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lomonaaerenTitle: Basilisk Heart
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo, mentions of canon pairings
Content Notes: AU starting with fourth year, violence, gore, angst, Parseltongue
Rating: : R
Summary: Theo Nott comes to Harry with a rather unusual request—to harvest the basilisk that he killed during his second year and use that to help Theo cure a blood curse. Oh, and to feed Theo the heart so that he can become a Parselmouth. Harry decides this is better than feeling sorry for himself because the school thinks he’s a cheater, and begins the first steps on a journey down a radiant pathway with Theo at his side.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” chaptered stories being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. BellaBix gave me a request for Theo helping Harry harvest the basilisk and becoming a Parselmouth when Harry feeds him the heart. This should have four or five parts. Hope you enjoy.
Basilisk Heart
“Potter.”
Harry turned his head. He had spent a good portion of the afternoon on the shore of the lake. At least that wasn’t full of people glaring at him and muttering about how he was a cheater.
The boy standing next to him made Harry tense for a second, because he just thought Slytherin. Then he saw that it was Nott. Nott didn’t follow Malfoy around and wasn’t as awful as some of the others. In fact, Harry couldn’t remember hearing him say anything before.
He was still. Harry thought he looked like a coiled snake waiting for someone to pass so he could sting them on the foot. But he continued not to say anything, so finally Harry asked, “What do you want?”
“What do you know about blood curses?”
Harry blinked. “Nothing. Why, going to test one on me?” He gripped his wand. Maybe Nott would win, but Harry would at least strike back.
“No. I—of course not. No.”
Nott came a few paces closer. He stopped and went still again when he was perhaps a meter from Harry. His eyes were bright, a silvery grey that reminded Harry a little of Sirius’s. He swallowed back pain.
If I were living with Sirius, I bet things like this wouldn’t be happening.
“All right. Why do you want to talk to me about them?”
“There’s a blood curse on me.” Nott spoke in a quiet voice that settled to the ground like snow. “I’ll be its victim the day I turn seventeen if I can’t find a way to cure it before then.”
Harry grimaced. “Look, Nott, I really didn’t put my name in the Goblet. I can’t tell you how to do the impossible and cure a curse like this because I didn’t do the impossible with the Goblet.”
“That isn’t—oh, for the love of Merlin.”
Harry blinked as Nott collapsed on the shore next to him, his head bowed into his knees. It was how Harry had sat for most of the morning, and he felt sympathy for Nott whether or not he wanted to.
“Then why come and talk to me about this?”
Nott sat like that a long moment, his head still bowed. Then he raised his head and turned to face Harry.
“My father cursed me when I was a child,” he said quietly. “He’s convinced that I’m a misfortune to him, and that I deserved to suffer as he was convinced I was making him suffer. The blood curse is destroying my magic and undermining it.”
“That’s horrible, Nott. I’m sorry.”
Nott huffed a little as if he didn’t know what to do with Harry’s apology and kept talking. “Precisely because it destroys my magic, if I had another powerful spell laid on me or given to me, it would—fill the space taken up by the blood curse now. That’s not an exact statement, but it’s accurate enough.” Then he leaned forwards and stared at Harry intently.
“I don’t know how to cast a spell like that, either.”
“You could give me Parseltongue.”
“What? How?”
Nott abruptly raked his hands through his hair. Harry stared. He hadn’t known Nott could do something like that. “Parseltongue can be given as a gift to someone else if they eat a heart of a snake the Parselmouth killed,” he recited rapidly. “Someone who has your gift should know that.”
Harry rolled his eyes. So Nott thought he should know and do things he didn’t know and couldn’t do. They were back on familiar ground. “Yeah, because my Muggle childhood included such a large number of books about Parseltongue.”
Nott gaped at him. Harry sneered back. He thought he’d got quite good at sneering since his name flew out of the Goblet. “Which part is making you do that, the Muggle one or the fact that I’m not a reader?”
Nott slammed his mouth shut and seemed to think furiously about what he was going to say next. Harry turned back to face the lake, ignoring the way that Nott’s gaze was fastened on his neck.
“That explains some things.”
“Get on with it, Nott. Or go away. I don’t really care which.”
“You could feed me the heart of the basilisk you killed. And then I would have Parseltongue, and it would banish the blood curse.”
Harry knew that he smeared mud across his robes with how fast he turned to gape at Nott, but frankly, he didn’t care what he looked like at the moment. “You want me to what?”
