Chapter 35 - Rage

Most people celebrated the Halloween Day as the day in which You-Know-Who was vanquished by Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived.

And just because they were happy about it, they felt that others should be happy about it as well.

But Penelope Clearwater, who had known Harry for some time knew very well that he would not be celebrating this day.

After all, how can a person celebrate the day their parents died?

Halloween might have been an happy event for the Magical Britain but the same couldn't be said for Harry Potter.

That was the reason why instead of joining her friends for the feast, she went to the abandoned room where she usually tutored him in order to spend some time with him.

She found him reading from some ancient tome that might have sold for over a thousand galleons if sold in the black market and she wondered where he brought all these obscure books from.

He never shared the source of his endless amount of books and she never deigned to ask. It was not her place to ask and if he decided that he trusted her enough to tell her about it someday then he would do so on his own.

Looking at his haggard appearance and his messy appearance, she also wondered when was the last time he slept.

Despite the initial hiccup in his journey to learn Ancient runes during which time he blew up just about everything that he carved with runes, he was now getting better and better at it everyday.

She envied him for that sometimes. How he could simply ignore everything else in the world and simplemindedly focus on that one particular thing no matter the time or date.

She saw the plate left on the table beside his work table filled with food that had gone cold who knows how long ago and sighed with the realization that she must remind him to eat properly as well. Once again.

She might as well have adopted him for all that she cared about him nowadays.

She had always wanted a little brother for herself and she felt like she had one now but by the gods, couldn't he at least take care of his health and hygiene himself.

He heard the footsteps and inclined his head toward her in greeting.

"Is it time for our classes already?" He asked with a frown that was directed toward the material in front of him as he went back to reading the tome while carving a rune on a wooden plank. She would have ducked him in the head for being so careless with such a dangerous item if she had not known about all the numerous precautions he'd already taken that made the room far safer than even the Ancient runes class supervised by Professor Babbling.

"I thought we still had three more hours to go." He said and then looked at the magical clock on the wall with a frown "Is the clock not working properly?"

"The clock is working as it should." She replied and took the chair to sit beside him, her gaze fixed on the runes he'd carved in the wooden planks.

"You're early? What happened?" he asked in a rare show of concern "Is everything alright?"

And with a start, she realized that he didn't even remember what day it was.

Of course, he spent almost all of his time away from other students and worked day and night while using the time turner on a continuous manner to the point were the day and night blended together with each other. So it was quite natural that he forgot what day it was.

'Only he would forget what day it was in such a crucial day as well.' She thought with growing exasperation and no small amount of fondness but decided that if he didn't remember what day it was, then there was no need for her to bring it up and open some old wounds and ruin his mood. She would rather keep the news to herself then cause him sadness.

"Everything's alright." She lied easily "Just had free period today so I came here to check up on you."

"There's really nothing for you to check up on here. You should spend your free period with your friends." He said with a yawn "You'll simply be wasting your time here."

She frowned at him for thinking that she was wasting time on him and had the urge to smack him in the head so that she could bring some sense to him but realized that doing that to an abused child might not be the best idea so she simply glared at him instead.

An action which was ineffective on him as he didn't even bothered to look up at her.

Little prick.

"On the other hand, I seemed to have noticed that you didn't finish your breakfast." She said and watched him cringe at her words. She didn't like to nag at people like Molly Weasley, her boyfriend's mother but that didn't mean that she would let him get away with not finishing his meals properly.

"Or is it the dinner from last night?" she asked with a frown.

His grimace turned worse at that question and she realized that it was indeed the dinner from last night. Which meant that he had gone for more than 18 hours without any food.

Possibly even longer if he had used his time turner during that time.

That thought pissed her off to no end and he seemed to have realized that as he stopped carving his runes and slowly turned to look at her with a strained smile.

"Now Penelope… I think we should talk about this calmly, like civilized peopl…"

"Harry James Potter" she thundered and watched with some twisted satisfaction as he wilted under her gaze "When was the last time you ate something?"

He gulped at that and gave her a weak smile and all her anger ebbed away at that and she sighed once again. After learning of his abused past, it was rather hard to stay angry at him.

