Work Text:
When Harry first arrives at Hogwarts from the Dursleys’, it feels like paradise. Like a walled garden kept safe and secret from the rest of the world, with as much food as he wants and warm, comfortable beds and green as far as they eye can see outside his window. The people here even remind him a little of animals. Not just because of the House mascots, or wixen like Professor McGonagall who can turn into a cat; the way the students move from place to place makes him think of a school of fish or a flock of birds. Prefects lead the first years around like little ducklings. Hagrid spends so much time in the forest that he’s like a big bear, but just as gentle on the inside too. Professor Dumbledore presides over it all like a wise old owl, perched in his office at the top of the castle.
He’s sorted into Ravenclaw, the House of Knowledge. Which fits him perfectly because wants to spend all seven years reading every book in the library, there’s just so much to learn.
But like any fast-growing plant, he’s soon climbing the walls, longing to expand beyond his boundaries. The more he learns, the more he questions. Why do they call some magic “Dark” just because it uses blood or sacrifice? Why does the government seem mostly concerned with keeping hidden from Muggles, instead of improving life for wixen? Why are the books about all this stuff kept in the Restricted Section—shouldn’t all knowledge be freely available? And the forest—where all the most powerful and beautiful and interesting plants and creatures live, the acromantulae and centaurs and the werewolves who are just normal humans all but twelve days of a year—instead of learning about its wonders safely, they’re just told it’s “Forbidden” without any further explanation.
Professor Quirrell, the Defense teacher, seems like a good person to ask about these things. His name sounds like “squirrel” but he seems more like a snake to Harry, quiet and watchful, with an air of danger he can’t quite put his finger on. Easy to talk to as well, it turns out, like the boa constrictor at the zoo. He agrees with Harry’s opinions—and has many of his own—about his subject, and “Dark” magic, and how the wizarding world could be made a lot better. Harry often lingers after class or even comes back after dinner, discussing books Quirrell lends him from the Restricted Section or practicing magic that is not on the official curriculum, due to what the professor calls “our esteemed headmaster, and his sclerotic worldview.”
It’s exciting, to have a teacher he likes so much, and who seems to like him equally in return.
Especially since his fellow students don’t seem to enjoy his company near as much. They get bored when he asks endless questions in class, or downright offended when he expresses curiosity about Voldemort’s actual beliefs and goals, instead of just hating him and refusing to say his name because he was Dark and killed his parents.
Professor Quirrell knows a lot about Voldemort, and doesn’t at all mind telling Harry. How the Dark Lord definitely made some mistakes but had a perfectly justifiable philosophy: That wixen shouldn’t be content with just hiding in places like Hogsmeade and Diagon that are more like zoos than gardens, artificial holding pens for magnificent creatures such as them, who’ve forgotten that they used to be wild and could be again. That the entire planet has always been magical at its core, nature and magical beings nurturing each other symbiotically, while Muggles are more like parasites, taking and exploiting and killing without ever giving anything back. And that creating a future like that takes a balance of Light and Dark, but the Ministry just called him a “Dark Lord” because the only amount of darkness they would accept in their magic was none.
He says all this in his smooth, confident baritone that doesn’t match his short stature, sprawled lazily on the sofa in his office looking like the king of all he surveys and somehow, weirdly, very handsome, even though he’s objectively plain looking with a whey-colored face, watery blue eyes, and lumpy features. When they’re together, Harry sometimes feels like he’s the snake, being charmed and hypnotized. Quirrell even has that exotic-looking turban that he carries on his head like a crown.
Things get even worse for Harry, socially, when he’s seen talking to a snake on the grounds and refuses to apologize or stop doing it just because it makes some people uncomfortable. Instead he asks if there are any books on Parselmagic he can check out, and now even Madam Pince, who used to love him, glares when he sits down in the library.
He starts staying in Quirrell’s office until well after curfew, preferring to risk detention with someone smart and interesting rather than sit alone in Ravenclaw Tower, being ostracized by people who are supposed to consider wisdom man’s greatest treasure but are afraid of a simple foreign language.
After several hours talking about unrelated things and going over the theory for Confringo (a spell objectively superior to Incendio in every way but classified as “Dark” because it’s powered by the caster’s anger), Quirrell glances at the clock and asks, casually:
“Are you trying to avoid encountering your housemates, Harry?”
Harry’s stomach does a funny little swoop at the use of his first name. Slowly, hesitantly, he nods.
Quirrell hums sympathetically. “Do you want to know a secret?”
His nod is faster this time, although he tries not to seem too eager. “Yes, Sir. I won’t tell anyone.”
His professor leans in, eyes slightly hooded. His turban really does smell like garlic, but Harry thinks it’s pleasant, like Italian food or a spicy stew. When he speaks, it’s in a whisper, even though they’re alone in the room. The syllables are raspy like scales dragging across a leaf-covered forest floor, like—like—
Harry’s eyes and mouth go equally wide.
§I can speak to serpents, too. It does not make us strange or evil; it makes us ssspecial.§
Then Quirrell teaches him a Parselmagic spell to keep his bed warded, so his roommates can’t jinx him in his sleep anymore for being a “Dark wizard”.
