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lomonaaerenTitle: Song Beneath Silence
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Background James/Lily, otherwise gen
Content Notes: AU (Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived), angst, creature fic, non-linear narrative, Slytherin Harry
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 3900
Summary: AU. Harry grew up as the much-loved eldest child of James and Lily Potter, with his younger brother being the Boy-Who-Lived. He had a sibling, he had friends, he had magic, he had everything to live for. But what he chose was the song beneath the silence, and a ritual that he knew would separate him from his family forever.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” short fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s for Dabududu, who gave me the idea of Harry being disowned from his family for doing a ritual that revealed his creature heritage. This will have three parts, to be posted over the next few days.
Song Beneath Silence
Harry lit the fourth candle.
The flame that flared to life leaped up tall and white, then sank down to a bright gold pinpoint and began to sway back and forth. Harry smiled, aware that it was strained. He turned away in silence and went to the fifth candle, the one that stood at the highest point of the pentagram and furthest from the one he had just lit.
The black candle accepted the flame he touched to it, but the fire that sprouted was dark and cold, not that Harry had anticipated any differently. He turned his back to that candle and looked around the pentagram, the four white candles that burned respectively with flames of blue, white, brown, and gold.
He had chosen. There was no going back now. Harry had felt the subtle shift of magic in the air when he lit the black candle. Wards locked him in the pentagram, and magic itself would drag the words and the gestures from him if he tried to hesitate.
Not that Harry would ever turn his back on this. It had been all he wanted from the time he was fifteen.
When he understood there was a way to hear the song beneath the silence, and sing it forever.
*
“Harry! What’s wrong with you?”
Harry blinked and glanced up from the small pond at the very edge of his parents’ wards. He blushed when he realized his twin brother Jordan was staring at him and rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, nothing?”
“You’ve been staring at your reflection for like ten minutes now,” Jordan said, and snickered and nudged Harry. “You’re worse than Mum with her mirror in the mornings!”
Harry blushed hotter than ever. It was true that he hadn’t kept track of the passage of time, but untrue that he’d been looking at his own face.
What he had been looking at, though, he didn’t have words for.
“Come on, come on!” Jordan said, tugging on his hand impatiently. “We want to get up to the house so the Hogwarts owls can find us, yeah? No point in getting your letter in the back garden. I reckon Mum and Dad already have a big party prepared for us.”
Harry smiled for real this time. Mum and Dad weren’t the greatest conspirators in the world. The way Dad waggled his eyebrows at Mum and mouthed things over Harry’s and Jordan’s heads—that he thought were over their heads—said everything. And Mum had told some feeble lie about all the owls flying to the house in the last week being because she was brewing an expensive potion.
“Yeah, come on,” Harry said, and ran towards the house beside his twin brother, his best friend in the world, trying to forget the voice that seemed to sing to him when he looked into the water.
*
Harry knelt in the middle of the pentagram.
He was in a meadow, and the ground underneath him was grass, smooth and soft. Or it had been. The grass turned to smooth, hard dirt as soon as his knees touched it.
Shivering in excitement, Harry spread his hands in front of him. He had no wand. He had no knife. The rules of this ritual relied on will and desire. Either one could conjure the necessary magic and shed the necessary blood with the power of one’s yearning alone, or one was not meant to transform.
Harry stared at his hands, examining his fingers and his nails until he knew what he would need to do.
Then he reached out and drew his right index finger down the center of his palm.
The skin split, and there was blood beneath, but there was also the bright emerald flash Harry had been waiting for, that soothed a screaming part of his soul as he stared at it.
*
“What a surprise you are,” the Sorting Hat whispered to Harry.
Harry frowned uncertainly. He didn’t think he was a surprise. He had never really been that different from other children, he thought, or at least the ones he’d known growing up, the Weasleys and the Longbottoms and Uncle Sirius’s cousins’ children. He was only different from Jordan because Jordan was the Boy-Who-Lived and more powerful. Harry was lucky and happy and loved. He knew he was.
“You do not know why you are different?”
“No, sorry,” Harry whispered, barely letting his lips move. He had the feeling that this wasn’t the kind of thing the Sorting Hat wanted other children to overhear.
“Then perhaps…” The Sorting Hat glided through his mind for a moment. Harry could feel it moving, and wriggled in discomfort. “Oh. Oh, my.”
“What? What is it?”
“Tell me, Mr. Potter, what House did your parents tell you that you would Sort into? What House did you think you would Sort into?”
Harry wanted to say that wasn’t an answer to his question, and he wanted to get Sorted already, because he could hear other people muttering restlessly in the background. But he answered, because Mum would have said that was the polite thing to do. “Gryffindor. All Potters have always been in Gryffindor. And so were Uncle Sirius and Uncle Remus and Uncle Peter and my mum.” He felt a stab of grief when he mentioned Uncle Peter, who was in all the stories about the Marauders but who he’d never met. Peter had died defending Harry and Jordan from Voldemort.
