Death and Domain - Chapter 2

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I expected some measure of wonder as I walked through the legendary halls of Hogwarts. Here I was in a world of magic and wands and talking portraits, in a castle with thousand-year-old secrets in every corner. Some gawking was acceptable in my mind.

But my insertion into Octavian had been more thorough than I thought. Just thinking of his experiences as separate from my own made the constant headache I had flare up. The most I could do was differentiate the before from the present. After all, all his memories were mine. His sorrows and his faults had become my burden. And he had plenty of those to go around.

I would start correcting one of them right now.

I strode into McGonagall's class with some ten minutes to spare. Bookshelves lined one side of the classroom, while high windows let in the late spring sun in the other. Rows of double-seating tables criss-crossed each other in the center. We shared the Transfiguration class with the Puffs this year, and the majority of students in both houses were already waiting in their seats. Names attached to faces floated to the forefront of my mind as heads turned when the door clicked shut behind me. Most simply turned back around.

I was no one important. Beneath notice, really.

Only my adversaries kept staring, a predatory glint to their eyes. Good. Let them look down on me. They would serve as a good show to the rest of my peers that I was not the same man I was yesterday. I would not be looked down upon and treated like no more than a house elf to abide the chores and duties of others.

I was so focused on them I almost didn't notice another boy flagging me down.

"Octavian," I heard.

I turned to him, almost expecting a confrontation. Except I was met with a friendly, if bored, wave. Ah. That's right. The dots connected easily enough in my mind.

Isaac Selwyn, the only person in Hogwarts I might be able to refer to as a friend. I didn't need to review any memories to remind myself of the times he's bumped me on the shoulders or made me do his homework or jinxed me in a hallway. Because there were none. A rare thing from the Slytherin house, which to my endless shame included students years younger than me.

Casting a last look around the students, I made my way to his table at the back of the room and sat down. "Selwyn." I nodded, using the time to look at him with the eyes of someone not as socially daft as Octavian was.

To everyone that knew him, Isaac Selwyn was an unremarkable nobody: average height for his age, brown hair, sullen eyes. I had never seen him score anything other than Acceptable in the five years I'd known him, though I had never seen him studying either. You could find him anywhere in the castle where there were places to sit down, always leaning back on a chair, always looking bored and half-asleep.

I narrowed my eyes. There was a difference now, though. The new Octavian just didn't buy it. He was just too perfectly ordinary to be real.

Isaac tilted his head for a moment, then coughed into his hand. "You missed History," he said.

I considered going straight for his throat and exposing him, but decided otherwise. "Ran into some trouble in the bathroom," I said simply.

"Cassius?"

I nodded. "And Travers."

He hummed for a bit, drumming his fingers against the table. Then he turned his gaze at me, and his sullen eyes looked suddenly alive. "Why does it feel like you'll finally do something about it?"

Perceptive.

I shrugged, opened my mouth to say something, then noticed from the corner of my eyes that someone was coming up to our table. "Perhaps I will," I said quietly.

Another step closer and a hand slapped down onto the wood in front of me. "Well?"

I looked up. It was Travers, doing his best to put a growl into his voice. It was cute, the way a kitten roared at its owner. Cassius was just a step behind, and he used his body to cover the view between us from the rest of the class.

"Are you trying to hold out on us, Oc?" Cassius said, low enough no one else would hear it. He leaned forwards on the table, coming up to my face with a sneer of disdain. "I said before McGonagall's class, not in the middle of it."

I had to bite the inside of my cheek. I could see it in my mind's eye. One hand comes up, grabs him by the pretty hair he's so proud of—he spends nearly an hour every morning on it—and smashes his face down on the table. He cries out, blood spurts from his nose like a faucet. Chairs scrape, people turn and scream, and I use the confusion to turn on Justin. I'm outgunned when it comes to wands, and he has a good twenty pounds on me, but a good headbutt to the face and a knee to the groin will have him lying in a puddle of his own making before he can have the magic stick out.

Despite my fantasies, I just swallow the bile of having to go through this song and dance and nod to Cassius. Oh, Octavian had already done the damn thing, it simply grated to be talked down like this.

"Sorry." I reach into my pocket and take out the rolled up parchment of their assignment. Fifteen inches with the theory behind the Vanishing Spell, written with a nifty charm that made my handwriting look like Cassius'.

This being our fifth year—the OWL year—we had no school exams for most classes. Instead, Professor McGonagall had assigned us a final transfiguration project with a partner. With the risk of having it taken or damage from my person, Isaac had ours with him.

"Here." I put the parchment into Cassius' outstretched hand. "Enough for Exceeding Expectations, as you asked."

Justin Travers huffed. "Better, little Prince." Sarcasm dripped from his tone.

It sounded strange coming from him. Like he had to practice in the mirror to get it down. And honestly, I didn't know he was capable of inflection beyond grunts and moans.

Cassius just clicked his tongue. "Whatever," he said, turning on his feet like I wasn't even worth intimidating. "See you next year, Oc."

I let him take a few steps away before I allowed myself a smile. "See you."

"Okay." Isaac sat up on his chair. "You suddenly have me curious. What did you do?"

I shrugged. "Nothing you won't know with a bit of patience."

The wind came out of him just as quickly and he hunched back down, that lazy posture back as if on cue. He turned to the front of the class. "It better be good, then," he said without looking my way.

Professor McGonagall walked in as soon as the bell tolled for three o'clock. She looked very much the strict disciplinarian I knew her to be, walking with shoulders tight and a straight chin. Noticeably, as the first character I was meeting that I remembered vividly, there was only a vague resemblance with the actress that played her.

