Chapter One of 'The Parselmouth Promise'- The Unforgivable Thing
Title: The Parselmouth Promise
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria, other canon pairings mentioned
Content Notes: Angst, divorce, Parseltongue, brief violence, ritual magic, not epilogue-compliant
Rating: R
Summary: Voldemort’s influence lingers after his death in the form of Parseltongue passed on to the children of everyone with a Dark Mark-or, in Harry’s case, someone who once hosted a Horcrux. As Harry struggles to be a good single father to his son, James, he inevitably runs up against Draco Malfoy, who’s not only a Parselmouth now but attempting to create a whole ritual and school system to benefit himself, his friends, and his son, Scorpius. No matter how much some people don’t like that.
Author’s Notes: This is probably going to be a medium-length fic of around 10-20 chapters. Note that it’s fairly angsty.
The Parselmouth Promise
Chapter One-The Unforgivable Thing
On evenings like this, when James had been full all day of tears and wails and unreasonable fixations on Muggle cartoons on the telly that he wanted to watch thirty hours of, Harry sat beside his cot and smoothed his sleeping son’s back and thought about the unforgivable thing he had said to his wife.
Harry knew the mood would pass. He knew he would get up in the morning and attempt to do the best he could for James. He knew that his and Ginny’s marriage probably wouldn’t have lasted given what had happened, and he knew that quitting his Auror job to be a father to James-to live to be a father to James-was the best thing he could do.
It still made him wince when he thought of his and Ginny’s last conversation.
*
“I can’t stand it.”
Harry stood back with his hands in his robe pockets and watched Ginny throw robes and books and hairbrushes and Quidditch equipment haphazardly into her trunk. He knew he should speak up, say something, convince her not to leave him. If nothing else, she had a duty to James.
But he was just too tired.
“I can’t stand it,” Ginny repeated, throwing a decorative robe into the trunk with enough force that it caught on a splinter in the wood and tore. With a huff, Ginny Levitated it into the air and threw it with her wand. This time, it sank into the interior of the trunk like a snowball into a field of snow. “To know that my son has Parseltongue because of you, and that his whole life he’ll be speaking the filthy language that Tom Riddle whispered in my ear when I was eleven…”
Harry stirred. “It’s not like I would have wished this for him,” he said, and although he kept his voice quiet, no one could have mistaken the fury in it-least of all Ginny, who knew him so well. She flung herself around to face him. “And it’s not like he’ll be unique. There’ll be lots of kids with Parseltongue now, Gin. Can’t you just-”
“Lots of Death Eater kids. You think I want my son marked that way?” Ginny wiped a hand across her face, knocking loose the tears. “And no, Harry. I tried. That’s why I stayed for a year after he started talking. I thought maybe I could get used to it. But I can’t. Having a son who speaks Parseltongue just brings up my old nightmares of Riddle.”
“The nightmares you never got Mind-Healing for,” Harry snapped. He’d admired Ginny for that after the war, that she seemed so strong she had moved on and put her past trauma behind her. But now she was doing something unforgivable in his eyes. “You’re walking away from being a mother to your son.”
“I told you why!”
“You’re abandoning him!”
“He’s going to have you, isn’t he?” Ginny put her hands on her hips. “Someone who’s not horrified by Parseltongue. Someone who gave it to him. It’ll be better for him not to have me around when I can’t get over my horror. And don’t tell me that you’re over the nightmares, either, Harry! I hear you hissing and twisting in your bed at night!”
“He still needs his mum!” Harry threw up his hands and paced towards the far side of the room. “Merlin, what kind of mother are you?”
“Someone who wants to have children who don’t speak Parseltongue! Someone who’s going to divorce you because it’s clear that you can’t!”
And Harry had spun around and said the unforgivable thing, the thing that made him wince remembering it, and the thing that someday, he would have to explain to James. (It flayed him alive, remembering it at night).
“Fine, then. Go off and hug your precious trauma instead of your child.”
Ginny’s eyes widened, and the tears that had been threatening spilled down her face. Harry slammed to a halt, staring at her. Since her first year, he couldn’t remember seeing her cry like this. She hadn’t even done it when it became clear that James’s first language was Parseltongue and that his English was slow and late in coming.