Still, that didn't meant that he could skip his meals.

She was about to tell him to call for an house elf for some food when one suddenly popped up in the room and she looked at it in surprise and wondered if the house elf had read her thoughts or something but it's next words broke all such notions from her mind and left her with a cold chill down her spine.

"Harry Potter Sir. Missy Grangy is being in danger. Missy Grangy is being attacked by giant biggy thingy. Missy Grangy is bleeding."

The time froze for a moment as the words of the house elf sank in her mind and then the moment passed and she was brought out of her shock as a look of utter fury came upon Harry's face and he snarled at the house elf "Take me to her."

If she had been thinking properly at that moment, then she would have realized that catching onto him while the elf was apparating them away was a truly stupid thing to do and had things gone wrong then they could have splinched quite badly. But she had not been thinking at that moment and had latched onto Harry as both him and the elf chose to go after Hermione Granger who was apparently attacked by some older student.

She had a feeling that she was going after him in order to protect that Harry from that big student. And interfere if things got too rough.

If only she knew.

The feeling of being squeezed out of a thin tube passed and before she could even properly orient herself, she was ȧssaulted by the foul smell of a series used toilets and she held the urge to gag at that but then the vertigo passed and she looked up and met with the sight of a devastated bathroom.

It looked like a hurricane had passed through the bathroom.

All the toilets and their doors were broken and laying on the ground along with the sinks and water was freely leaking out of the broken pipes, gathering on the ground.

Water that turned red at…

And then she saw it. The body of a student lying under a pile of broken door and wall.

She froze at the sight of the 12 feet tall beast that seemed to be bringing it's club down one last time on the still form of Hermione.

She felt utterly helpless at what was happening in front of her and was about to close her eyes in fear when…

A rage filled shout shook her to the the core and brought her our of her shocked state and she jerked around to look at Harry clutching at his hair in dispair and looking at the troll with wild hateful eyes which also held a world full of pain.

"Aaahhhhhdd." He let out a mixture of an enraged cry and a sob as tears started to fall from his eyes before he put his hands inside the purse that he usually carried around with him and took out a…

Was that a handgun?

And then she didn't have the time to think anymore as the troll, who had stopped his club mid swing stopped and looked at both of them with a confused glare before it started to walk toward them and she fumbled with her wand in order to come up with some way to protect herself and Harry.

She shouldn't have bothered.

"YOU BASTARDDD!!!" Harry yelled "YOU BASTARDD!!!" he screamed before pointing the gun at the troll and at that small moment, the madness in his eyes worried her far more than the 12 feet large mountain troll for some reason.

"I WILL KILL YOU!!!" he shouted and pulled the trigger.

Or so she thought.

Thus she was totally unprepared for what happened next.

The first shot struck the troll's shoulder and took out it's hand along with a large portion of it's shoulder.

She didn't even had the time to register what had happened. And neither did the troll as before his confused gaze could even be wiped off it's face, Harry shot it once again.

This time she heard it's pain filled cry wide and clear as the bullet tore out a large piece from it's left abdomen.

And then before her very eyes, Harry yelled madly and continued to shoot at the large beast, all the while moving forward at a steady pace looking utterly unafraid of anything.

On the fourth shot, the troll lost it's head.

By the sixth shot, the troll had lost both it's arms and a large portion of it's ċhėst.

By the twelfth shot, everything atop it's legs was splattered in the opposite wall of the bathroom in a gory mess of meat, bones and various organs with it's entrails dropped around it's legs.

A person whom he apparently cared for a great deal.

He was removing the body from under the debris all the while shouting something like 'Don't die. Don't die' again and again in a crazed fashion, not caring about any shrapnels that scraped his fingers and cut into his bones.

And as she watched this whole scene with a faint sort of detachment, she realized deep down that she must have gone into shock.

And then she looked up at her surrounding once more and wondered how this peaceful day had turned around this way so drastically and wondered if she was actually awake and not in fact, dreaming.

Then the feeling of calmness passed and she promptly fell to the side and vomited all the contents in her stomach on the floor.