lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-07-09 02:43 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-07-09 02:43 pm
Entry tags:
[Songs of Summer]: The Task of Being Emerald, Harry/Salazar, PG-13
Title: The Task of Being Emerald
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Harry/Salazar
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, references to canonical character deaths, angst
Wordcount: 3500
Summary: After the Battle of Hogwarts, the school isn’t healing, with cracks both in the walls and among the defenders plaguing the attempt to repair it and open it in time for September. Harry, having been told by Dumbledore’s portrait of a ritual that might summon a Founder back and repair at least the physical cracks, undertakes it. Dumbledore believes he might summon Godric Gryffindor. Harry, deep in his bones, knows better.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. A couple people requested Harry/Salazar, so this is for them. The title comes from a quote by Marcus Aurelius, below.
The Task of Being Emerald
“No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.”
-Marcus Aurelius.
Harry began his walk at the top of the Astronomy Tower.
He stood there for long moments, looking at the stars. He had done this before, and never experienced anything like the whirl that Dumbledore had said would consume him. Then again, he had never done this with the intention of performing a magical ritual that would repair the school before.
The Tower seemed to tremble under his feet. Harry tensed and yanked his mind back to the ritual. The Tower hadn’t fallen, and the trembles were magical quakes, not physical ones, reactions to all the curses and deaths released here. But it was a preview of what might happen if Harry wasn’t successful in repairing the cracks in the school.
Physical and otherwise, Harry thought, and then the stars above did seem to begin whirling around him, slow and stately. Harry put his hands on the Tower’s stone wall without taking his gaze from the sky. A bright fan of silver emerged, a slowly turning galaxy that was no galaxy Harry was familiar with.
Prickles surged up Harry’s spine, and cold deeper than the month of July in Scotland usually produced. He swallowed and took a slow step back, not removing his gaze from the stars until his foot bumped against something. Then he looked down.
As Dumbledore’s portrait had promised, there was a new stairway there, a set of silver steps outlining blackness. Harry took a step forwards. In instants, he was walking down them, his legs moving easily in a way that wasn’t quite his choice. Harry clenched his fingers into the center of his palms and kept walking.
*
“And you really believe this could help?” Harry stared at Dumbledore’s portrait. Headmistress McGonagall had told Harry that the portrait wanted to speak with him, and only him. She’d left the office with a squeeze of one hand on his shoulder and an invitation to call her Minerva, which Harry would never be able to do.
“Yes, I think so.” Professor Dumbledore looked old and worn-down, the way Harry hadn’t seen him since the day he’d used the Elder Wand to heal the holly wand. “Minerva tells me that no matter what spells they use, the cracks in the walls, the tremors, the disrupted wards, they’re all getting worse.”
Harry nodded. “And people snap at each other, grief gets sharper, there are entire areas like the Slytherin common room that no one can stand in without bursting into tears,” he whispered. He took a deep breath. “Professor. Do you think it was because…Voldemort died here? And so did six of the Horcruxes? Does it have something to do with that?”
“I think it probably does,” Dumbledore said quietly, and then smiled at him. “But I can’t exactly get out of my portrait to do research as I once did, and I don’t understand the mechanics, even with as much as I learned about Horcruxes in my efforts to stop Tom. I do think that’s why you would be the best choice for the ritual, however. You bore a Horcrux, you destroyed one other, and you were in the presence of some extremely powerful magic during the battle.”
The Deathly Hallows, Harry thought, but didn’t say aloud. He never mentioned them to anyone except Ron and Hermione, and then only when they weren’t in Hogwarts. He nodded. “All right, sir. Tell me what I need to do.”
“The Founders were intimately magically connected with the school, as they raised the first wards,” Dumbledore began. “Summoning one of them back is not to be done lightly, and can only be done when the school is in danger, not people in general or even the students. I think this ritual may call Godric Gryffindor back to us…”
*
Another tremor struck as Harry was walking down the corridor where the Room of Requirement was, or had been. The stairs had dumped him from one place to another without going through all the ones in between, which hadn’t surprised Harry. He’d already known this wouldn’t be a walk conducted entirely on a mortal plane.
Harry reached out and put a hand on the wall where the door to the room always would have appeared, closing his eyes. The tremors were already retreating, but touching the stone like this, he knew he wasn’t imagining the wails of sorrow through the walls. The Room of Requirement had been unusable since the Fiendfyre.
