Chapter One Hundred and Nine of 'A Brother to Basilisks'- Happy Birthday, Harry
Chapter One Hundred and Eight.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (109/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence, some gore, AU from Prisoner of Azkaban onwards
Rating: R
Summary: AU of PoA. Harry wakes in the night to a voice calling him from somewhere in the castle-and when he follows it, everything changes. Updated every Friday.
Author’s Notes: This is a canon-divergent AU that starts after Chapter 7 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It will probably run to at least the mid-point of The Half-Blood Prince. It will also be long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter One Hundred and Nine-Happy Birthday, Harry
Lucius gave a bored sigh and looked down his nose at the Azkaban guard who had challenged him. “I don’t actually need to be here, as I’m sure you realize.”
“Then why are you?”
There is no helping some people. “Because I wish to check on the condition of my sister-in-law.” Lucius shifted the folds of his cloak from one side to the other, and let a brief glimpse of Galleons flash in his palm. About seventy-five percent of the Aurors were bribable, from what he knew. If this was one of the unfortunate twenty-five that weren’t, then Lucius was handy with a Memory Charm.
“Oh. Of course. We don’t get a lot of...family visitors here.” The Auror dipped his head in a little bow, and his hand at the same time. At least he’s adept at the important part, Lucius thought, sliding the money over. “What’s her name?”
“Bellatrix Lestrange.”
The Auror straightened and shivered. He tried to hide it with a smile, but Lucius only raised his eyebrow. The Auror shook his head and decided, as most of them did, that he owed Lucius a few answers as well as no questions. “No need to look up the way to her cell. I can hear her cackling every night from here.”
Then what has replaced Bellatrix cannot simply be someone under permanent Polyjuice, Lucius decided as he listened to the directions and began to stride down the corridor. That would not implement the correct behavior.
Of course, there was the possibility that enough exposure to Dementors would make anyone cackle with insanity, but from what Lucius saw, that was not the case. A lot of the prisoners he passed simply huddled in their cells, staring straight ahead. Others rocked with their hands on their heads. A few jumped and shrieked when they saw him, or stretched out pleading hands.
“I didn’t mean to kill him! The pot fell! It was accidental magic!”
“How was I supposed to know that curse was illegal on Muggles? They never told me!”
“I don’t-don’t remember, but it wasn’t that bad, surely it wasn’t this bad…”
Lucius ignored them all except for a slight wrinkling of his nose. The Auror walking in front of him acted as though he saw nothing but the expanse of slimy grey corridor that separated them from Bellatrix’s cell, and maybe the Galleons that still clinked in his pocket. He stopped around a corner and gestured ahead.
“There she is.”
“You will not be accompanying me?”
“It’s bad enough hearing her.”
The man mumbled that as he turned away, which Lucius had to admit piqued his curiosity. He walked around the corner expecting almost anything. Perhaps something that would only come to life when a human and not a Dementor was nearby. Or perhaps a sophisticated golem.
But he didn’t have his expectations extended far enough. He felt a sharp tingle on his shoulder, a tightening and flashing of senses that he hadn’t used in years. Lucius halted with a hand on his wand. The last time he had felt something like that was during the Dark Lord’s first war, when he had created defenses that would coil around one of their headquarters and ensnare the minds of any Aurors who came seeking them, rather like a place-bound Confundus.
This was on the cell. Lucius stood still, sorting through his impressions with care. When he moved forwards again, it was only because he was sure of what was in front of him.
The bars of Bellatrix’s cell gleamed. They were less grimy than the others. It didn’t look as though she-or whoever really crouched there in place of Bellatrix-had clutched them as much as the other prisoners. Lucius knelt down to stare at the bundle of grey and black robes in the cell.
“Bellatrix?” he asked, as an experiment.
The spells inside the cell at once engaged and slid around each other, triggered by the sound of her name. Lucius heard a wild cackle and saw a face lunging at him, with wide dark eyes and gibbering, foaming lips.