“Ah. But are you a typical Gryffindor?”
“I think I’m brave!”
“And yet…”
The Sorting Hat did something that made one of Harry’s memories show up bright and new at the top of his mind, like he was living through it for the first time. Harry saw himself lying to his mum and dad that he didn’t know how Jordan’s brand-new broom got broken. Harry had flown it too close to the Bludgers—and he’d had the Bludgers on too high a setting—and he didn’t want to tell them.
“You are a flawless liar,” the Hat murmured. “You project a much more shining and guileless and polished image than the reality.”
Harry didn’t know exactly what “guileless” meant, but it sounded bad. “I just didn’t want them or Jordan to be upset with me,” he whispered, hearing his voice crack, and winced. The murmuring was getting louder. People wanted the Sorting to finish and get on with their meal.
“You don’t belong in Gryffindor, Mr. Potter.”
“Just because I lie?”
“No. Because you have overwhelming, overreaching ambition, and that is so strong that there is only one House for you.”
Harry felt panic seize him. He knew very well which was the House of ambition, and it was the House his dad and godfather hated, even if Mum was all right with it. “No! No, please! I don’t have ambitions!”
“Not even to understand magic? Not even to follow the song you hear to the deepest places where it sounds?”
Harry hesitated, confused. “If I want to know things, you should put me in Ravenclaw.”
“You don’t know what you want to know, yet. But you have looked into the water, and felt the magic moving there, and wanted to know it? Didn’t you?”
“Yes, I—did.”
“SLYTHERIN!”
Harry took the Hat off with a shaking hand. He could see Jordan staring at him with a slightly open mouth. Professor McGonagall, who was in all the stories that his Dad and Uncle Sirius had told them about their detentions, had straightened and was staring at him, too. She had actually been facing away, probably because she had thought there was no chance that he would be Sorted somewhere other than Gryffindor. His Sorting had been almost boring.
Harry found himself lifting his head as he walked towards the Slytherin table, which began clapping for him after a few startled seconds. He did want to know things. Like the song under the water. It wasn’t the water itself he wanted to know. That was just a place that the song lived. It was magic he wanted to understand.
“Didn’t think we’d get a Potter here,” drawled a boy who had to be Draco Malfoy as Harry sat down in the seat next to him.
“Didn’t think I’d hear someone commenting on the obvious in Slytherin,” Harry said, and Malfoy flushed pink, but a few older students up the table laughed.
Jordan got Sorted—into Gryffindor, of course—and took his place at the cheering table draped in red and gold while giving Harry a puzzled glance. Harry raised his shoulders in a shrug and looked up at the Head Table as Professor Dumbledore stood up. At least he was smiling kindly at Harry, instead of disapproving the way Harry had thought he might be.
“Welcome to the start of another excellent year at Hogwarts!”
*
Harry knew what he had to do. He turned to face the candles and bowed his head, spreading his hands, and the flames of the candles sharpened into what looked like spears and shot towards him.
The flames raked up and down his body, not so much burning as leaving scratches behind which made Harry catch his breath again and again. And then he looked down and saw those scratches losing the skin that had covered them, which peeled off in long shreds and left the emerald green behind.
Harry smiled. Peeling off in long shreds was only appropriate.
He spent a moment concentrating on the memory of the song that was always with him. He didn’t have to lock it in his mind. It came bubbling up, dancing golden notes rising like the waters of a river from under ice.
A moment later, Harry opened his mouth and began to sing.
*
“I just—don’t know how you got Sorted into Slytherin. You’re not a Slytherin.”
Jordan just seemed bewildered rather than angry, much the way that Mum and Dad had been in their letters so far. Harry took a deep breath. “Thanks, Jordan.”
“You’re not angry I said that?”
“No. I argued with the Hat, I said I was a Gryffindor, and the Hat didn’t listen to me and still sent me to Slytherin.”
“Huh.” Jordan rocked back on his feet. They were in a quiet corner of the library, with all the history books that Binns had written on the goblin rebellions when he was alive, where no one came. “I wonder why it did that?”
Harry shrugged a little. He wasn’t about to admit he had lied about breaking Jordan’s broom, and the song beneath the silence was a private thing.
“Well, they always say that no one can argue with the Hat’s choice,” Jordan said, and then glanced down at the Muggle watch on his wrist that Mum had got him for their last birthday and yelped. “I’m going to be late for Charms!”
Harry waved good-bye as his brother took off between the shelves, and grinned a little as he heard Jordan promptly get stopped by Madam Pince. Then he leaned on the nearest bookcase and looked carefully around.
It didn’t look like anyone was nearby. Still carefully, Harry made his way further into the aisles, straight towards the books that described magical creatures and magical music. He wanted to find out what the song was.