“It was too much,” Harry whispered, the words Dumbledore had told him he would have to speak at some point during the walk. Harry hadn’t thought he would be doing them this early, but, well, he needed to. “It cost too much, my survival, the defeat of Voldemort. Come back, one who can support the school. Come back.”
The wails quieted. Harry straightened up and walked on.
It was only a few minutes later, as he was on the moving staircase up to the Headmistress’s office, that he realized he had spoken the last words in Parseltongue.
*
“I must ask before you begin, Harry. The ritual may call back the Founder to incarnate into your body, rather than simply summoning them back as a separate being.”
Harry nodded, looking up at Professor Dumbledore’s portrait. His face was sorrowful, now, but Harry knew he would still ask. At least he was asking, instead of just coming up with a plan he wouldn’t tell Harry anything about and expecting him to somehow carry it through.
“I want to live,” Harry said quietly, his mind on the taste of food after the battle, the warmth of Hermione’s hugs, playing Quidditch with Ron. “But I also want Hogwarts to be healed, and to be here for kids who need it the way I did. That’s the stronger desire.”
Professor Dumbledore closed his eyes. “Thank you, my boy,” he whispered. “No one has given up more than you did, and I honor your sacrifice.” He took a breath in a way that reminded Harry of how rarely he’d heard a portrait do that. “I believe that we have the best chance of summoning Godric Gryffindor back if the ritual does use your body, as you are connected to his family, distantly, by blood, and so much an embodiment of his House’s principles.”
Harry tried to imagine transforming into Godric Gryffindor. He wondered if it would hurt. Then he shook off the notion. He had more important things to think about. “How do I begin the ritual, sir?”
*
When Harry stepped into the Headmistress’s office, he wasn’t surprised, at least with part of him, to see that the walls were empty of portraits. The walls were also sketches of blank space, and the office had eight of them. Harry turned in a slow circle, watching everything with mild interest.
The wall that had faced him when he stepped through the door was red, the one next to it gold. Then blue, then bronze, then yellow, then black. Harry completed the slow circle and saw the last two walls glowing emerald and silver.
The emerald wall was brighter than anything else.
Harry swallowed. I don’t think it’s Godric Gryffindor I’m calling back, sir.
Professor Dumbledore had told him what to do next, but he had done it predicated on the notion that Harry would be summoning Gryffindor. He would touch either the red wall or the golden one, depending on which was brighter. Professor Dumbledore hadn’t known which color indicated which quality.
But it wasn’t going to matter. Because the emerald wall truly was emerald, not just green, a glittering, faceted brightness that seemed to lead Harry’s eyes into the heart of a jewel. Harry took a step forwards and reached out.
His fingers brushed the wall.
*
“Well, at least we can be completely sure the Horcrux is gone,” Hermione had said, the night before Harry had decided to begin the ritual. He’d told her and Ron, of course.
“What do you mean?” Harry blinked up at her from the middle of a sprawl of parchments and books on the floor of Ron’s room in the Burrow.
Hermione sat down next to him and smoothed her hand over his hair, lingering for a second over his scar. It had faded so much since the battle that Harry thought she would say that was her proof for the Horcrux being completely gone, but instead, she whispered, “You don’t speak Parseltongue anymore.”
Harry jerked his eyes away from her and swallowed. He thought about how he had expected to discover the same thing, and then had heard a grass snake behind the Burrow complaining about its peeling skin. He thought about how the curl of serpent-speaking seemed more natural on the back of his tongue now than it had before Voldemort’s death.
He thought about how “don’t” wasn’t the same thing as “can’t.”
“Yeah.” Harry had forced a weak smile. Hermione thankfully couldn’t see how weak it was as long as Harry kept his head bowed. “That’s true. At least we don’t have to deal with someone who speaks Parseltongue anymore.”
*
The emerald wall sang when Harry touched it, a green splintering power that burrowed all the way into his bones.
Harry gasped in shock. Maybe this was the beginning of the Founder incarnating into his body, he thought inanely, and it wasn’t painful, it just felt as if he were spinning rapidly while standing in place and his eyes were being assaulted by light and he could feel someone touching the part of his soul where Parseltongue lived—
How did I know that? Harry wondered, dazed, and blinked, hard, and then opened his eyes.
He was no longer standing in the Headmistress’s office. He also wasn’t a Founder, as far as he could tell. Instead, he was in a room he had never seen before, surrounded with curving and perfectly bare stone walls, like being inside a hollow egg. The only furniture seemed to be a bed carved of black wood and ornamented with crawling snakes on the far side of the room. It had no door.
