Work Text:
There’s barely any time to think. Jeongguk moves fast as balls of fiery green shoot across the living room. They burn large holes into the expensive tapestries and into the old, blue wallpaper. Jeongguk flinches with every large crack, ducking his head just in case the man in the kitchen has seen him.
His heart pounds harshly against his ribcage, adrenalin pumping through his veins like unsettled waves. He’s nervous, scared for his life, more scared than he has ever been and probably ever will be.
The man keeps missing, aim completely off as he waves his wand haphazardly. He’s been drinking - it’s obvious with the way it reeks even from this far away, and Jeongguk had scrammed as soon as he’d heard the first shout of his name.
“Where are you, you useless child?!” the man yells, and another orb of green fire flings into the vitrine cabinet, shattering dozens of antique china. Jeongguk can only imagine what his grandparents would say to that, and he’s suddenly filled to the brim with shame and guilt for having caused the rage to destroy sacred Mason memorabilia.
Jeongguk resists the urge to stand up and yell back at the sorry excuse of a man, and crawls quietly to the other side of the room, hiding behind an old study desk. It’s dark in the room and with the way the man can barely see anything through his haze, Jeongguk should be able to escape into the hallway and up the stairs without trouble.
The indecipherable yelling seizes, and Jeongguk’s breath hitches. Green orbs no longer light up the room in burning flashes, but that doesn’t comfort him at all. He wills his breathing to slow, holding his breath as footsteps walk around slowly, deliberately. It’s all a game of scaredy cat, Jeongguk understands, as the man sets the heel of his boots down slowly with every step.
“Come out, come out, where ever you are,” the man sings tauntingly, and Jeongguk can hear the sleazy smirk in his voice like a knife in his ears. Jeongguk will never get used to that voice, will always have it haunt him even when he thinks he’s safe. It’s been sixteen years of that voice toying in his ears, twelve since that voice had become a nightmare, and the sickly sweet baritone is engraved in Jeongguk’s skin like a burning scar.
He swallows the sick that threatens to rise.
“I know you’re in here,” the man continues, but he’s nowhere near Jeongguk. The man has taken steps into the drawing room, his voice echoing through the thin walls of the house, and Jeongguk counts the steps, one, two, three, four, until he knows the man is standing by the far window.
That’s when he stands up, carefully peeking beyond the mahogany wood of the desk, to then sneak his way into the hallway. His breath seizes for a minute as he catches a glimpse of the man’s back, broad and muscular even after all these years, and for a moment, it looks like the man Jeongguk had once admired when he was four, sturdy and secure in his military uniform. He tears his eyes away from the man’s back before he’s caught, and carefully tiptoes up the stairs.
He’s almost all the way up when the footsteps begin moving again, slow and deliberate like the baseline of a horror movie build up. Jeongguk stops in his tracks, making himself flat against the wall as he listens.
“You know, your magical signature has always been awfully strong, Jeongguk,” the man plays with the words like he’s juggling knives, “I never understood why, you filthy half-blood,” the way he says the insult with venom is guttural, and Jeongguk bites back his anger, “Your mother was a disgusting muggle. So why do you crackle like a dragon’s fire, child?”
Jeongguk swallows harshly.
The footsteps are right below him in the drawing room, if he takes a step now he’ll be caught for sure, so he stays put, prays the man will walk into the next parlour instead.
Like a preying animal, the man sniffs the air loudly, searching for Jeongguk’s magical scent. There’s nothing he can do other than hope the man’s drunken enough to block out his nose, but something in Jeongguk’s mind tells him this is all just a game.
Eventually, the footsteps move away towards the next parlour, and Jeongguk can finally take the last three steps up the stairs to rush to his bedroom. He’s memorised all the places where the floorboards don’t creak, and takes extra caution to step on only those. His weight is heavier than the last time he’d had to run like this, back then he had been a scrawny fifteen year old, and his shoes clank harshly on one board. Jeongguk freezes up, waiting for the sounds of the man to continue, but the footsteps stop for a moment and so does Jeongguk’s heart. His throat clogs up as he waits, forcing him to breathe through his nose as quietly as possible, and only allows himself to take a deep breath when footsteps start up again.
“You were always such a rowdy kid, full of energy. You would’ve been the perfect Mason heir, Jeongguk, if it weren’t for your tainted blood.” The accented voice reverberates through the house, vibrating through Jeongguk’s limbs as he moves forward.
There’s a need inside Jeongguk to yell from the top of his lungs how no one cares about blood status anymore, that it’s old fashioned and there are barely any pureblooded wizard left. It boils anger within his veins thinking about it, and Jeongguk clenches his fists to keep it in. It doesn’t matter what blood one has, Jeongguk wants to yell fiercely. It’s unjustified, horrendously unfair above all else, and not a single bit noble as the man thinks.
Quickly and quietly, Jeongguk racks his things up when he’s in his room. He’s barely had the time to unpack any of his things from yesterday, and shuts his trunk carefully. The click of the lock is too loud, he feels, and his heart pounds harder in his chest.
“I wasn’t supposed to touch your mother. It was a mistake, creating you,” the knife like voice continues, teetering on the edge of taunting laughter. Jeongguk hates how it gets to him, filters in through his ears like sharp stings that never end. The guttural drawl of his Durmstrang accent slicing deep into Jeongguk bones like it always does. “She was useless, just like you. A muggle!” he laughs loudly, “It’s a good thing I got rid of her, isn’t it, my boy?”
Blood boils within Jeongguk to the point of pain as he clenches his fists into tight balls, blunt nails digging deep into his palms, enough to almost draw blood. He refuses to answer back, ignores the taste of filth in his mouth at the words. How can a man say with such innocent sweetness all those vicious words and think it’s amusing. Jeongguk’s filled to the brim with hatred for this man, wants nothing more than to pull out his wand and Avada Kedavra the man himself, and if he had been a little bit younger, he would’ve, without regard to Azkaban or death.
But Jeongguk seizes, forces himself to stand and pull out his wand for a different reason. With the flick of his wrist, he gets his trunk to float silently through his bedroom and to the window.
“You’re a horrible man, father,” Jeongguk whispers as the window opens for the trunk to float out. Next, he flicks his wand to levitate Steff’s cage, careful not to wake the owl. Then, quietly, he climbs through the window with a heart full of anger. As he sits on the edge of the window, hands gripping tight to the window frame and to his wand, he casts one last look back at his bedroom.
His childhood bedroom, still as victorian and messy as it's always has been, with old books from Flourish and Blotts' second hand section by his four post and countless posters of old quidditch legends plastered on the pale blue walls. It’s almost funny how normal the bedroom looks.
“I’ll find you soon enough, filthy child,” rings through the house at that moment. Loud and clear and full of taunting laughter, but the authority behind it is clear, as if the great general Severin Mason still existed instead of the drunkard running around, and it sends a horribly cold shiver down Jeongguk’s sweaty back. Like juggling knives, the voice cuts through the house and into Jeongguk’s flesh, leaving new scars and old ones open, and hatred is the only thing Jeongguk can feel from his head to his toes. The laughing grit, the haunting, taunting singing in the man’s voice is that of one who likes nothing more than to play wicked games like an oversized child. No morals. No rules. Only cruelty and pain.
Soon enough, the wicked, knife juggling man will have no family, and Jeongguk doesn’t feel at all sad for the old man Mason, not when he gladly hops off the window frame and disappears into the dead of the night like he never lived there.