

The sand morphed into words above the red-haired boy with his arms crossed and a prominent scowl set upon his face 'Did you face the dementors last night?'

As the mentioned boy read the message in the air he couldn't help but blush slightly as the entire great hall seemed to expect his answer. "Well… no, but… never mind." After that he turned back to his food and Gaara did the same, leaving the sand to form into a ball once again and stay in the air above him, floating with a slight rotation to it.

Gaara wasn't really one for humiliating people but he had had a rough night and when he saw someone being such an antagonistic hypocrite he wasn't in the mood to suffer their idiocy. There was also something else that made Gaara uneasy about the boy he was rooming with, nothing supernatural but something equally disturbing and almost familiar that made him wary, though he couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was.

Not long after they had finished the spectacle, which had still rendered the hall motionless and silent, which Gaara seemed to have a knack for, McGonagall approached Gaara brandishing a frown almost as deep set as his own. "It is against school rules to use magical artefacts outside of assigned lessons. Being new is not an excuse!" The stern deputy-headmistress scolded in her strong Scottish accent. "Please remove this…" she didn't quite know how to describe the gourd on Gaara's back as he sat there with his arms crossed and a decidedly defiant look about him "-artefact" she settled for "and give it to me now." Her order was all but ignored as Gaara didn't do anything.

Minerva was about to reprimand the boy but he did move. He released one of his arms from their comfortable folded position in front of his chest and pointed his finger upwards in a lazy and uncaring manner. McGonagall looked up carefully, remembering a similar incident with the Weasley twins several years prior with floating water bombs, and not to mention the Marauders mischief, that sent chills down her spine. Above her wasn't a prank of any kind but instead a message written in sand-letters saying 'I won't give you my sand' the letters reformed after the first part 'and it is not an artefact' once again the sand broke into the mist like state before reforming back into discernable letters and words 'I move this sand with my own power'

The senior staff member was shocked by this; to use that high level of control was almost unheard of and to be done by a new student with no training and without the use of a wand; it was terrifying for the Hogwarts professor. The same was true for all of the students of Hogwarts who had seen the messages in the air. McGonagall walked off soon after looking to be in an even worse mood than before. She was going to have to talk to Albus about the boy's presence in the school after all of her classes were done. Gaara didn't even get to turn around to quietly finish his breakfast because his head of house, Severus Snape, came walking down the hall with a scowl that seemed to be apparent on all of the teacher's faces that morning, well, except Hagrid who still looked cheerful.

Snape deposited the pile of paper he had been carrying into the lap of one of the seventh years, walking back to his seat not long after. The seventh year didn't look at all pleased to have been chosen for the prestigious job of handing out the student timetables during what was supposed to be his breakfast. Gaara noticed, as he finished off his toast and the juice he had been given, that professor Lupin wasn't eating with the rest of the staff once again. He assumed the man was preparing for the lessons he would be teaching on his first day of work. 'Defending against dark arts' or something akin to that, Gaara checked his new timetable but he wasn't scheduled for that lesson that day, not until later in the week. The first wizarding lesson he would receive was Divination and it seemed to be with another house, Gryffindor, as were all of his lessons, not specifically Gryffindor but always with at least one other house.

Before they left the great hall, Gaara recalled his sand back into his gourd and re-corked it seeing no need to waste chakra keeping it suspended. Fortunately it seemed as if Draco had quickly gotten over his embarrassment at his hands earlier as they both left together.

Once they had left the great hall, Gaara and Draco walked back down to their dormitory, Gaara leaving Draco to speak the password to enter, and into their room to retrieve their books for the first few lessons of the day. By the time they had walked from the bowels of the school to the stone steps leading up to the North Tower, one of them was sweating profusely and gasping for breath, and it wasn't the one with the gourd of sand on his back.

As Gaara was led up the ancient stone spiral staircase to the North Tower for Divination, he noticed the constant hostility between both Slytherin and Gryffindor. It seemed childish to him, but so did the hostility between some of the Elemental Nations. Draco seemed fairly restrained compared to the night before when he had openly and proudly taken any chance he could to snipe at Potter and the other Gryffindors. Gaara guessed it was because of absence of the goons Draco had kept with him before. Gaara had to admit he wasn't as annoying when the others weren't around.

