[This Lord Business Series]: I Have Been a Brother to O.W.L.S., 28/?

[lomonaaeren]

Harry wakes up, snatched urgently out of sleep. He gasps, sitting up and staring around. In his cage next to the bed, Salazar is standing on his hind legs, but he isn’t scratching at the cage bars the way he did when hunting the Horcrux. He’s just looking at Harry with wide eyes.

Ahalam stirs sleepily around Harry’s neck. “Why did you wake up? Why disturb the prettiest snake?”

Harry absently pets Ahalam. At first he thought that he woke up due to his bond with Ahalam, but his snake doesn’t dream as far as Harry can tell, and he only woke up after Harry. It was something else. Someone trying to alert him.

Something?

As soon as Harry thinks that, a new thought takes root in his head, as if Harry has given permission for it to form. There’s a power moving beneath Harry’s bed, stirring like a giant snake of warmth and force that makes Harry think of the basilisk. But it isn’t anything so threatening. It only wants to warn him.

Harry opens his mouth. “Hogwarts?” he whispers.

There’s no reason to suspect it, except that of course Hogwarts has taken his part as Lord Slytherin before, but the knowledge blooms to life in his mind that yes, that’s it, Hogwarts is warning him, there is danger coming and she needs Lord Slytherin there to help defend her students—

Harry flies out of bed, only fumbling for a moment to make sure that he’s got his wand and Ahalam firmly wrapped around his neck, and also that he can shuck his pyjamas and change into robes. Ahalam is sleepy and grumbling, but Harry doesn’t let that slow him down. He can feel the warning pulsing through him now, and he won’t be surprised if it wakes the professors.

On the other hand, he has no idea if Hogwarts can communicate with them that directly.

Go!

Harry runs out of his dormitory and towards the door of the common room. A few studying O.W.L. and N.E.W.T students are asleep there, but no one’s awake to cry anxiously after him. Harry scrambles out of the portrait and takes off running again.

He lets the sense of urgency and fear guide him through the corridors. He doesn’t keep track of the staircase that he’s speeding down, and he nearly stumbles when he comes around a corner and finds a pool of water on the floor that he slips in.

He’s outside Myrtle’s bathroom.

Harry swallows and strides in, ignoring the splash that probably means Myrtle’s diving into a toilet. She doesn’t bother him, and his gaze is fastened on the sink with the carving of the snake on the faucet, which is trembling a little.

Not really with any real vibrations, Harry thinks. Not yet. This is a version of Hogwarts’s warning system.

Someone is coming up through the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry snorts in the next second. Someone. No. He knows perfectly well who’s coming through the Chamber of Secrets, and what he has to do to stop them. He takes a deep breath and reaches out to connect with the magic of Hogwarts.

It flows into him and drowns his soul.

*

Later, Harry will think about what he’s doing. Now, there is only the need, the temptation, the knowledge to act.

He raises his wand and steps forwards as the sink opens in front of him to reveal the tunnel that he went down at the end of second year. Later, he will wonder if he hissed to open it. He might not have. He doesn’t remember it. Maybe Hogwarts opened it for him.

He looks down, and there’s a set of black stone stairs leading down. They weren’t there before, but that doesn’t really matter. Harry goes down them confidently, and comes out at the bottom of them in the flicker of torchlight from the walls.

That is all Hogwarts’s doing, Harry knows. He would have relied on a Lumos if he cast anything at all.

He walks, and walks, and walks. The tunnel bends back and forth in front of him, and there’s the basilisk skin, and the crunch of small bones beneath his feet, and there’s the sounds from ahead that indicate people are already there and arguing in low voices.

Part of Harry freezes and shatters like glass when he realizes that, maybe the part of him that’s Lord Slytherin. Voldemort revealed the secret of the Chamber to other people.

He deserves death.

(Later, Harry will think that that doesn’t make much sense, when he could have shown the Chamber to his friends, but he will also know it’s different).

He walks forwards with his wand still aimed and his eyes clear and bright, and he steps around the corner to see several masked Death Eaters standing there, arguing with each other about what’s happening.

It doesn’t even take much finesse to aim. After all, Harry is right in front of them, and he lifts his wand with the magic already boiling through him. Green and brilliant, the magic of Lord Slytherin, it lifts like the wings of a dragon.

“Serpentem voco!”

The stone walls ring with the answering chorus of offensive spells, but Hogwarts is manipulating the stone beneath Harry’s feet, and he stumbles to one knee. All the hexes fly overhead. Harry laughs a little as he stands and tilts his head to the side so that they can no longer ignore the movement beside them.

“I think you have larger problems to worry about,” he breathes, “then hexing me.”