“There aren’t that many people who know the truth about what happened in the Chamber of Secrets, but I’m one of them.” Nott gave him the kind of thin, cold smile Harry would have expected from the person he usually seemed to be. “I know you killed a basilisk. I know that no one’s been down in the Chamber since you did. I know that you can give me its heart.”
“I mean—fine. I could do that.” Harry felt a bit of relief at thinking of something he could do. “I suppose I could take you down in the Chamber and you could use Cutting Spells?”
“You have to give me its heart.”
“What? Cast some kind of promise spell or something?”
“No. Cut it free yourself and feed it to me.”
Harry thought this was one of the weirdest things he had ever heard. But he shook his head. “All right, Nott. If that’s what you want.”
Nott froze, staring at him. Harry stared back. He wondered if Nott had thought he wouldn’t agree, or wouldn’t agree so easily, and was now waiting for Harry to laugh and say he’d been lying.
But then Nott whispered, “That’s not the way it works.”
Harry groaned. “Look, I already agreed to feed you the heart and help with your blood curse. I don’t know what else you want.”
“It has to be balanced.”
“Do you know how to conjure scales to weigh the heart? Because I don’t.”
Nott muttered something that sounded like, “Merlin grant me patience.” Harry just waited, and resisted the temptation to say that they would already be discussing real things if Nott hadn’t resorted to cryptic little statements.
Nott finally took a long breath and faced him. He held out his hands, palm-up. Harry eyed them and waited.
“The enormous gift that you’re granting me has to be balanced out in some way.” Nott let his hands dip up and down like the scales Harry had been discussing. “You’re saving my life, granting me a rare magical gift, and protecting—well, I can tell you about that later, if this works out.
“Those are enormous gifts. You have to let me balance them out. Give you something that’s of equal value.”
“Everything that I would value equally, you can’t give me.”
Harry tried to say it gently, but Nott still paled, his nostrils flaring. “I have to,” he said so quietly Harry had trouble hearing him. “You don’t understand how ancient this magic is, how it has to work.”
“No, I don’t. But you can’t kill Voldemort—” Nott flinched so hard it looked like he was about to stand “—and you can’t take away my fame, and you can’t bring my parents back, and you can’t make people realize my godfather’s innocence. It’s the way things are.”
Nott narrowed his eyes and stared at Harry as if looking for secrets in his aura or something like that that would tell him how Harry really felt. Harry maintained eye contact as gently as he could.
“I’ll give you the heart for free,” Harry added, at the same time as Nott tried to say something. Nott jerked his head in irritation, but let Harry speak. “I can swear a vow or something like that says there’s no debt, can’t I?”
“No. Because of the magic involved.”
“You’re so frustrating, Nott,” Harry muttered, and rubbed his forehead. It felt like his scar was hurting again. “There’s nothing I want from you.”
“I can offer you something that you might not know you want.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Freedom from the Muggle world.”
Harry jerked and looked up at Nott. He had leaned near enough that Harry felt uncomfortable, but he also wasn’t going to retreat and look weak. He stared into Nott’s dark brown eyes, which looked as if they had flecks of gold and blue around the edges. It was the closest he had ever looked at someone’s eyes.
“I told you that you can’t make my godfather innocent,” Harry whispered.
“There are ways and means around the Ministry’s decrees,” Nott whispered back. “People who think that Black is guilty right now, or just want him dead because it would be more convenient, can be bribed to think differently.”
Harry swallowed. Maybe he should feel bad about the thought of bribing people, but—
After third year, he knew that Minister Fudge was exactly the kind of person Nott was talking about. And the kind of person who got manipulated by Lucius Malfoy, too. If someone was going to be manipulating him, then Harry should just as well be the one doing it.
But he didn’t think he had enough money in his trust vault for that, or at least not for the whole Ministry, even if it was enough for Fudge. Harry shook his head reluctantly. “I would need a lot of Galleons.”
Nott smiled, a triumphant expression that glowed more in his eyes than on his face. “So get them by selling the basilisk.”
“But you want its heart.”
“That still leaves the scale, and the venom, and the fangs—”
Harry jumped despite himself.
“You didn’t sell the fangs already, did you?”
“No. It just made me jump because one of them went through my arm and Fawkes had to cry on it to heal me. Dumbledore’s phoenix?” Harry added, when Nott stared at him as if he didn’t know what Harry was talking about, and pulled back his sleeve.
Nott stared in silence at the puckered scar on his arm. Then he said, “You are impossible.”