Shame drenched Harry like a cool shower.
He took a step forwards, reaching out. “Ginny, I’m sorry-I didn’t mean-”
“No, Harry, you did.” She was astonishingly composed, now, but the tears kept on flowing as she looked away from him. “That’s what you think of me. You think I’m weak because my mind and soul were raped when I was eleven, is that it?”
“No, I just.” Harry stopped moving and speaking for a long moment. “James needs his mum.”
“Sometimes,” Ginny said, “a woman needs to heal on her own.”
She picked up the packed trunk and walked towards the Floo. “Expect the divorce papers in the morning,” she added over her shoulder.
And Harry had to stand there and watch her walk away. He knew, even then, knowledge as deep as his bones, that if he had found the right words, or hadn’t meant what he said, she would have stopped and turned around, and James would have had his mum.
But he didn’t know the right words. Which only proved why what he had said was unforgivable.
She did send the divorce papers in the morning. And Harry and James (more to the point) hadn’t seen her in the past two years.
*
“Daddy!”
Harry rolled out of bed in instants. It had been two years since he was a full-time Auror, but he still had the reflexes. He sprinted down the corridor, aiming his wand in front of him and calling up Lumos silently.
James was sitting up in bed, his eyes wide. He didn’t have the usual tears, though. Harry looked around the room decorated in soft blues and greens, wondering if he had cast accidental magic and startled himself awake, instead of with a nightmare.
“Daddy, look.” James pointed a shaky hand at the far wall. Harry turned, his mind filling with visions of enemies breaking into his house to hurt his son.
But instead of a Death Eater or that group of lunatics calling themselves the Order of the Serpent, there was nothing but a small golden snake curled up there. Harry lowered his wand, but kept it out. The snake still could have been sent by an enemy.
“Can you talk to it, James?” Harry was casting a few charms as he spoke, ones that would pick up on the ill intent of the snake if it had been conjured to bite his son. Nothing came back except the charm that clarified the snake did have venom. He studied it in the light. Bright red stripes caught down its golden body, so bright that he was inclined to believe it wasn’t natural, but a magical creature someone had made in Gryffindor colors.
To appeal to his son? If James had been by himself and spoken innocently to the snake, or been attracted to pick it up…
Harry shuddered.
“You talk to it, Daddy.”
Harry sighed and got down on the floor. He hated speaking Parseltongue, especially since it had been one of the things that had cost James his mother. But on the other hand, maybe it was best that he take the lead so James wouldn’t get charmed by the thing and want to keep it as a pet. “Where did you come from?”
The snake snapped her tail straight, a little motion of shock, and then crawled towards him. “It was not a lie! Everyone told me the truth!”
Harry placed his wand between them so he could Stun her easily if he had to, and hissed a warning. The snake stopped in place, coiling back and forth, obeying him but obviously resentful about it. Harry sighed. “Who is everyone? Where did you come from?”
“I came to seek a speaker, since they are no longer rare. I knew my speaker was in this house.” The snake lifted her head, her tongue darting out as she scented. “And I was talking about the other snakes. They told me that there was someone here who would Match me, but I did not believe them because I had not smelled the scent for myself.”
“Match you?” Harry echoed warily. That sounded like some sort of mating, and he was not about have a snake lay eggs in their house.
“Each snake has a kind of speaker who would Match us. Protect us best, match our temperaments, be able to use the blood magic. What kind of speaker are you, that you do not know this?”
“A reluctant one,” Harry snapped. “And I am not going to allow you to Match with my son. He’s far too young for blood magic and the like.”
“You are mistaken. He is not my speaker. You are.”
Harry shut his eyes. He shook his head. “I will not Match with you, either. Go back to where you came from.”
“Why? We are meant to be together.”
Harry quelled the hysterical laughter that was trying to well up in him, remembering the time when he would have said the same thing about himself and Ginny. He shook his head again and said, “I do not wish any snake as a pet or a companion, and my son is too young for one. There are many other speakers in Britain now. Go find one of them.”