And standing in front of him was a man Harry didn’t need an introduction to. He found his hand reaching for his wand and snatched it back just in time. He managed to bow, stiffly, keeping his eyes on the floor.
“Salazar Slytherin?” he asked, still not looking up. The man’s expression was maybe a little less stern than the one on his face in the Chamber’s statue, but not by much.
“I am.” The man answered in Parseltongue that seemed thicker, somehow, than Voldemort’s or Harry’s, sliding around corners and bubbling up in his throat. “You have summoned me?”
“Yes.” Harry straightened up and eyed Slytherin warily. He was wearing thick green robes trimmed with silver fur and embroidered, or at any rate decorated, with silver symbols that flashed back and forth as he shifted his weight. Harry wasn’t sure what they meant, but they tugged at his eyes in an unpleasant way. Slytherin’s hair was as dark and his eyes were as green as Harry’s. “Hogwarts is dying, and we can’t seem to repair it. My Headmaster told me about a ritual that could summon you back.”
“Me specifically?”
Slytherin’s eyes and voice might, sort of, resemble Harry’s, but there was a dangerous quality to his tone right now that Harry knew he had never had himself in his life. He rolled his shoulders and shook his head. “No, sir. It was a ritual to summon any Founder of Hogwarts. My Headmaster actually thought it was going to be Gryffindor and he would reincarnate in my body.”
“Why, when you speak my language?”
“I’m in Gryffindor’s House and his distant descendant.”
“That makes no difference. Have people forgotten what Parseltongue means?”
Harry swallowed. Oh, great. This was going to be some other weird thing that he totally should have known about before jumping into it, wasn’t it? Just like revealing that he was a Parselmouth in the Dueling Club second year. “I think we must have, sir. The only recent well-known Parselmouth was one of your descendants who was feared as the most terrible Dark Lord most people ever knew.”
Slytherin tapped his fingers on his side for a long moment. Harry ignored the temptation to follow the movement of his fingers, because it would have meant also following the movements of the appearing and disappearing symbols. Harry had the impression that that would be a Very Bad Idea.
“And yet, the Dark Lord is the one who summoned me back?”
Harry blinked, and then laughed. “Sorry, sir,” he said, clearing his throat, although Slytherin didn’t seem offended one way or the other. He just kept staring at Harry. “I’m not the Dark Lord. I was his prophesied enemy, and I carried a Horcrux in my head. That’s the reason I can speak Parseltongue. We actually think the damage to the school happened because the last battle against him was fought here, and six of his Horcruxes were destroyed here—”
“Six.”
Slytherin’s tone was flat. Silver fires sparked to life along the walls as Harry watched, and then fizzled out again. Slytherin gave a low sound that was more snarl than hiss.
Harry almost wished Voldemort was still alive just so he could see what his ancestor thought of Horcruxes.
“And a living one.”
“Two living ones,” Harry corrected, just because he didn’t want Slytherin to find this out later and feel like he’d been lied to. “The other was a huge snake, his familiar.”
“How did you destroy them?”
“One with Fiendfyre, the others with basilisk fangs or the Sword of Gryffindor that was imbued with basilisk venom. And I stood in front of the Dark Lord and let him shoot a Killing Curse at me. That took care of the Horcrux.”
Slytherin tilted his head to the side, eyebrows rising. “And yet, you still speak my noble tongue.”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know why. Any connection I have to Slytherin blood is really distant. Voldemort was definitely the most direct descendant. His mother and her family spoke Parseltongue.”
Slytherin rapped his fingers on his leg again. Harry shifted his weight from side to side, wondering why Slytherin wasn’t asking more questions about the school. But then, he probably did want to know more about his descendants. Harry had to admit he would be curious about what modern Potters were doing if someone woke him up a thousand years later.
“Parseltongue means that someone is bound to defend others,” Slytherin said abruptly. “To heal. To lift their hands in protection of themselves, yes, but also people who are kind to them, whom they are allied with, and who are helpless.”
Harry blinked. “All right, yeah, that is really different from what it means now. Especially since I thought you didn’t like or want to defend Muggleborns.”
Slytherin turned to face him fully again, and Harry shivered. His eyes had a depth and color to them that made Harry think other people wouldn’t have praised his eyes so much if they could have seen Slytherin’s.
“I did not care for blood among mages in that way,” Salazar said quietly. “But I counted Muggles among my enemies, and it sounds like my descendants have gone too far and twisted the Slytherin legacy. I will make up for it.” He took a breath. “You came here prepared to sacrifice your life and your body to repair Hogwarts. What else will you sacrifice?”
