Tripping on Skies PV K. Deathmote Finished

It was a strong smell, his favorite scent in the whole world, although he didn’t really understand why. It was pungeant and sweet and sour all at the same time. He had been walking about that night, wind blowing his grey scarf to the side, making it whip and curl in endless unpredictable twists that could easily be compared to swirling mist.

The boy’s face was chalk white, with undertones of a sickly grey that made onlookers think of a corpse. His eyes were heavily lidded and obviously exhausted. His eyes themselves were dark, and far too large. The pupils were at least twice the size they should normally have been, and he could feel a little pain in his mouth.

His hair was black, burned in places, melted in others. It didn’t look clean in the slightest, some dead grass lending dim colors to his otherwise monochromatic features.

His tired eyes stared ahead, trying to glean every last detail from the scene in front of him. A girl had been running barefoot and had hurt her foot. It all made sense so far, Kaegen had injured his foot by doing that many a time. Eventually the callouses became thick and the feet softer. She started to whimper the word Ow over and over again for a second or two.

This also made sense, it was natural to whimper when you got hurt. It was the next part that made the ravenclaw prefect think twice. She called her foot weak. It was an interesting thing to call her foot. Her foot carried her faithfully wherever she needed to go, it had just happened to have gotten wounded in service. It certainly didn’t deserve to be called weak like that.

Or maybe she was talking about herself. The girl certainly didn’t appear strong, shivering and bleeding in a tank top and shorts. And that was when he remembered. Remembered what made that smell, the smell that had lured him here to begin with.

Blood. The crimson fluid that gave life to everything it ran through. He had never actually managed to taste some before, something had always come up, something had always blocked him. But not this time. He would figure out what she was talking about, and then ask to lick her foot, maybe just a little. Just to see if it tasted as good as it smelled.

He walked up behind the girl until he was only a few inches away before finally making up his mind on what to say.

”What are you talking ablood? What's weak?”

Did he say about wrong? No, it was an easy enough word that he had said plenty of times before he saw the blood. Before, rather. The blood had nothing to do with the blood. Sorry, not the blood. The situation.

The ravenclaw’s mind was trying to think clearly, but the word blood kept coming up, kept scrambling his train of thought. His left hand twitched, but then fell back along his side.

This was fine.

She didn't hear the boy approaching her, because she was too self-centered to be aware of her surroundings. This is what happened when you were too focused on yourself, you got distracted. What if he had been holding a gun? A knife? Hell, even a sharp stick? She would've been dead. You're so vain... it's just a little blood. Get up, soldier. Hastily blinking away any lingering, remaining signs of tears, Ami lifted her chin and drew away slightly from the boy who had come to stare at her cut, to call her out on what a baby she was.

He looked like her mom. Well, no, not really, not in the overall sense- after all, her mom had brilliant blonde hair as opposed to his raven, and she was taller than him. But the shadows under his eyes matched Abella's perfectly. Their cheeks were the same- high, sharp cheekbones, but the skin was gaunt, and sallow. The same skin that used to be beautiful, but was now dull and no longer glowed with health and happiness.

Clearly, this boy was wise beyond his years, his question had already somehow touched all the sensitive parts of her mental state.  This... wasn't ideal. "Nothing!" Narrowing her eyes at him, she tilted her head, staring into his eyes suspiciously. Did he- did he just say ablood? Her hand drifted down to her foot, subtly trying to wipe the blood away. To her complete and utter dismay, the action only resulted in her smearing the crimson fluid. "I didn't say anything."

Trying to stop staring into those soulless, lifeless eyes of his, her eyes wandered up to his raven locks instead. "Your hair..." she said quietly, hesitantly. "It's like mine, isn't it? It's burnt." Instinctively, Ami reached up to her own head, tucking the loose hair behind her ear.

Oh, that must have sounded rude... darn, had she offended him? "I mean, not that burnt hair is a bad thing, it was just more of an observation..." This was getting more and more awkward by the minute. Why couldn't she just keep her big fat mouth shut? Thrusting out her blood-stained hand for a handshake, Ami desperately tried to save the floundering conversation. "I'm Ami." 

Wait, wait, wait wait wait, wait a minute. Hold your horses, hang on a hot second. Wasn't this kid a prefect, the deathly Ravenclaw one, right? She had seen him around before, for sure. "Please don't tell on me!" she blurted out, eyes wide. "I- I'm sorry that I left dinner early... But I just ate really fast, I wanted to see the sunset."