But that was only with one part of himself. When he concentrated hard enough, he saw and heard the truth, which was a cluster of shadows that remained motionless in the cell, boiling with illusion but wrapped around something that didn’t move.
It can’t be a corpse. That would have started to smell by now. Lucius knew from experience with the Dark Lord’s maze spells that unexpected, startling sensory input would cut through the enchantment. The smell of a corpse qualified, or blood in places that were supposed to look peaceful.
So Lucius remained still, not drawing back from the gibbering face, and in the end that glamour dissolved entirely and he saw beyond it. In the center of the cell was a black stone, carved with runes that shimmered and sputtered. Silver light, a mark of the same enchantment that had guarded the Dark Lord’s headquarters, yes.
But this one produced the illusion of Bellatrix Lestrange in the cell. Lucius thought that it hadn’t been discovered before because all other Death Eaters of the Inner Circle were in cells next to this one or had reasons for staying away and not visiting.
Lucius gave a faint smile and stood. This had been worth coming here to learn. But he wanted to make sure of something else before he left.
By the time he passed the Auror on guard duty again in order to depart, he was full with knowledge. The Auror shuddered at him. “Right bitch, isn’t she?” he muttered, not seeming to care that he was talking to a family member.
Then again, given how both the illusory and real Bellatrix behaved, Lucius could hardly blame him.
“An interesting experience,” Lucius agreed blandly, and strode from the prison to the point where the boat waited to take him back to the mainland.
He was smiling even as the foam and wind lashed into his face on the way back, which made the boatmen eye him uneasily. Lucius didn’t care. His head was also filled and humming with the knowledge.
Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange had illusion spells wrapped around rune-caved rocks in their cells, too.
*
Harry yawned and poked Dash when Dash poked him. Leave me alone. It’s my birthday. I don’t have to get up early if I don’t want to.
You have to when all your friends are going to be here to honor you.
Harry turned so that his face was buried in his pillow. None of them are going to be here until noon. I mean, except you and Severus, and you’re always around.
Light laughter came down the bond, and then Dash slapped Harry’s back with his tail. It stung like a whip. Harry yelped and jumped out of bed. “You didn’t have to do that! Even if I insulted you!”
I do not regard it as insulting. This whole interaction is amusing. Be grateful that my tail did not land on your arse.
Harry rubbed the stinging welt he now had and scowled at Dash’s back as he let himself fall off the bed and slither towards the far wall. Fine, fine. Let me take a shower and I’ll be out.
As he’d expected, Dash insisted on getting into the shower and splashing around in the warm water for a few minutes before he got out again. Harry watched him thoughtfully as he wrung the wetness out of his hair with a towel. “Would you like a large pool where you can swim around? One that’s heated, I mean, so you don’t get cold?”
It only took you this long to notice!
Well, you could have asked for it, Harry snapped, and pulled on his clothes while Dash sulkily looked at the wall. At any time. It’s not like you’re limited like an ordinary snake. You don’t even technically have to communicate with just a Parselmouth.
It’s tiring and irritating to try to talk to someone else.
Do you ever regret your decision to come back as a basilisk? Wouldn’t a human have been easier? Hands to carry things with, a voice that you could use to talk to anyone else you wanted…
Dash hesitated for long enough that Harry raised his eyebrows at him. Then Dash said, The way I came back isn’t that simple, and doesn’t involve that much choice. He immediately slithered over to the door and looped a smaller coil of his body through the handle, tugging it open. Harry thoughtfully watched him disappear up the corridor.
He knew that Dash was Slytherin, and he’d benefited from some of that knowledge, but that didn’t mean he knew everything or even all the implications of putting a human soul in a basilisk body. Harry followed Dash down to Severus’s office for breakfast. Apparently they would need a bit more room for the meal than usual this morning.
When he opened the door of the office, he found out why.