*
The song traveled around him, binding chains of golden notes and silver ones around his neck like chokers, around his legs like ropes. Not around his arms, not yet. Harry knew he would need them for what was left of the ritual.
But his legs?
They snapped together abruptly, and only the fact that Harry was kneeling saved him from tipping over. He didn’t lose his place in the song, though. At the moment, he didn’t think he was capable of doing so.
When he finished the last cadence and glanced down, his legs were gone, subsumed into the glittering green scales of a serpent’s tail.
Harry smiled.
*
“Mum? Dad? Could I get a snake?”
Dad choked a little from where he stood near the front door of Eeylops’ Owl Emporium, where they’d come to pick up treats for Hedwig and Jordan’s owl, Jackson. Mum glanced up with a sharp motion of her hand that came to rest on Jordan’s shoulder.
Harry just waited. His parents had been fine when he’d been Sorted into Slytherin, although a little surprised, just like Jordan. But snakes were more of a problem. He knew that because Voldemort spoke Parseltongue and had conjured a lot of serpents during the war, Mum and Dad felt differently about them than they just did about Slytherin House.
His godfather, Sirius, would always have a certain weakness in his right hand because of a serpent’s bite.
But he wanted one. And maybe they could see the yearning in his eyes, because Mum and Dad exchanged glances, and Mum—who had been bitten once and spent months in St. Mungo’s—was the one who nodded first.
“You can’t have a venomous one, of course,” she said. “And you’ll be responsible for taking care of it, Harry, and feeding it.”
Maybe she thought that the idea of feeding mice and rats and the like to his snake would put him off, but Harry just smiled more widely. After all, Hedwig liked to eat her meals in his bedroom every summer and holiday, and he still loved her no matter how messy she was. It was only natural.
“Thanks, Mum!” He ran over and hugged her, ignoring the way that some of the people in the shop stared at them and Jordan grumbled under his breath about twelve years old being too old for hugs. “Thanks, Dad!”
Dad accepted the hug with a confused little smile. “Why do you want a snake so much, son?”
Harry laughed a little. “I just think they’re brilliant.”
He wouldn’t tell his parents about the nights he’d spent hissing softly to the carved stone and wooden snakes in Slytherin, hoping they would understand him. He wouldn’t tell them that his Housemates had been wary around him but accepted him better once they found out how much Harry liked snakes.
He wouldn’t tell them about the song or who was singing it.
“All right, then,” Dad said, and ruffled his hair. “I think there’s a specialty shop that sells them a few alleys down. Let’s go find the newest member of our family.”
They’re being so good about it, Harry thought as he trailed them. Maybe I could tell them.
But then again, maybe not. And Harry was a twin who shared a birthday and a last name and parents and everything with Jordan. He wanted some things that were just his own.
*
Harry touched the scales of his tail, marveling at the strength of the coils, their shimmering colors, their beauty. He had a few moments before he needed to begin the next component of the ritual, and he was lost in wonder.
It was what he had always wanted. What he had dreamed of becoming. And now he was here.
When the flames of the candles began to rise into walls, then Harry knew he had to begin the next part of the ritual. He turned back to them and bowed, folding his arms. His fingernails were starting to tingle, and the next part of the song was rising up his throat.
*
“You’re speaking to her.”
Harry looked up with a faint smile. A first-year Slytherin Harry thought was some kind of cousin of Nott’s was standing there, staring at Harry with wide eyes. Harry’s ball python, Adda, lifted her head with a little hiss.
“Yes. Her name’s Adda.”
“But you were speaking! You were hissing!”
Harry’s stomach flipped with pride, but he forced himself to frown. “No, I mean, we were just talking. It seems like she’s answering me sometimes, but I think that’s probably just something I’m imagining because—”
“No! You were hissing at her! And she was hissing back.”
Harry licked his lips. “You mean as if I were speaking Parseltongue.”
“Yes.”
The little girl was looking at him with eyes as big as moons. Harry bit his lip for a moment, sharp sparks of wonder and awareness racing through him, and then he asked, “Could you not tell anyone about this, please? I want to keep it secret for a little while, until I figure out what I want to do with it.”
“Why wouldn’t you want people to know? You could be the next Salazar Slytherin!”
“Yes, but I’m also a Potter, and the brother of the Boy-Who-Lived. If you think people would just accept what I could do without questioning it or thinking I was wrong somehow, then I wonder how you were Sorted into Slytherin.”
The girl blinked, then laughed and sat down on the couch beside him. “My name is Isobel Nott,” she said. “And if you want me to keep your secret, then I want you to tell me what snakes think. What does yours say?”
Harry stroked Adda’s back. “I’m afraid it’s not very interesting. Mostly about food and sleep, and how she doesn’t understand why I have to leave her behind when I go to class.” He paused. “I really did think I was imagining her side of the conversation. You’re sure…?”