Harry shrugged and covered the scar up again. He didn’t see what was so much more impossible about surviving a basilisk bite than about surviving the Killing Curse, and that seemed to be just the kind of thing everyone around him thought he should accept. “Believe me or not.”
“The fangs are still in the Chamber?”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe the one that bit me is broken because I rammed it through the Dark artifact that was possessing G—er, the student who was possessed. But the others ought to be okay.”
Nott rolled his eyes and muttered something. Then he shook his head. “Venom and scales and fangs—they can be used in potions, or sold to strengthen goblin weapons, or to help with breeding experiments, or to make special robes, or—”
“Yeah, I see what you mean.”
Nott stilled and stared at him expectantly. Harry looked off to the side and wondered if he should do this.
Then he shrugged. At this point, it didn’t sound as though anyone else wanted the basilisk. No one had been going down in the Chamber as far as he knew. The worst thing would probably be if he and Nott went down there and then couldn’t cut the thing because they didn’t have strong enough magic.
Nott seemed to know the answer before Harry could speak it to him. He climbed back to his feet and swatted some dirt off his robes. He was still smiling.
“Shall we go?”
*
The only good part so far of the way the school shunned him, Harry thought, was that people deliberately turned away from him when they saw him walking down a corridor. They didn’t even bother to comment on the fact that Nott was with him. And he wouldn’t be missed if he went down into the Chamber of Secrets, either.
Harry swallowed the loneliness he felt. He would still speak to Hermione later today.
But she also wanted to spend time with Ron, to reassure him that she hadn’t forgotten him, and Harry was—
He put the thought aside. He and Nott were here for something else.
Moaning Myrtle dived out of sight when they came into her bathroom instead of trying to speak to them. Harry went over to the sink and hissed uncertainly. Part of him didn’t believe it would really work. The events at the end of second year still seemed more like a dream than anything else.
But it did. The sink shuddered and ground into the wall, and Harry found himself staring down the black pipe.
“Potter?”
Nott’s hand on his back made Harry start. He stepped back and nodded. “There’s a pretty slimy slide down this way,” he said. “I suppose we should have brought brooms or something.”
“I know Cleaning Charms.”
Harry shrugged and leaped onto the slide.
This time, he was prepared when they came to the end, and he rolled and dropped the way he would if he’d fallen off his broom during Quidditch practice. Nott didn’t seem to know that, but Harry snapped his wand out and said, “Arresto momentum!”
Nott half-floated to the floor and blinked at him. “I’m surprised you know that spell.”
“The Gryffindor Quidditch practices taught it to me.” Harry spelled the slime off his robes at the same time Nott did and turned to face the corridor that led to the Chamber. “There’s a fairly large skin here, and lots of bones. More slime.”
“How big would you say the skin was?”
“Not as big as the basilisk itself, but big.”
“Then we can sell that, too.”
Harry nodded and began walking, his lit wand in front of him. Nott walked in near-silence, or as quiet as he could get when things were crunching beneath his feet, so Harry didn’t say anything, either.
They came to the cave-in, and Nott looked at him. “Did this happen when you were here?”
“Yeah. Lockhart tried to Obliviate us—Ron and me—but he used Ron’s wand, which was broken, and the backfiring brought down the ceiling.”
Nott stared at him again.
Harry shrugged, rubbed the back of his neck, and aimed his wand at the scattered rocks. He hadn’t really thought about how they would clean them out of the way, because he hadn’t remembered this part, but he might as well try the plan that had just occurred to him. “Reparo!” he yelled, putting all his strength into it.
The rocks went hurtling off the floor and crashed into the ceiling. Harry yanked Nott with him as he dived back, thinking that they would probably drop again, but when he looked up, the cracks were closing behind the stones. He smiled a little. Good enough.
“Warn me next time, Potter,” Nott said faintly from the floor.
“Sorry. Let’s go before they decide to fall again.”
“They wouldn’t decide to do that.”
Harry walked ahead, leaving Nott to have his philosophical debate with empty air if he wanted to, and they eventually came to the Chamber doors. Harry flinched instinctively, but there was no hissing and no foul stench, either. The doors had in fact sealed themselves, and the snakes’ emerald eyes glinted at them.
“What an impressive set of doors,” Nott whispered.
Harry shrugged and spoke to the doors. “Open.”
As the doors obeyed, Nott asked, “What word was that in Parseltongue?”
“Just open.”
