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Title: The More You Try To Erase Me
Fandom: Harry Potter: Theodore Nott
Characters:Theo Nott
Prompt: 89, Work
Word Count: 1520
Rating: R for violence and suggested adult themes.
Summary: Theo's work has always been death, whatever causes him to be paid.
Author's Notes: Written originally for Jus Ad Bellum. This story marks the start of a different continuity for Theo than I have previously written. In this continuity he is teaching at Durmstrang, is unmarried, but is in a relationship with a student, Jasper Perkins, and has custody of Harry Potter. He is still an oneiromant. Title taken from the Thom Yorke song "The Eraser". Unbetaed.
Theo goes to sleep that night in a strange mood, bidding Harry good night not with words but with the slow, deliberate touch of his hand to Harry's cheek, his fingers trailing over the other's warm skin for a moment as he meets the green eyes with promises in his own.
It will not be much of a victory, but it will be something - it will answer to the diversion down the path of truth that Theo has made, and it will allow him to go on to the creature that has been his target for years. Whether for good or bad, Theo has long been fixated on his Lord, and it has only been recently that he has known that it has been for ill.
He thinks of himself sometimes as a comet, the death of kings and commoners alike, harbinger of change.
And sometimes he thinks that is overly poetic fancy, for he prides himself on being a man firmly grounded in reality - one cannot change reality if one does not accept what it is, after all - but the truth is that where Theo walks in dreams people die. The ground of the dreamscape has been sown with salt, where Theo's feet have touched, and there are places that one simply does not go.
Not if one wants to come back out.
Asparouh Stoichkov does not know this, for he is a stupid man. Stupid and fawning, a combination Theo dislikes intensely, but his father made sure he had a spine and apparently no one cared enough for the man who would become the Headmaster of Durmstrang to give him the same. Instead of leading as he could, instead of ushering in an age of truth and reason as he could - for he could, even in their Lord's bastard educational system, teach truth and skills and give as his devotion a generation of scholars who spoke the truth and knew how to spin the words to make it truth - he has chosen to be the midwife to an age of cowardice and fear and stupidity, where it is not the smart who survive but the ones who deny truth longest.
Theo is no historian, but he knows that history is written by the winners. And they are winning - so why are they not teaching? Why are they afraid of the truth, why are they not able to understand that truth is only what one makes it?
There is no such thing as truth, in the real world. There are merely shades and lights that, when looked at together, can give you a picture of what truth might be. But if you move the light or the shade slightly, it gives you a new truth.
In the dream world, however, there is truth, and Theo stands in it, on grass that his mind made, and waits. He looks negligent, but the thing to recall is that Theo almost always has something in his hands. He might not be often moving, for Theo knows the gift of stillness, but he often has something in his hands.
Now, he has nothing there, not even his wand. His hands are simply clasped lightly at his waist, as he waits, watching Stoichkov's dreams.
The images come fast and hard.
There is a woman, young enough to be one of his students. Her body is stretched into unusual positions, something wrong about the set of the head, and he is pleased not to see how that happened, but only because it would, undoubtedly, take too much time to watch Stoichkov use magic to stretch her neck that way, let alone her body.
The man's dream is in a cemetery in a busy city, an oasis of calm in the storm of modernity. Cypresses are outlined against the sky like sentinels, beauty in heaven-striving forms, guarding as they have done since the cemetery began, since the first shell, plague-dead, was put to rest.
Theo has no time for Muggle religion, and he wonders why the man he watches dreams in its conventions, but that is a question that will never be answered, and that is the root of oneiromancy, isn't it, the knowledge that any questions you might have when you watch someone else dream will never be answered because you are about to kill them and end their ability to answer forever.
It is not entirely a sexual thrill to consider that. Theo knows what sex is, and knows that he finds his lust in the bodies of living creatures, rather than their pain, but it is a feeling of power, as adrenaline runs through your veins as you stand there, watching Stoichkov dream and knowing that you can kill him any time now, or you can wait. You can do as you like, because you are subtle and he is stupid and does not know that you are there.
Never turn your back on an oneiromant. Never.
Never think you are safe from one who regards the human mind as a playground, with reason.
Never turn your back on your sworn enemy. Never.
Never think you are safe from an oneiromant who regards you as the obstacle in the way of his true target and got over his fear of killing a long, long time ago, before the war even started.
But Stoichkov, much as he does not know other things, does not know these things, and Theo smiles as the dream he is watching shifts, and the woman starts speaking, begging to be one of the dead in the cemetary that surrounds them because there is no other way to silence the alien voice in her mind.