The snake glanced around the bedroom. “This is a nice large space. I will like it here.”
“I told you to go home!”
The snake arranged herself around the foot of one of the bedposts on James’s bed, and yawned soundlessly at him, revealing the delicate fangs that stood out in the front of her mouth. She seemed to have no other teeth. “It is strange that you would tell me to leave the place where I already am.”
“I’m not too young for blood magic, Daddy,” James said, apparently deciding that he could get over his shyness about speaking in front of a snake.
The snake twisted her neck in James’s direction. “It is good that the young one also speaks. Perhaps he will bond with one of my eggs one day.”
“Can I have a snake, Daddy?”
Harry resisted the temptation to bang his head into a different bedpost than the one the snake was coiled around, because it wouldn’t help. “I have no reason to trust a venomous magical snake that an enemy of mine probably conjured around my son.”
“I am not a conjuration. I have lived in the shadows for most of my life. My kind do. We are so highly magical that people would sacrifice us for potions and blood magic against our will if they knew where we were.”
Harry stared at her. “What kind of snake are you?”
“You mean you could not tell?” The snake flicked her neck to the left this time, and revealed that the blood-bright stripes ran all the way across her scales and ended up in a messy knot of color on the back of her head-which at least didn’t have a hood the way a cobra’s did, Harry saw. “I am a Gryffindor snake. From us, Godric Gryffindor took his name and his House colors.”
“Daddy was a Gryffindor,” James chimed in.
“That is part of the reason I came to him,” the snake agreed. “Someone who was in that House is more likely to be a Match for a Gryffindor snake than someone outside it.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t practice the kind of magic that some of the Parselmouths who are announcing themselves now do. You should go and find someone among them.” Even as he spoke, he knew there weren’t very many Gryffindor Parselmouths other than him. There had been few Marked Death Eaters in Gryffindor in this last war, and the two Harry survivors was aware of were in prison.
But that wasn’t his problem. The snake would just have to deal with the inconvenience.
“There are other kinds of magic we could make together.” The snake flicked her tail.
“I am uninterested in blood magic.”
“Still others.”
“Can we keep her, Daddy, please?” James clasped his hands and gave Harry the sort of big-eyed look he was terrible at refusing. “She could be your snake, and I could play with her, and I could put a hat on her head.”
Harry had to smile, while the snake, who evidently did understand English, said, “You could not.”
“I am not going to accept a dangerous pet in this house,” Harry said coolly, glad to return to his real native language now that he knew he could do so. “Not when I know you have venom. Go find someone else.”
“No, speaker. I like it here.”
Harry shrugged, cast a Netting Charm that he usually used on some of the pixies and fairies who tried to get into the house since it resonated with James’s magic, and carried the snake in the transparent bag that had surrounded her to the window. She hissed at him in agitation, but Harry forced himself to essentially unfocus his hearing and not listen, the way he might prevent himself from reading a book. He’d learned to do it when he was trying to make sure James learned English, too.
The snake appeared extremely upset, but Harry dumped her out the window, then began casting temporary spells that would keep out any reptile from the house in general and James’s room specifically. There was no reason for any reptiles to cross the boundary on an ordinary day, so the spells wouldn’t keep out any creature that had a legitimate reason for visiting them.
“Daddy.”
James sounded as if he was about to cry again. Harry turned from the window and went to sit down next to his son, holding him close and stroking his hair back from his forehead. Sometimes he would just sit there and look at his son, so different from him despite how messy his hair was. No scar, no green eyes, no black hair, no haunted, terrified expression.
And Harry was determined to keep it that way, which was why he was so reluctant to tell James about the unforgivable thing.
Then again, he wasn’t old enough to hear about why his mother had wanted to leave, anyway. Harry kissed James on the forehead, and then tickled him a little until James was giggling and yawning.
As he put James back to bed, James whispered, “Can the snake come and visit tomorrow, Daddy?”
“Maybe,” Harry said, which was a good enough promise with as sleepy as James was. He yawned once more, gave a huge stretch, and went to sleep so fast that Harry could only stare.