When Gaara passed through the old doorway into the Divination classroom at the top of the stairs, the first thing the tanuki-host noticed upon entering was the overpowering stench of incense and fragrances that made him want to deposit his breakfast all over the pillowed floor. He saw that most of the others entering before and after him were suffering a similar reaction to the smell, although maybe not as severely. Gaara literally stumbled to one of the numerous cushions littered around the room with almost no grace as he fell. There didn't seem to be any chairs in the room so Gaara just tried to concentrate on breathing through his mouth instead of his nose as he hoisted himself into a more comfortable sitting position on the soft royal-purple pillow. Draco sat between him and the rest of the Slytherins so he could get a conversation from the others and cultivate a friendship between Gaara and him, who he decided was worth his time if only for the power the boy possessed, which seemed all the more potent from the display that morning.

Gaara was more or less of the same opinion, even as antisocial as he was, he did try, on occasion to create bonds of friendship with people, much to the delight of his doting sister and mocking brother. He decided at that point that he would try and at least attempt to become more… social in this world, if only for the sake of becoming a better person for when he got back home. Unable to continue his current thoughts, Gaara was dragged back to the harsh, smelly, reality that was first period Divination.

Not long after the poor red-head had sat down, a tweedy little woman who looked jitterier than a blonde-Jinchuriki being followed by a ghost, entered. The curly haired woman walked into the room at a quick pace, only taking time to look at her new students one by one in rapid succession. Gaara was a little disturbed by the way the woman gasped and started to harass one of the overweight Gryffindors about their dead grandmother, or something to that effect. Gaara couldn't concentrate with all of the perfumes in the air. After she had seemingly read the boy's, Neville's, future, she stopped scrutinizing the rest of the students. Instead she went to the front of the circular room and introduced her subject as well as gave a speech on how it was all true and definitely not fake. Gaara wasn't exactly convinced about that.

Trelawney went into the back room whilst the students, who could talk, talked about how much of a crackpot she was; this even extended to the usually quite mild mannered Gryffindors who would normally stick up for such people from what Gaara had seen and heard. Even if Gaara could have, he wouldn't have joined the conversation though; he wasn't really one for passive verbal aggression. Every once in a while Malfoy would turn to Gaara for his opinion, usually expecting a positive expression from the boy, only for Gaara to ignore him or to disagree with him. He wasn't trying to annoy the platinum blonde; he just didn't want to mislead anyone into thinking that he cared about what others thought on the subject.

When the woman re-entered she was carrying a tray with around twenty or so tea cups and a pot of boiling water, Gaara lightened up at this. He could really use some tea to clear his nose of the smell that permeated the room, the stench that he just couldn't get over.

All of the students crowded around a few desks leaving two or three to each short table and each person got a cup with tea leaves in and were asked to get out their books and turn to page five: 'Reading Tea-Leaves.'

Sybil Trelawney then went around the room depositing hot water into the cups and asking the students to drink the tea. Some looked almost horrified to have to drink tea, but Gaara just leisurely drank his whilst flipping through his copy of the required text book. Gaara was fairly fortunate that the courses he was taking weren't too knowledge based as he hadn't been there in the previous years to study them. The only things he had to worry about was potions which was apparently the only subject that relied on any science, that and that he hadn't even used his wand yet but he was hoping he would get the hang of it sooner rather than later.

Gaara was finding the tea refreshing, having come from a culture where it was perfectly normal for a boy his age to drink tea. He had quite a taste for the hot beverage, which was more than could be said for most of the other students who had probably only ever drunk fruit juice, water and maybe the occasional hot chocolate.