“Speak to her again, and I’ll do a Recording Charm,” Isobel said, holding her wand up expectantly.
Harry blinked several times, and then bent over Adda again when Isobel gave him a look. He asked, “What did you say about the mice that I fed you last time? Were they supposedly too big, or were they too small?”
“You know that they were too small. You heard me say that. I am more than a baby ball python. I can handle more than baby mice.” Adda nudged his hand with the corner of her jaw in her irritation.
“There!”
Harry looked up. Isobel’s voice had been a little too sharp, and a few of the Slytherins in the far corners of the common room were turning around to stare. But although Isobel ducked her head when Harry glared at her, she still smiled as she lifted her wand in between them and twirled in it a complex pattern.
The air between them sparked, and where Harry would have expected to hear his own voice asking Adda about the mice in English, there was only the sound of two intertwined voices hissing.
“There! See! I told you…” Isobel trailed off as she stared at Harry. “Are you all right?”
All too aware that tears were glistening in his eyes, Harry shook his head and turned away from her. “Can you just keep it a secret?” he whispered. “It means a lot to me, and I thought I was imagining it.”
Isobel patted him on the shoulder, as awkward with the emotions as her cousin, Harry’s roommate, and nodded. “I’ll—just go away now,” she said, and hurried towards the cluster of first-year girls on the other side of the fire.
Harry didn’t care if they were now whispering and staring at him. He lowered his head and buried his chin in Adda’s scales.
Adda hissed softly, “I wish to sleep.”
Harry got up and stumbled towards the door of his bedroom, joy and triumph and power and panic spiraling together in his chest.
I really am a Parselmouth. I really didn’t imagine it. A Parselmouth. I am.
*
Harry sang, and the song was full of wonder and strength and pride, the pride of who he was, who he had learned to become, the day that he had learned he was a Parselmouth, had made himself one with trying.
Or because he had heard the song beneath the silence, and even then, he had been destined to come to this.
His fingernails continued tingling, and grew longer and longer. There had been one point, when he was studying the ritual, when Harry had thought he would have to give his hands up, and he hadn’t really wanted to. His legs were different, because he would still be able to move with a serpent’s tail.
But without hands, he wouldn’t be able to write, or carry things, or make drawings, or play an instrument that would help him give back to the song.
He should have known better, though. He had seen pictures of what he was under the skin, and they had hands.
*
Harry crept into the hospital wing to see Jordan on the night after his brother’s fight with the basilisk, and stood by his brother’s bed biting his lip.
He had hidden in a corner of Dumbledore’s office when Jordan was telling Dumbledore what had happened. Dad had decided that Jordan would have the Invisibility Cloak the first year, Harry the second, and so on, trading back and forth like that. It was the only fair thing to do when they both deserved it but they were in separate Houses, so they couldn’t easily share it in the same period of time.
Harry had heard that Dumbledore could see through the Cloak, but he didn’t really care. He had to know what had happened to his brother.
The Petrifications had scared everyone, and Aurors, including Mum and Dad, had come to the school and marched up and down, trying to find Slytherin’s Heir and the beast. But they hadn’t before the scary message went up that Ginny Weasley’s skeleton would lie in the Chamber forever, and then Jordan had somehow got involved. Harry had heard wind of that from Isobel Nott, who liked creeping about and secrets, and he’d run to try and stop his brother.
It hadn’t worked. Ron and Jordan had already vanished into the Chamber, and in his conversation with Dumbledore, Jordan had been saying that the spirit that possessed Ginny had let them in.
Because it was the spirit of Voldemort. Who’d let them in because he wanted to finish Jordan off and return to full power.
He’d had to let them in because Jordan wasn’t a Parselmouth.
Harry ached with so many complicated feelings as he stared at his brother. Jordan had somehow got the Sword of Gryffindor from the Sorting Hat and killed the basilisk. Harry stared at him and thought about how he could have spared his brother this if he had only gone in his place, how he could have opened the Chamber and perhaps talked the basilisk down from its killing spree.
How he could never tell Jordan he was a Parselmouth, or his parents, unless he wanted them to look at him with hatred and disgust.
But Harry had been keeping that secret all year, from everyone except Adda and Isobel, and he was used to it. No, something else was making him ache as he stood there, and he didn’t understand it until he imagined the moment when the basilisk had died, and…
He felt as he would have felt if Jordan had died in the Chamber.
We are kin, the basilisk and I.
But it was so strange a thing that it made him run from the hospital wing and back to the Slytherin common room, where he sat huddled in a corner near the fire and hissed a few carved snakes into soothing him.
But I’m a Parselmouth. Not a snake.
Aren’t I?
*
His fingernails grew, long and brilliant and beautiful, into pearlescent claws.