“I would have thought Salazar Slytherin would choose something more impressive for his Chamber.”
Harry shrugged again and stepped in.
There wasn’t any thick smell, and the basilisk didn’t look rotted in any way at all. Harry shuddered a little as he looked at it. He didn’t know if his memory was faulty or if he just hadn’t really had time to take in its size when he was twelve and trying to get Ginny out of the Chamber, but the thing was huge.
After what felt like an eternity of staring, Harry realized that he wasn’t hearing any movement from behind him. He turned and found Nott holding as still as a rabbit, eyes fixed on the snake.
“It’s all right,” Harry said quietly.
“I know it’s all right, I’m not stupid.”
But Nott still inched along the wall, with his back to it, as he came into the Chamber. Harry would have thought that a Slytherin would be overcome by awe at the sight of the Chamber, since their House probably told stories about their Founder, but Nott just stared at the basilisk and didn’t even look up at the statue.
Harry waited for a minute, then two. Nott didn’t stop staring. Harry cleared his throat finally, and felt a little bad for the way that Nott jumped and spun around. But he had to say it. “Are you ready to cut the scales?”
Nott lowered his eyes and nodded. Then he turned to the body and lifted his wand. Harry didn’t hear the spell he hit the corpse with, but it sliced scales aside. Harry wondered if he could have done that when he was fighting it, but—
Well, Riddle had had his wand. Or maybe the basilisk’s scales were resistant to spells like this when it was alive, but not after death.
Harry wrinkled his nose as congealed, jelly-like masses of blood fell out of the corpse. Nott turned and stared at him, making a noise that was too nervous to be a giggle. “You want to do the honors, Potter?”
Harry stepped cautiously forwards, thinking about saying that he didn’t know exactly what the heart looked like. But it turned out there was no mistaking it. The organ didn’t look that much like a human heart—the illustrations of them Harry had seen in some Muggle science textbooks in primary school—but it looked enough like it.
Harry swallowed, then gagged and had to hold his breath as he cast the spell that would cut the heart out of the basilisk. It fell and rolled on the floor of the Chamber.
It was wider than the span of Harry’s arms. He turned and stared at Nott. “How exactly are you going to eat this?”
“You’ll cut pieces of it off it and feed them to me.” Nott seemed to be past whatever nervousness had gripped him when they entered the Chamber. He lifted his head now, his face proud, eyes glittering. “We’ll come back across multiple evenings and Saturdays if we have to.”
Harry nodded. He’d been about to say that he needed to devote some time to studying for the First Task, but he supposed that this didn’t really have a deadline, unlike the First Task.
What is it? How am I going to survive it?
But Harry shoved that aside. He might not be able to help himself much with the school’s shunning and the like, he might not be able to figure out who had put his name into the Goblet, but he could help Nott get rid of the stupid blood curse his father had cast on him.
Harry could hardly believe a father would act like that. Well, except that Nott’s father had been a Death Eater. So he supposed that made sense.
“Going to cut off the first piece, Potter?”
Harry jerked himself back to the present and nodded. “Can you show me the spell that you used on the basilisk? I think I’m going to need something as tough as that to slice through this.” He eyed the black-purple flesh of the heart.
“Of course.”
Nott stepped forwards, his eyes resting on Harry instead of the heart. Harry swallowed. There was something weirdly intense about Nott’s gaze, as though he was trying to pierce through all the nonsense that people thought and thought they saw about the Boy-Who-Lived and work through to who Harry was underneath.
But then, Harry thought, that would make sense. Nott wanted to have the blood curse removed and be able to live. He wanted to trust that Harry was going to give him that ability.
So Harry let Nott guide his wand through the right motions, and then he turned and shot the charm at the heart.
The first sliver pulled away, looking more blue-black than anything else. Harry walked over and picked it up, then turned.
Nott was right there. Harry honestly couldn’t remember the last time he had been this close to anyone except Ron and Hermione.
And even Ron and Hermione had never stared at him like this, eye to eye, close enough for Harry to feel their breathing, a warm hand on his wrist as Nott stooped down and bit into the piece of raw flesh Harry was offering him.
Harry had had some concerns still, like whether Nott would be able to eat the thing at all, what raw meat from a dead magical beast might do to him—
But as Nott swallowed the meat and licked the last of the blood off his lips, those thoughts reeled into quietness like birds flying home to roost for the night.
“I can manage another few strips,” Nott said, watching him with that same intent gaze.
