Chapter Twenty-One: No Peace
Two more days and the only evidence at all to what had happened at Dakhal were the now healed, raised scars coursing
across Harry's war torn body. Being of muggle origin, Kitsaka had offered to remove them, but Harry had curiously
declined.
"To remember," Harry had whispered, more to himself than Kitsaka as he brushed his fingers across the one on his forehead. His first one, but now only one of many.
"Well, young master, I do not have much to offer you to send you on your way, but I trust, having been reunited with your wand, you can find your path back home?"
Harry was working in Kitsaka's makeshift infirmary, organizing the recently harvested herbs and potion ingredients he'd picked from the garden out back into their proper assortments when the witchdoctor's words hit him. Harry paused.
'On my way... home... Where is that exactly?' Harry owed Kitsaka his life, more than his life.
"I... I don't have much to repay you..." Harry started. Kitsaka smiled joyously to his back.
"Your good health is payment enough, but you have been more than helpful these last couple of days. Reuniting Shima with her family is more than I could have asked for in any payment," Kitsaka referred to the muggle girl Harry had helped save.
"Kitsaka..." Harry continued, ill at ease, carefully choosing his words with fear that the good doctor might reject him. "I - I have been fighting all my life, hurting people..." Harry frowned with grief, admitting his darkest sins. "Shima..." he remembered that swell of relief in the girl's parents' faces at seeing their daughter healed again, "I think... if you would let me... I don't know much about healing, but I am good with potions... could I stay, help you with what I can?" his words were troubled and fraught with doubt. He could not see the smile spreading across Kitsaka's face.
"I am honored, Kokerel," Harry felt the doctor's gentle hand upon his shoulder. Harry would be staying.
. . . .
Doctors were indeed in short supply in the sparse lands of India's expansive countryside. Villagers from across the state made the long journey to Kitsaka's simple home to seek his healing powers. Most were muggles, but Harry did get to interact with India's magicians here and there as well. All revered Kitsaka as a savior, and he didn't have to kill a soul. On the contrary, he saved them.
And Kitsaka did not accept payment from his fellow countrymen. Their well of joyous tears and unending thanks were forever more than enough to the humble doctor. He lived as a pauper, but such materialistic things were of no importance to him. And Harry, for his part, was far from being a burden. Harry was well adept to just getting by. Kitsaka provided the roof over his head, and his patients and their families brought them their food to eat. Kitsaka's true payment, his true joy in life, was seeing his patients heal. And Harry reveled in it.
The poor, sick and injured showed up on a near daily basis, at all hours of the days and nights. And Harry helped where he could at first, mostly in brewing the potions. But he watched and he learned and he studied until Kitsaka entrusted Harry as much as himself to take care of the lesser ailments. Here, Harry found fulfillment in life.
Lost in his work, Harry forgot of Britain. Dakhal became a distant memory. That monster that had threatened to consume him, turn him completely into something he feared worse than death, was quickly outpaced, left far behind on that dark trail.
But there was still one... one long lost, cherished memory that would visit him late at night as he laid in his bed reading. Those brown, glimmering eyes. He held them close to his heart, never forgetting them, but always locking them away. She lives in my memories now.
The days and weeks began to slip by. Harry immersed himself in every waking minute and hour that he was not treating someone to listening to Kitsaka's stories, hearing his knowledge and wisdom, or pouring through his books. A great bond began to form between them.
Kitsaka did not care for the name Harry had given him, Kokerel, and had begun calling him Isake, or son in Hindi. And Harry in turn, first as a joke, but then as a sign of the relationship that was building between them, he began calling Kitsaka, Pita, or father.
As Harry's abilities and confidence as a Healer improved, he began venturing out from Kitsaka's disparate home and clinic. Kitsaka had not approved at first, afraid that Harry might draw too much attention to himself, obviously looking the foreigner in these distant lands, but as the stories of Harry's visits to the local orphanages and slums, healing all those he could, or bringing those back with him that he could not, Kitsaka found it ever more difficult to deny him.
"I shall become a student of yours one day..." Kitsaka told him after Harry had managed to cure a most difficult case of the Veezon Pox from an elderly woman they'd been keeping. The words echoed around in Harry's head as if he had heard them before. Koca had once told him those words.
"I do my best," Harry blushed humbly.