Harry smiled at them with wonder, and swayed back and forth on his tail, as the next part of the melody began.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Background James/Lily, otherwise gen
Content Notes: AU (Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived), angst, creature fic, non-linear narrative, Slytherin Harry
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 3900
Summary: AU. Harry grew up as the much-loved eldest child of James and Lily Potter, with his younger brother being the Boy-Who-Lived. He had a sibling, he had friends, he had magic, he had everything to live for. But what he chose was the song beneath the silence, and a ritual that he knew would separate him from his family forever.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” short fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s for Dabududu, who gave me the idea of Harry being disowned from his family for doing a ritual that revealed his creature heritage. This will have three parts, to be posted over the next few days.
Song Beneath Silence
Harry lit the fourth candle.
The flame that flared to life leaped up tall and white, then sank down to a bright gold pinpoint and began to sway back and forth. Harry smiled, aware that it was strained. He turned away in silence and went to the fifth candle, the one that stood at the highest point of the pentagram and furthest from the one he had just lit.
The black candle accepted the flame he touched to it, but the fire that sprouted was dark and cold, not that Harry had anticipated any differently. He turned his back to that candle and looked around the pentagram, the four white candles that burned respectively with flames of blue, white, brown, and gold.
He had chosen. There was no going back now. Harry had felt the subtle shift of magic in the air when he lit the black candle. Wards locked him in the pentagram, and magic itself would drag the words and the gestures from him if he tried to hesitate.
Not that Harry would ever turn his back on this. It had been all he wanted from the time he was fifteen.
When he understood there was a way to hear the song beneath the silence, and sing it forever.
*
“Harry! What’s wrong with you?”
Harry blinked and glanced up from the small pond at the very edge of his parents’ wards. He blushed when he realized his twin brother Jordan was staring at him and rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, nothing?”
“You’ve been staring at your reflection for like ten minutes now,” Jordan said, and snickered and nudged Harry. “You’re worse than Mum with her mirror in the mornings!”
Harry blushed hotter than ever. It was true that he hadn’t kept track of the passage of time, but untrue that he’d been looking at his own face.
What he had been looking at, though, he didn’t have words for.
“Come on, come on!” Jordan said, tugging on his hand impatiently. “We want to get up to the house so the Hogwarts owls can find us, yeah? No point in getting your letter in the back garden. I reckon Mum and Dad already have a big party prepared for us.”
Harry smiled for real this time. Mum and Dad weren’t the greatest conspirators in the world. The way Dad waggled his eyebrows at Mum and mouthed things over Harry’s and Jordan’s heads—that he thought were over their heads—said everything. And Mum had told some feeble lie about all the owls flying to the house in the last week being because she was brewing an expensive potion.
“Yeah, come on,” Harry said, and ran towards the house beside his twin brother, his best friend in the world, trying to forget the voice that seemed to sing to him when he looked into the water.
*
Harry knelt in the middle of the pentagram.
He was in a meadow, and the ground underneath him was grass, smooth and soft. Or it had been. The grass turned to smooth, hard dirt as soon as his knees touched it.
Shivering in excitement, Harry spread his hands in front of him. He had no wand. He had no knife. The rules of this ritual relied on will and desire. Either one could conjure the necessary magic and shed the necessary blood with the power of one’s yearning alone, or one was not meant to transform.
Harry stared at his hands, examining his fingers and his nails until he knew what he would need to do.
Then he reached out and drew his right index finger down the center of his palm.
The skin split, and there was blood beneath, but there was also the bright emerald flash Harry had been waiting for, that soothed a screaming part of his soul as he stared at it.
*
“What a surprise you are,” the Sorting Hat whispered to Harry.
Harry frowned uncertainly. He didn’t think he was a surprise. He had never really been that different from other children, he thought, or at least the ones he’d known growing up, the Weasleys and the Longbottoms and Uncle Sirius’s cousins’ children. He was only different from Jordan because Jordan was the Boy-Who-Lived and more powerful. Harry was lucky and happy and loved. He knew he was.
“You do not know why you are different?”
“No, sorry,” Harry whispered, barely letting his lips move. He had the feeling that this wasn’t the kind of thing the Sorting Hat wanted other children to overhear.
“Then perhaps…” The Sorting Hat glided through his mind for a moment. Harry could feel it moving, and wriggled in discomfort. “Oh. Oh, my.”
“What? What is it?”
“Tell me, Mr. Potter, what House did your parents tell you that you would Sort into? What House did you think you would Sort into?”
Harry wanted to say that wasn’t an answer to his question, and he wanted to get Sorted already, because he could hear other people muttering restlessly in the background. But he answered, because Mum would have said that was the polite thing to do. “Gryffindor. All Potters have always been in Gryffindor. And so were Uncle Sirius and Uncle Remus and Uncle Peter and my mum.” He felt a stab of grief when he mentioned Uncle Peter, who was in all the stories about the Marauders but who he’d never met. Peter had died defending Harry and Jordan from Voldemort.