To an observer who was not particularly smart, Theo's smile would appear the same as Stoichkov's. To someone who knew what being an observer meant, the set of the Headmaster's mouth would speak of greed and of stupidity and of sadism, while Theo's would only speak of cruelty and the removal of a small annoyance.
To someone who did not need to think about what the task of the observer is, the look on the Headmaster's face would be slightly repulsive while Theo's smile would be terrifying.
And then Theo changed the other man's dream. The woman who begged, who was prostrating herself on the ground, kneeling on the stone of a grave, who was reaching for the Headmaster, but not for his hands or his face - Theo's face flickered into annoyance and he altered it, pulling Stoichkov hard and fast into the arena where dreams met, but this was not a battle. Theo had no intention of making it one - that would imply that rabid dogs had the right of fighting back as they were disposed of.
He also had no intention of killing the other man with magic. That would be a gratification - a statement that he was a threat to Theo, and he wasn't. Marked he might have been, but Theo had been tried in battle before now, and the other man had gone to Bulgaria as quickly as he could and knew little of the warrior.
He shoved the man so that he knelt on the grass, slamming him hard into the ground, but Theo's hand in his hair kept him from falling face-first. When he let go, short hairs drifted out of his fingers in a cloud and the other man's scalp bled.
He wished for a moment, as he circled the other man, that he could simply break his neck and have done with it, but that would leave sign in the real world, and that was unacceptable.
Theo crouched in front of the man who knelt, his eyes wide and terrified as Theo's face came into view, and he smiled again, the same terrifying smile as before.
"I have broken with him," he said simply, the emphasis on the pronoun making it obvious that he spoke of their Lord. "You would have been better served by ensuring that your staff was loyal. As it is - your last mistake." And the smile became a grin as Theo stroked his thumb along the other man's cheek, in a parody of the gesture he had given Harry earlier.
It was almost funny, watching the other man try to draw himself up in indignation at the touch and the words and the threat, would have been far funnier if it hadn't been such a failure, but Theo left the grin on his face as he simply dreamed of a world that did not have Stoichkov in it. The Headmaster made a faint gagging sound before his body disappeared; Theo remained in his crouch for a few moments before he stood.
As he turned, calling the path back to his own mind to him, he brushed his hands against each other, but gave no other indication of a task completed.
And in his bed, he turned over and reached out for the man who was not there, a faint smile on his face as he dropped entirely into sleep, his hands still seeking Jasper's warmth.
Fandom: Harry Potter: Theodore Nott
Characters:Theo Nott
Prompt: 89, Work
Word Count: 1520
Rating: R for violence and suggested adult themes.
Summary: Theo's work has always been death, whatever causes him to be paid.
Author's Notes: Written originally for Jus Ad Bellum. This story marks the start of a different continuity for Theo than I have previously written. In this continuity he is teaching at Durmstrang, is unmarried, but is in a relationship with a student, Jasper Perkins, and has custody of Harry Potter. He is still an oneiromant. Title taken from the Thom Yorke song "The Eraser". Unbetaed.
Theo goes to sleep that night in a strange mood, bidding Harry good night not with words but with the slow, deliberate touch of his hand to Harry's cheek, his fingers trailing over the other's warm skin for a moment as he meets the green eyes with promises in his own.
It will not be much of a victory, but it will be something - it will answer to the diversion down the path of truth that Theo has made, and it will allow him to go on to the creature that has been his target for years. Whether for good or bad, Theo has long been fixated on his Lord, and it has only been recently that he has known that it has been for ill.
He thinks of himself sometimes as a comet, the death of kings and commoners alike, harbinger of change.
And sometimes he thinks that is overly poetic fancy, for he prides himself on being a man firmly grounded in reality - one cannot change reality if one does not accept what it is, after all - but the truth is that where Theo walks in dreams people die. The ground of the dreamscape has been sown with salt, where Theo's feet have touched, and there are places that one simply does not go.
Not if one wants to come back out.
Asparouh Stoichkov does not know this, for he is a stupid man. Stupid and fawning, a combination Theo dislikes intensely, but his father made sure he had a spine and apparently no one cared enough for the man who would become the Headmaster of Durmstrang to give him the same. Instead of leading as he could, instead of ushering in an age of truth and reason as he could - for he could, even in their Lord's bastard educational system, teach truth and skills and give as his devotion a generation of scholars who spoke the truth and knew how to spin the words to make it truth - he has chosen to be the midwife to an age of cowardice and fear and stupidity, where it is not the smart who survive but the ones who deny truth longest.
Theo is no historian, but he knows that history is written by the winners. And they are winning - so why are they not teaching? Why are they afraid of the truth, why are they not able to understand that truth is only what one makes it?