“I mean, I don’t know?” Harry stumbled on the words. “I don’t know what else I could have given up. My magic? But I thought that would go if the Founder called back was going to inhabit my body.”
And he didn’t have a guarantee yet that that wouldn’t happen, he thought. They were in this doorless room and might not be able to leave unless Slytherin possessed him. He braced himself.
Slytherin stretched out his hand. “Are you prepared to sacrifice your future?” he asked.
“Isn’t that the same as my life?”
Slytherin snapped his head back and forth, his hair coiling behind him in crisp dark curls. “No. I mean, are you ready to sacrifice the future you might have planned on to support the legacy of bearing the gift of Parseltongue? To defend the kind and the allied and the helpless? To heal?”
Harry breathed out slowly. Hadn’t he come here intending to do that? And he had wanted to be an Auror, which was sort of the same thing, and he had considered being a Healer.
“Yes,” he said, lifting his head, trying to ignore the feeling that Slytherin loomed over him for all that he wasn’t much taller than Harry. “I can do that.”
“Are you willing to bear the name of Slytherin for the rest of your life?”
“Are you possessing me, then?”
“No. I will be coming back with you. But I cannot repair Hogwarts without fully establishing the Slytherin legacy, and that means both allies and a family. Someone who can help me flourish.” Slytherin slid gentle fingers suddenly over Harry’s cheek, and left behind what felt like a tingling stream of those silver symbols. “I have not even asked your name.”
“Harry Potter.”
“Are you willing to take on the name of Slytherin?”
Harry braced himself, thought with longing of James Potter and the Potter ancestors he had only ever seen in the Mirror of Erised, and nodded. “I am willing.”
Slytherin smiled, a small thing that still completely altered his face away from Harry’s memory of the statue in the Chamber. He moved forwards, reaching out to comb his fingers through Harry’s hair for a moment, and then leaned forwards and kissed him.
Harry started. The press of lips against his own made magic spark through him, and move down his body, and when he broke free and looked down, he saw silver sparks dancing through the fabric.
“I—what? Why a kiss?” he asked, and was amazed that Parseltongue had a word for that. Then again, there were lots of other things it shouldn’t have had words for, like “Dark Lord.”
“It is a way of bonding you into the House of Slytherin,” Slytherin said simply, and stretched out his hand. “Come, Harry. We should return to the surface and begin the task of repairing Hogwarts.”
Harry blinked, a bit dazed, and hid the fact that he wouldn’t mind getting more kisses like that in the future. It wasn’t important right now. “All right,” he whispered, and clasped Slytherin’s hand.
*
Salazar had never tended to act on impulse. He left that to Godric and his kind.
But he had never before had a young Parselmouth appear before him, blazing with magic and prepared to surrender his life to help Salazar’s school if need be. He had never expected to meet someone who had come back to life from beyond death. He had never expected, when he had become a statue in the depths of the school and spread the rumor that he had “left,” to wake again.
But here he was, standing on the top of what seemed to be a version of the Starry Tower with the most amazing person he had ever met or heard of holding his hand, and feeling the groaning wrack of Hogwarts below.
It was as Harry had told him. It was worse than Harry had told him.
Salazar nodded. They had much work to do. And he had told Harry the truth. To bear Parseltongue was to be a defender, unless one turned against his essential nature, the way it seemed this “Voldemort” had done. They needed to create a strong Slytherin line to make up for what had happened and the prejudice his line had become heir to.
But he had been a man who created his own advantages, too. As a bearer of Parseltongue, he was committed to defense; there was no other way that he could exist. That did not mean he must become a martyr or a saint. He could have what he wanted, as long as it did not violate the terms of the bargain created by the language he carried on his tongue.
Salazar shot a glance sideways. Harry was touching his robes and watching the symbols that danced there with puzzlement.
Salazar wished to have a strong House. He wished to bind the strongest and strangest wizard he had ever met into his House and teach him what Parseltongue meant and ensure that Harry Slytherin could never go far from him again.
It would not be a one-sided bargain. Harry would be taught to wield his power, what his Parseltongue meant, how to come back from being broken-down himself as well as how to bring the school back. Salazar would make sure that Harrydid not become a saint or martyr, either.
In all, Salazar thought it would work out well for both of them.
He swept his arm in front of them. “Will you follow me, Harry Slytherin?”
Harry muttered something that ended with the word “strange,” but stepped forwards without hesitation. Salazar enjoyed the sparks that cascaded down his arm from the touch, only partially magical ones, and escorted Harry towards the entrance into the castle.
