Harry Potter: outlier

"Wake up."

Lucas awoke to the booming voice of Dumbledore and a crowd of funnily dressed people. 

His head throbbed like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his skull. His lungs burned with the ghost of Holly's lightning. His arms ached, especially his left one. He tired to comfort it with his right arm, but couldn't, because he was in shackles. Iron binds bound him tightly to the stone chair that held him in place.

He looked down to the left to assess the amount of damage Holly's lightning had caused, only to see his sleeve hanging there limblessly. Yet he felt no foreign magic. It was salvagable.

Lucas blinked, trying to remember. 'How long was I out?'

The last thing he remembered was Dumbledore breaking a vial with blood inside. His no doubt and it powered some sort of blood magic. 'When did he get that?'

He slowly refocused back to his situation into that massive, circular courtroom, the Wizengamot. He recognized it from the mind of a politician he had looked through the last time he 'visited' the ministry. High, dark stone walls. Countless eyes peering down from seats stacked in tiers. Robes rustling. Quills scratching.

This was a trial.

Undoubtlessly, his trial.

The chains clinked softly as he adjusted.

There were about fifty witches and wizards in purple robes seated in the upper tiers. Some looked vaguely curious. Others looked furious. One or two looked nauseous. All of them were watching him.

"Now for the verdict."

They had released him from the blood magic at the end.

"Your punishment shall be as followed."

"On accounts of multiple violations via illegal legilimency, your eyes are to be destroyed."

"Furthermore, as you were found guilty of murder of one Ronald Bilius Weasley you are hereby sentenced to indefinite imprisonment in Azkaban."

Lucas leaned back in the chair, the iron digging into his bones, and laughed once, short, quiet, bitter. 'You old fucker. Finally decided to get rid of me. Hah.'

----

The sentence had been passed. There would be no recess. No time for appeals.

Lucas sat motionless in another room as the enchanted restraints on his wrist and ankles pulled tighter, locking his head in place with a sharp *snap* of steel at the collarbone. His back arched slightly from the strain.

Footsteps echoed.

Three black-robed Aurors emerged, flanking a fourth figure with gleaming blond hair and cold eyes, Lucius Malfoy, stepping forward like this was a family inheritance he'd come to collect.

He wore his public face, the practiced smile and harmless politeness.

"Per the sentence of the Wizengamot," Lucius announced, his voice perfectly smooth, "we will now carry out the first measure."

Lucas didn't look at him. He was concentrating on his magic, or the lack of it. Not even he with his strange magic was immune to the suppression. And sitting in this chair robbed him of any way to fight back.

The ritual circle beneath the chair flared as the first Auror approached with a small obsidian blade. Whatever happened now would be irreversiblly etched into his soul, courtesy of the unspeakable's research.

The blade gleamed once under the courtroom's torches.

Lucas's breath stilled. He tried to fight it, to stop the blade. But nothing could get him out of this situation now.

Lucas's breath stilled.

*Slice*

He didn't scream. But something in him twisted. Flares of magic danced uncontrollably along the floor before collapsing in on themselves like dying stars.

The eye sizzled the moment it left his socket.

Burned to ash mid-air.

Lucius Malfoy's eyes narrowed.

"Of course," he said softly, more to himself than anyone else. "A ritual failsafe."

"I expected nothing less from you." Lucius turned to Lucas. "Tell me where did you find that information?"

"Filthy mudblood like you shouldn't be aware of such sophisticated magic." He crouched at the boy's side, studying the ruin of his face, the collapsed socket, the blood that trickled down like tears. 

"I bet you stole that." He pulled a silver dagger from his coat, letting the flat of the blade tap gently against his own chin as he thought aloud. "How many people's privacies have you invaded? How often did you snoop in other people's business?"

Lucius waited for any reaction.

When nothing came he simply stabbed his knife in Lucas' gut. The other aurors didn't react, for them Lucius' actions were too normal.

"You're lucky I'm doing this, you know," he whispered. "In the old days, we'd have cut out the tongue."

Lucas didn't react. That was the most he could do, flee into his own mind.

Lucius's eyes flicked sideways, checking for any sign of fight. But he saw nothing, no pain, no fear, no plea, no escape.

"Disrespectful to the end." he stood back up and yanked the blade out. "I originally didn't want to do this. But you forced me to."

"I want you to know that this is your fault. I don't like hurting mothers." he commented with a twisted smile that exposed his sadistic tendencies. "I thought that you would have gotten the message after my friend worked with you."

"You don't have a say in this. You will do what I want and you will do it now." Lucius took the obsidian knife and approached Lucas again. 

"Now," he said, standing upright, voice smooth and public once more. "We can attempt to remove the second eye like the first. And risk losing another person you love..."

He held the blade loosely at his side, letting the gleam catch the torchlight.

"Or," he said, smiling as if offering a favor to an ungrateful child, "you can give it to me willingly. The choice, of course, is yours."

Lucas didn't respond once more.

But Lucius could see it in his remaining eye. He had given in.

Lucas simply didn't care anymore what happened to the wizarding world, but if he could keep his mum safe he would sacrifice everything.

A short moment later and the second eye came loose like a pearl from its shell.