“Ah. But are you a typical Gryffindor?”
“I think I’m brave!”
“And yet…”
The Sorting Hat did something that made one of Harry’s memories show up bright and new at the top of his mind, like he was living through it for the first time. Harry saw himself lying to his mum and dad that he didn’t know how Jordan’s brand-new broom got broken. Harry had flown it too close to the Bludgers—and he’d had the Bludgers on too high a setting—and he didn’t want to tell them.
“You are a flawless liar,” the Hat murmured. “You project a much more shining and guileless and polished image than the reality.”
Harry didn’t know exactly what “guileless” meant, but it sounded bad. “I just didn’t want them or Jordan to be upset with me,” he whispered, hearing his voice crack, and winced. The murmuring was getting louder. People wanted the Sorting to finish and get on with their meal.
“You don’t belong in Gryffindor, Mr. Potter.”
“Just because I lie?”
“No. Because you have overwhelming, overreaching ambition, and that is so strong that there is only one House for you.”
Harry felt panic seize him. He knew very well which was the House of ambition, and it was the House his dad and godfather hated, even if Mum was all right with it. “No! No, please! I don’t have ambitions!”
“Not even to understand magic? Not even to follow the song you hear to the deepest places where it sounds?”
Harry hesitated, confused. “If I want to know things, you should put me in Ravenclaw.”
“You don’t know what you want to know, yet. But you have looked into the water, and felt the magic moving there, and wanted to know it? Didn’t you?”
“Yes, I—did.”
“SLYTHERIN!”
Harry took the Hat off with a shaking hand. He could see Jordan staring at him with a slightly open mouth. Professor McGonagall, who was in all the stories that his Dad and Uncle Sirius had told them about their detentions, had straightened and was staring at him, too. She had actually been facing away, probably because she had thought there was no chance that he would be Sorted somewhere other than Gryffindor. His Sorting had been almost boring.
Harry found himself lifting his head as he walked towards the Slytherin table, which began clapping for him after a few startled seconds. He did want to know things. Like the song under the water. It wasn’t the water itself he wanted to know. That was just a place that the song lived. It was magic he wanted to understand.
“Didn’t think we’d get a Potter here,” drawled a boy who had to be Draco Malfoy as Harry sat down in the seat next to him.
“Didn’t think I’d hear someone commenting on the obvious in Slytherin,” Harry said, and Malfoy flushed pink, but a few older students up the table laughed.
Jordan got Sorted—into Gryffindor, of course—and took his place at the cheering table draped in red and gold while giving Harry a puzzled glance. Harry raised his shoulders in a shrug and looked up at the Head Table as Professor Dumbledore stood up. At least he was smiling kindly at Harry, instead of disapproving the way Harry had thought he might be.
“Welcome to the start of another excellent year at Hogwarts!”
*
Harry knew what he had to do. He turned to face the candles and bowed his head, spreading his hands, and the flames of the candles sharpened into what looked like spears and shot towards him.
The flames raked up and down his body, not so much burning as leaving scratches behind which made Harry catch his breath again and again. And then he looked down and saw those scratches losing the skin that had covered them, which peeled off in long shreds and left the emerald green behind.
Harry smiled. Peeling off in long shreds was only appropriate.
He spent a moment concentrating on the memory of the song that was always with him. He didn’t have to lock it in his mind. It came bubbling up, dancing golden notes rising like the waters of a river from under ice.
A moment later, Harry opened his mouth and began to sing.
*
“I just—don’t know how you got Sorted into Slytherin. You’re not a Slytherin.”
Jordan just seemed bewildered rather than angry, much the way that Mum and Dad had been in their letters so far. Harry took a deep breath. “Thanks, Jordan.”
“You’re not angry I said that?”
“No. I argued with the Hat, I said I was a Gryffindor, and the Hat didn’t listen to me and still sent me to Slytherin.”
“Huh.” Jordan rocked back on his feet. They were in a quiet corner of the library, with all the history books that Binns had written on the goblin rebellions when he was alive, where no one came. “I wonder why it did that?”
Harry shrugged a little. He wasn’t about to admit he had lied about breaking Jordan’s broom, and the song beneath the silence was a private thing.
“Well, they always say that no one can argue with the Hat’s choice,” Jordan said, and then glanced down at the Muggle watch on his wrist that Mum had got him for their last birthday and yelped. “I’m going to be late for Charms!”
Harry waved good-bye as his brother took off between the shelves, and grinned a little as he heard Jordan promptly get stopped by Madam Pince. Then he leaned on the nearest bookcase and looked carefully around.
It didn’t look like anyone was nearby. Still carefully, Harry made his way further into the aisles, straight towards the books that described magical creatures and magical music. He wanted to find out what the song was.