After everyone had finished their tea they were instructed to read through their textbooks and match the symbols in them to the shapes the tea leaves in the bottom of their cups had taken. Needless to say, Gaara wasn't impressed. He had been handed Draco's cup not long after the orders were given and could only see a vague, blobby ambiguous shape in the tea. But Gaara didn't want to start an unnecessary problem with his teacher on his first lesson on his first day, so he looked through his book again, and picked the most unimportant and unconcerning fortune he could find. It was essentially 'work hard and the future could be promising', no actual meaning but would get the teacher off his back. The subject itself was ludicrous in the first place, in the red-head's opinion, and from what he could hear around the room, many of the others in the class agreed with him. Draco seemingly did the same as he flipped through the book and stopped on a random page and read out the fortune on it. Gaara actually smiled a little at the others antics. He was sure now, that Draco Malfoy wasn't as annoying without the other idiot Slytherins around him. He'd even managed to go the majority of the lesson without trying to antagonize Harry Potter at all, although he had done none of the assigned work it seemed to be a wide spread practice in this class from the continuous quiet conversations circulating around the tower.

The talking immediately ceased when a clatter resounded throughout the tower, followed by a loud gasp, emanating from Professor Trelawney who was currently standing above Harry Potter's table and examining one of the tea cups. Gaara was at the other side of the room so he wasn't too sure whose fortune was being read but his suspicions were proven to be correct when she turned to the-boy-who-lived and started ranting about "The grim!"

Along with a few others in the class, who weren't too shocked by the unfolding scene, Gaara flipped through the text book and came upon the sign of a 'grim,' the shape of a silhouetted dog that foretold a very unfortunate and suitably titled grim future. The silence that had engulfed the room was almost stifling for the majority of the students, but Gaara, on the other hand, was enjoying the awkward peace that reigned as it was one of the few times since he had arrived in the school that he had been able to collect his thoughts without the noisy distractions around him.

After the silence had ended Trelawney spent a few moments trying, in vain, to console the unnerved Potter, though it seemed to all listening like a token gesture towards a dying person, before moving on with a sad look upon her face. She roamed around the room, not really stopping to look at anyone else's tea cups; this was until she came upon a certain Slytherin pair's table. She might have looked depressed before and after her previous reading but now her face looked completely devoid of any emotion. She looked to be on autopilot, approaching Gaara and Draco, who were wearily watching the tweedy looking woman as she walked towards them. The entire class had gone silent, all waiting and watching for the next dramatic fortune telling. The only noise that could be heard was the heavy almost unnatural wheezing of the woman who was seeming less like a fake after each prediction.

"What?" Draco demanded an explanation for the strange behaviour but he wasn't even acknowledged as Professor Trelawney continued to focus her seemingly large eyes on the red-headed mute.

She paused when she was right before the tiny table and gasped in another heavy breath after which she spoke in a tone very much unlike her usual one "He, who is part of ten, killer of a hundred killers, will destroy the foundation and overwhelm death itself!" The surprised room of students were as motionless and silent as the dead, as they tried to process the cryptic message of the future from the teacher they had previously dismissed as a fraud. The gaunt looking woman continued in her supernatural tone soon after "The seven bonded will die, for the final moments will reveal the darkness hidden," This time she took a larger breath, the climactic moment approaching "-unless evil overcomes evil and good prevails… He will return!"

Of all of the students, Gaara was the most shocked. When he came back to his senses, with a double blink of his pale green eyes, he put on his typical stoic expression and watched as others started to come out of the startled state the seemingly genuine reading had left them in.

Not long after the second dramatic reading, the class was over and the students were filing out of the room looking slightly ill, much like Gaara, though, they were just sick of the smell whereas the shinobi was troubled by their teacher's concurrent predictions…. and the smell. In all honesty, Gaara didn't particularly care about the first of the omens, the aptly named 'grim,' mostly because he didn't particularly care about the Potter boy and that particular fortune had seemed to pale in comparison with the second. The second, aimed at him, as far as he could tell, seemed about as genuine as one could hope for a reading of the future. The entire class had been noticeably shaken by the predictions by the time they exited the classroom, though most of them were more startled by the depressing prediction directed at the hero/celebrity Harry Potter. In Gaara's opinion the boy-who-lived seemed a little too naive and nosy for his own good, but he had decided to bear with the celebrity teenager as he was Sirius's godson.