Harry nodded, dazedly, and stooped to cut another piece.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo, mentions of canon pairings
Content Notes: AU starting with fourth year, violence, gore, angst, Parseltongue
Rating: : R
Summary: Theo Nott comes to Harry with a rather unusual request—to harvest the basilisk that he killed during his second year and use that to help Theo cure a blood curse. Oh, and to feed Theo the heart so that he can become a Parselmouth. Harry decides this is better than feeling sorry for himself because the school thinks he’s a cheater, and begins the first steps on a journey down a radiant pathway with Theo at his side.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” chaptered stories being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. BellaBix gave me a request for Theo helping Harry harvest the basilisk and becoming a Parselmouth when Harry feeds him the heart. This should have four or five parts. Hope you enjoy.
Basilisk Heart
“Potter.”
Harry turned his head. He had spent a good portion of the afternoon on the shore of the lake. At least that wasn’t full of people glaring at him and muttering about how he was a cheater.
The boy standing next to him made Harry tense for a second, because he just thought Slytherin. Then he saw that it was Nott. Nott didn’t follow Malfoy around and wasn’t as awful as some of the others. In fact, Harry couldn’t remember hearing him say anything before.
He was still. Harry thought he looked like a coiled snake waiting for someone to pass so he could sting them on the foot. But he continued not to say anything, so finally Harry asked, “What do you want?”
“What do you know about blood curses?”
Harry blinked. “Nothing. Why, going to test one on me?” He gripped his wand. Maybe Nott would win, but Harry would at least strike back.
“No. I—of course not. No.”
Nott came a few paces closer. He stopped and went still again when he was perhaps a meter from Harry. His eyes were bright, a silvery grey that reminded Harry a little of Sirius’s. He swallowed back pain.
If I were living with Sirius, I bet things like this wouldn’t be happening.
“All right. Why do you want to talk to me about them?”
“There’s a blood curse on me.” Nott spoke in a quiet voice that settled to the ground like snow. “I’ll be its victim the day I turn seventeen if I can’t find a way to cure it before then.”
Harry grimaced. “Look, Nott, I really didn’t put my name in the Goblet. I can’t tell you how to do the impossible and cure a curse like this because I didn’t do the impossible with the Goblet.”
“That isn’t—oh, for the love of Merlin.”
Harry blinked as Nott collapsed on the shore next to him, his head bowed into his knees. It was how Harry had sat for most of the morning, and he felt sympathy for Nott whether or not he wanted to.
“Then why come and talk to me about this?”
Nott sat like that a long moment, his head still bowed. Then he raised his head and turned to face Harry.
“My father cursed me when I was a child,” he said quietly. “He’s convinced that I’m a misfortune to him, and that I deserved to suffer as he was convinced I was making him suffer. The blood curse is destroying my magic and undermining it.”
“That’s horrible, Nott. I’m sorry.”
Nott huffed a little as if he didn’t know what to do with Harry’s apology and kept talking. “Precisely because it destroys my magic, if I had another powerful spell laid on me or given to me, it would—fill the space taken up by the blood curse now. That’s not an exact statement, but it’s accurate enough.” Then he leaned forwards and stared at Harry intently.
“I don’t know how to cast a spell like that, either.”
“You could give me Parseltongue.”
“What? How?”
Nott abruptly raked his hands through his hair. Harry stared. He hadn’t known Nott could do something like that. “Parseltongue can be given as a gift to someone else if they eat a heart of a snake the Parselmouth killed,” he recited rapidly. “Someone who has your gift should know that.”
Harry rolled his eyes. So Nott thought he should know and do things he didn’t know and couldn’t do. They were back on familiar ground. “Yeah, because my Muggle childhood included such a large number of books about Parseltongue.”
Nott gaped at him. Harry sneered back. He thought he’d got quite good at sneering since his name flew out of the Goblet. “Which part is making you do that, the Muggle one or the fact that I’m not a reader?”
Nott slammed his mouth shut and seemed to think furiously about what he was going to say next. Harry turned back to face the lake, ignoring the way that Nott’s gaze was fastened on his neck.
“That explains some things.”
“Get on with it, Nott. Or go away. I don’t really care which.”
“You could feed me the heart of the basilisk you killed. And then I would have Parseltongue, and it would banish the blood curse.”
Harry knew that he smeared mud across his robes with how fast he turned to gape at Nott, but frankly, he didn’t care what he looked like at the moment. “You want me to what?”