When he finally goes to sleep long after midnight, he dreams that Quirrell is sitting on his bed, speaking to him in the language of the snakes. It’s his voice, but the face is different. This professor is tall and aristocratic-looking, all dark eyes and sculpted features, his turban gone and a head of thick, luscious curls on his head in its place. Harry wants to run his fingers through them, but his hands won’t move. Dream-Quirrell chuckles as if reading his mind, and then—
—then he runs his own hand through Harry’s hair, long cool fingers grazing his lightning scar, and it feels so good that he wakes up with tears in his eyes.
*
Not long after, they’re discussing the Forbidden Forest again, and the magical snakes that live there, and how Quirrell met a different centaur colony last year in Albania where they told him about their much more complex theories of Divination, prophecy in particular.
§It changed my entire thinking on the subject,§ he says in Parsel so they can practice, looking meaningfully into Harry’s eyes. §Even the words of the greatest Seer can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. And nothing can stand against the ultimate fate written in the stars.§
§I’d love to meet them,§ Harry says. §Even just the ones in the forest here.§
Quirrell cocks his head. §You do not mind venturing to forbidden places, then?§
§Of course not. Not if they’re off limits for no good reason. We talked about that before.§
§Oh, I remember everything you tell me, Harry. I was just checking.§ He smiles and for a brief moment it’s like he has two faces: the one Harry knows is real and the other one, that matches Quirrell’s voice and personality and the warm, buzzing way he makes Harry feel inside. The one that he sees, more and more frequently now, in his dreams. §In that case, if I may ask…have you ever been curious about the contents of the ‘forbidden corridor’ on the third floor?§
*
It’s no difficulty at all for him to open the door in the dungeons so Professor Quirrell can let in his distraction during dinner, and then slip away while the prefects are leading everyone back to the “safety” of their common rooms (like little ducklings) to meet his mentor on the third floor. The man plays the harp like someone with much longer fingers, and Harry isn’t afraid of a three-headed dog just because it’s associated with the god of the underworld. Catching a flying key is more of a game than a deadly trap for him, and chess actually is a game—one Quirrell is extraordinarily good at. “Along with riddles,” he says when they reach the potion-room, winking as if at a small private joke.
When Harry looks into the Mirror of Erised, the man from his dreams walks up behind him and smiles, patting his shoulder and running his fingers through his hair. With the other hand, he slips something into Harry’s pocket and winks just like Quirrell did a minute ago.
In the real world, he feels something hard and heavy against his leg.
Hardly believing that it worked (but Quirrell said it would, and by this point in his education he trusts his fellow Parselmouth more than everyone else he’s met combined), he beams and pulls the Philosopher’s Stone from his pocket, holding it out on his palm like a red, red apple. “We did it.”
“You did it, you wonderful boy,” Quirrell says, his own smile gone a little pointy around the canines. “And the both of us are going to be very richly rewarded. But before that, I would like to thank you properly…face to face, for the first time.”
He reaches up behind him and—slowly, ever so slowly—begins to undo the turban, unwinding the purple cloth like a cobra awakening from a long slumber.
Harry knows what’s waiting underneath. He’s known it on some level for a while now, he thinks, since Quirrell (not Quirrell, not ever) spoke to him in Parseltongue at the very least. Maybe even since he described, so eloquently, the better, beautiful world of magic that Voldemort was fighting for.
And he’s not afraid. What the Dark Lord offers—freedom, respect and care, endless delicious forbidden knowledge—is far more than he’s ever had before, far too tempting to refuse.
*
To Lord Voldemort—Tom Marvolo Riddle—the boy is an absolute vision with the Stone in his hand offered freely, glistening dark red and almost wet in the firelight, like a pomegranate seed or a freshly torn out heart.
He had a much different plan when he first stumbled upon Quirrell (destiny, ultimate fate written in the stars) in that Albanian forest, it’s true. To simply take the Stone and kill the child on his way out, or, if Dumbledore’s traps proved too devious, use him to get the Stone and then discard him without care. But that was before he met Harry Potter, discovered what he was. Both the simple fact of the soul connection—he speaks to snakes, we share our dreams—and the mind that was all Harry, a rare thing so much like Tom’s own at that age and yet unique, unknowable, irresistible.
It was always dangerous, inviting another to join you in your grand design, and as an equal partner no less; just look what happened to Gellert Grindelwald. But Harry is a seed, a fruit not yet ripe, pure potential in human form. And Tom, fallen angel that he is, has never been immune to temptation.
There will be time for that fruit to ripen to fullness; time is the one thing the Stone bestows above all others. Time for him to fashion himself a new body that truly fits the shape of his soul—the shape Harry has already glimpsed, in his dreams and in the Mirror, because a part of that soul is nestled invisibly inside him, like a stone within a cherry. Time for Harry to grow into his own adult body and preserve it alongside Tom’s with the Elixir of Life. And then, endless centuries; to remake the entire world into the paradise they’d both once, as naive orphans desperate for a home, thought Hogwarts was. No one can cast them out; they will jump, together.
All of eternity will be their garden, and they will cultivate it however they like.