The girl led the conversation off with an obvious lie. One that stung quite a bit, another nail in the coffin that was Kaegen’s hope in the rest of wizard kind even being worthy of names. He had come to hogwarts sure that his would be one of the more insignificant names out there. But no one here really had a huge sense of honor. They were out for themselves, no one else. Their beliefs were totally different from the prefect’s, but no matter how many times that was reaffirmed he never changed his ways.

She immediately changed the topic, probably to hide the fact that she had just dragged her honor along in the dirt. She pointed to his burnt hair, and then to hers. Drawing a connection and then saying that it didn’t matter.

Kaegen took a smooth half-step back. His mind was fine, it worked just the way it was supposed to. And he would never lie, right? That could only mean that her mind was different, was broken. Or at least that her mind had broken a fundamental building block of what made someone human.

”Are you still… human?”

Kaegen’s left hand ring finger twitched, a strange and jerky motion when contrasted to the rest of his body. There was something wrong with the entire scenario, something that he did not appreciate in the slightest. Not just her lying, not just her broken mind. Something beyond that. Something deadly.

The girl introduced herself, forcing Kaegen to reciprocate the greeting. It would take time away from the task at hand, take time away from him either defeating this foe or escaping with his life. There was no reason for him to be out alone with one other person, a person that possessed a currently unknown skill set no doubt stronger than the power the prefect himself possessed. But formalities had to be followed.

”Kaegen Deathmote, Fens-Born Scarf-Wielder. He who was called fat tadpole as a babe and suicidal idjit as a toddler. He who earned the name Eeh before arriving at hogwarts. Companion to November, Deathmote-kin, prefect of ravenclaw under the authority of sir happiness and the black burn, he whose names were given authority by grandfather whose name was given authority by the conqueror of the 14th dark place.”

And then things got really weird. The haze in his head started to build back up, probably due to the smell of fresh blood that was flooding his senses, making it more difficult to make rational judgement calls, which was saying something because his usual behavior was already far from rational. The girl told him not to ‘tell on her’ because she ate quickly or something weird.

”I don’t even know how to tell on someone, who even cares how fast you eat? Is that a thing? Do you get in trouble for eating too fast?”

Kaegen's question startled her, confused her. What did he mean, was she still human? Poking her arm almost comically, then squishing the lean muscle on her bicep, she shrugged as a way of response. Yeah, sure, she was still human, considering that she still had blood flowing through her veins and she was still breathing. Last time she checked, her parents were still humans- albeit, magical ones, but humans nonetheless. There would be no green antennae sprouting from her very-much-human parents anytime soon.

"Y- yeah, I'm still human." I think...

Because surely, there was something to be said about mean people, about mean people who hurt other people. Surely, those people would be considered monsters- like the terrorists who had attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11, They weren't human, they were terrorists, they were monsters. They had hurt their own kind.

So then what was she? She had hurt Dorian Gray, and quite badly. But he had also hurt her, right...? This was dumb and confusing, why was she even thinking about this? Shut up brain, shut up... 

Kaegen's name was a heck of a mouthful- what was that, thirty plus words? Unbelievable- fat chance she was going to regurgitate that every single time she wanted to get his attention. "I'm just going to call you Kae," she said decisively, leaving absolutely no room for protest. "Or Kaegen, if I feel like it." Once again, no room for any type of protest- which was really quite unfair, it was his name, after all, and not hers.

Ah, pre-teens. They knew no type of justice.

His next set of questions were good ones, ones she really hadn't considered before. Was it some sort of crime to eat quickly? Surely, it wasn't- there weren't people being sent off to jail because they inhaled their meals at an unhealthy rate. "I guess you can't get in trouble for eating fast, then. That's good." That meant she wouldn't get in trouble, which was most definitely ideal.

But wait, there's more. What did he mean, he didn't know how to tell on someone? Wasn't that a prefect's main job, to tattle on the misbehaving students to the professors, telling their classmate's misdeeds to the proper authorities?

He still hadn't accepted her handshake. Rude. Withdrawing her hand, Ami took a step backward from the boy, retreating back towards the waves of water once more. "It was nice meetin' ya, I gue-" Ah frick. When would this child ever learn?

Tripping over the same rock she had cut her foot on, the idiot, she tumbled backwards, her arms windmilling wildly as she crashed into the waves, landing heavily on her bum (oof, that was going to leave quite the bruise), her head submerging underwater.

This. Child. I swear to God, she needs help.

Splashing about, Ami finally managed to stick her head back above water, now completely soaked- and blood seemed to be streamed down her arm, a new cut had surfaced. The picture had been lost, as well, completely water-logged and somewhere at the bottom of the lake by now.