Lucius caught it midair with a smoothness that suggested practice. A conjured velvet case appeared in his hand before the eye had even cooled. He sealed it inside without fanfare. A present for his master.

Lcuas Foster's two eyes were now officially destroyed.

Lucius tucked the case inside his robes. No one would question him, no one would find out.

No one would dare.

"Clean him up a bit and get him ready for the Azkaban transport."

----

The journey had flown by like nothing. The what felt like weeks of waiting in the ministry for his transport didn't concern him. Lucas with his eyesight blinded was surrounded by the same darkness he had seen in the mind space.

Azkaban.

The name most wizards only whispered.

He lay on the cold floor of his cell, head against the stone, chains around his ankles and wrist. They weren't magical anymore. They didn't need to be. He was blind and wandless after all. 

But that was not what kept him there. It wasn't what made him feel hollow or powerless. Not even the floating black holes swarming the prison affected him much.

It was what he had kept buried. The thing he didn't dare face from all the way from back in the clearing.

But now he finally let himself feel again.

Akane.

Yuki.

Their heads.

Floating. Dripping. Staring at him across the clearing with empty eyes.

He'd sealed it all away then. Locked it so deep that even he could barely remember the color of their eyes or the shape of their laughter.

He let it come now.

The pain. The agony. The torturous feelings.

And he wept.

Quiet, at first. Just a tremble in his chest. A single choked breath. A ghost of a sob.

Then the gates opened.

He folded in on himself, arm tight around his torso, body shaking.

He remembered Akane's touch, the way she would brush his hair behind his ear with absent tenderness. Yuki's laughter, her cute curses in Japanese when she dropped a knife or burned rice in her make believe kitchen.

He remembered how they died. How their minds suddenly collapsed.

How he hadn't been there.

How he had failed.

Tears he hadn't known he still had poured down his face.

And it didn't stop.

Not for minutes.

Not for hours.

Not for days.

A Dementor drifted close, and for once, it found a prisoner with nothing to feed on.

There was no joy to steal.

No hope to crush.

Lucas had already taken care of that himself. If he was to feel sad then he wanted to feel it fully. That's the least he could do for them.

----

A long time later.

Lucas lay still in the filth of his cell, silent and slack-jawed, eyes staring at nothing.

The grief had gutted him. Days had turned into weeks of convulsing, sobbing, breaking under the weight of Akane and Yuki's absence. Every breath since he'd remembered them tasted like ash. His voice was hoarse from weeping.

He had nothing left. Just the echo of love lost.

Until something pierced through that numbness.

A scream.

But not his.

His body jerked as if struck. The sadness evaporating as if it were rain on lava. He knew that mind, knew it in the deepest fiber of who he was. No one else could have brought him out of this haze.

"Mum…"

Her thoughts were a storm. Shattered and jumbled. Fear. Pain. Fragments of memory flickering like glass shattering in slow motion.

And blood.

There was blood in her thoughts. Something was attacking her, tainting her.

Lucas's body seized. He felt her mind lurch and writhe like a wounded animal, felt the parasitic jinx wound tight around her like invisible thorns. Someone had done something, taken her.

She had fought. He saw it. She had screamed. She had begged.

Pippin and William by her side, before they succumbed to the onslaught.

And now she was slipping.

"No... nonono please..."

He clawed at his head, his chains rattling violently as her consciousness flickered.

Images surged, a dark room, walls wet with condensation. Footsteps. Cold laughter. The feeling of steel against skin. Questions she couldn't answer. Screams.

Lucas felt the blade. Every cut.

"No, don't... STOP..." he howled in a raw voice.

He couldn't lose her too.

He wouldn't.

He reached out with his mind. Towards her's.

And pulled.

Dragged her consciousness away from the pain, away from the horror.

And into him.

Into the vast architecture of his mind.

He collapsed into the corner of his cell, sweat beading on his face, shaking violently. He had taken her awareness of what was undoubtedly torture and rerouted it.

The curse, the pain, the mental violation, it all now coursed into him.

A thousand needles puncturing every fiber of his body. White-hot pain. Every nerve on fire. His body seized and twitched. Every curse or dark magic. He felt them as if they hit him fully without a chance to fight back.

But she was safe.

She didn't need to feel this.

Not now.

Not ever.

He could endure. He would.

Because of her, because if he didn't then he would loose her too.

Inside his mind, he cradled her in his arms afraid to let go. Her body curled into his arms like a sleeping child finding solace.

The pain was gone.

Here reigned peace and gentleness.

He shaped the mindscape around them into a quiet, sunlit garden. The wind whispered through tall grass. Wildflowers bloomed. A sky so blue, and birds, real birds, ones she loved from her hometown, where she had grown up.

A house waited in the distance, low and wooden, with a porch swing swaying in the breeze.

His mother sat on a blanket beside him.

Safe.

Smiling.

Whole.

Forgotten were the atrocities she had just lived through.

He sat with her, tears dripping down his real face, the taste of iron on his tongue.

Outside, in the real world, Lucas convulsed in the corner of his cell as unseen hands tortured one of his minds from afar. He bit through his tongue. His gums bled. His shackles groaned.

But his other one inside… inside the sanctuary he built for her…

"Would you like some tea, mum?" he asked softly.

She nodded.

And he poured.

...inside here he would keep her safe.