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trans_92011-10-05 04:37 am
head-heldhigh.livejournal.com) wrote in trans_92011-10-05 04:37 am
Entry tags:
Hearth and Home [Open]
The world had ended. Worlds, plural, had ended, and there was a war on, a war to save all of existence. It was a war Harry'd been recruited for, apparently, just when he'd finished fighting the last one.
It was quite a bit to take in, and Harry Potter wasn't exactly taking it well. It certainly helped that some of the people he knew were awake and had been saved by the talking ship, but he would have felt much better if all the people he cared about were, so he was sure they'd even been saved.
Still, in the end, there was another war to fight. Another one. He was "Chosen" twice over. How could someone have such rotten luck? How could he lose parents, be raised by people like the Dursleys, be a marked man, spend all that time fighting, and then lose his whole world? A world was not the sort of thing you lost, in general. It wasn't as if you could go out for the day, have a hole in your pocket and have the world fall out. A world was an awfully large thing to lose.
The only thing that had offset the despair shock he was currently going through was the fact that Harry Potter had found a magic room on the ship. First day there, no map and he'd found it--how was that for luck? It was clearly some sort of Room of Requirement--all you had to do was walk outside, think very hard about what you wanted on the inside, and there it was, just like that. Unlike the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts, it got around the limitations on magic that existed back home for Harry and even did food.
This remarkable room could even duplicate other places perfectly. This was how Harry found himself in the Gryffindor Common Room, eating chocolate frogs, and playing wizard's chess against the board itself. The opposing pieces were floundering without a player to call the shots, and because of it, it wasn't really fun at all.
Then again, he wasn't sure if he was even allowed to have fun.
Ever again.
After all, Harry though, shouldn't he be grieving? For all the people lost? It was difficult, though, to wrap his head around the numbers, around a loss of that magnitude, and part of him didn't even want to try. As a result, he spent his day holed away in the past, pretending Ron and Hermione would come bounding in through the entrance to the Common Room any minute, and trying his best to quell that tiny voice in the back of his head that told him that what he was doing wasn't healthy at all.
Chess, anyone?
It was quite a bit to take in, and Harry Potter wasn't exactly taking it well. It certainly helped that some of the people he knew were awake and had been saved by the talking ship, but he would have felt much better if all the people he cared about were, so he was sure they'd even been saved.
Still, in the end, there was another war to fight. Another one. He was "Chosen" twice over. How could someone have such rotten luck? How could he lose parents, be raised by people like the Dursleys, be a marked man, spend all that time fighting, and then lose his whole world? A world was not the sort of thing you lost, in general. It wasn't as if you could go out for the day, have a hole in your pocket and have the world fall out. A world was an awfully large thing to lose.
The only thing that had offset the despair shock he was currently going through was the fact that Harry Potter had found a magic room on the ship. First day there, no map and he'd found it--how was that for luck? It was clearly some sort of Room of Requirement--all you had to do was walk outside, think very hard about what you wanted on the inside, and there it was, just like that. Unlike the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts, it got around the limitations on magic that existed back home for Harry and even did food.
This remarkable room could even duplicate other places perfectly. This was how Harry found himself in the Gryffindor Common Room, eating chocolate frogs, and playing wizard's chess against the board itself. The opposing pieces were floundering without a player to call the shots, and because of it, it wasn't really fun at all.
Then again, he wasn't sure if he was even allowed to have fun.
Ever again.
After all, Harry though, shouldn't he be grieving? For all the people lost? It was difficult, though, to wrap his head around the numbers, around a loss of that magnitude, and part of him didn't even want to try. As a result, he spent his day holed away in the past, pretending Ron and Hermione would come bounding in through the entrance to the Common Room any minute, and trying his best to quell that tiny voice in the back of his head that told him that what he was doing wasn't healthy at all.
Chess, anyone?
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He laughs, but it's a little bit hollow. "Easier? Oh, sure. If you count the fact that we're all from wildly different worlds and that Stacy's been known to pick up psychos and nutjobs who want to take over the ship as easier. Facing the same threat as you doesn't necessarily mean that someone's on your side - or that you can trust them."
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"'Course not," said Harry as if that was completely obvious. "People will still have one over on you and trick you for their own benefit and sometimes they'll choose the wrong side." And sometimes you had to trick someone else to survive, to have a chance of winning, not that he'd admit that aloud. "War still has a funny way of getting people fighting with someone else rather than each other, though."
He was either speaking from experience or speaking disrespectfully where he had no experience. It was up for Marco to decide which he thought it was.