They had much work to do, and greater strength to find.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Harry/Salazar
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, references to canonical character deaths, angst
Wordcount: 3500
Summary: After the Battle of Hogwarts, the school isn’t healing, with cracks both in the walls and among the defenders plaguing the attempt to repair it and open it in time for September. Harry, having been told by Dumbledore’s portrait of a ritual that might summon a Founder back and repair at least the physical cracks, undertakes it. Dumbledore believes he might summon Godric Gryffindor. Harry, deep in his bones, knows better.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. A couple people requested Harry/Salazar, so this is for them. The title comes from a quote by Marcus Aurelius, below.
The Task of Being Emerald
“No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.”
-Marcus Aurelius.
Harry began his walk at the top of the Astronomy Tower.
He stood there for long moments, looking at the stars. He had done this before, and never experienced anything like the whirl that Dumbledore had said would consume him. Then again, he had never done this with the intention of performing a magical ritual that would repair the school before.
The Tower seemed to tremble under his feet. Harry tensed and yanked his mind back to the ritual. The Tower hadn’t fallen, and the trembles were magical quakes, not physical ones, reactions to all the curses and deaths released here. But it was a preview of what might happen if Harry wasn’t successful in repairing the cracks in the school.
Physical and otherwise, Harry thought, and then the stars above did seem to begin whirling around him, slow and stately. Harry put his hands on the Tower’s stone wall without taking his gaze from the sky. A bright fan of silver emerged, a slowly turning galaxy that was no galaxy Harry was familiar with.
Prickles surged up Harry’s spine, and cold deeper than the month of July in Scotland usually produced. He swallowed and took a slow step back, not removing his gaze from the stars until his foot bumped against something. Then he looked down.
As Dumbledore’s portrait had promised, there was a new stairway there, a set of silver steps outlining blackness. Harry took a step forwards. In instants, he was walking down them, his legs moving easily in a way that wasn’t quite his choice. Harry clenched his fingers into the center of his palms and kept walking.
*
“And you really believe this could help?” Harry stared at Dumbledore’s portrait. Headmistress McGonagall had told Harry that the portrait wanted to speak with him, and only him. She’d left the office with a squeeze of one hand on his shoulder and an invitation to call her Minerva, which Harry would never be able to do.
“Yes, I think so.” Professor Dumbledore looked old and worn-down, the way Harry hadn’t seen him since the day he’d used the Elder Wand to heal the holly wand. “Minerva tells me that no matter what spells they use, the cracks in the walls, the tremors, the disrupted wards, they’re all getting worse.”
Harry nodded. “And people snap at each other, grief gets sharper, there are entire areas like the Slytherin common room that no one can stand in without bursting into tears,” he whispered. He took a deep breath. “Professor. Do you think it was because…Voldemort died here? And so did six of the Horcruxes? Does it have something to do with that?”
“I think it probably does,” Dumbledore said quietly, and then smiled at him. “But I can’t exactly get out of my portrait to do research as I once did, and I don’t understand the mechanics, even with as much as I learned about Horcruxes in my efforts to stop Tom. I do think that’s why you would be the best choice for the ritual, however. You bore a Horcrux, you destroyed one other, and you were in the presence of some extremely powerful magic during the battle.”
The Deathly Hallows, Harry thought, but didn’t say aloud. He never mentioned them to anyone except Ron and Hermione, and then only when they weren’t in Hogwarts. He nodded. “All right, sir. Tell me what I need to do.”
“The Founders were intimately magically connected with the school, as they raised the first wards,” Dumbledore began. “Summoning one of them back is not to be done lightly, and can only be done when the school is in danger, not people in general or even the students. I think this ritual may call Godric Gryffindor back to us…”
*
Another tremor struck as Harry was walking down the corridor where the Room of Requirement was, or had been. The stairs had dumped him from one place to another without going through all the ones in between, which hadn’t surprised Harry. He’d already known this wouldn’t be a walk conducted entirely on a mortal plane.
Harry reached out and put a hand on the wall where the door to the room always would have appeared, closing his eyes. The tremors were already retreating, but touching the stone like this, he knew he wasn’t imagining the wails of sorrow through the walls. The Room of Requirement had been unusable since the Fiendfyre.
“It was too much,” Harry whispered, the words Dumbledore had told him he would have to speak at some point during the walk. Harry hadn’t thought he would be doing them this early, but, well, he needed to. “It cost too much, my survival, the defeat of Voldemort. Come back, one who can support the school. Come back.”
