Chapter Text
Lord Voldemort, the darkest wizard in a century, whose names was so feared it was taboo, was gaping. As much as he liked to proclaim that emotion was a sign of weakness and therefore a foreign concept to him, he couldn't deny that, at this very moment, he was absolutely and unmistakeably gob-smacked.
Crimson eyes comically wide, he gazed at the scene before him and wondered just how deep his insanity ran, for, surely, this had to be a product of his own imagination; there was no way this was actually happening...
"Oh, do re-hinge your jaw; you look positively ridiculous, much like your idiot followers."
It certainly was witty enough to be a figment born from his own conscious. Why it was manifesting now though...
"Reporters are an awful breed, don't you think?" a page rustled softly as it was flipped and Voldemort realized belatedly that his hallucination seemed to be reading a rather precious tome about Parselmagic, "They haven't left me alone since that night in the Ministry - Dumbledore had to remove me from my relatives' house early because the neighbours were starting to get suspicious. Then someone let it leak that I'd been spotted at the Weasley's, so they started flooding into the nearest town. Caused a right stir, that did. So I told Dumbledore I'd take care of it and came to the one place they would never think to look for me, even if they could actually find the property... Hope you don't mind; it's just until the hype dies down. You won't even know I'm here!"
The Dark Lord was slowly starting to realise that this apparition was assuredly not a figment of his imagination; the excuse of avoiding the press was one he would never have dreamed up.
The apparition in question was one inexplicably relaxed Harry James Potter. The youth was sprawled sideways in a luxurious wing-back Voldemort had never seen before, head resting against one arm, legs dangling over the other. While this in itself was strange enough, what made the scene even more implausible was Nagini – the Dark Lord's vicious familiar was currently lazily draped over the teen, her bulk nearly obscuring him, both seemingly at ease, the snake's head resting on Potter's shoulder, Potter's book propped up against her curves.
As he stared the pair started conversing as if he weren't there, Harry asking the intelligent serpent questions regarding the language of snakes while Nagini patiently explained the nuances, such as the differences between “den” and “nest”, or how the emphasis of different parts of the word “hatchling” could change the word from a fond moniker to an insult for one who is childish.
“It's a lot like English, ” Harry teased, laughing when she lightly tapped the side of his head with her tail, “but, it seems to me that Parselmagic relies a lot more on the pronunciation of a word that normal magic does... I mean, yeah, if you pronounce a spell wrong in Latin you're sure to fuck up, but in Parselmagic, the enunciation of a word could complete alter the outcome of the spell. ”
“Correct! ”
“So, if I were put magic behind the word “hatchling”, and enunciate the word with a slight drawl and emphasis on the first syllable, I might turn someone into a hatchling, while a smoother tone, with equal enunciation on all the syllables, might... What? What would equal enunciation do?”
Nagini cocked her head to the side, unable to answer, and Voldemort, ever the academic, found himself replying without thought, nor realising that he did so in Parseltongue.
“Equal enunciation would render the word one of fondness and protection, therefore the spell would presumably place the one it is spoken to under the caster's protection.”
Harry nodded thoughtfully, “That makes sense,” he agreed, “but what sort of protection would the spell provide?”
Voldemort frowned, pondering the question, “I'm not entirely sure, it may provide only a token protection, or something far more powerful...”
Harry seemed excited by the prospect of this discovery, “Let's try it!”
“On who, exactly? You? I don't think I could muster such a tone on your behalf.”
Rather than be offended, Harry tilted his head in understanding. His considering gaze landed on Nagini, but he shook away the idea before Voldemort could even protest.
“What about a follower of yours?”
“Do you honestly think I hold any of those idiots in a high enough regard to be fond of them?”
Harry laughed, “Of course not. Hmm, I wonder...”
The boy quickly extracted himself from a grumpy Nagini and, after a moment's thought, conjured a dummy. A few flicks of his wrist later, and an uncanny copy of Sirius Black stood before them. Harry took one look at the face of his dead godfather, winced, shook his head, and quickly transformed the dummy into a copy of Hermione Granger instead.
“Alright, lets see if this works,” Harry took a deep breath, shifted into a steady position, lifted his holly wand, focused his eyes on the likeness of one his best friends, then spoke; “ Hatchling! ”
Voldemort shivered as a wave of magic crashed through the room, and rose non-existent eyebrows when the dummy glowed a bright gold, an aura which pulsed for a few seconds before fading almost completely; there was one more undulation of light, centered around the dummy's ankle, before vanishing entirely, leaving behind the impression of a thin circlet.
“Well, something happened,” Nagini hissed somewhat sarcastically, her scales still quivering.
“Sorry,” the raven-haired teen apologised, rubbing the back of his neck while he grinned sheepishly, “I think I may have put too much magic behind that.”
“And your tone was pronouncedly protective.”
“Yes, well, let's see if it worked.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
Harry shot the Dark Lord a look that seemed to question his intelligence, “ Hmm, maybe you could, I don't know, throw a few spells at it?” he suggested mockingly, arching an eyebrow. Voldemort glared back at the insolent teen for a breath, then turned to the dummy, thinking for a moment.