Another thing that was different between them, and the only one that Harry envied. He went back to his room and sipped carefully at Dreamless Sleep. He was always careful with it, given how addictive it was.
But he hadn’t had a peaceful night’s sleep without it in nearly a decade now, and he didn’t see that changing any time soon.
*
“Daddy, Daddy!”
Harry looked up from his pile of post. He still received way too much despite having been retired from the Aurors for two years. People wanted his autograph, or thought he would give them a perfect quote about their random product, or wanted to talk about the war, or, in case of the stupid letter in front of him that he was about to tear up, wanted to convince him to enroll James in a “Parselmouth School.”
They were in the drawing room, a large room with a little sunken area in the middle of it that Harry could fill with balls or pillows for James, and had been the reason he’d bought the house. James was hovering a cushion in front of him now.
And he was doing it with purposeful magic, there was no doubt of that, and with the help of gleaming silver snakes that extended from his hand and held the cushion in their mouths for him, instead of Levitating it.
Harry crossed over to his son and crouched on the brick rim of the sunken area. James grinned at him. “I’m doing it, Daddy!”
“Yeah, you are,” Harry agreed, staring at the snakes. They weren’t illusions, but neither were they real creatures. They were conjured ones who had appeared because James wanted to hover the pillow, he was pretty sure. But he needed to ask. “James, how are you doing it?”
“I askded for help, and they came and didded it!” James said. He still had trouble with English words sometimes. He waved his hand around. “It’s fun,” he added in Parseltongue.
Harry took a deep breath, ruffled his son’s hair, and went back to the table to stare at the letter. There were several lines about how the Parselmouth School would help Parselmouth children because they instinctively performed magic in a different way than ordinary accidental outbursts.
Harry sighed. He hated Parseltongue, but he wasn’t the one being asked to speak it. And he wanted to do what was best for James. He deserved to be trained even though Harry would never embrace his own Parseltongue.
“So tomorrow,” Harry said aloud, even though James was occupied with his pillow and wouldn’t understand him even if he was, “we have to go talk to that git Malfoy.”
Chapter Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria, other canon pairings mentioned
Content Notes: Angst, divorce, Parseltongue, brief violence, ritual magic, not epilogue-compliant
Rating: R
Summary: Voldemort’s influence lingers after his death in the form of Parseltongue passed on to the children of everyone with a Dark Mark-or, in Harry’s case, someone who once hosted a Horcrux. As Harry struggles to be a good single father to his son, James, he inevitably runs up against Draco Malfoy, who’s not only a Parselmouth now but attempting to create a whole ritual and school system to benefit himself, his friends, and his son, Scorpius. No matter how much some people don’t like that.
Author’s Notes: This is probably going to be a medium-length fic of around 10-20 chapters. Note that it’s fairly angsty.
The Parselmouth Promise
Chapter One-The Unforgivable Thing
On evenings like this, when James had been full all day of tears and wails and unreasonable fixations on Muggle cartoons on the telly that he wanted to watch thirty hours of, Harry sat beside his cot and smoothed his sleeping son’s back and thought about the unforgivable thing he had said to his wife.
Harry knew the mood would pass. He knew he would get up in the morning and attempt to do the best he could for James. He knew that his and Ginny’s marriage probably wouldn’t have lasted given what had happened, and he knew that quitting his Auror job to be a father to James-to live to be a father to James-was the best thing he could do.
It still made him wince when he thought of his and Ginny’s last conversation.
*
“I can’t stand it.”
Harry stood back with his hands in his robe pockets and watched Ginny throw robes and books and hairbrushes and Quidditch equipment haphazardly into her trunk. He knew he should speak up, say something, convince her not to leave him. If nothing else, she had a duty to James.
But he was just too tired.