“Happy birthday, Harry!”
Harry jumped in surprise as Hermione flew at him and hugged him. Behind her were Ron, and Fred, and George, and Ginny, and Molly, and Arthur, and Draco, of course, giving him a faint smile until the moment when he could lean forwards and kiss Harry. Harry was more than surprised not to get a hug from him at first, until he registered the fragile shape of the egg Draco was cradling beneath his shirt.
“We thought there was no reason to wait until noon,” Severus said, coming forwards with a small wrapped present that must be a potions vial, from the shape. “Open them first. Miss Granger almost expired at the thought of waiting to see what you would think.” He rolled his eyes, and Hermione flushed.
“I just want you to see mine, Harry,” she said earnestly. “That’s all.”
Harry smiled at her and opened the vial Severus had handed him. It looked like liquid sunlight trapped in glass. Enthralled, he tilted it back and forth. “Is this really Felix Felicis?” he asked. It was the only potion he could think of that looked even vaguely like this one.
“It is.” Severus leaned forwards and pinned Harry with the kind of stare that Harry knew meant he was looking at his guardian right now, not the man who comforted him with hugs. “You are to use it only in dire need, not simply because you feel like it.”
Harry nodded to him and then rapped the glass of the vial with his fingernail. It chimed in a way that glass didn’t, most of the time. “Spelled to be unbreakable?”
“Yes. I mean for you to carry it everywhere with you.” Severus glanced to the side, at an oddly-shaped package in golden wrapping paper. “It works well with Miss Granger’s gift, I think.”
“Hermione?” Harry smiled at her and picked it up, shaking it back and forth.
“You can’t do that! You’re not supposed to do that! It’ll ruin the surprise!”
Harry laughed and tore open the paper. He blinked when he saw the thin silver chain, and then lifted out a pendant that was shaped like a snake folded back on itself. He didn’t think it was meant to be a basilisk, but then again, it was so tiny that he might be missing some of the detail on the scales.
“Hermione?”
“I heard all this gossip last year,” said Hermione, and her voice was dark. “About how you could resist the Imperius Curse, but you probably couldn’t resist a love potion. And now that you’re dating Draco, I think it would be even worse for you to be subjected to one. Who knows what Draco would do?”
“That’s a fair point, Granger.”
“You know you call her Hermione all the time, Draco.”
Draco only frowned, as if to say that didn’t matter, and pointed at the pendant. “How does it protect Harry from love potions?”
“It has the antidote on its fangs,” Hermione said promptly. “You need to wear it next to your skin, Harry. That way, it can sense when your blood is affected by the ingredients in the most common love potions-and Amortentia. The woman who sold it to me specifically enchanted it to find that one. The snake will bite you if you’re being affected by a love potion and release the antidote into your blood.”
“That’s…pretty brilliant,” Harry breathed, and leaned in to hug her again. He knew that even more had changed than just her accepting Dash and that Draco was his boyfriend. That she would get him something shaped like a snake at all, and something that had to bite him in order to work its magic, said that she accepted Dash as Slytherin and the Slytherin tendencies Harry himself had.
“I thought so.” Hermione’s cheeks were pink. “And it does something else, too. Look, touch the snake’s tail.”
When Harry concentrated, he could see a small notch there. He pressed it, and a tiny compartment opened. No, Harry realized as he tilted the pendant, only the door was tiny. The whole snake was hollow, except for something solid at the far end that was probably the antivenin for the love potions.
“A rather good storage for the potions vial,” Severus said. “And you are not to let it out of your sight any more than you are the pendant.” He was staring at Harry as if he could force him to make the promise with the sheer strength of his gaze.
“I do promise,” Harry whispered, and slid the vial of Felix Felicis into the compartment. He clasped the tail shut and dropped the silver chain around his neck, arranging the snake so that it rested under his robes. “Thank you, Hermione. And Severus.”