There is no such thing as truth, in the real world. There are merely shades and lights that, when looked at together, can give you a picture of what truth might be. But if you move the light or the shade slightly, it gives you a new truth.
In the dream world, however, there is truth, and Theo stands in it, on grass that his mind made, and waits. He looks negligent, but the thing to recall is that Theo almost always has something in his hands. He might not be often moving, for Theo knows the gift of stillness, but he often has something in his hands.
Now, he has nothing there, not even his wand. His hands are simply clasped lightly at his waist, as he waits, watching Stoichkov's dreams.
The images come fast and hard.
There is a woman, young enough to be one of his students. Her body is stretched into unusual positions, something wrong about the set of the head, and he is pleased not to see how that happened, but only because it would, undoubtedly, take too much time to watch Stoichkov use magic to stretch her neck that way, let alone her body.
The man's dream is in a cemetery in a busy city, an oasis of calm in the storm of modernity. Cypresses are outlined against the sky like sentinels, beauty in heaven-striving forms, guarding as they have done since the cemetery began, since the first shell, plague-dead, was put to rest.
Theo has no time for Muggle religion, and he wonders why the man he watches dreams in its conventions, but that is a question that will never be answered, and that is the root of oneiromancy, isn't it, the knowledge that any questions you might have when you watch someone else dream will never be answered because you are about to kill them and end their ability to answer forever.
It is not entirely a sexual thrill to consider that. Theo knows what sex is, and knows that he finds his lust in the bodies of living creatures, rather than their pain, but it is a feeling of power, as adrenaline runs through your veins as you stand there, watching Stoichkov dream and knowing that you can kill him any time now, or you can wait. You can do as you like, because you are subtle and he is stupid and does not know that you are there.
Never turn your back on an oneiromant. Never.
Never think you are safe from one who regards the human mind as a playground, with reason.
Never turn your back on your sworn enemy. Never.
Never think you are safe from an oneiromant who regards you as the obstacle in the way of his true target and got over his fear of killing a long, long time ago, before the war even started.
But Stoichkov, much as he does not know other things, does not know these things, and Theo smiles as the dream he is watching shifts, and the woman starts speaking, begging to be one of the dead in the cemetary that surrounds them because there is no other way to silence the alien voice in her mind.
To an observer who was not particularly smart, Theo's smile would appear the same as Stoichkov's. To someone who knew what being an observer meant, the set of the Headmaster's mouth would speak of greed and of stupidity and of sadism, while Theo's would only speak of cruelty and the removal of a small annoyance.
To someone who did not need to think about what the task of the observer is, the look on the Headmaster's face would be slightly repulsive while Theo's smile would be terrifying.
And then Theo changed the other man's dream. The woman who begged, who was prostrating herself on the ground, kneeling on the stone of a grave, who was reaching for the Headmaster, but not for his hands or his face - Theo's face flickered into annoyance and he altered it, pulling Stoichkov hard and fast into the arena where dreams met, but this was not a battle. Theo had no intention of making it one - that would imply that rabid dogs had the right of fighting back as they were disposed of.
He also had no intention of killing the other man with magic. That would be a gratification - a statement that he was a threat to Theo, and he wasn't. Marked he might have been, but Theo had been tried in battle before now, and the other man had gone to Bulgaria as quickly as he could and knew little of the warrior.
He shoved the man so that he knelt on the grass, slamming him hard into the ground, but Theo's hand in his hair kept him from falling face-first. When he let go, short hairs drifted out of his fingers in a cloud and the other man's scalp bled.
He wished for a moment, as he circled the other man, that he could simply break his neck and have done with it, but that would leave sign in the real world, and that was unacceptable.
Theo crouched in front of the man who knelt, his eyes wide and terrified as Theo's face came into view, and he smiled again, the same terrifying smile as before.
"I have broken with him," he said simply, the emphasis on the pronoun making it obvious that he spoke of their Lord. "You would have been better served by ensuring that your staff was loyal. As it is - your last mistake." And the smile became a grin as Theo stroked his thumb along the other man's cheek, in a parody of the gesture he had given Harry earlier.
It was almost funny, watching the other man try to draw himself up in indignation at the touch and the words and the threat, would have been far funnier if it hadn't been such a failure, but Theo left the grin on his face as he simply dreamed of a world that did not have Stoichkov in it. The Headmaster made a faint gagging sound before his body disappeared; Theo remained in his crouch for a few moments before he stood.
As he turned, calling the path back to his own mind to him, he brushed his hands against each other, but gave no other indication of a task completed.
And in his bed, he turned over and reached out for the man who was not there, a faint smile on his face as he dropped entirely into sleep, his hands still seeking Jasper's warmth.