“I suggest that we start with the lighter curses first, before progressing to the darker ones.”
Harry hummed, seeming to agree, before casting another spell at the dummy, after which a large white circle appeared on the torso, “ That should give us a fair indication of the damage inflicted on the dummy by the spells; if the circle glows green it means the spell has no adverse effects, orange means there's been minimal damage, red means it would have caused serious injury, and black means it would have been fatal.”
“Let's hope for a lot of black then,” Voldemort sneered, shrugging when Harry arched another eyebrow, “ What, I can't very well seem pleased with a spell you just invented, can I?”
“Touche,” Harry sighed, “ Now, get to it!”
Voldemort rolled his eyes, before aiming his wand at the dummy and, far too casually, throwing a tickling charm at it.
They started with spells typically used in school-yard duels; tickling charms, boils hexes, bat-bogey hexes, tripping jinxes, and so it went on. The circle shown a consistent green, not even flickering to orange.
“Alright, so it covers the basics. How about things the light side would use in an all-out fight?”
“Ugh, “light spells”, how plebeian.”
“You're plebeian.”
“Your mother was plebeian.”
“And yet, here we are; I'm healthy as a Hippogriff, and you looked like something Crookshanks hacked up.”
Voldemort snarled and Harry smirked.
“Might I remind you that you are currently in my domain, where no one would find you before you turned to dust?”
“Might I remind you... Okay, I got nuthin'...”
This time is was the Dark Lord who smirked, until Harry turned up his puppy eyes.
“Please don't kill me, oh massively snakey yet handsome Dark Lord!”
Voldemort blinked, then scowled, “ Those should be illegal.”
“So I've been told.”
Voldemort sighed, cocked his head, before he started throwing yet another volley of spells at the dummy, everything from a basic Repulso , to a rather viscous Bombard, to a slashing spell Harry as sure bordered on Grey Magic. The dummy withstood it all and the light never flickered.
“That's slightly disappointing,” the Dark Lord murmured, before shrugging and immediately moving onto darker curses; entrail expelling, bone crushing, blood boiling, a curse that cut of the victim's air supply, one that caused the heart to contract painfully and another that caused the lungs to try escape through the mouth.
“That's just nasty,” Harry muttered when he'd translated the last incantation, shuddering slightly at the thought of his lungs clawing their way up his esophagus.
“It's Dark Magic; it's not meant to be unicorns and rainbows, you know.”
“Oh, I know.”
“So, results?”
“Well, with most of those nasties, the light flickered orange for a few seconds before returning to white or green, but the suffocation curse and that last one seemed to cause more damage; the light stayed orange until you threw the next spell...”
“Hold on, you say the light flickered before turning green again?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you realise what that means?”
“Uh, my spell was a bit off?”
“No, you moron, it suggests that your Parsel-spell may have latent healing abilities!”
“Ah... And how do we prove that?”
“Let's see...” Voldemort narrowed his eyes in thought, ideas flying through his head, all discarded after a moment's consideration, before he landed on the perfect curse.
“Alright, there's a curse that, if left, does one of two things; either it releases it's victim after a period of time, or it slowly eats away at their life force. Either way, the effects can take weeks, even months, to progress. If we're correct, this spell of yours should negate both the long gestation period of the curse, and the more damaging digestion of magic.”
“Alright, curse the dummy.”
Voldemort did as told, and it was only his snake-like reflexes that stopped a suddenly terrified Harry from leaping in the path of the purple flames.
“No! Hermione! NO!”
“Potter! Potter, what on earth are you doing?!” Voldemort turned the hysterical Harry to face him, and froze, immediately what was happening and how foolish he had been to touch the boy; “Oh my, it seems The Boy Who Lived suffers from PTSD...”
Indeed, the boy seemed to be in the middle of a flashback; wide eyes darted around without seeing, sweat ran down his contorted face in rivulets, and his breathing was, at best, erratic, at worst, non-existent. Voldemort knew that he had to snap the teen out of the memory before it progressed much further and the previously-relaxed Harry Potter became violent. But how? A spell might cause the boy to react viciously, and it was bad enough that he was holding him, any other sort of touch may cause Potter yet more distrress.
“Nagini! Help!”
The snake, who'd been roused from her nap by the boy's scream for his friend, was fully awake the moment the words had left her master's mouth, and, like the lightning bolt that adorned Harry's head, she shot off the wing-back, flew across the room, and sunk her teeth into the writhing teen.
The Dark Lord could only stare down at the limp body in his hands. He'd always dreamt of killing the raven-haired young man, but the thought hadn't even crossed his mind today – not even when he'd threatened Harry – and now...
“He will wake,” Nagini hissed, breaking through the myriad of thoughts clouding his mind, and Voldemort shook himself, finding it in himself to lift the teen off his feet, carrying him to the wing-back, which he wordlessly and wandlessly transfigured into a large divan, laying Harry gently down.
“He will wake,” Nagini repeated, “I injected only a little poison into him; enough to subdue him but not kill him. Mind you, he may even wake up immune to my venom.”
