For the Writer's Duel: Behind Every Legend.
Oh, yes.
I know what you're thinking.
You can't speak.
You can't write.
But you're wrong.
Boggarts can do anything.
*
It was a long time ago that I was born: I can't say that I remember it well, and I don't think I ever had a mother. I remember one day looking at the inside of a box. I rattled every once in a while to let the humans know that I was there, but they didn't mind. They never mind, really, except for when they have to use the space that is our home--and then, well, we do our thing.
We're pretty famous for it. We can change into anything; we know without trying what your biggest fear is, and we know how to change into it. Some passing mice have asked me if it's a conscious transformation, and I've always answered them that it isn't. My physicality reacts to the instincts of the human standing before me--my capabilities of thought, which are far underrated, don't come into play. It's an animal reaction. It's what I'm born to do.
As a Boggart I have been lucky: throughout my encounters, I have been free to return to my box without fear of vanishing into the Unknown. It's true that no one knows where a Boggart goes when they cast the final spell--the racuous laughter bursts us apart, breaks down the bonds between our makeup and sends us flying into some sort of oblivion. I've never met another Boggart, or anyone who could tell me what happens to us upon implosion.
You're probably thinking that I'm lucky to know anything.
You might be right. It might just be a fluke, that I've inherited a basic knowledge of my own species and the world around me, just by being born, or being created, or simply appearing--I don't know which. I don’t think that any of us know.
*
I remember every face I’ve ever seen.
Up to today, I have seen three.
One: the one they call Filch. Upon discovering me, he fell back in fear as I became the picture of his fear. Two figures, who exuded shame. He was unable to defeat me. He was unable to cast me away. I overcame him--he did not know how to use his wand.
Two: the man who took me away from my first home. He is a professor, from what I hear through keyholes. Upon seeing me, his eyes reflect the image of a full moon. I now know two secrets.
Three: a boy. They call him Harry Potter. Word has traveled through all magical circles, don’t think that just because you never think of me, I never know anything about your world. I know about Harry Potter, and when the professor presented me to the newest victim, I became, before I was aware, the picture of fear. I saw fear reflected in fear. I saw a small boy collapse before me. I felt myself becoming stronger on his weakness. That was new. I know three secrets now.
You might be wondering how my conscience accepts my purpose with little to no qualms. But I’m not very different than you, really, you humans. Wasn’t it one of you who came up with the saying, “never give a sucker an even break”?
As you say.
*
He’s come to train again.
Since he saw me last, the boy has become more strained, more worried, more determined. I see him through the cracks in the trunk where the professor keeps me. The professor opens the trunk and I look down at the small boy, who expels a silver mist from his wand before collapsing.
It scares me. I shrink back into the trunk, and the professor snaps closed the lid, going to the boy with a large chunk of chocolate. The word has traveled around the castle for ages, at least since I’ve been here, that the chocolate from a place called Honeydukes is the best kind. I wonder if that chocolate is from Honeydukes. I’d like to try it sometime. Why doesn’t the professor ever consider that the Boggart might like some chocolate?
No one ever considers that a Boggart might like anything. Like a little peace and quiet once in a while. Once the boy Harry Potter has awaken, the professor, after a little conflict, reopens my box. I shoot back out into the air, once again becoming the rotting figure of fear, and he fails, again, to repel me completely. I shrunk back into the box, feeling content that I had a little while left to live.
I stared out of the keyhole. The boy was lying on the floor, and the professor was trying to arouse him. I wondered for the first time why the kid was subjecting himself to this--that was maybe the tenth time he’d tried to dispel me without success. He looked like it was painful, what I did to him when I became fear.
I began to reason that there was some bigger picture that you could miss easily living in a trunk. In the coming days I asked the mice that passed by, and the spiders who came to share the rent, if they could gather any word of what was brewing in the outside world. The word came back in trickles--talk of Dementors about--and I discovered that that creature was what the boy saw in me when I shot out of the trunk to scare him. The word never became complete, but by the last time that they boy was to face me, I saw that he wanted to defeat me for his own protection--he’d taken a fall, lost a prized possession, and nearly fainted at the hands of the Dementors, and he wanted to make himself safe.
But this boy was special.
He needed to be safe, more than others.
Word traveled to me through the tiny mouths of mice and spiders that there was a Dark, Dark wizard abroad, looking to regain his powers. Harry Potter--the boy who lived, they called him--Harry Potter was the object of the Dark Lord’s obsession. He had survived another attack only a half a year before, and I began to understand that I was aiding in something much bigger than learning how to produce a Patronus--that’s what they called the silver mist, a Patronus.
I was being used.
The roles were reversed. Usually a Boggart is the one who takes advantage of the human--naïve to the horrors I would unleash, they stand confident, only to be wrecked to pieces upon seeing the faces that I could create. But this was different--everything was turned on its head. Harry knew what he would see each time I arose from the trunk, and it was him calling me forth, voluntarily.
Never give a sucker an even break.
I was the sucker.
Perhaps it was unBoggart of me to surrender myself to a bigger picture--but don’t think that times of Darkness don’t affect creatures, too. We feel it all, like you feel it all. We may not have a strict moral code, but we know what to avoid.
I gave myself up for the last time, unknowing that it would be the last, and stared the determined boy in the face.
The fear that I became sent out a rush of chilly wind, which pushed back the boy’s hair and revealed a bright red scar through the middle of his forehead. His green eyes were narrowed, almost closed, as he racked his brains for a memory strong enough to repel me into Oblivion, and I couldn’t help but wish him well as my vision accepted the figure of a strong, large beast, and I was dissolved.
a/n: edited 14 oct 2011 :)))
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