Hermione beamed and hugged him again, and then Ron stepped towards him with a small cluster of grey feathers fastened around a circle of leather. Harry took it curiously. The feathers looked familiar, but he couldn’t place them.
“Errol died this summer.”
Harry snapped his head up. “I didn’t know that! I’m sorry, Ron.”
“He was old. Mum and Dad did get another owl.” Ron hesitated for a second, then plunged ahead. “But I was thinking about the feather magic that you’re learning, and I learned a little of it, too. Fleur…she’s dating Bill now. Or spending an awful lot of time around him. It’s harder to learn how to use feathers to defend yourself, but it’s not as hard to bind them to an object. So I made this for you. If someone casts a jinx at you, then it’ll block it. And then it’ll crumble away.” Ron frowned. “I’m not very good at making them yet.”
“You still have great ideas,” Harry said firmly, and draped the bracelet around his wrist. He looked warily at Fred and George, who were grinning for some reason. “Thanks, Ron.”
“You’re welcome.” Ron patted Harry on the shoulder and sat back in his chair, looking relieved that that was over.
Fred and George stepped forwards. They held a flask of what Harry thought for a second was Polyjuice, but it was a lighter brown color.
“For your birthday, Harrikins-”
“We thought you might like-”
“To have some fun!” Fred finished brightly, and tossed the entire flask over Harry.
Well, he might have managed to do that if Dash hadn’t reared up between them just then, and hissed loudly. The flask froze in midair, the liquid slamming against a shield and trickling down. Harry blinked and stared. The shield was made of small shadow-snakes that spread out around Dash’s head like a medusa’s hair. He had never seen that before.
I did not need to show it before, Dash snapped, and then moved forwards briskly, rearing right into Fred’s face and hissing at him. Fred turned a little pale, but leaned towards Dash and hissed back.
“That doesn’t mean anything, you know,” Harry said, desperate to say something to relieve the tension.
“Oh, I know,” said Fred, and reached out as if he would touch one of the shadow-snakes around Dash’s head. Dash ducked and moved back, snapping in what only Harry could tell was disgust. “I only wanted to know why he stopped your birthday surprise.”
I should have known that I wouldn’t frighten him.
“He stopped you, Mr. Weasley, because that potion would have ruined the other Mr. Weasley’s feather-charm, and quite possibly the necklace Miss Granger bought.” Severus’s voice was low and cold. Harry hadn’t heard it like that since the night he and Professor McGonagall and the others had battled Voldemort. “What were you thinking, releasing an experimental potion against valuable magic?”
“That we didn’t know they would give him those presents, and-” George offered.
“We wanted to give Harry the gift of an afternoon in snake form,” Fred finished, nodding. He stepped back from Dash, but even though his motion was respectful, Harry didn’t think he was afraid. “That potion would have turned him into a serpent. Just for the afternoon. Think of all the fun he and Dash could have playing together!” By the end of the speech, he was once again grinning mildly.
No! Harry snapped in turn, stopping Dash’s lunge just before it would have become visible to anyone else. I don’t want you to bite him or look at him or anything else. Besides, you would have to kill both of them. You know they thought this up together.
Trying to transform you into a serpent is…
“It was rather foolhardy, to think that everyone else would find this amusing,” Severus said, and his voice had grown chillier.
“That’s Fred and George all over,” Ron muttered. Hermione put an arm around his shoulder. Draco, cradling the egg in his shirt, only looked back and forth as if this was a play and he didn’t know which side was the most entertaining.
“A transformation potion! Fred and George Weasley, what were you thinking?”
As Molly scolded her sons, Harry shook his head. “Thanks but no thanks,” he whispered behind his hand to George, who was standing nearer to him.
George nodded back amiably. “No harm done. Although any time you do want to try the potion-”
He will not.
“He will not.”
Harry rolled his eyes at George. “Not right now,” he said. Maybe some other day, when there wasn’t a surprise birthday party everyone wanted him to enjoy, he would take them up on that. George winked and went back to nodding sorrowfully along with Fred.