The wails quieted. Harry straightened up and walked on.
It was only a few minutes later, as he was on the moving staircase up to the Headmistress’s office, that he realized he had spoken the last words in Parseltongue.
*
“I must ask before you begin, Harry. The ritual may call back the Founder to incarnate into your body, rather than simply summoning them back as a separate being.”
Harry nodded, looking up at Professor Dumbledore’s portrait. His face was sorrowful, now, but Harry knew he would still ask. At least he was asking, instead of just coming up with a plan he wouldn’t tell Harry anything about and expecting him to somehow carry it through.
“I want to live,” Harry said quietly, his mind on the taste of food after the battle, the warmth of Hermione’s hugs, playing Quidditch with Ron. “But I also want Hogwarts to be healed, and to be here for kids who need it the way I did. That’s the stronger desire.”
Professor Dumbledore closed his eyes. “Thank you, my boy,” he whispered. “No one has given up more than you did, and I honor your sacrifice.” He took a breath in a way that reminded Harry of how rarely he’d heard a portrait do that. “I believe that we have the best chance of summoning Godric Gryffindor back if the ritual does use your body, as you are connected to his family, distantly, by blood, and so much an embodiment of his House’s principles.”
Harry tried to imagine transforming into Godric Gryffindor. He wondered if it would hurt. Then he shook off the notion. He had more important things to think about. “How do I begin the ritual, sir?”
*
When Harry stepped into the Headmistress’s office, he wasn’t surprised, at least with part of him, to see that the walls were empty of portraits. The walls were also sketches of blank space, and the office had eight of them. Harry turned in a slow circle, watching everything with mild interest.
The wall that had faced him when he stepped through the door was red, the one next to it gold. Then blue, then bronze, then yellow, then black. Harry completed the slow circle and saw the last two walls glowing emerald and silver.
The emerald wall was brighter than anything else.
Harry swallowed. I don’t think it’s Godric Gryffindor I’m calling back, sir.
Professor Dumbledore had told him what to do next, but he had done it predicated on the notion that Harry would be summoning Gryffindor. He would touch either the red wall or the golden one, depending on which was brighter. Professor Dumbledore hadn’t known which color indicated which quality.
But it wasn’t going to matter. Because the emerald wall truly was emerald, not just green, a glittering, faceted brightness that seemed to lead Harry’s eyes into the heart of a jewel. Harry took a step forwards and reached out.
His fingers brushed the wall.
*
“Well, at least we can be completely sure the Horcrux is gone,” Hermione had said, the night before Harry had decided to begin the ritual. He’d told her and Ron, of course.
“What do you mean?” Harry blinked up at her from the middle of a sprawl of parchments and books on the floor of Ron’s room in the Burrow.
Hermione sat down next to him and smoothed her hand over his hair, lingering for a second over his scar. It had faded so much since the battle that Harry thought she would say that was her proof for the Horcrux being completely gone, but instead, she whispered, “You don’t speak Parseltongue anymore.”
Harry jerked his eyes away from her and swallowed. He thought about how he had expected to discover the same thing, and then had heard a grass snake behind the Burrow complaining about its peeling skin. He thought about how the curl of serpent-speaking seemed more natural on the back of his tongue now than it had before Voldemort’s death.
He thought about how “don’t” wasn’t the same thing as “can’t.”
“Yeah.” Harry had forced a weak smile. Hermione thankfully couldn’t see how weak it was as long as Harry kept his head bowed. “That’s true. At least we don’t have to deal with someone who speaks Parseltongue anymore.”
*
The emerald wall sang when Harry touched it, a green splintering power that burrowed all the way into his bones.
Harry gasped in shock. Maybe this was the beginning of the Founder incarnating into his body, he thought inanely, and it wasn’t painful, it just felt as if he were spinning rapidly while standing in place and his eyes were being assaulted by light and he could feel someone touching the part of his soul where Parseltongue lived—
How did I know that? Harry wondered, dazed, and blinked, hard, and then opened his eyes.
He was no longer standing in the Headmistress’s office. He also wasn’t a Founder, as far as he could tell. Instead, he was in a room he had never seen before, surrounded with curving and perfectly bare stone walls, like being inside a hollow egg. The only furniture seemed to be a bed carved of black wood and ornamented with crawling snakes on the far side of the room. It had no door.
And standing in front of him was a man Harry didn’t need an introduction to. He found his hand reaching for his wand and snatched it back just in time. He managed to bow, stiffly, keeping his eyes on the floor.