“I can’t stand it,” Ginny repeated, throwing a decorative robe into the trunk with enough force that it caught on a splinter in the wood and tore. With a huff, Ginny Levitated it into the air and threw it with her wand. This time, it sank into the interior of the trunk like a snowball into a field of snow. “To know that my son has Parseltongue because of you, and that his whole life he’ll be speaking the filthy language that Tom Riddle whispered in my ear when I was eleven…”
Harry stirred. “It’s not like I would have wished this for him,” he said, and although he kept his voice quiet, no one could have mistaken the fury in it-least of all Ginny, who knew him so well. She flung herself around to face him. “And it’s not like he’ll be unique. There’ll be lots of kids with Parseltongue now, Gin. Can’t you just-”
“Lots of Death Eater kids. You think I want my son marked that way?” Ginny wiped a hand across her face, knocking loose the tears. “And no, Harry. I tried. That’s why I stayed for a year after he started talking. I thought maybe I could get used to it. But I can’t. Having a son who speaks Parseltongue just brings up my old nightmares of Riddle.”
“The nightmares you never got Mind-Healing for,” Harry snapped. He’d admired Ginny for that after the war, that she seemed so strong she had moved on and put her past trauma behind her. But now she was doing something unforgivable in his eyes. “You’re walking away from being a mother to your son.”
“I told you why!”
“You’re abandoning him!”
“He’s going to have you, isn’t he?” Ginny put her hands on her hips. “Someone who’s not horrified by Parseltongue. Someone who gave it to him. It’ll be better for him not to have me around when I can’t get over my horror. And don’t tell me that you’re over the nightmares, either, Harry! I hear you hissing and twisting in your bed at night!”
“He still needs his mum!” Harry threw up his hands and paced towards the far side of the room. “Merlin, what kind of mother are you?”
“Someone who wants to have children who don’t speak Parseltongue! Someone who’s going to divorce you because it’s clear that you can’t!”
And Harry had spun around and said the unforgivable thing, the thing that made him wince remembering it, and the thing that someday, he would have to explain to James. (It flayed him alive, remembering it at night).
“Fine, then. Go off and hug your precious trauma instead of your child.”
Ginny’s eyes widened, and the tears that had been threatening spilled down her face. Harry slammed to a halt, staring at her. Since her first year, he couldn’t remember seeing her cry like this. She hadn’t even done it when it became clear that James’s first language was Parseltongue and that his English was slow and late in coming.
Shame drenched Harry like a cool shower.
He took a step forwards, reaching out. “Ginny, I’m sorry-I didn’t mean-”
“No, Harry, you did.” She was astonishingly composed, now, but the tears kept on flowing as she looked away from him. “That’s what you think of me. You think I’m weak because my mind and soul were raped when I was eleven, is that it?”
“No, I just.” Harry stopped moving and speaking for a long moment. “James needs his mum.”
“Sometimes,” Ginny said, “a woman needs to heal on her own.”
She picked up the packed trunk and walked towards the Floo. “Expect the divorce papers in the morning,” she added over her shoulder.
And Harry had to stand there and watch her walk away. He knew, even then, knowledge as deep as his bones, that if he had found the right words, or hadn’t meant what he said, she would have stopped and turned around, and James would have had his mum.
But he didn’t know the right words. Which only proved why what he had said was unforgivable.
She did send the divorce papers in the morning. And Harry and James (more to the point) hadn’t seen her in the past two years.
*
“Daddy!”
Harry rolled out of bed in instants. It had been two years since he was a full-time Auror, but he still had the reflexes. He sprinted down the corridor, aiming his wand in front of him and calling up Lumos silently.
James was sitting up in bed, his eyes wide. He didn’t have the usual tears, though. Harry looked around the room decorated in soft blues and greens, wondering if he had cast accidental magic and startled himself awake, instead of with a nightmare.
“Daddy, look.” James pointed a shaky hand at the far wall. Harry turned, his mind filling with visions of enemies breaking into his house to hurt his son.
But instead of a Death Eater or that group of lunatics calling themselves the Order of the Serpent, there was nothing but a small golden snake curled up there. Harry lowered his wand, but kept it out. The snake still could have been sent by an enemy.
“Can you talk to it, James?” Harry was casting a few charms as he spoke, ones that would pick up on the ill intent of the snake if it had been conjured to bite his son. Nothing came back except the charm that clarified the snake did have venom. He studied it in the light. Bright red stripes caught down its golden body, so bright that he was inclined to believe it wasn’t natural, but a magical creature someone had made in Gryffindor colors.