“Thank you Nagini,” Voldemort whispered, not tearing crimson eyes away from Harry, and if Nagini was surprised by this, she made no indication of it, simply sliding onto the divan, curling up around the unconscious boy. The Dark Lord glanced at the dummy, coming to a decision. He quickly cast a dictation charm on a quill and roll of parchment and, after making sure that Harry hadn't woken, cast the curse again, carefully recording the results, after which he continued with their little experiment.
When Harry woke, it was with a killer headache, two small puncture wounds on his arm, and inside his own bed in the Gryffindor tower.
He groaned as he levered himself up on his elbows, rubbing his eyes beneath the glasses which had miraculously stayed on his face. It took him a moment to register his surroundings, after which he was out of bed and down the stairs into the Common Room rather quickly. The large room was empty, save for his two best friends, who were seated before the fire, playing a game of chess. Hermione was the first to notice him, and the girl was out of her chair and into his arms a moment later.
“Harry! Oh, we were so worried! Dumbledore had no idea where'd you gone and even Hedwig couldn't find you! And then last night you set off all the alarms in the castle when you somehow appeared in your bed upstairs! What happened?!”
“I.. I can't remember...” Harry ran his hands through his hair in frustration, before looking back up at his friends, only to discover that they were staring at him as if he'd grown a second head.
“What?”
“Mate, I'm not entirely sure what you just said...”
“I just said that I can't remember anything!”
“Harry,” Hermione said gently, “you're speaking Parseltongue.”
He gazed at her uncomprehendingly, how could he be speaking Parseltongue when there... weren't... any... His eyes widened as it all came flooding back.
“I have to -” Hermione shook her head, indicating that they still couldn't understand him and Harry huffed.
“Parchment and a quill, now!”
The pair gasped as a sheet of parchment and a rather fancy quill appeared beside Harry, but he ignored them in favour of grabbing the writing equipment out of the air and hurrying to the nearest desk. His first attempts at writing only drew hissed growls as the letters were obviously of no known alphabet. He focused and soon he was writing in plain English;
I can't tell you what happened before I appeared here last night; I'm not even sure how I got here, but I promise that I was safe where I was. I'm not entirely sure why I'm speaking in Parseltongue, and I'm not sure how long it'll take for it to fade... I'm sorry I worried you guys, but I had to get away from those blasted reporters. I'll warn you next time, 'kay?
While his friends crowded around the parchment, Harry dug through his pockets, heaving a relived sigh when he laid a hand on his wand. It was during this search that he found a sheaf of rolled parchments and a small pendant in the shape of a curled snake that looked very familiar. He slipped the chain attached to the pendant around his neck, then unrolled the parchment. It was written in the same manner his first attempt at a letter to his friends, and after a moment of confused pondering, the curving script slowly shifted into English.
“Parselscript! ” Harry exclaimed, startling his friends, but he was too busy scanning the scrolls to notice. Ron and Hermione watched as their odd friend frowned, then, suddenly, his face lit up like the sun and he pumped the air. They jumped back when he launched himself at the sheet he had written on and began scribbling, crossing out his first few attempts. Eventually he handed the sheet back to Hermione, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he waited for them to read it.
While I was away, it read, I did some research on a branch of magic only myself and Volde You-Know-Who can use – Parselmagic! I thought, since it's so rare, it might give me an edge. Anyway, I discovered that Parselmagic is fairly simple – your incantation depends on what you need (instead of a set, Latin, incantation) and the spell's results often vary according to your enunciation of a word. For instance, the spell I did to get this parchment and quill; my incantation “Parchment and a quill, now!” - the insistence in my tone, and the “now!” caused the objects to materialise, while, for example, the words “Parchment and a quill”, spoken with a patient tone, may merely summon the objects. Understand?
“Blimey mate,” Ron exclaimed, “You sound like Hermione!” The girl in question shushed him, and they carried on reading;
So, while doing research, one of the words I experimented with was “hatchling” - a snake's way of saying young one – and, while incanting it in an insulting tone, may change the person being cast on into a child, speaking it with affection and protectiveness, becomes a protection shield of sorts!
“You created an entirely new spell with just one word?!” Hermione exclaimed, eyes wide, and Harry grinned, nodding.
“And it works?”
Harry gestured for the parchment, and began writing the moment it was slid toward him.
I got someone to test it for me (don't worry about who), and it seems it can withstand even the nastiest of curses. Also, the shield seems to hold healing properties! It can even heal the effects of a prolonged Crucio!
“Harry, this is great, but...” Hermione bit her lip, and Harry knew her eyes were lingering on the words “tested” and “prolonged Crucio”.
He narrowed her eyes at her, “I trust him with this!”
Ron sighed, “I'm not entirely sure, but I think he just told you to drop it.”
Harry sighed and nodded, snatching the parchment, I trust this person, with this at least. May I please cast the spell on the two of you?
“Oh, yes please! Just imagine what we could do with this!”
Harry grinned, pulling his wand, ready to cast the spell.