“Salazar Slytherin?” he asked, still not looking up. The man’s expression was maybe a little less stern than the one on his face in the Chamber’s statue, but not by much.
“I am.” The man answered in Parseltongue that seemed thicker, somehow, than Voldemort’s or Harry’s, sliding around corners and bubbling up in his throat. “You have summoned me?”
“Yes.” Harry straightened up and eyed Slytherin warily. He was wearing thick green robes trimmed with silver fur and embroidered, or at any rate decorated, with silver symbols that flashed back and forth as he shifted his weight. Harry wasn’t sure what they meant, but they tugged at his eyes in an unpleasant way. Slytherin’s hair was as dark and his eyes were as green as Harry’s. “Hogwarts is dying, and we can’t seem to repair it. My Headmaster told me about a ritual that could summon you back.”
“Me specifically?”
Slytherin’s eyes and voice might, sort of, resemble Harry’s, but there was a dangerous quality to his tone right now that Harry knew he had never had himself in his life. He rolled his shoulders and shook his head. “No, sir. It was a ritual to summon any Founder of Hogwarts. My Headmaster actually thought it was going to be Gryffindor and he would reincarnate in my body.”
“Why, when you speak my language?”
“I’m in Gryffindor’s House and his distant descendant.”
“That makes no difference. Have people forgotten what Parseltongue means?”
Harry swallowed. Oh, great. This was going to be some other weird thing that he totally should have known about before jumping into it, wasn’t it? Just like revealing that he was a Parselmouth in the Dueling Club second year. “I think we must have, sir. The only recent well-known Parselmouth was one of your descendants who was feared as the most terrible Dark Lord most people ever knew.”
Slytherin tapped his fingers on his side for a long moment. Harry ignored the temptation to follow the movement of his fingers, because it would have meant also following the movements of the appearing and disappearing symbols. Harry had the impression that that would be a Very Bad Idea.
“And yet, the Dark Lord is the one who summoned me back?”
Harry blinked, and then laughed. “Sorry, sir,” he said, clearing his throat, although Slytherin didn’t seem offended one way or the other. He just kept staring at Harry. “I’m not the Dark Lord. I was his prophesied enemy, and I carried a Horcrux in my head. That’s the reason I can speak Parseltongue. We actually think the damage to the school happened because the last battle against him was fought here, and six of his Horcruxes were destroyed here—”
“Six.”
Slytherin’s tone was flat. Silver fires sparked to life along the walls as Harry watched, and then fizzled out again. Slytherin gave a low sound that was more snarl than hiss.
Harry almost wished Voldemort was still alive just so he could see what his ancestor thought of Horcruxes.
“And a living one.”
“Two living ones,” Harry corrected, just because he didn’t want Slytherin to find this out later and feel like he’d been lied to. “The other was a huge snake, his familiar.”
“How did you destroy them?”
“One with Fiendfyre, the others with basilisk fangs or the Sword of Gryffindor that was imbued with basilisk venom. And I stood in front of the Dark Lord and let him shoot a Killing Curse at me. That took care of the Horcrux.”
Slytherin tilted his head to the side, eyebrows rising. “And yet, you still speak my noble tongue.”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know why. Any connection I have to Slytherin blood is really distant. Voldemort was definitely the most direct descendant. His mother and her family spoke Parseltongue.”
Slytherin rapped his fingers on his leg again. Harry shifted his weight from side to side, wondering why Slytherin wasn’t asking more questions about the school. But then, he probably did want to know more about his descendants. Harry had to admit he would be curious about what modern Potters were doing if someone woke him up a thousand years later.
“Parseltongue means that someone is bound to defend others,” Slytherin said abruptly. “To heal. To lift their hands in protection of themselves, yes, but also people who are kind to them, whom they are allied with, and who are helpless.”
Harry blinked. “All right, yeah, that is really different from what it means now. Especially since I thought you didn’t like or want to defend Muggleborns.”
Slytherin turned to face him fully again, and Harry shivered. His eyes had a depth and color to them that made Harry think other people wouldn’t have praised his eyes so much if they could have seen Slytherin’s.
“I did not care for blood among mages in that way,” Salazar said quietly. “But I counted Muggles among my enemies, and it sounds like my descendants have gone too far and twisted the Slytherin legacy. I will make up for it.” He took a breath. “You came here prepared to sacrifice your life and your body to repair Hogwarts. What else will you sacrifice?”
