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Amanda Sefton ([personal profile] xp_daytripper) wrote in [community profile] xp_logs2018-12-16 03:51 pm

TDRP: Harry Potter - Log 2

No matter where you go, there’s always a troll.



The smell was an obstacle all on it's own. Marie-Ange wrapped her blue-and-copper tie around her nose and mouth and it did exactly nothing to help. This was the kind of smell that had gotten its own Hogwarts letter, or maybe the kind of smell that caused warts anyway. It smelled like sewer and sick and sweat, and also it smelled like troll feces, which alone would have been enough to cause retching and also profanity.

An eleven year old cursing Asgard, trolls, Dumbledore, Albania and snakes would have been much more comical if it hadn't been for the crashing and banging and roaring nearby.

This had always been a fun part of the book when Stephen read it when he imagined this but the reality of the situation was far worse than he'd imagined. The smell was overwhelming, even through the sleeve of his blazer which he'd pressed up in front of his face, trying to breathe through the thick material. "This is so so much worse than they described, seriously, whoever came up with this smell is a sadist."

"D'accord." Jean-Phillipe shuddered. "And I have smelled some of the more… fragrant members of the Brotherhood." Even Toynbee's casual attitude about personal hygiene did not come close to the stench the troll created. His hand was still curled around Angelo's. "I am thinking explosions perhaps? What is that phrase - 'kill it with fire'?"

“Shame John isn’t here”, Angelo agreed, unconsciously twining their fingers. “Or Angel. But we’ll have to make do... Alex, you do something like explosions, right?”

"Uh, well." Alex tried to summon up the energy, but it just wasn't working. Why did everyone else get to keep their powers? Not fair. He yelped and jumped back when the troll swung a little too close to them. Thank god Lorna wasn't here to see that. "Oh!" He remembered the wand in his robes and quickly whipped it out, pointing it at the troll. There was a blast and a flash of light, and red energy very similar to what Alex usually produced on his own streamed from the wand, hitting the troll. "I think that's my powers now."

"It does not seem to have done much good!!!" Hope cried out as she dove out of the way, as the troll brought down his club angrily. "Any other ideas?"

"I have...one. And it is an exceedingly bad one." Jean-Phillipe pulled his hand from Angelo's and put it on his wand. He had watched the movies, though he did not care to admit it, protective as he was of his image. But he remembered the warnings - you had to mean it, to really want to cause pain. It was an impulse that he largely channeled into being an X-Man and protecting others, but he could not deny that a deeper, darker part of him would always be there, always revel in the fact that his mutant power allowed him to do it. The part that had led him to the Brotherhood so long ago.

And he remembered what the Unforgivable had looked like when Voldemort had used it on Harry Potter - very much like a victim of his own ability. And so his wand thrust outward, with that peculiar little flick of the wrist at the end that also tended to accompany his power when using it in the real world, and he spoke coldly.

"Crucio."

It was far too easy to sometimes dismiss her cousin - her wry, sometimes slightly camp cousin who dropped fashion magazines in her hospital room and was actually picking out a china pattern, Marie-Ange thought. She did, she underestimated him and it was easy to forget that under fitted vests and scarves and patterned shirts was a man who had started his adult life openly queer as a dock labourer - and had joined the Brotherhood of Mutants openly. She thought of herself as the worst of the pair, and that was still true.

She wouldn't had the twisted expression of guilt on her face if she had been the one to cast that spell on the troll.

But it was probably a closer thing than she liked to think.

Her own hand twitched to a wand tucked into a holster under her blazer sleeve as the grey-skinned creature went down bellowing, but she cast no spells - just nudged her cousin's arm with the blunt end and then deftly plucked his wand from his fingers. "Enough. Alexander, please repeat your spell. The thing is quite overcome, it does not need much more to be of no danger to us."

"Right. Right. Uh...." Alex pointed his wand again, feeling a little ridiculous. Another explosion of energy, and the walls rattled as the troll was thrown into the wall, roaring, before suddenly going very still. "Oh jeez, did I kill it? Wait, does it matter? Are trolls even real?" His tiny bordering-on-teenager voice cracking on the last word.

"I mean," Stephen inched closer to the troll, his fingers clasped firmly over his nose as he inched closer to the body of the troll. Despite his best efforts, the boy could feel his eyes watering as he backed away from the troll, "Yeah, it looks dead but...I mean none of this is real right? So I mean...you should be ok...I think." He didn't really know what was going on but, sounded like Alex needed comforting."

Hope quickly latched on with Stephen's effort. "How real this might seem, it's still just a world made of light and computer programs."

Alex rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "Let's just go before I think too much about this. I can talk to someone later about the ethics of maybe killing a maybe not real troll."

"It is a fictional construct of some sort, given that we are all versed in the references," Jean-Phillipe said, making no move yet to retrieve his wand from his cousin's grip. If he kept reminding himself that, perhaps he would not feel as guilty over jumping straight to a torture analogue as his first solution to a problem.


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