Harry Potter and The Black Prince [Theodore Nott]

Chapter 4: Homecoming

It felt like Seren had only just closed his eyes when he found himself awakening the next morning, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. For a moment, he simply stared at the ceiling, his mind still hazy and not fully caught up to him.

He could feel the presence of his brother lying just beside him, though they weren't touching. They didn't always have to be touching to know the other was there, nor even looking. They'd read about something called twin telepathy at the library back in Little Whinging, once. Most of it had sounded ridiculous, but there were a few things that Seren couldn't help but think were somewhat accurate. Instinctively knowing when his twin was close by was one of them.

As Seren laid on their makeshift bed on the floor, the events of the previous day slowly came back to him. Waking up at the hotel, driving to the coast, procuring the rowboat, coming to the shack, exchanging gifts with his brother for their birthdays, Hagrid arriving with their letters, going to sl—

Seren shot up. Hagrid arriving with their letters.

He snapped his head to the side to find that, indeed, there was a giant sleeping on the couch, snoring something fierce.

"Ren, you awake?" came his brother's groggy voice, who was still curled up next to him, clearly having been woken up by Seren's movement as he slowly began to stir. "I had the strangest dream—"

"Not a dream," Seren hissed quietly to his brother, trying not to wake Hagrid or, worse, the Dursley's.

"Wha—" A yawn. "What do you mean?"

Seren sighed and flicked his brother's forehead. "Wake up and see for yourself, four-eyes."

Harry scowled at the nickname, muttering under his breath about it being "uncalled for" even as he dutifully sat up next to Seren, slipped on his glasses, and peered over at the couch.

"Not a dream, then," Harry said, eyes a little wide around the edges.

"Not a dream," Seren repeated, his excitement growing by the second.

Finally, they had a world they belonged in. A world with people like them. A world where they weren't freaks.

An escape, Seren thought desperately to himself, an escape from the Dursleys.

The thought was enough to almost make Seren cry with happiness, but then he caught sight of his reflection in the closed window across from them. His lightning-bolt scar stood out like a sore thumb on his neck, raised and paler than the surrounding skin, almost silver. It was larger than Harry's, spanning down the entirety of the side of his neck and ending at his Adam's apple, and incapable of being hidden easily by fringe as Harry's was. He would have to wear a turtle-neck every day for the rest of his life if he didn't want people to see it... Or perhaps he could grow his hair out even longer—he liked the thought of that better.

His whole life Seren had thought his scar was simply a token of the "car crash" that had killed his parents. Now, he knew the truth, and it was far darker and more terrible than he'd known. A symbol of the night his parents were murdered by a mad-man—a mad-man who had tried to murder him and his brother too. A mad-man who had failed... A mad-man they had defeated.

Seren frowned at the thought.

No, that wasn't right. He and Harry hadn't defeated anybody—they were babies. Neither of them even knew how to talk yet when it happened, but Hagrid—and the rest of their new world, apparently—thought they had managed to defeat the most powerful dark Wizard of all time?

That didn't seem right. Not at all.

Seren didn't want to be hailed as a hero just because the man who murdered his parents had tried to kill him too and failed. Seren didn't want to be a hero at all—he just wanted a hot meal every day, a bed of his own, a safe place to rest, friends. He didn't want to be famous, he wanted to be normal.