“There aren’t that many people who know the truth about what happened in the Chamber of Secrets, but I’m one of them.” Nott gave him the kind of thin, cold smile Harry would have expected from the person he usually seemed to be. “I know you killed a basilisk. I know that no one’s been down in the Chamber since you did. I know that you can give me its heart.”
“I mean—fine. I could do that.” Harry felt a bit of relief at thinking of something he could do. “I suppose I could take you down in the Chamber and you could use Cutting Spells?”
“You have to give me its heart.”
“What? Cast some kind of promise spell or something?”
“No. Cut it free yourself and feed it to me.”
Harry thought this was one of the weirdest things he had ever heard. But he shook his head. “All right, Nott. If that’s what you want.”
Nott froze, staring at him. Harry stared back. He wondered if Nott had thought he wouldn’t agree, or wouldn’t agree so easily, and was now waiting for Harry to laugh and say he’d been lying.
But then Nott whispered, “That’s not the way it works.”
Harry groaned. “Look, I already agreed to feed you the heart and help with your blood curse. I don’t know what else you want.”
“It has to be balanced.”
“Do you know how to conjure scales to weigh the heart? Because I don’t.”
Nott muttered something that sounded like, “Merlin grant me patience.” Harry just waited, and resisted the temptation to say that they would already be discussing real things if Nott hadn’t resorted to cryptic little statements.
Nott finally took a long breath and faced him. He held out his hands, palm-up. Harry eyed them and waited.
“The enormous gift that you’re granting me has to be balanced out in some way.” Nott let his hands dip up and down like the scales Harry had been discussing. “You’re saving my life, granting me a rare magical gift, and protecting—well, I can tell you about that later, if this works out.
“Those are enormous gifts. You have to let me balance them out. Give you something that’s of equal value.”
“Everything that I would value equally, you can’t give me.”
Harry tried to say it gently, but Nott still paled, his nostrils flaring. “I have to,” he said so quietly Harry had trouble hearing him. “You don’t understand how ancient this magic is, how it has to work.”
“No, I don’t. But you can’t kill Voldemort—” Nott flinched so hard it looked like he was about to stand “—and you can’t take away my fame, and you can’t bring my parents back, and you can’t make people realize my godfather’s innocence. It’s the way things are.”
Nott narrowed his eyes and stared at Harry as if looking for secrets in his aura or something like that that would tell him how Harry really felt. Harry maintained eye contact as gently as he could.
“I’ll give you the heart for free,” Harry added, at the same time as Nott tried to say something. Nott jerked his head in irritation, but let Harry speak. “I can swear a vow or something like that says there’s no debt, can’t I?”
“No. Because of the magic involved.”
“You’re so frustrating, Nott,” Harry muttered, and rubbed his forehead. It felt like his scar was hurting again. “There’s nothing I want from you.”
“I can offer you something that you might not know you want.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Freedom from the Muggle world.”
Harry jerked and looked up at Nott. He had leaned near enough that Harry felt uncomfortable, but he also wasn’t going to retreat and look weak. He stared into Nott’s dark brown eyes, which looked as if they had flecks of gold and blue around the edges. It was the closest he had ever looked at someone’s eyes.
“I told you that you can’t make my godfather innocent,” Harry whispered.
“There are ways and means around the Ministry’s decrees,” Nott whispered back. “People who think that Black is guilty right now, or just want him dead because it would be more convenient, can be bribed to think differently.”
Harry swallowed. Maybe he should feel bad about the thought of bribing people, but—
After third year, he knew that Minister Fudge was exactly the kind of person Nott was talking about. And the kind of person who got manipulated by Lucius Malfoy, too. If someone was going to be manipulating him, then Harry should just as well be the one doing it.
But he didn’t think he had enough money in his trust vault for that, or at least not for the whole Ministry, even if it was enough for Fudge. Harry shook his head reluctantly. “I would need a lot of Galleons.”
Nott smiled, a triumphant expression that glowed more in his eyes than on his face. “So get them by selling the basilisk.”
“But you want its heart.”
“That still leaves the scale, and the venom, and the fangs—”
Harry jumped despite himself.
“You didn’t sell the fangs already, did you?”
“No. It just made me jump because one of them went through my arm and Fawkes had to cry on it to heal me. Dumbledore’s phoenix?” Harry added, when Nott stared at him as if he didn’t know what Harry was talking about, and pulled back his sleeve.
Nott stared in silence at the puckered scar on his arm. Then he said, “You are impossible.”