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"They like to talk a lot of big words here, about how everyone should just trust each other and be one big happy family, blah blah blah. But it's not going to happen. Not when there are people here who would screw over the rest of us to save their own asses, you can find that it's your own worst enemy that wakes up one podpop. And that's not even getting into the Daligig, our 'allies'."
Marco moved his rook, leaned back, and smirked. "Checkmate," he said.
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"What happens if your worst enemy wakes up on the ship?" he asked. "Wouldn't everyone fight against people that were dangerous?"
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So if Voldemort himself showed up, they wouldn't do a thing?
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Brilliant.
"Why would they let someone who'd done that get away with it? I read the things on the omnicom or whatever the thing is, and aren't there laws here?"
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"Because they don't apply the laws to the stuff people did before they got here, and they seem to think that 'not convicting people for past crimes' equals 'ignoring their past crimes altogether'. Course, these are the guys who have someone who calls himself an evil demon overlord sitting on the Council with them, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some selective self-interest going on there."
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"Brilliant. Just brilliant. Why did I think for a second there'd be government here that was actually competent, when there's no government anywhere that is?"
The more he learned about this place, the more he wanted to stay here in the simulated Common Room and not leave.
Pushing his hand up through his hair, he said, "And to answer your question, it's nearly impossible to tell and very difficult to throw off. That's why the Imperius Curse is an Unforgivable."
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"But you can throw it off?" Marco said, seizing on that piece of information. If it could be thrown off, it meant there was a way out. "How?"
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"And sheer force of will, basically. Not everyone can do it, or if they can, it takes them years."
He neglected to mention that he was someone that could, with great effort, throw it off.
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"How exactly does 'sheer force of will' work though?" Was it like how hosts could cain control for a few precious moments sometimes? Like Chapman, and his wife? "And what if you found out someone else was under it - could you take the spell off?"
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"So you came from a war then, too?" he asked.
He quickly clarified. "You come from somewhere with brain-controlling slugs, don't trust governments, and right now, you're scouting out what possible threats there are from someone new on the ship."
He hadn't guessed the morphing, or that Marco had fought in one, but clearly, he'd come from one. A world at war.
"It's what I'd do is the thing. It's what I plan to do. Soon as I deal with the fact my world is gone and stop hiding from everything. Only you really have got to be more subtle about it. You're lucky I'm not someone that's fussed over being questioned and doesn't really have anything to hide."
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It was eerily like back when he'd had that psych eval with Samson, and no matter how much he'd tried to hide, Samson has still managed to get past all of his defences.
"Parasitic slugs who want to enslave people aren't exactly peaceful," he said shortly, giving up on any attempt to refute Harry's assertions. "If there's someone else out there that control me, my friends, my family? You bet I want to know about it." It was the one thing that Marco feared more than anything else. To see his mother a slave again, to end up a slave himself, unable to control his own body...he didn't think he'd be able to deal with that.
He leaned back, watching Harry through narrowed eyes. "If you want to know about who's a possible threat though, I'll make you a deal - you tell me anything you know about how to fight this curse, and how else they guys you're fighting in your world could be a thread, and I'll tell you what I know about who's potentially dangerous on the ship."
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"Deal."
Harry told Marco about more than the Imperius Curse, however. He also covered the Killing Curse--though he didn't mention he'd survived it when he was a baby, the Cruciatus Curse, and other hexes and curses that he knew about, as well as information about Voldemort and the Death Eaters and how they were organized and operated (though he left off the exact details of how he knew all that).
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In return, Marco told Harry what he knew about everyone on the ship who could be dangerous, as crewmembers who had become enemies in the past. The Yeerks, Lex Luthor, Azula, Kang - even the fact that the Doctor had a (supposedly) no longer functioning Time Machine. And he definitely went into detail about all he knew about the GIA and the Daligig.
But like Harry, he left out any mention of how he knew all this, and his ability to morph. Maybe that information was public knowledge by now, but Marco wasn't going to just hand that out to anyone who didn't already know it yet.
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"So this entire thing--it's all that complicated," Harry said in a dull sort of voice, as if he was quite tired of complicated things and wars in general. "It's not just fighting bug...things."
He made a halfhearted little pincer gesture near his mouth.
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Harry couldn't stop the grin from creeping to his lips again.
"I'm Harry, by the way. Harry Potter. I don't think we ever exchanged names."
He held out his hand over the chessboard.
"You can tell we've got our priorities straight."
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"Marco," he said, reaching over to shake Harry's hand. "And hey, gossiping about evil wizards and space slugs is totally more important than introductions."
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