Great, fantastic, what a wonderful way to end her day. Wincing, the Hufflepuff shifted herself into a better upright position as she pressed the hem of her soaked-through shirt against her new cut, trying to stop the crimson liquid from flowing out of her.

What was that ablood? Why the blood was she even doing that? Squishing her blood filled arm to check to see if she was still a blood-filled human? As if there was ever a time she wasn’t blood? She acknowledged her blood a second later, by saying she was a human with blood. Well, human. The blood was probably him just assuming.

The prefect started to blink rapidly, trying to clear his head, but only managing to make it more muddled. The blood was getting to his brain, and his pupils had started to expand more. She stated that she was going to call him Kae or Kaegen, whichever she preferred. He didn’t care regardless. He had given her his name, and she knew it. From now on she could label him anything she wanted, that was her business. That didn’t bother him so much as the fact that she looked delicious

As much as her rather edible appearance was starting to distract him he was still able to form a coherent sentence in order to respond to the girl.
”I don’t care, call me anything.”

It was sometimes hard to tell when something was prey or a predator, and sometimes it was easy. This time it was easy. He could almost taste the juicy blood under the skin he knew would part way for his teeth. She wasn’t wearing any armor, not even thick clothing. It would taste so good, so wonderfully marvelously delicious. But he didn’t do anything, he restrained himself.

It didn’t make any sense, why would he want to eat another person? Sure animals did it, but he hadn’t seen anyone eat someone else for as long as he’d been at hogwarts. You would think someone would bring that up if it was a thing. Or maybe people would trust each other a lot less. But if it wasn’t a thing, then why did he want to eat her this badly? There had to be another explanation.

Kaegen’s eyes expanded further, to the very edge of his eyes, fluctuating bigger and smaller as the blackness tried to take control. He could dimly hear his grandfather’s voice struggling to teach him something, to impart some wisdom unto the young ears that so desperately needed it.

“If you’re being controlled, you deserve it. Go along with it, if you weren’t strong or smart enough to stop yourself from being controlled in the first place, you don’t deserve freedom.”

He found it strange that it was this memory specifically that had come back to him. That it was a memory of an entirely irrelevant teaching. Some lesson on whether or not humans ate each other would be a lot more helpful. When the black fluctuated again, the boy went back to his past, mind on the brink of shutting down to the advances of Dhampiric blood.

This time he was young. Young and sitting behind a log, not breathing. A monster was coming his way. It was tall and thin and pale and bald, fangs and black eyes. A monster that wanted nothing more than to devour the boy less than 30 feet from where it stood. But the mists helped him as they had countless times before, and as they would countless times after. The creature passed by.

And suddenly, for no reason at all, Kaegen felt fear. Fear of the blood, of something the blood represented. It was as if there were two foreign powers warring in his mind. That of hunger and that of fear. When his eyes focused, pupils starting to diminish back to their regular size, he saw the girl had fallen down. She had fallen down and had started to bleed. More blood.

The fear and hunger both reared screaming heads, split halves that both wanted control over the boy. A stronger man might have chosen one, or stood there heroically, defiant of his own thoughts. This boy was young, he was not strong. And so he fell to the ground in as tight a ball as he could manage, and began to cry silent tears.

He had heard of this. The uncontrollable urge to feast on blood, the unknown fear somehow stemming from a huge pale monster that was trying to track him down in a magical swamp. What Kaegen had, was the flu. And the flu was not fun in the slightest.

What kind of an awful prefect was this kid? Ami was quite clearly hurt and in pain, whether she would admit it or not. What kind of soulless, horrible monster was he? Headmaster Blackburn must have been completely out of his mind to choose such a heartless child to become a prefect. Prefects were supposed to be shining beacons of hope for students, not a stone cold wall they couldn't talk to!

"Aren't you going to do something?" Ami spat out at the quivering boy, tears pricking delicately at the corners of her eyes. If there was one thing her mother had taught her, it was how to cry correctly, prettily. You know, the most important thing in life.

Thank goodness that the lake was freshwater, because she knew that her cut would've stung so much more if it had been salt. Scrambling to her feet, she dabbed at her cuts with the hem of her tank top, trying to stop the blood from flowing. If he wasn't going to even try and help her, she'd have to soldier up and do it on her own. She should've done that anyway, she couldn't rely on anyone else. She was an independent woman, not some damsel in distress. She didn't need anyone else.

She was stronger than this, wasn't she? She wasn't going to get anywhere by relying on other people, that was stupid. She had to learn how to take care of herself, and this stupid idiot prefect wasn't going to to do for her. She really was insane to expect that of him.