Harry shrugged and covered the scar up again. He didn’t see what was so much more impossible about surviving a basilisk bite than about surviving the Killing Curse, and that seemed to be just the kind of thing everyone around him thought he should accept. “Believe me or not.”
“The fangs are still in the Chamber?”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe the one that bit me is broken because I rammed it through the Dark artifact that was possessing G—er, the student who was possessed. But the others ought to be okay.”
Nott rolled his eyes and muttered something. Then he shook his head. “Venom and scales and fangs—they can be used in potions, or sold to strengthen goblin weapons, or to help with breeding experiments, or to make special robes, or—”
“Yeah, I see what you mean.”
Nott stilled and stared at him expectantly. Harry looked off to the side and wondered if he should do this.
Then he shrugged. At this point, it didn’t sound as though anyone else wanted the basilisk. No one had been going down in the Chamber as far as he knew. The worst thing would probably be if he and Nott went down there and then couldn’t cut the thing because they didn’t have strong enough magic.
Nott seemed to know the answer before Harry could speak it to him. He climbed back to his feet and swatted some dirt off his robes. He was still smiling.
“Shall we go?”
*
The only good part so far of the way the school shunned him, Harry thought, was that people deliberately turned away from him when they saw him walking down a corridor. They didn’t even bother to comment on the fact that Nott was with him. And he wouldn’t be missed if he went down into the Chamber of Secrets, either.
Harry swallowed the loneliness he felt. He would still speak to Hermione later today.
But she also wanted to spend time with Ron, to reassure him that she hadn’t forgotten him, and Harry was—
He put the thought aside. He and Nott were here for something else.
Moaning Myrtle dived out of sight when they came into her bathroom instead of trying to speak to them. Harry went over to the sink and hissed uncertainly. Part of him didn’t believe it would really work. The events at the end of second year still seemed more like a dream than anything else.
But it did. The sink shuddered and ground into the wall, and Harry found himself staring down the black pipe.
“Potter?”
Nott’s hand on his back made Harry start. He stepped back and nodded. “There’s a pretty slimy slide down this way,” he said. “I suppose we should have brought brooms or something.”
“I know Cleaning Charms.”
Harry shrugged and leaped onto the slide.
This time, he was prepared when they came to the end, and he rolled and dropped the way he would if he’d fallen off his broom during Quidditch practice. Nott didn’t seem to know that, but Harry snapped his wand out and said, “Arresto momentum!”
Nott half-floated to the floor and blinked at him. “I’m surprised you know that spell.”
“The Gryffindor Quidditch practices taught it to me.” Harry spelled the slime off his robes at the same time Nott did and turned to face the corridor that led to the Chamber. “There’s a fairly large skin here, and lots of bones. More slime.”
“How big would you say the skin was?”
“Not as big as the basilisk itself, but big.”
“Then we can sell that, too.”
Harry nodded and began walking, his lit wand in front of him. Nott walked in near-silence, or as quiet as he could get when things were crunching beneath his feet, so Harry didn’t say anything, either.
They came to the cave-in, and Nott looked at him. “Did this happen when you were here?”
“Yeah. Lockhart tried to Obliviate us—Ron and me—but he used Ron’s wand, which was broken, and the backfiring brought down the ceiling.”
Nott stared at him again.
Harry shrugged, rubbed the back of his neck, and aimed his wand at the scattered rocks. He hadn’t really thought about how they would clean them out of the way, because he hadn’t remembered this part, but he might as well try the plan that had just occurred to him. “Reparo!” he yelled, putting all his strength into it.
The rocks went hurtling off the floor and crashed into the ceiling. Harry yanked Nott with him as he dived back, thinking that they would probably drop again, but when he looked up, the cracks were closing behind the stones. He smiled a little. Good enough.
“Warn me next time, Potter,” Nott said faintly from the floor.
“Sorry. Let’s go before they decide to fall again.”
“They wouldn’t decide to do that.”
Harry walked ahead, leaving Nott to have his philosophical debate with empty air if he wanted to, and they eventually came to the Chamber doors. Harry flinched instinctively, but there was no hissing and no foul stench, either. The doors had in fact sealed themselves, and the snakes’ emerald eyes glinted at them.
“What an impressive set of doors,” Nott whispered.
Harry shrugged and spoke to the doors. “Open.”
As the doors obeyed, Nott asked, “What word was that in Parseltongue?”
“Just open.”
“I would have thought Salazar Slytherin would choose something more impressive for his Chamber.”