They do indeed, as the basilisk skin swells with life and power. It’s incomplete, given that Harry harvested part of it in his third year to pay for brooms for the school, but magic brims around the ragged edges of the skin and fills it with sparkling life. The great basilisk lifts its head and turns it, slow, ponderous, suddenly living yellow eyes fixing on the Death Eaters.

Two die before they can glance away. One of them, trembling, manages to conjure a rooster, but Harry isn’t at all surprised to see that the rooster’s cry has no effect on the basilisk. It isn’t exactly a natural one.

The basilisk gives a single, hungry hiss and then dives towards the Death Eater who has the rooster. He ducks, and the fangs, made of magic, pierce the stone instead of him. The basilisk begins pulling its length back around to face the intruders into Hogwarts’s domain.

Two of the Death Eaters turn and run away. Harry lets them go. He knows who is here, who is really behind the red and blue spells splashing harmlessly against the basilisk’s hide. He steps forwards, and Ahalam rears up on his shoulder, streamers of green serpentine magic curling away from them.

“Show yourself!” Harry hisses, and Ahalam’s voice blends with his and dances into the air so that there is no difference between them.

There’s a long burst of red and blue in front of him, as though to echo the Death Eaters’ spells, and two of them fall to their knees with their heads bowed. It gets one of them pierced through the back of the neck by the basilisk’s fangs, but that’s little enough for Harry to worry about, as Voldemort steps out through the back of the tunnel from the open doors of the Chamber of Secrets.

It’s the first time that Harry’s ever really seen him in the flesh. Him possessing other people’s bodies or the back of Quirrell’s head didn’t count.

And Harry is shocked by how not-afraid he is. In fact, he’s just furious that this pale being with blazing red eyes and a hateful sneer on his face has invaded his school and endangered his people.

At the moment, they are all his people, even Dumbledore, even Snape, even the students who think that he’s trying to take over the school or something. He lifts his hands in front of him and brings them down. The green streamers of power tangle around him and then shoot forwards like vines to grip Voldemort.

Voldemort snarls and swats them away. There’s something deep and dark and angry inside him, and it rears up like a snapping snake with jaws spread wide.

Harry doesn’t care. He is full of the power of Lord Slytherin, and he hisses, “Turn and face the enemy!”

Ahalam echoes his words precisely. He’s flowing back and forth on Harry’s shoulder, his body forming shapes that Harry can’t take his eyes off Voldemort to appreciate properly.

The basilisk heaves itself around, and maybe it remembers, since it was shed from the one that Voldemort controlled and set on the school, that this is indeed the enemy. It gives a hungry hiss and tilts its head.

Voldemort meets its eyes and doesn’t die.

Harry is so disappointed that it shocks him, for a moment, out of the consuming magic of Lord Slytherin and Hogwarts. He swallows and realizes that people are lying dead in the tunnel, that he’s killed people, and—

And it doesn’t matter. This is one of the burdens that he always knew he would have to take on himself as Lord Slytherin.

And of course Voldemort doesn’t die. He has Horcruxes.

Including the one in me.

At the moment, Harry would be willing to die under the basilisk’s gaze himself if it meant that he could take Voldemort with him.

But that’s not an option, and Harry can feel the tide of Slytherin’s power rearing up inside him again, pushing against the one of Slytherin’s blood. He tilts his head back and cries out in a voice that is Parseltongue and not, is also the grinding of stones and the flickering of torches and the slamming of shutters and the clanking of armor. “Be gone from this place!”

The rush of the magic leaves him, and Harry sags to his knees. But he gets to watch as it slams into Voldemort, see his enemy’s mouth open wide in frustration, and then watch him flung backwards down the tunnel and through what Harry knows is the open door to the Chamber. The other Death Eaters have broken and fled, and Harry and Ahalam are alone in the tunnel except for the basilisk shifting back and forth and hissing in agitation.

Harry realizes he can understand the hisses, that they’re on the edge of the basilisk speaking and thinking independently, and he wants to think about that. But right now, all he can think about is the basilisk accidentally killing someone who comes down through the sink to try and rescue him.

Because Harry knows that he doesn’t have the strength to get back up the tunnel or the stairs by himself.

“Return to skin,” he whispers, and the basilisk collapses back into the tatters of itself that it was before he animated it. Harry closes his eyes, breathing deeply. He’s exhausted, but it’s not the kind of exhaustion that feels dangerous.

More the sort of thing that happens when he’s played a good Quidditch game, he thinks drowsily, than when he’s dueled for his life.

“You are to wake!”

But not even Ahalam’s voice can keep him up right now. Harry lets his head droop, his cheek rest against the dusty floor. He’ll lie here for just a moment—there’s plenty of time to get back up the stairs before the others wake up—

The last thing he feels for some time is the stone of Hogwarts softening beneath his cheek and cradling him, in reverence, in thanks.