To appeal to his son? If James had been by himself and spoken innocently to the snake, or been attracted to pick it up…
Harry shuddered.
“You talk to it, Daddy.”
Harry sighed and got down on the floor. He hated speaking Parseltongue, especially since it had been one of the things that had cost James his mother. But on the other hand, maybe it was best that he take the lead so James wouldn’t get charmed by the thing and want to keep it as a pet. “Where did you come from?”
The snake snapped her tail straight, a little motion of shock, and then crawled towards him. “It was not a lie! Everyone told me the truth!”
Harry placed his wand between them so he could Stun her easily if he had to, and hissed a warning. The snake stopped in place, coiling back and forth, obeying him but obviously resentful about it. Harry sighed. “Who is everyone? Where did you come from?”
“I came to seek a speaker, since they are no longer rare. I knew my speaker was in this house.” The snake lifted her head, her tongue darting out as she scented. “And I was talking about the other snakes. They told me that there was someone here who would Match me, but I did not believe them because I had not smelled the scent for myself.”
“Match you?” Harry echoed warily. That sounded like some sort of mating, and he was not about have a snake lay eggs in their house.
“Each snake has a kind of speaker who would Match us. Protect us best, match our temperaments, be able to use the blood magic. What kind of speaker are you, that you do not know this?”
“A reluctant one,” Harry snapped. “And I am not going to allow you to Match with my son. He’s far too young for blood magic and the like.”
“You are mistaken. He is not my speaker. You are.”
Harry shut his eyes. He shook his head. “I will not Match with you, either. Go back to where you came from.”
“Why? We are meant to be together.”
Harry quelled the hysterical laughter that was trying to well up in him, remembering the time when he would have said the same thing about himself and Ginny. He shook his head again and said, “I do not wish any snake as a pet or a companion, and my son is too young for one. There are many other speakers in Britain now. Go find one of them.”
The snake glanced around the bedroom. “This is a nice large space. I will like it here.”
“I told you to go home!”
The snake arranged herself around the foot of one of the bedposts on James’s bed, and yawned soundlessly at him, revealing the delicate fangs that stood out in the front of her mouth. She seemed to have no other teeth. “It is strange that you would tell me to leave the place where I already am.”
“I’m not too young for blood magic, Daddy,” James said, apparently deciding that he could get over his shyness about speaking in front of a snake.
The snake twisted her neck in James’s direction. “It is good that the young one also speaks. Perhaps he will bond with one of my eggs one day.”
“Can I have a snake, Daddy?”
Harry resisted the temptation to bang his head into a different bedpost than the one the snake was coiled around, because it wouldn’t help. “I have no reason to trust a venomous magical snake that an enemy of mine probably conjured around my son.”
“I am not a conjuration. I have lived in the shadows for most of my life. My kind do. We are so highly magical that people would sacrifice us for potions and blood magic against our will if they knew where we were.”
Harry stared at her. “What kind of snake are you?”
“You mean you could not tell?” The snake flicked her neck to the left this time, and revealed that the blood-bright stripes ran all the way across her scales and ended up in a messy knot of color on the back of her head-which at least didn’t have a hood the way a cobra’s did, Harry saw. “I am a Gryffindor snake. From us, Godric Gryffindor took his name and his House colors.”
“Daddy was a Gryffindor,” James chimed in.
“That is part of the reason I came to him,” the snake agreed. “Someone who was in that House is more likely to be a Match for a Gryffindor snake than someone outside it.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t practice the kind of magic that some of the Parselmouths who are announcing themselves now do. You should go and find someone among them.” Even as he spoke, he knew there weren’t very many Gryffindor Parselmouths other than him. There had been few Marked Death Eaters in Gryffindor in this last war, and the two Harry survivors was aware of were in prison.
But that wasn’t his problem. The snake would just have to deal with the inconvenience.
“There are other kinds of magic we could make together.” The snake flicked her tail.
“I am uninterested in blood magic.”
