Alternatives

A/N: I did my best to try to write from the perspective of someone who has suffered mistreatment for so long that they aren’t quite sure of right, wrong, and their own sanity anymore. I’m not sure how well I did on that since I have never lived through this kind of situation. If someone (god forbid) has and objects to the way I wrote this, please let me know and I will try to fix it. To the rest of my readers, please give me feed back, because if you don’t tell me when I’m writing badly, nobody else will.

The House

Pet lives in The House. He has since he was 9 years old. He isn’t sure how long he has lived here, but he knows it happened after The Old Man with the White Beard came and took him. The Men paid him a lot of money so The Men could keep Pet and hurt him.

The Men did not just hurt him, but let The Clients pay them to hurt him also. The Men need Pet to let The Clients do as they want to get the money, so they don’t feed Pet often and make him take pills and shots that keep Pet too weak to fight much and make his head feel strange.

The hunger and the pills and shots keep Pet from being sure of how many days, weeks, or years he has been in The House, but he knows he has been here long enough to grow hairs in new places, and long enough that sometimes his body lies to him just as his mind dose. His body sometimes tells him that he likes the pain, the sting of the whip, the burn in his ass, the gagging feeling in his throat that happen to him at the hands of The Men and The Clients. Pet has also been here long enough to learn that if he appears drugged and compliant, The Men don’t remember to dose him as often, and soon his head will clear enough to find a way out.

He also knows that while most of The Clients blur together as pain, there is That One he can’t forget in the moments of peace he gets. That One had hypnotic eyes and shining black hair and would be beautiful if not for him adding to Pet’s pain. That One tricks Pet’s body every visit into thinking the pain is good as he pierces Pet’s skin with long pointed teeth and then makes the wound vanish. That One may not be so hated above all the others by Pet if he would make all the other wounds he gives Pet vanish as well.

Pet knows he has names, but The Men took them away, or The Old Man with the White Beard did. Now that Pet has almost gotten his head clear, he tries to remember what happened before The House, but each time he finds a wall inside his mind. It hurts his head to push on it, and he almost gives up on his names, but the he starts to see Them.

At first, Pet thinks They are a sign that the drugs broke his brain, but They move things in The House and The Men notice Them as well. Pet listens to Them and they tell him how to break the wall in his mind and show him other walls, and They tell him why his names were taken. They can only be found when he is as close to sober as The Men let him get, so They teach him how to force the drugs out of his body as well. When The Men don’t feed Pet, They even start to bring him food.

Pet learns a great deal very quickly with food and a way to fight the drugs. He learns he needs Keys to leave The House and The Men and The Clients, but he doesn’t know how to get them or use them yet. He knows that Keys will let him have all the food he wants. With food and Them to guide him, he could find a way to hurt The Old Man with the White Beard named Albus for letting him be in The House to begin with.

Then That One comes again, and Pet is so angry at everything and just wishes with everything he has that everyone who hurts him would just die screaming right now. They do, bleeding from all sorts of places. Even That One, who Pet always knew was different, stronger, more dangerous. Though Pet couldn’t see them, he knew even The Clients that were far away died too.

He learned from Them that this was called magic, and by using it he had proven himself worthy of knowing who They are. They are The Dead and now The Men and The Clients are among them. He had a gift that meant The Dead could never lie to him and he could call on their knowledge whenever he wished. They would teach him all he needed.

The Dead told him that he would need clothing and money so he should take it from the bodies and The House. They told him he would need to eat to get strong over the next weeks, but first he must put the bodies in the big freezer so they would not make him sick as they rot. They told him that the drugs he had been given for so long and the hunger would keep him small and delicate looking, but it was a good thing, it would help him.

With all the clothing, money and jewelry he could find in a bag, the bodies in the freezer, and all the food he could eat, Pet turned on the radio and set about choosing a new name so that Albus wouldn’t find him till he was ready to make him give back the old ones. Whenever he needed a mental break, The Dead taught him of the old magic and told him all he would need to survive when he left. When he felt strong enough to leave, he finally decided the name Julius Price was good and told The Dead he was leaving to find Albus and seek revenge.

