Up and Down

Pain and Pleasure

She can deal with physical pain.

The number of times she got hit, knocked on the ground, bitten, burned and cut is astounding. Since her magic awakened, she was constantly fighting, sometimes for her life, sometimes for what she might even term fun.

Sometimes she misses the carefree days when her family had thought her a Squib. Her family isn't pureblood, so she was taught with her Muggle cousins by their governess, blissfully unaware of the power dormant within her. Some days she regretted not being able to participate in the magical world of her parents, but most days she didn't even think of it.

Her concerns were getting a proper ladies' education, and pursuing light work, befitting of her upper-middle-class station. Perhaps she would have been a secretary in London or worked in her relatives' department store.

But then, one day, as her family visited a travelling circus - a low-brow form of entertainment, but she and her cousins begged her aunt and uncle long enough for them to cave in. There, she slipped away and peeked in between flaps of cloth, into a separate, smaller enclosure.

A cruel-looking man was lashing a tigress that was shielding her cub. He yelled for the mother to get off, to get away, to give him the cub. But the tigress bore the punishment, despite the merciless beating, her fur matted with blood, old and new.

Something boiled inside Anna at the sight. Something that slept in her for fifteen years, finally awakened. She screamed and rushed inside the dirty, stinking tent. Her arm swung forward, even though she had no hope of stopping the meaty paw of the man.

He was shot across the tent, and out through the cloth, and he kept going. Flying further and further, until he crested the nearby buildings and disappeared from sight.

Anna stood, dumbfounded, staring at the tear in the fabric, cool air gently blowing through. She knew enough to not ask questions of herself. This was magic, somehow. She can ask herself the how of it later.

She kneeled beside the tigress without fear and reached out her hand. Another feeling of power welled up inside of her, but this time it wasn't to hurt but to heal. The wounds on the back of the animal stitched together.

The tigress licked her arm, leaving it raw and scratched from the touch of the rough tongue, picked up her baby, and slunk back to her cage.

Her heart broke for their plight, but where could a tigress and a cub possibly go in the middle of a city? As she despaired, the tigress' form began to change.

In mere seconds, the mighty huntress of the jungle turned into a house cat, and her cub turned into a mewling kitten. Anna scooped them both up and ran. She never saw that performance.

A letter from Hogwarts came in the post in two days' time.

She never regretted her actions that night. Even though she was fairly certain she killed that cruel man. However, on her first visit to Hogsmeade, she is in for a surprise.

Not only the troll, Victor Rookwood or Ranrok. There he is, the large man who tormented the tigress. Sirona called him 'Theophilus'. Theophilus Harlow, the one professor Weasley warned her about?

"You," he growls, beady eyes bulging, "that little bitch!"

He lunges forward, only stopped by Sirona's wand jabbing into his abdomen. The papery smell of burning cloth tingles her nostrils.

"Where are my tigers?!" Harlow growls, face red and blotchy with anger.

"Come now, Theophilus," Rookwood puts an arm on his henchman's shoulder, "do not concern yourself with lowly non-magical creatures any longer. There is much more lucrative prey about."