"That you do," Kitsaka intoned as he watched Harry scourgify and straighten the sheets of the recently vacated bed, only to move to the map he now kept on the wall to see what village he was scheduled to visit this day. "Though I have to wonder, Isake, when is it that you find time to sleep, to eat?"
Harry paused, his shoulders slumping in preparation for the oncoming lecture. "I..." Harry started defensively. Of course he slept, he ate... but then, when exactly? It had been a habit that had started in prison at Dakhal. Harry thought of the dreams that had still plagued him, those nightmares, of Death always coming to visit him. But he had not had them in quite some time. He'd have to sleep to dream. "I... do, its just that..."
"Hmm..." Kitsaka took a seat on the edge of a cot across from Harry. "Isake, I know you do not like to talk about your past..." Harry glanced a warning shot back over his shoulder at the doctor before returning to his map. "You will always be welcome here, my Isake, you have earned your place, but you cannot run from your past forever..."
"I'm not running," Harry said with such finality, as if trying to convince himself.
"Aren't you?" Kitsaka asked him in all tenderness. "You are doing great things, Isake, but you are far from your home. Why do you not talk of it? Why do you not go back?"
"Trying to get rid of me?" Harry quirked an uneasy smile, trying to infuse some comedic relief in the suddenly tense exchange. Kitsaka smiled briefly, but his eyes seemed to frown all the same.
"Hmm..." Kitsaka intoned again. "We can never change our Past's, young Isake, but we can learn from them. And with that knowledge comes wisdom to guide us in our Future's. Do not dwell too long on your past, but remember it only for what you wish to change in your path ahead."
Harry nodded.
"Just think on it. And try to eat something and get some rest for a change, will you?" he tried to sound more light heartened as he joined Harry in the chores.
. . . .
There was no more talk of Harry leaving as Kitsaka had become just as accustom to leaning on Harry as Harry did on him.
Outside of his powers of healing and herbs, Harry was surprised to learn that Kitsaka was not very well trained in the other arts of wizardry. Kitsaka got a kick out of apparating, and started to travel regularly with Harry on his ventures to the surrounding local towns and villages. They were able to help so many more this way.
Harry'd even given him some rudimentary lessons in transfiguration and charms, getting a good laugh when he often caught Kitsaka practicing in their down times. Like their lack of any proper Ministry in India, Harry learned that there was no such think as a magical school or anything else that resembled Hogwarts here.
Kitsaka's house was given some much needed repairs, and Harry magically expanded the room of the infirmary to hold more patients. The magical garden out back doubled in size as well as the stock in potion ingredients as Harry began traveling far and wide to acquire them. Kitsaka was pleased with these changes, but protested when Harry tried bringing home more luxurious gifts to adorn his simple abode.
"I need only my potions!" Kitsaka reminded him, but that didn't stop Harry. He expanded Kitsaka's own bedroom, and touched up his worn furniture. He was doing just thus on one of their more idle days when this new world, this new happiness would be shook from its foundation.
"Pita, do you know where the..." Harry stopped mid stride at the top of the stairs, frozen with horror. "No..." the cry barely escaped his lips.
"Yes!" a raspy, thick voice sauntered back up at him. Harry did not recognize the face. It did have that damaged, wiry hair and beard, that lined, weathered skin, but the features... the features were different. But not the eyes. He'd seen those eyes enough to recognize them. He'd seen them on Privet Drive. He'd seen them in Australia, and on the streets in Kolkata, and so many times in his forgotten nightmares. Those cold, dead eyes.
Those eyes bore into him now as Harry stared mortified at the scene before him. His Pita, Kitsaka, laid prostrate at that devil's feet. His head was turned unnaturally so, his eyes open... his eyes open and dead and lifeless. That devil had found him. That devil had killed Kitsaka... Pita. Death had come back for him.
"NO!" Harry cried forcefully, the wail sounding from deep in his soul with the pitch of enraged Banshee, rattling the pictures on the walls of he and Pita and the very foundations of the house.
Pita was dead. Isake died with him. Kokerel returned. The animal returned with him.
There was no meditated spell. Pure, raw rage and fury rose up from an untold well and spilled out like the swell of an unrelenting, unforgiving storm. What could have rivaled the most murderous clasp of thunder broke through the house. The heat of Harry's wrath lit like a bolt at the devil.
