Chapter Seven of 'The Parselmouth Promise'- Investigations in Thought
Chapter Six.
Chapter Five.
Chapter One.
Title: The Parselmouth Promise (7/25)
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.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seven-Investigations in Thought
Harry came gasping out of the nightmare that had gripped him, and rolled on his side. Sela slithered out of the way, hissing, “You dream of the small dark spot often.”
“Yes, I do,” Harry said, and didn’t say anything more as he raked his trembling fingers through his hair. It was soaked with sweat, and Harry shook his head. Why did the cupboard scare him more when he was an adult than it ever had as a child? Then, it was just something to be endured. Now he dreamed again and again that he was locked in it forever, unable to open the door, unable to make someone hear him, unable even to die.
Harry closed his eyes, and felt the cool brush of Sela’s scales against his arm. “I do not know if I can help you with this nightmare,” she said softly. “You feel such despair. I am better at dealing with fear.”
Harry shrugged a little. “You don’t have to help with every nightmare. What you’ve done is enough.” In truth, he didn’t think there was much change since Sela had started helping him, except that he dreamed of Voldemort less. But he would take that.
“I should be able to.”
Harry touched her back, and said, “No, you can’t take up every burden someone else has.”
“I didn’t know you knew that.”
The surprise in her voice made Harry open his eyes to blink at her. “Why wouldn’t I know that?”
“Because you take on burdens that are not your own all the time. The fears of your old wife. The comfort of your friends. The need to be a perfect father to your son, when no one can be a perfect anything.”
Harry shook his head and lay back in the bed, staring at the ceiling. He’d had a Floo call from Ron and Hermione that morning, inviting him and James to dinner tomorrow-today, now. He’d go, and he’d talk to them, and he’d try to shed some of his burdens that he was carrying in regards to them.
“Your thoughts hurt you, still. You smell of pain, and I wish I could do something about it.”
Sela had coiled herself around his arm and settled her head into the crook of his elbow. Harry sighed and rolled over to face her. Having her here was-more pleasant than he’d expected. She didn’t makes any threats to bite, except for those people in Diagon Alley that first day, and she wasn’t making demands for him to practice ritual magic, either. He touched her head, between her eyes.
“I know, but you can’t expect me to heal overnight just because you’re here.”
Sela’s tongue darted out, and she tilted her head in a motion that was neither a yes nor a no. “You would heal faster if you were performing ritual magic with your own kind.”
Harry rolled his eyes. He supposed that he’d spoken too soon about her lack of demands.
“I know what that human gesture means. It is a contemptuous one.”
She sounded somewhere between angry and hurt, herself. Harry blew air out between his lips and sat up. Sela came with him, but stayed where she was, even though it was a more awkward position now and made Harry have to juggle her on his arm. Sela just gave a sulky little hiss and didn’t move.
“I don’t want to practice ritual magic. And I’ll never feel that other Parselmouths are my kind. Maybe they can be James’s, as he gets older and understands more about the magic that he can wield. But not mine.”
“Why not?”
Sela still sounded sulky, but as if she was struggling not to be. Harry wouldn’t have thought a snake could have such complex emotions before meeting her, but then, his main example had been Nagini, which was not a good one.
“Because the people who have Parseltongue mostly have it because they followed the man you see in my dreams. He’s the only reason I have it, in fact. But they weren’t Parselmouths, when we were younger, and they tormented me. I don’t have to hate them now, or regard them as enemies, but I don’t want to work with them, either.”
Sela was quiet. Harry leaned back on the pillows and stared at the ceiling. He knew from experience that this mood meant he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. He did wonder what Sela was thinking, but he still started when she answered.
“Perhaps they can become allies and friends if they apologize for what they did. Have you asked them to apologize?” She had a slight tone of pride in her voice when she said those words. Harry knew that James and Sapphire had worked hard the other day to explain the concept of apology to her.
Hell, James had only learned it himself a few months ago, or at least enough to understand what it really meant when Harry asked him to say that he was sorry for something.
“No. I don’t care enough about them to ask them to do that.”
“Then you shouldn’t mind working beside them in ritual circles, either,” Sela retorted. Her tail coiled out and around his wrist, squeezing hard enough to make Harry scowl at her. She let go of his wrist, but not his gaze. “You could ask them for whatever you needed to make it comfortable, and I think the Malfoy one would give it to you.”
“Why him?” Just because he was James’s teacher didn’t mean that Malfoy would do any favors in particular for Harry. He had several other students, too.
“Because your magic is utterly suited to each other’s, and you could work together well.” Sela did lift her head from its resting place now, her tongue darting out as she considered Harry. “You cannot feel it? You cannot sense it?”
Harry just shook his head. Probably someone trained in Parselmouth magic could. He just wasn’t.
“I will help you to feel it.”