So far, Harry had tried to stay out of the way of the small, scary looking, mysterious transfer student as much as possible. And the fact that he had been sorted, if that was the correct term for what had happened the night before, into Slytherin, didn't sit right with him. But, the-boy-who-lived had to admit he didn't seem overly evil or snobby, unlike most other Slytherins, like Draco Malfoy, perfect example, who seemed to have taken a liking to the mute addition to the year group. Harry just hoped that Draco didn't turn him into an ass. Then again, the prophecy made in his previous lesson unsettled him as much as it unsettled the rest of the class. Not only had his death been predicted in the tea leaves but also the second prediction of the future that seemed even darker than his own. Harry went with the crowd and gave Gaara a wide birth as he went to his second lesson, with McGonagall.

Gaara was walking on his own down to his second subject of the day, Potions. He had been lucky enough to have the locations of the classes for that day included on his timetable along with the names of the teachers instructing the subjects as well. He was about half way down to the dungeon; fortunately he already knew the location of the damp underbelly of the school, when Draco caught up to him after having walked with a group of his peers with whom he had been chatting. Draco seemed almost calm after the eventful lesson as he started another one-sided conversation with Gaara, being cautious not to mention the surely sore subjects of blood purity or the prophecy that had been spoken not more than ten minutes before.

As they had made their way down to the lower levels, Gaara had been subjected to many not-so-subtle whispers and points along with the good-ol'-stares. They were fascinated, the students, by the new transfer who had used sand, of all things, to communicate that very morning along with his suspect appearance and the strange circumstances surrounding his transfer along with the rumours of the prophecy that were already beginning to circulate; which, combined, made him one of the four most discussed topics in the school, though he was definitely the top topic. Coming in at number two was the elusive escaped murderer Sirius Black, in at number three were the dementors of Azkaban who were patrolling the grounds of Hogwarts, and at number four was the two Slytherins in the hospital wing.

Back to Gaara, Draco and the Slytherins, along with half a class of Hufflepuffs in a dank dark potions room, awaiting the arrival of Professor Severus Snape, potions master of Hogwarts and detestable excuse for a human being in most of the students opinions.

He had swept into the room with a scowl set deeply upon his face, which seemed to deepen more so when he spotted the crimson-haired monster teen whom he had already taken a drastic disliking to.

"Well, well. If it isn't the silent wonder." He mocked as he rounded on the desk Gaara was sitting at. The teenage shinobi wasn't too bothered by the mockery of the staff member as his mood was already starting to lift. The fact that there were stools in this classroom instead of chairs meant he could continue to wear his trusty gourd on his back where it belonged. "Should we expect any other miracles today, or can we get on with the lesson?" He asked, and by the length of the pause following his inquiry, Gaara assumed that he was expected to answer, which was another insult all by itself due to his obvious inability to do so.

Gaara settled for glaring at the man while waiting patiently. Snape smirked as he strutted to the front of the room thinking to himself that he'd won the encounter. Even a few of the Slytherins had had the gall to snicker at the bullying and had thrown nasty and snide looks towards Gaara who, after Severus had finished making his way to his desk at the front, had turned his own attention to removing the heavy gourd on his back after he had been told by the only adult in the room that every student was to walk to the front of the cluttered and dank room and collect the ingredients he was writing on the board, thus necessitating the removal of the bulky object for the time being.

The red-head noticed with a smirk that after he had walked to the cabinet at the front of the room, people who were walking past his desk were avoiding his sand like it was going to jump up and bite them. He could have made it do that, but the teacher already seemed to have a great measure of loathing for him for whatever reason and using the already-frowned-upon-sand to injure one of the students seemed foolhardy despite however much enjoyment he might have taken from doing so.

After he had picked up the items listed on the blackboard, which he couldn't recognize from name alone so he simply selected the same things as everyone else, he made his way back through the students who, from the looks on their faces, seemed only slightly afraid to be near him, and back to his seat where he deposited his armload of potions equipment and ingredients. Draco appeared soon after with his own equipment.

The tanuki-host watched as Snape started to write the baffling instructions onto the board leaving most of the class looking almost as befuddled as him. So, in an effort to avoid failing he attempted to copy what his classmate was doing.

Attempted being the operative word.