And then Harry was on him. Had he charged or apparated, it happened so fast, but the two suddenly collided and were sent tumbling out through the open door. The force of the collision had been so strong that they did not stop rolling until that were out in the yard.
Harry did not stop to draw his wand, but in his spike of rage, rained down blow after blow onto the beast's face with his bare fists. He wished for nothing more than to pound it into the dirt. No matter his anger, he was fighting a wizard like a muggle. A spell finally hit him and he was cast off his victim.
"You bloody, stupid, insolent..." the wizard cursed angrily as he crawled up onto his knees, spitting blood out into the grass. Harry smiled to himself as he saw the man's physical pain. Shaking off whatever spell he'd been hit by, as if it were nothing, Harry now went for his wand.
"Stupefy!" Harry shouted, and though the spell was strong, the wizard corrected himself and be no novice, blocked it before countering with a terrible spell of his own. Now they would duel.
Harry just managed to deflect the wizard's counter spell and the ball of energy crashed back into Kitsaka's house, exploding it into a ball of flame.
"Damn you!" Harry cursed him, sending spell after spell at the wizard, but he blocked and countered each with his own. The two moved about each other with a blinding speed, apparating and disapparting, casting spell and curse with ever rebound.
A duel to match all duels persisted right out in front of Kitsaka's burning house. The street, the other buildings and houses, all were being laid to ruin. People, muggles, were sent screaming and crying in all directions.
"You never learn, do you boy?!" the wizard caught Harry and sent him crashing into a parked car, its frame giving way beneath his body.
Pops of apparation began emanating from every direction as for the first time Harry witnessed Indian wizards began to arrive onto the scene.
'Not this time!' Harry seethed. He'd been bested for the final time. For Pita!
With all the agility he'd learned from Koca, Harry suddenly kicked out before flipping back, up over the damaged auto. Flourishing his wand mid air, Harry sent the car hurdling towards the devil.
It was violent and loud as pieces were slung off in every direction, but it was nothing for the wizard deflect it, sending it tumbling towards some of the new arrivals.
"Sectumsempra!" Harry had apparated and reappeared once again at the devil's flank. The wizard could now do nothing as he stared in frozen horror at his severed arm. His wand lay useless, still clasped in the fist, but now laid upon the ground. With one final slash of his wand, the mocking face of the devil twitched with shock, before his head tilted and fell from his still standing body to join his arm and wand on the ground.
"Freeze! Drop you're wand!" the new arrivals shouted at him in Hindi as the devil's headless body crumpled to the ground. Harry watched with awe as a black spirit seemed to suck right out of the dead form and dissipated into the air.
Harry tried to apparate as he dodged the incoming spells. Nothing. They'd already put up a disapparting jinx.
"Damn!" Harry cursed as he searched for some way out the enclosing noose about him. But then, something in the sky...
It came hurdling down at him like a fiery comet. Harry was struck motionless, just like the rest of them as they watched this anomaly come soaring in. It was going to hit him. It was going to kill him.
But just before it crashed into him, the smoldering ball suddenly burst forth wings, two wide, scarlet feathered wings of an eagle. And that's when he saw the talons of the raptor reaching down for him. Harry raised one hand into the air and with a sharp pinch and crack! He was gone.
. . . .
A/N: I am conflicted how this is all coming off. Any thoughts or words of advice? Are the fighting scenes too much and too often? I have gotten a bit gory, applying that NC17 rating, but just trying to build a certain aspect into Harry's character...
It is impossible for an author to judge his own story, so I am curious as to how it's going from your end. Sorry to fish for some reviews, but this is one of my first real attempts at writing and I just want to learn, so anything you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Any guesses as to the character in the dreams? The devil that keeps showing up in different forms? What exactly Harry is carrying in his pouch? Have I revealed too much? Not enough? Dragging it on too long? I like shorter chapters, always makes me feel more accomplished as a reader:).
Well, Harry's stint abroad is at it's end. I have a hunch he is about to return back to England, but as a very different Harry. Part Two still has about seven chapters left in it, with Harry continuing his transformation. Part Three will bring certain revelations and the antagonist more into direct confrontation with Harry as well as the conclusion to the story. I have up to Part Three written and will get posted as soon as I can. If you've stuck around this long, thank you for reading, and would love to hear your feedback. Thanks!