*
The song traveled around him, binding chains of golden notes and silver ones around his neck like chokers, around his legs like ropes. Not around his arms, not yet. Harry knew he would need them for what was left of the ritual.
But his legs?
They snapped together abruptly, and only the fact that Harry was kneeling saved him from tipping over. He didn’t lose his place in the song, though. At the moment, he didn’t think he was capable of doing so.
When he finished the last cadence and glanced down, his legs were gone, subsumed into the glittering green scales of a serpent’s tail.
Harry smiled.
*
“Mum? Dad? Could I get a snake?”
Dad choked a little from where he stood near the front door of Eeylops’ Owl Emporium, where they’d come to pick up treats for Hedwig and Jordan’s owl, Jackson. Mum glanced up with a sharp motion of her hand that came to rest on Jordan’s shoulder.
Harry just waited. His parents had been fine when he’d been Sorted into Slytherin, although a little surprised, just like Jordan. But snakes were more of a problem. He knew that because Voldemort spoke Parseltongue and had conjured a lot of serpents during the war, Mum and Dad felt differently about them than they just did about Slytherin House.
His godfather, Sirius, would always have a certain weakness in his right hand because of a serpent’s bite.
But he wanted one. And maybe they could see the yearning in his eyes, because Mum and Dad exchanged glances, and Mum—who had been bitten once and spent months in St. Mungo’s—was the one who nodded first.
“You can’t have a venomous one, of course,” she said. “And you’ll be responsible for taking care of it, Harry, and feeding it.”
Maybe she thought that the idea of feeding mice and rats and the like to his snake would put him off, but Harry just smiled more widely. After all, Hedwig liked to eat her meals in his bedroom every summer and holiday, and he still loved her no matter how messy she was. It was only natural.
“Thanks, Mum!” He ran over and hugged her, ignoring the way that some of the people in the shop stared at them and Jordan grumbled under his breath about twelve years old being too old for hugs. “Thanks, Dad!”
Dad accepted the hug with a confused little smile. “Why do you want a snake so much, son?”
Harry laughed a little. “I just think they’re brilliant.”
He wouldn’t tell his parents about the nights he’d spent hissing softly to the carved stone and wooden snakes in Slytherin, hoping they would understand him. He wouldn’t tell them that his Housemates had been wary around him but accepted him better once they found out how much Harry liked snakes.
He wouldn’t tell them about the song or who was singing it.
“All right, then,” Dad said, and ruffled his hair. “I think there’s a specialty shop that sells them a few alleys down. Let’s go find the newest member of our family.”
They’re being so good about it, Harry thought as he trailed them. Maybe I could tell them.
But then again, maybe not. And Harry was a twin who shared a birthday and a last name and parents and everything with Jordan. He wanted some things that were just his own.
*
Harry touched the scales of his tail, marveling at the strength of the coils, their shimmering colors, their beauty. He had a few moments before he needed to begin the next component of the ritual, and he was lost in wonder.
It was what he had always wanted. What he had dreamed of becoming. And now he was here.
When the flames of the candles began to rise into walls, then Harry knew he had to begin the next part of the ritual. He turned back to them and bowed, folding his arms. His fingernails were starting to tingle, and the next part of the song was rising up his throat.
*
“You’re speaking to her.”
Harry looked up with a faint smile. A first-year Slytherin Harry thought was some kind of cousin of Nott’s was standing there, staring at Harry with wide eyes. Harry’s ball python, Adda, lifted her head with a little hiss.
“Yes. Her name’s Adda.”
“But you were speaking! You were hissing!”
Harry’s stomach flipped with pride, but he forced himself to frown. “No, I mean, we were just talking. It seems like she’s answering me sometimes, but I think that’s probably just something I’m imagining because—”
“No! You were hissing at her! And she was hissing back.”
Harry licked his lips. “You mean as if I were speaking Parseltongue.”
“Yes.”
The little girl was looking at him with eyes as big as moons. Harry bit his lip for a moment, sharp sparks of wonder and awareness racing through him, and then he asked, “Could you not tell anyone about this, please? I want to keep it secret for a little while, until I figure out what I want to do with it.”
“Why wouldn’t you want people to know? You could be the next Salazar Slytherin!”
“Yes, but I’m also a Potter, and the brother of the Boy-Who-Lived. If you think people would just accept what I could do without questioning it or thinking I was wrong somehow, then I wonder how you were Sorted into Slytherin.”
The girl blinked, then laughed and sat down on the couch beside him. “My name is Isobel Nott,” she said. “And if you want me to keep your secret, then I want you to tell me what snakes think. What does yours say?”
Harry stroked Adda’s back. “I’m afraid it’s not very interesting. Mostly about food and sleep, and how she doesn’t understand why I have to leave her behind when I go to class.” He paused. “I really did think I was imagining her side of the conversation. You’re sure…?”