That sounded like a threat, but Harry forced himself not to take it that way. He simply lay there, and eventually, Sela went back to sleep, and let Harry wander in his head, in silence, turning pieces of the past over and over in his head like wheels.
He wished he could change them. But he didn’t see how.
*
“How is life with your snake, Potter?”
Draco had meant the question to be a casual one, or as casual as it could be when he was intensely interested in the answer, but Potter tensed and flickered his eyes towards him. Draco forced himself to stand still, loose-limbed and waiting, and after a long moment, Potter nodded at him and glanced aside.
“She’s fine. It’s fine.” His eyes were on James and Scorpius, who were playing with the little Flint girl Julia in the middle of a pentagram on the floor of the classroom. The pentagram was only chalk, but Potter was watching it as if he expected it to explode. “Should they be in a shape like that so young?”
“It simply gets them more attuned to feeling their ritual magic. It isn’t as potent a shape as the circle.” Draco motioned with his head, and Potter reluctantly followed him back towards the other side of the classroom, a large room with grey walls and a blue floor. The combination of colors, like the pentagram, was one that got young Parselmouths used to feeling the flow of their magic. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I said so.”
Draco eyed him for a second, then snorted. “Yes, that’s why you look like you’re going to bolt from the room at any second.”
“I’m not-” Potter closed his eyes and clenched down on what seemed to be his emotions, or maybe just his tongue. Sela hissed softly at him, the kind of soothing nonsense noise that Draco heard often from Charlie when Scorpius was going to sleep. Potter didn’t respond to her, but opened his eyes a second later and said, “I’m not frightened. I just think that I’ve taken enough of your time.”
It wasn’t often that Draco felt he had no idea what someone was talking about, but he felt like that now. “Enough of my time,” he repeated blankly. Edwina raised her head and turned from where she had been watching the children to study Potter, her tail flicking so that it tapped the back of Draco’s wrist.
“You’re my son’s teacher.”
“Yes.”
“James needs the comfort and the discipline of Parseltongue.”
That was a phrase straight out of the pamphlet that Draco distributed to anxious parents. He eyed Potter and wondered why the git had decided to repeat it now. “Yes.”
“That doesn’t mean I get to have some kind of personal claim on you.” Potter turned back to watch the children again, ignoring what seems to be the rhythmic clenching and tightening of Sela on his arm. “I’ve already confessed enough that’s personal to you. I-have inappropriate emotional reactions in your presence. I’m sorry.”
Draco just stared at him, and then turned and spoke directly to Sela. “Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know. I told him about the affinity your magic has for his, and he appears not to sense it or believe me.”
“I believe you,” Potter said in English. His posture had gone tense, and Draco’s own muscles ached at how tight Potter’s appeared. “I just don’t need to take up more of your time or attention than I have. I have friends I’ve neglected and who invited me and James over for dinner tonight. I’ll talk to them.”
“I think it’s a good thing that you’re talking to your friends,” Draco said mildly, surprising Potter into a sidelong stare. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t help as well.”
“It would be-”
“A pleasure.”
Potter spun fully around to face him then, the tension uncoiling and spilling all at once, and the children fell silent in their play and their half-Parseltongue, half-English chatter. Potter sensed that and curbed the things he would have said (which made Draco blink in regret). Instead, he stepped nearer and lowered his voice.
“I believe you, I said. I believe James needs this, and I’ve had fewer nightmares since I accepted Sela. You don’t need to keep proving yourself over and over again. I trust you with James, and you should know that’s a trust I don’t grant to many people.”
“I do know it,” Draco said, leaning in a little, making Potter stare at him, and not trying to touch him even though his hand trembled with the longing to do so. Edwina looped herself around his neck and watched. “But I’m not trying to prove myself. I’m trying to offer you help if you need it.”
“I don’t need it.”
Draco didn’t need to say anything to that. He was sure his face expressed the force of his skepticism. Potter glanced to the side and moved his fingers for a second as if he was clutching an invisible wand.
“I’m going to talk to Ron and Hermione,” he said finally, his words precise. “You don’t need to worry about me. And I don’t want instruction in Parseltongue, or the magic that Sela seems to think you and I share.”
“All right,” Draco said. “That is, of course, your decision. I will say that I have seen ritual magic help other Parselmouths sleep better and release some of the tension that boils up in them on a regular basis. But there are other ways to do that, and probably talking to your friends is one of them.”
“Why are you being so…”
Potter trailed off, but Draco thought he knew what words would follow that. “Nice?” He spread his hands. “Hogwarts was a long time ago, Potter. And you’re the father of a child in my care, and you’re a fellow Parselmouth, and you’re suffering.”
Potter moved his head like a bridled horse, but didn’t say anything in the end. Instead, he turned and called roughly to his boy, summoning James away from the others.