Harry shrugged again and stepped in.
There wasn’t any thick smell, and the basilisk didn’t look rotted in any way at all. Harry shuddered a little as he looked at it. He didn’t know if his memory was faulty or if he just hadn’t really had time to take in its size when he was twelve and trying to get Ginny out of the Chamber, but the thing was huge.
After what felt like an eternity of staring, Harry realized that he wasn’t hearing any movement from behind him. He turned and found Nott holding as still as a rabbit, eyes fixed on the snake.
“It’s all right,” Harry said quietly.
“I know it’s all right, I’m not stupid.”
But Nott still inched along the wall, with his back to it, as he came into the Chamber. Harry would have thought that a Slytherin would be overcome by awe at the sight of the Chamber, since their House probably told stories about their Founder, but Nott just stared at the basilisk and didn’t even look up at the statue.
Harry waited for a minute, then two. Nott didn’t stop staring. Harry cleared his throat finally, and felt a little bad for the way that Nott jumped and spun around. But he had to say it. “Are you ready to cut the scales?”
Nott lowered his eyes and nodded. Then he turned to the body and lifted his wand. Harry didn’t hear the spell he hit the corpse with, but it sliced scales aside. Harry wondered if he could have done that when he was fighting it, but—
Well, Riddle had had his wand. Or maybe the basilisk’s scales were resistant to spells like this when it was alive, but not after death.
Harry wrinkled his nose as congealed, jelly-like masses of blood fell out of the corpse. Nott turned and stared at him, making a noise that was too nervous to be a giggle. “You want to do the honors, Potter?”
Harry stepped cautiously forwards, thinking about saying that he didn’t know exactly what the heart looked like. But it turned out there was no mistaking it. The organ didn’t look that much like a human heart—the illustrations of them Harry had seen in some Muggle science textbooks in primary school—but it looked enough like it.
Harry swallowed, then gagged and had to hold his breath as he cast the spell that would cut the heart out of the basilisk. It fell and rolled on the floor of the Chamber.
It was wider than the span of Harry’s arms. He turned and stared at Nott. “How exactly are you going to eat this?”
“You’ll cut pieces of it off it and feed them to me.” Nott seemed to be past whatever nervousness had gripped him when they entered the Chamber. He lifted his head now, his face proud, eyes glittering. “We’ll come back across multiple evenings and Saturdays if we have to.”
Harry nodded. He’d been about to say that he needed to devote some time to studying for the First Task, but he supposed that this didn’t really have a deadline, unlike the First Task.
What is it? How am I going to survive it?
But Harry shoved that aside. He might not be able to help himself much with the school’s shunning and the like, he might not be able to figure out who had put his name into the Goblet, but he could help Nott get rid of the stupid blood curse his father had cast on him.
Harry could hardly believe a father would act like that. Well, except that Nott’s father had been a Death Eater. So he supposed that made sense.
“Going to cut off the first piece, Potter?”
Harry jerked himself back to the present and nodded. “Can you show me the spell that you used on the basilisk? I think I’m going to need something as tough as that to slice through this.” He eyed the black-purple flesh of the heart.
“Of course.”
Nott stepped forwards, his eyes resting on Harry instead of the heart. Harry swallowed. There was something weirdly intense about Nott’s gaze, as though he was trying to pierce through all the nonsense that people thought and thought they saw about the Boy-Who-Lived and work through to who Harry was underneath.
But then, Harry thought, that would make sense. Nott wanted to have the blood curse removed and be able to live. He wanted to trust that Harry was going to give him that ability.
So Harry let Nott guide his wand through the right motions, and then he turned and shot the charm at the heart.
The first sliver pulled away, looking more blue-black than anything else. Harry walked over and picked it up, then turned.
Nott was right there. Harry honestly couldn’t remember the last time he had been this close to anyone except Ron and Hermione.
And even Ron and Hermione had never stared at him like this, eye to eye, close enough for Harry to feel their breathing, a warm hand on his wrist as Nott stooped down and bit into the piece of raw flesh Harry was offering him.
Harry had had some concerns still, like whether Nott would be able to eat the thing at all, what raw meat from a dead magical beast might do to him—
But as Nott swallowed the meat and licked the last of the blood off his lips, those thoughts reeled into quietness like birds flying home to roost for the night.
“I can manage another few strips,” Nott said, watching him with that same intent gaze.
Harry nodded, dazedly, and stooped to cut another piece.