“I mean, I don’t know?” Harry stumbled on the words. “I don’t know what else I could have given up. My magic? But I thought that would go if the Founder called back was going to inhabit my body.”
And he didn’t have a guarantee yet that that wouldn’t happen, he thought. They were in this doorless room and might not be able to leave unless Slytherin possessed him. He braced himself.
Slytherin stretched out his hand. “Are you prepared to sacrifice your future?” he asked.
“Isn’t that the same as my life?”
Slytherin snapped his head back and forth, his hair coiling behind him in crisp dark curls. “No. I mean, are you ready to sacrifice the future you might have planned on to support the legacy of bearing the gift of Parseltongue? To defend the kind and the allied and the helpless? To heal?”
Harry breathed out slowly. Hadn’t he come here intending to do that? And he had wanted to be an Auror, which was sort of the same thing, and he had considered being a Healer.
“Yes,” he said, lifting his head, trying to ignore the feeling that Slytherin loomed over him for all that he wasn’t much taller than Harry. “I can do that.”
“Are you willing to bear the name of Slytherin for the rest of your life?”
“Are you possessing me, then?”
“No. I will be coming back with you. But I cannot repair Hogwarts without fully establishing the Slytherin legacy, and that means both allies and a family. Someone who can help me flourish.” Slytherin slid gentle fingers suddenly over Harry’s cheek, and left behind what felt like a tingling stream of those silver symbols. “I have not even asked your name.”
“Harry Potter.”
“Are you willing to take on the name of Slytherin?”
Harry braced himself, thought with longing of James Potter and the Potter ancestors he had only ever seen in the Mirror of Erised, and nodded. “I am willing.”
Slytherin smiled, a small thing that still completely altered his face away from Harry’s memory of the statue in the Chamber. He moved forwards, reaching out to comb his fingers through Harry’s hair for a moment, and then leaned forwards and kissed him.
Harry started. The press of lips against his own made magic spark through him, and move down his body, and when he broke free and looked down, he saw silver sparks dancing through the fabric.
“I—what? Why a kiss?” he asked, and was amazed that Parseltongue had a word for that. Then again, there were lots of other things it shouldn’t have had words for, like “Dark Lord.”
“It is a way of bonding you into the House of Slytherin,” Slytherin said simply, and stretched out his hand. “Come, Harry. We should return to the surface and begin the task of repairing Hogwarts.”
Harry blinked, a bit dazed, and hid the fact that he wouldn’t mind getting more kisses like that in the future. It wasn’t important right now. “All right,” he whispered, and clasped Slytherin’s hand.
*
Salazar had never tended to act on impulse. He left that to Godric and his kind.
But he had never before had a young Parselmouth appear before him, blazing with magic and prepared to surrender his life to help Salazar’s school if need be. He had never expected to meet someone who had come back to life from beyond death. He had never expected, when he had become a statue in the depths of the school and spread the rumor that he had “left,” to wake again.
But here he was, standing on the top of what seemed to be a version of the Starry Tower with the most amazing person he had ever met or heard of holding his hand, and feeling the groaning wrack of Hogwarts below.
It was as Harry had told him. It was worse than Harry had told him.
Salazar nodded. They had much work to do. And he had told Harry the truth. To bear Parseltongue was to be a defender, unless one turned against his essential nature, the way it seemed this “Voldemort” had done. They needed to create a strong Slytherin line to make up for what had happened and the prejudice his line had become heir to.
But he had been a man who created his own advantages, too. As a bearer of Parseltongue, he was committed to defense; there was no other way that he could exist. That did not mean he must become a martyr or a saint. He could have what he wanted, as long as it did not violate the terms of the bargain created by the language he carried on his tongue.
Salazar shot a glance sideways. Harry was touching his robes and watching the symbols that danced there with puzzlement.
Salazar wished to have a strong House. He wished to bind the strongest and strangest wizard he had ever met into his House and teach him what Parseltongue meant and ensure that Harry Slytherin could never go far from him again.
It would not be a one-sided bargain. Harry would be taught to wield his power, what his Parseltongue meant, how to come back from being broken-down himself as well as how to bring the school back. Salazar would make sure that Harrydid not become a saint or martyr, either.
In all, Salazar thought it would work out well for both of them.
He swept his arm in front of them. “Will you follow me, Harry Slytherin?”
Harry muttered something that ended with the word “strange,” but stepped forwards without hesitation. Salazar enjoyed the sparks that cascaded down his arm from the touch, only partially magical ones, and escorted Harry towards the entrance into the castle.
They had much work to do, and greater strength to find.
The End.