Draco watched them go, and answered Edwina’s soft question with only an, “I don’t know.”
*
“She’s beautiful, Harry.”
Ron, watching from the other side of the dining room, winced a little as Hermione extended her hand to Sela and let Sela’s tongue touch her fingers, but at least he wasn’t upset or trying to interfere. Harry smiled at him, winked with a casualness he didn’t feel, and glanced at James and Sapphire. James stepped forwards and said, “Sapphire is pretty, too.”
“She can’t understand you when you speak in Parseltongue, James.”
Hermione flinched a little, but took her hand gently away from Sela and smiled down at James and Sapphire. “Were you trying to show me your snake?” She bent down and examined his scales as James tilted his head back and forth. Sapphire held still. Harry could admit that he was glad his son had been found by such a calm snake. “He is a beauty. Can I touch him?”
James hissed softly to Sapphire, and received a response that was conveyed more in the coiling of his body than Parseltongue, because Harry couldn’t hear anything, but James nodded proudly.
Hermione touched Sapphire behind the head and made a soft noise. Ron leaned towards Harry and muttered, “That snake looks venomous.”
Harry took a deep breath. “He is.”
“And you trust him with James?”
“Yes. I don’t think he would ever harm him.”
“He would not,” Sela interjected. Ron looked at her, but of course he couldn’t understand what she was saying.
And Harry wasn’t in the mood to translate her contribution to the conversation. He shrugged at Ron. “I don’t think me trying to ignore that I’m a Parselmouth has done James much good. He needs to learn how to control it, because he’s already performing accidental magic with it. The last thing I want is for him to hurt someone with it.”
Ron’s eyes softened. “I know about that. You want your son to have a different reputation with the public than you had.”
Harry nodded. “And it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” he added, once again ignoring the opinion Sela tried to give as she twined herself around his fingers. “James is making some friends at the school. Other Parselmouths. And his magic is a lot more under control now that he has Sapphire.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
Ron’s stare grew more penetrating, and he glanced once at Hermione, who was still cooing over Sapphire and James, then turned back to Harry. “I hope that you’re getting something out of this. That you’re not just turning it into another sacrifice for your son.”
“I like this one,” Sela announced. “He is sensible.”
Harry licked his lips. He had come here determined to tell his best friends something of what was going on with him, and reclaim them as best friends again. He hadn’t known how hard it would be, or how hard his heart would be pounding.
“It’s not easy,” he finally managed to say. “I’m adjusting. Malfoy wants me to practice ritual magic with him, and I don’t want to.”
“Git,” Ron said at once, scowling.
Harry shrugged. “He’s been good with James. What he wants or wants with me doesn’t matter.”
Ron blinked, and then murmured, very gently, “You just said it wasn’t easy, Harry. How can it not matter?”
Harry closed his eyes. The thoughts he wanted to say and couldn’t speak tumbled inside his head.
I don’t know if I’m doing the best thing for James by refusing to learn ritual magic. But I don’t want someone else to get another chance to betray me. But I think maybe Malfoy is different since he hasn’t betrayed what he’s learned so far. But I don’t want to lose myself to some kind of Dark magic that Malfoy and the others might be all right with practicing because of what they used to be like. But maybe they wouldn’t be like that-
“I don’t know what my final answer is going to be,” he decided on. “I think ritual magic could offer me a chance to protect James, but it seems intense.”
“It is.”
“Oh?” Harry blinked at his best mate. He wouldn’t have thought that Ron knew much about ritual magic.
Ron snorted at the look on his face. “I have opened a book or two since Hogwarts.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“When you’re practicing ritual magic-well, ordinary ritual magic, if there’s such a thing, I don’t know about Parseltongue-” Ron waved his hand through the air. “You’re open to each other. You can control each other’s magic if you need to, if something gets out of control. It’s like your whole body is your wand, and their body is their wand, and you can wield each other.”
Harry shivered. Yeah, that was much more open than he wanted to be with Malfoy. What he’d done during the ritual to find Sapphire was one thing, because that had been to protect James, but he couldn’t see helping Malfoy become more powerful.
“You would benefit from it, too,” Sela hissed at him.
Harry ignored her again. “Well, then I’m going to keep refusing Malfoy’s offers. Thanks but no thanks.”
Ron grinned at him, although it was a bit shadowed. “There’s no saying that you can’t find someone else to practice it with, though. Someone you could be comfortable with and could date, even. Did I tell you that Cho Chang asked me about you the other day?”
Harry made polite noises, while his eyes went back to his son. Hermione was sitting on the floor while Sapphire crawled into her lap, and laughing, her eyes bright.
Harry relaxed. He was glad to have found such support from his best friends, that James could have that kind of circle around him.
For now, he had no need to look outside it.
Chapter Eight.