“Still others.”
“Can we keep her, Daddy, please?” James clasped his hands and gave Harry the sort of big-eyed look he was terrible at refusing. “She could be your snake, and I could play with her, and I could put a hat on her head.”
Harry had to smile, while the snake, who evidently did understand English, said, “You could not.”
“I am not going to accept a dangerous pet in this house,” Harry said coolly, glad to return to his real native language now that he knew he could do so. “Not when I know you have venom. Go find someone else.”
“No, speaker. I like it here.”
Harry shrugged, cast a Netting Charm that he usually used on some of the pixies and fairies who tried to get into the house since it resonated with James’s magic, and carried the snake in the transparent bag that had surrounded her to the window. She hissed at him in agitation, but Harry forced himself to essentially unfocus his hearing and not listen, the way he might prevent himself from reading a book. He’d learned to do it when he was trying to make sure James learned English, too.
The snake appeared extremely upset, but Harry dumped her out the window, then began casting temporary spells that would keep out any reptile from the house in general and James’s room specifically. There was no reason for any reptiles to cross the boundary on an ordinary day, so the spells wouldn’t keep out any creature that had a legitimate reason for visiting them.
“Daddy.”
James sounded as if he was about to cry again. Harry turned from the window and went to sit down next to his son, holding him close and stroking his hair back from his forehead. Sometimes he would just sit there and look at his son, so different from him despite how messy his hair was. No scar, no green eyes, no black hair, no haunted, terrified expression.
And Harry was determined to keep it that way, which was why he was so reluctant to tell James about the unforgivable thing.
Then again, he wasn’t old enough to hear about why his mother had wanted to leave, anyway. Harry kissed James on the forehead, and then tickled him a little until James was giggling and yawning.
As he put James back to bed, James whispered, “Can the snake come and visit tomorrow, Daddy?”
“Maybe,” Harry said, which was a good enough promise with as sleepy as James was. He yawned once more, gave a huge stretch, and went to sleep so fast that Harry could only stare.
Another thing that was different between them, and the only one that Harry envied. He went back to his room and sipped carefully at Dreamless Sleep. He was always careful with it, given how addictive it was.
But he hadn’t had a peaceful night’s sleep without it in nearly a decade now, and he didn’t see that changing any time soon.
*
“Daddy, Daddy!”
Harry looked up from his pile of post. He still received way too much despite having been retired from the Aurors for two years. People wanted his autograph, or thought he would give them a perfect quote about their random product, or wanted to talk about the war, or, in case of the stupid letter in front of him that he was about to tear up, wanted to convince him to enroll James in a “Parselmouth School.”
They were in the drawing room, a large room with a little sunken area in the middle of it that Harry could fill with balls or pillows for James, and had been the reason he’d bought the house. James was hovering a cushion in front of him now.
And he was doing it with purposeful magic, there was no doubt of that, and with the help of gleaming silver snakes that extended from his hand and held the cushion in their mouths for him, instead of Levitating it.
Harry crossed over to his son and crouched on the brick rim of the sunken area. James grinned at him. “I’m doing it, Daddy!”
“Yeah, you are,” Harry agreed, staring at the snakes. They weren’t illusions, but neither were they real creatures. They were conjured ones who had appeared because James wanted to hover the pillow, he was pretty sure. But he needed to ask. “James, how are you doing it?”
“I askded for help, and they came and didded it!” James said. He still had trouble with English words sometimes. He waved his hand around. “It’s fun,” he added in Parseltongue.
Harry took a deep breath, ruffled his son’s hair, and went back to the table to stare at the letter. There were several lines about how the Parselmouth School would help Parselmouth children because they instinctively performed magic in a different way than ordinary accidental outbursts.
Harry sighed. He hated Parseltongue, but he wasn’t the one being asked to speak it. And he wanted to do what was best for James. He deserved to be trained even though Harry would never embrace his own Parseltongue.
“So tomorrow,” Harry said aloud, even though James was occupied with his pillow and wouldn’t understand him even if he was, “we have to go talk to that git Malfoy.”
Chapter Two.