Watching as the small, pale boy crumbled to the ground and began to cry silently, thin tears slowly streaking down his face, Ami's flaming eyebrows shot up across her forehead in surprise. She didn't know what had set him off like that, but surely... surely it had been something of importance, people as stiff and cold as he was didn't crack that easily.

"Hey..." she said softly, slowly stepping closer, ever so slowly as not to scare him, treating him like one would treat a lost kitten. Who knew how he might do if he got spooked? "Hey, Kaegen..." Now directly in front of him, she offered her palms to him, upward. I come in peace, the gesture said. He wasn't dumb, he wasn't stupid. He could understand her body language... right?

"Are you alright?" she asked softly, sitting down across from him, placing her hands on her knees. Maybe he just needed someone to talk to. She, herself, was always up to listen to other people's troubles and worries- most people seemed to enjoy that about her, like it was some sort of luxury. Really, it should've just been basic human decency to offer an ear to someone's hurt and pain.

The boy could hear voices, voices that seemed to mock him as emotions surged unchecked. Why did he never see anyone else collapse like this, feel this? Was everyone else just more capable than he was? Better suited for the strains of existence? Was he simply the weakest student in hogwarts, perhaps all of hogwarts history? He had thought himself at least okay, to have at least mediocre powers. He had faced off against several other students and come on top, hadn’t he? Or was that just his imagination, even memory failing. Why was he this afraid of the blood, this afraid of what it represented? He didn’t even know what it represented, why would he feel this much fear?

He felt fear constantly, was at home with it. Fear was his blanket, paranoia his pillow. Caution was the bed. It was rare that he was this rattled, rare that his emotions were this conflicted. He had always known that his brain was more or less split in half. That there was half of him that was curious, wanting to learn as much as it possibly could. And that there was half of him that was terrified, wanting nothing more than to survive. They constantly warred in his mind, fighting for control over the young boy. But the flu had made it worse. Far worse.



A voice, mocking him for his weakness, mocking him for the flu, mocking him for not being able to cope with the effects of the terrible illness.

“Yeah, aren’t you?”

Another voice, hammering the nail further home. It was an unwelcome feeling, he was getting ganged up on. He didn’t even know who else was nearby, who else besides the girl was even out here?
It seemed like an eternity of screaming, constant screaming going on in his mind as two halves of him fought for some facsimile of control. But then he heard a voice, a voice that actually sounded pleasant.



It was a calm voice, but it was immediately followed up by a much harsher one. A voice that dripped bile with every word.

“Hey. Kill her or Die.”

But then the calm voice came again, heralding the slight relief it offered in a world of screaming emotions and the flu. It was something, at the very least. Something different.



And again the other person followed up the softness with harsh, bitter words that stung deep into the little boy’s heart.

“No wonder you lost vortigern, you won’t even defend yourself.”

The soft voice spoke again, sounding closer. A small beacon of light that had slowly grown. When it feels like you are in the depths of hell, it often the smallest things that remind you there is still some good, that maybe you haven’t gone quite all the way down there just yet. Not all the way, but close.



Why would she ask that, it was obvious he wasn’t alright. The girl and her blood was so close, all he would have to do is move is head a little bit and take a bite. But at the same time he wanted to run away from the blood so much, wanted to flee, leave this place and the girl with her bright red fluid of terror and hunger. Rolling over on his other side he stared at the girl, trying to understand what she was doing. Her voice was nice but her actions were anything but. Bringing her blood closer and closer to him, steadily increasing the discord breaking loose in his mind.

The boy’s eyes were wide open in fear, staring at the girl with pupils convulsing and pulsating, expanding and contracting like twin living beasts in his eyes, striving to cover them in the inky blackness.



He wasn’t sure who he was speaking to, or if he was even the one that had said anything. He was asking for the screaming to stop, for his mind to stop arguing, for the voices to stop and for her blood to go away. Or maybe for it to come closer, he wasn’t sure which one. Maybe he was just asking for an end to the indecisiveness. Something, anything. For everything to stop for one second and let him think clearly. But nothing stopped, and his pupils kept struggling harder and harder to morph, to change, to move. And move they did, forming amorphous blobs and shapes. Other people had to feel this too, there was no way he was the only one.

With every word she spoke, Kaegen just seemed to get worse and worse. Was it possible for him to get sick that quickly? Surely, there was no type of illness that could take effect so quickly. It could've been a heart attack, sure, but only old bald men who drank too much beer got heart attacks, right? Kaegen was neither old nor bald, and he most certainly wasn't a man. He was a boy!