That was good. Seeing actors whenever I went outside would freak me out.

Across the room, I spotted Cassius quickly going over the assignment with a clinical eye. Like it or not, the boy was no fool. The star Chaser for our house team, Cassius did not lag in academics and was a good hand with a wand too. There was a reason he led Slytherin's ticket for the Triwizard tournament in the books. He would easily spot it if I had made any mistakes on purpose to screw them over.

Looking at things now, I realized he only relied on me for his schoolwork as a way to prove himself the top dog for our year. Slytherin had its own internal method of ranking students beyond Hogwarts' own system—which, to my surprise, seemed much more rigorous and doggedly followed than I remembered, even if the details escaped Octavian. Grades mattered heavily outside school too, especially when applying for ministry jobs.

This showdown in the bathroom had been just a show of force by the two to make sure Octavian stayed in his lane—the lane he'd been in since he'd proven a weakling in first year—and the slugs were probably more out of surprise that I had tried to fight back than anything. Octavian had just never fought back—never.

My head throbbed.

"Please hand in your assignments now." Professor McGonagall stopped in front of the blackboard and waved her wand in its direction. The words written in chalk on the board for a second year spell suddenly shifted around until instructions for a much harder fifth year spell for us remained. "In the meantime, work in silence with your partners while I will go over them. Expect a grade by the end of class."

The students did as told. One by one Slytherins and Hufflepuffs walked up with their partners and submitted their parchments. I asked Isaac to hand ours by himself. I didn't want to run the risk of missing the show.

In the end, I shouldn't have worried. Professor McGonagall didn't get to their assignment until the two hours were almost over. Meanwhile, after getting back an Acceptable for our own assignment, I had tried doing the work on the board. The instructions sounded easy enough, and I understood the concepts behind the Inanimatus Conjurus Spell without problem, but spells just didn't come easy for Octavian.

For the twentieth time, my wand waved and twisted back and forth in front of me fruitlessly. I grit my teeth and tried again, enunciating the spell as carefully as I could, but my attempt to bring about a working pocket watch resulted in nothing but a lump of metal that vanished itself a few seconds later.

I sucked in a breath through my teeth. This shit had ruined the mood for me.

"Trying a bit hard today, are we?" Isaac suddenly asked. There was something between curiosity and amusement in his voice. He'd managed his own pocket watch—a simple, unadorned piece, about halfway through the class. Prick.

I almost snapped at him, but then it happened.

Professor McGonagall almost jumped in her chair. "Merlin's beard!" she exclaimed, a long piece of parchment held in her hands. Her bespectacled eyes raked over the assignment over and over again, as if no matter how many times she'd read it, she still couldn't believe she was seeing it. "I have not… not in all my years… and this!" One hand went to cover her mouth.

The students all stopped to stare at her. It was most uncommon for Minerva McGonagall of all people to lose her composure.

"Justin Travers and Cassius Warrington!" McGonagall's voice snapped like a whip in the stunned silence of the classroom. "Front of the class, this instant! You have some explaining to do. And if I have my way, so will your head of house and your parents!"

The boys walked to the front of the class as if in a trance. When they saw what was proudly stamped on their assignment, they gaped. Justin's eyes nearly popped out of his head. Cassius turned white as paper.

Then, as if with a sense of slow realization, they turned to me. Surprise turned to murder on their faces.

With the candlelight behind McGonagall's table, the rest of the class could only just see the outline of the drawing in the parchment beneath a few paragraphs. Beyond the passionate disdain for her and her class I tried to express with words—written in a way that showed the perpetrators tried to vanish the ink after they were done venting—there was a crude picture of her and Hagrid going at it slap in the middle of the assignment. I was most proud of how life-like it had turned out.

Unfortunately for Cassius, it turned out the before-Octavian wasn't all that useless. He just never had the courage or the impetus to lead his nerdy brain to its logical conclusion. There was more to magic beyond foolish wand-waving, after all.

He was decent in runes, great in potions, but it was in something else that he truly shone. Octavian was a brilliant enchanter, to the point where he sold children's toys and other knick-knacks in bulk to two stores in Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley. It was the only way he'd found to have some money for himself, as father dear couldn't give two shits about him, much less gold. The idiot just allowed himself to be sucked dry by selling for knuts what the stores resold for galleons.

It was a piece of cake to enchant the parchment to show the actual transfiguration project for a few minutes after it left my hand, before the ink changed itself into something different. Much like Professor McGonagall had done with the blackboard, only using a different school of magic.

I could see Cassius white-knuckling his wand through his pocket as McGonagall railed on him, his jaw locked tight in anger, though he had the presence of mind to stop Justin when he made to step in my direction. The large boy looked like he wanted nothing more than to stomp me with his troll-like feet.

Around the room, Slytherins and Hufflepuffs joined together in the millennial art of laughing at another's misfortune.

I just smiled and gave them a little wave. Funny thing was, they couldn't pin the blame on me. I was not at all known as a prankster, and they couldn't tell the Professor I had done the assignment for them.

I thought I could feel another pair of eyes on me as we exchanged stares, but I didn't turn away from the two bullies. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of turning away first.

I had made my mind up back in the bathroom. Actually giving them the project was never an option to me. Fuck that. I'd rather be crucio'd to insanity than kowtow to these pathetic morons.

In the end, the options I had were to either screw with them and face their reprisals or don't give them the assignment at all and still face the reprisals. I've simply never been a man to choose inaction over its counterpart, and I chose to start a new life in this world with a punch to the gut to my first enemies.