The Dead told him not to. He needed help for Albus had a great deal of power. They told him where The Others were and how to help them and make them friends. They told him that when he and The Others united and trained enough to win, that Albus would find them.

So Pet, now Julius, left to find his comrades.

Hunter Drakeson had spent years trying to find this particular rouge vampire. Jason Damask was one twisted piece of work, having left a trail of dead twelve year olds in London before dropping off the radar completely. Many of the other Hunters believed him dead, but his instincts told him otherwise. To him, all the dead ended leads in the world were worth checking just to be SURE that scum like him was off the street for good.

When he entered the suburban house in Scotland, the graveyard like silence and faint lingering smell of old blood and even older sex had him wondering if he had another dead end, but since he was there already, a thorough check couldn’t hurt. He was glad he took the time when he got to the freezer and found Damask’s frost covered body along with the bodies of three human males. Though it was good to know Damask was down, there was still a niggling little voice in his head that told him to pursue the cause of death and reason for four adult male bodies to be crammed in a freezer together.

Drakeson took out his S-com, a device looking and working similarly to a cell phone and called Headquarters with a report. They sent the Clairvoyant and the Site Recorders along with the Corpse Collectors in record time, not liking in the least that a dead vampire turned up with dead humans. Anyone in the Rouge Hunter Department knew it was bad news for everyone when a multi-being crime site turned up.

Once thawed, Damask’s body showed no external wounds to explain the blood on the outside, though all 4 bodies had a magical field so intense that they glowed slightly in the dark. The signature of the magic was unidentifiable according to the Records Department. To make it all stranger there was evidence that Damask had anal sex before death, but no time to cum or wipe his penis off.

The Site Recorders found that all small valuables and clothing were missing and there was no food in the house, but the trash indicated there had been as recently as two days ago. The living room had used syringes that smelled like a tranquilizer, but no drugs were to be found either. There was blood from all four victims on the carpets, as well as one that didn’t smell like any of them, though was also present on all the victims.

With everything the Site Recorders could find only providing more questions than answers, it was time to let the Clairvoyant do her work. The cute and bouncy brunette set out to start, only to show her newness to crime site work by going into screaming spasms shortly after. Ah, the joys of new recruits.

When she final calmed enough to talk, nobody could really blame her, though. “There was a boy, small, maybe 4’9 or 4’10’, pretty deep green eyes with long black lashes, fair skin, long curly black hair to his waist and he looks maybe thirteen years old. He looks so thin I think they starved him. The humans were drugging him and renting out his body. He was talking to something we can’t see-“

“Oh goody, teen hearing shit that’s not there and we get to track him down as a witness, just what I needed.” Drakeson replied sarcastically.

The Clairvoyant had other thoughts though. “No, not things that aren’t there, things we can’t see. They seem to have told him how to remove a block put on his magic. That’s highly advanced magic and there is no way the kid learned that trick by luck. The luck happened after he removed the block and decided that he wanted the victims dead. The humans had rented him to Damask at the time and he kind of snapped while Damask was in the middle of feeding on him, among other things.”

“So we have a petite starved teen male who accidentally killed three adult humans and one century old vamp?” the Hunter asked with a raise brow.

“Yes, and before he left he said he was going to find the others.” the Clairvoyant replied with a frown.

“Other what?”

“Other victims to help him get revenge. I think he figured out who brought him here and plans to go after him.” she silently wished the boy luck.

“As much as I wouldn’t mind letting him, what are the chances he’ll be this lucky again? Do we have any other info on where he was going?”

“Just that he was going to find the seer first and that she was expecting him.”

So he had gone from searching for one needle in a haystack to an entirely new one. To make maters worse, the same way his gut had told him that Damask was still out there, it now told him there were going to be a lot more bodies before they found the boy. He could only hope the kid didn’t do anything that would warrant jail or death before their paths crossed.

The photos taken and the memories of the site duplicated, Hunter Drakeson set out with a name and a sketch of an effeminate and deceptively harmless looking boy, hoping he hadn’t managed to go too far from the house in two days time.


A/N: Since this is an alternate universe, I just want to clarify that, no, Dumbledore did not sell Harry into slavery. Harry is still with his relatives. Julius is not a close relation to Harry either, but they will meet eventually.