As for the beer, maybe he was drunk? If he was, then this was surely the hangover, where he would bend over and retch his guts out, and his head would be pounding, and oh... how awful that experience that would be. But no, surely, Kaegen wasn't the type to drink? He was, after all, a prefect. Headmaster Blackburn wouldn't let drunks gain a position of power! Was he... gasping, Ami's eyes widened in absolute terror as the answer struck her. An aneurysm. He was having an aneurysm. Obviously. A blood vessel had burst within him and he was dying.

Well, then. If she was going to approach him, then, she needed to be sterile- or, at least, as close to sterile as she could possibly be. Licking the blood off of her injured hand, not unlike a cat giving itself a bath, Ami watched as Kaegen seemed to collapse in on himself, both mentally and physically.



His voice startled her, but Ami respected his request and didn't move from her spot on the ground, hands on her knees and legs crossed over one another. Maybe he didn't have an aneurysm? If a blood vessel had burst, wouldn't his skin be some hue of red by now, as the blood flooded the empty space between the vessels? 

Blood made no sense.

"Kaegen..." she said slowly, carefully. He really, truly did seem to be in pain, and she couldn't help but feel for this small boy, even if he could technically boss her around whenever he wanted to. "Kaegen, what hurts?" If she wanted to fix his pain, then obviously, she would have to find the source, first.

"I only want to help you," she continued, keeping her voice as calm and steady as humanly possible. "I promise. I swear on my life, I'm only trying to help you feel better. If... if I'm hurting you in any way, please, just tell me so." 

When had she become such a mother? This was so incredibly annoying. She wouldn't, couldn't just stand up and leave him trembling there, though- that was super rude and super mean. She probably should've gone to go get a band-aid for herself before anything got infected, but that could wait- a few more scars wouldn't matter, not when Kaegen was in so much pain.

Maybe this was why she was a Hufflepuff.

As hard as the two sides of his body was fighting, the scarred side of him was winning, stopping him from moving towards the girl, towards the blood. But now she was closer, talking to him in soft, comforting words. It made him want to curl up and take a nap, more than anything. Or at least part of him did. It was a very small part that craved the safety her soft tone of voice promised him, the warmth that her presence would provide. Kaegen was unfamiliar with human contact of any sort, receiving only one hug a year until he had arrived in hogwarts. People scared him, confused him. The prefect was more animal than boy. But he was still boy, somewhere in there. And young children want comfort when they feel distressed.

But the small voice that spoke up and mentioned the need for comfort was small indeed, and was drowned out as soon as the ravenclaw inhaled, a fresh wave of the blood assaulting his senses, making his blood boiling, roiling and bubbling over in more fury, in more hunger. But his fear was still huge and prevalent, and he simply didn’t want to hurt this girl, this girl with the calm voice. And it was in that moment of confused misery and internal pain that he heard it. A voice talking to him that sounded nothing like the calm understanding of the girl. It was dark and horrible, terrifying and chilling. But also familiar in a way. Like a friend, mostly forgotten.

“Prey, she’s prey. What are you? Who are you? Kaegen Deathmote is nothing, no one without a name. Your name has authority passed down. It originates from the conqueror of the 14th dark place. You’ve seen the dark places, you know what that means, what that implies. You are fully aware of how precious your name is. Of all the treasures in this school, your name is one of the greatest.

Is your name squandered, then? Is your name wasted on prey, on someone that hides and cries, seeking a mother’s care and affections? You swore your loyalty to a small girl. It doesn’t matter how strong she is, how bright her fire. You are stronger, more powerful. Now go. Go and destroy this woman. It would take you two minutes, two minutes and she would be nothing but bones.”

The boy had no reply, nothing he could say. And so he got up, standing on his feet and staring at the girl. One eye was solid black, a pit of emotionless hollow. The pupil on his other eye was moving, fluctuating as if it was something alive, trying to grow and expand. One shaky pale hand, slender fingers and dirty, long fingernails with dull points, almost like claws, reached behind and grasped his long umbrella. It took two jerks to dislodge the umbrella from the release knots that had it tethered to his back. Pointing the umbrella behind him, and the bottom of the staff in front, the boy took off running. The umbrella was almost like a lance, the boy’s feet seemed to hardly touch the ground at all.

He quickly started to reach speeds that shouldn’t have been possible. A streak across the ground that defied anything anyone should be able to physically do. A few blinks and he was completely gone, headed off in the direction of the forbidden forest.

But he would remember the girl, that much was certain.

Kae left the thread, unless forcibly held down during that moment of hesitation.