“Speak to her again, and I’ll do a Recording Charm,” Isobel said, holding her wand up expectantly.
Harry blinked several times, and then bent over Adda again when Isobel gave him a look. He asked, “What did you say about the mice that I fed you last time? Were they supposedly too big, or were they too small?”
“You know that they were too small. You heard me say that. I am more than a baby ball python. I can handle more than baby mice.” Adda nudged his hand with the corner of her jaw in her irritation.
“There!”
Harry looked up. Isobel’s voice had been a little too sharp, and a few of the Slytherins in the far corners of the common room were turning around to stare. But although Isobel ducked her head when Harry glared at her, she still smiled as she lifted her wand in between them and twirled in it a complex pattern.
The air between them sparked, and where Harry would have expected to hear his own voice asking Adda about the mice in English, there was only the sound of two intertwined voices hissing.
“There! See! I told you…” Isobel trailed off as she stared at Harry. “Are you all right?”
All too aware that tears were glistening in his eyes, Harry shook his head and turned away from her. “Can you just keep it a secret?” he whispered. “It means a lot to me, and I thought I was imagining it.”
Isobel patted him on the shoulder, as awkward with the emotions as her cousin, Harry’s roommate, and nodded. “I’ll—just go away now,” she said, and hurried towards the cluster of first-year girls on the other side of the fire.
Harry didn’t care if they were now whispering and staring at him. He lowered his head and buried his chin in Adda’s scales.
Adda hissed softly, “I wish to sleep.”
Harry got up and stumbled towards the door of his bedroom, joy and triumph and power and panic spiraling together in his chest.
I really am a Parselmouth. I really didn’t imagine it. A Parselmouth. I am.
*
Harry sang, and the song was full of wonder and strength and pride, the pride of who he was, who he had learned to become, the day that he had learned he was a Parselmouth, had made himself one with trying.
Or because he had heard the song beneath the silence, and even then, he had been destined to come to this.
His fingernails continued tingling, and grew longer and longer. There had been one point, when he was studying the ritual, when Harry had thought he would have to give his hands up, and he hadn’t really wanted to. His legs were different, because he would still be able to move with a serpent’s tail.
But without hands, he wouldn’t be able to write, or carry things, or make drawings, or play an instrument that would help him give back to the song.
He should have known better, though. He had seen pictures of what he was under the skin, and they had hands.
*
Harry crept into the hospital wing to see Jordan on the night after his brother’s fight with the basilisk, and stood by his brother’s bed biting his lip.
He had hidden in a corner of Dumbledore’s office when Jordan was telling Dumbledore what had happened. Dad had decided that Jordan would have the Invisibility Cloak the first year, Harry the second, and so on, trading back and forth like that. It was the only fair thing to do when they both deserved it but they were in separate Houses, so they couldn’t easily share it in the same period of time.
Harry had heard that Dumbledore could see through the Cloak, but he didn’t really care. He had to know what had happened to his brother.
The Petrifications had scared everyone, and Aurors, including Mum and Dad, had come to the school and marched up and down, trying to find Slytherin’s Heir and the beast. But they hadn’t before the scary message went up that Ginny Weasley’s skeleton would lie in the Chamber forever, and then Jordan had somehow got involved. Harry had heard wind of that from Isobel Nott, who liked creeping about and secrets, and he’d run to try and stop his brother.
It hadn’t worked. Ron and Jordan had already vanished into the Chamber, and in his conversation with Dumbledore, Jordan had been saying that the spirit that possessed Ginny had let them in.
Because it was the spirit of Voldemort. Who’d let them in because he wanted to finish Jordan off and return to full power.
He’d had to let them in because Jordan wasn’t a Parselmouth.
Harry ached with so many complicated feelings as he stared at his brother. Jordan had somehow got the Sword of Gryffindor from the Sorting Hat and killed the basilisk. Harry stared at him and thought about how he could have spared his brother this if he had only gone in his place, how he could have opened the Chamber and perhaps talked the basilisk down from its killing spree.
How he could never tell Jordan he was a Parselmouth, or his parents, unless he wanted them to look at him with hatred and disgust.
But Harry had been keeping that secret all year, from everyone except Adda and Isobel, and he was used to it. No, something else was making him ache as he stood there, and he didn’t understand it until he imagined the moment when the basilisk had died, and…
He felt as he would have felt if Jordan had died in the Chamber.
We are kin, the basilisk and I.
But it was so strange a thing that it made him run from the hospital wing and back to the Slytherin common room, where he sat huddled in a corner near the fire and hissed a few carved snakes into soothing him.
But I’m a Parselmouth. Not a snake.
Aren’t I?
*
His fingernails grew, long and brilliant and beautiful, into pearlescent claws.
Harry smiled at them with wonder, and swayed back and forth on his tail, as the next part of the melody began.