*
A serpent transformation potion. There are times it could be useful, but trust Weasleys to find the wrong moment to introduce it.
Severus held off on pinching his nose as he watched the Weasley matriarch give Harry a jumper with a few protective and cleaning spells woven into it, and Arthur give him a small model of a Ford Anglia that ran on its own and honked its horn. Harry’s face broadened into a grin, and he spent a moment talking happily about the car he and his friend had flown into Hogwarts their second year.
I will have Arthur’s head if that gift encourages him to go to the Forbidden Forest after the other one.
He stepped back and watched as the girl, Ginny, came forwards with a small wooden box in her hands. Her face was flushed. Draco made a sudden movement, but then stopped himself. Severus caught his eye and shook his head.
As far as he knew, Harry had only smiled at Ginny and regarded her as his best friend’s sister since his second year. There was no reason to think that he would suddenly start dating her. And that she had stars in her eyes for him was not enough to turn the head of someone like Harry.
“I know that sometimes you get stressed and tired,” said Ginny, and gave Harry a faint smile. “So I thought you could use this. When you open the box, you’ll smell whatever clears your head the most.”
Harry smiled again. “Did you make this all by yourself, Ginny? I’m impressed.”
“Fred and George helped,” Ginny said, and flushed. “It’s kind of the same smell trick that you get with love potions like Amortentia, where they smell like the person you fancy most-”
Draco hissed. Severus would have reached out and pinched his shoulder as unobtrusively as he could, but Dash took care of that for him, whipping his tail into the back of Draco’s ankle. Draco stumbled, snatched at his egg, and then stood still, scowling.
“But it works with stress instead.” Ginny looked on in interest as Harry opened the box and sniffed.
Severus was too far away from it to smell anything, but Harry obviously could. “Like fresh oranges and broomstick polish,” he said, laughing. “That’ll clear my head right up. Thanks, Ginny!”
“You’re welcome, Harry,” said the girl, and moved out of the way. Almost everyone then turned to look towards the back of Severus’s office where he had concealed the birthday breakfast.
But Draco cleared his throat quietly and started forwards. It hadn’t escaped Severus’s notice that he was the only one who hadn’t given a gift yet, but most of the others did look surprised.
“You still have a gift to come from me,” Draco said, and stared at Harry intently.
“I know. I was looking forward to it.”
He does say the right thing effortlessly sometimes, Severus thought, watching the way Draco’s face softened. Almost as much as he says the disastrously wrong thing.
“Then here you are,” Draco said, and held out a plain scroll to Harry that was tied with a silver ribbon. Harry opened it immediately, and stared at it. His eyebrows rose, and he glanced at Draco.
“This is blank.”
“When you’re ready, then you’ll see the words on it,” Draco said, and inclined his head a little, and moved out of the way.
Severus was more than suspicious about that, but everyone else was demanding the birthday breakfast now, and he certainly couldn’t give Harry’s other presents-the books on Dark Arts-to him in front of his friends. He led the way to the back of the office and the preparation the house-elves had gone out of their way to orchestrate.
*
He isn’t ready yet.
The words seared Draco in the middle of the chest, but honestly, he wasn’t that surprised. Harry just wasn’t at the same point in their-dating as Draco was, yet. When he was, then he would glance at the scroll and see the declaration of Draco’s feelings written out in full.
Mother had helped him with the enchantments on that scroll, although she had also asked him several times if he was sure if he wanted to do this, if maybe his feelings wouldn’t change. But Draco had been, and had insisted on it, and in the end she had taught him the magic and stood back while he used it.
This isn’t going to change, Draco thought, and fell into step beside Harry, who reached out and squeezed his hand, smiling at him. Then he leaned in and stole a quick kiss that left Draco breathless and made more than one other person in the room blush.
And maybe it won’t be as long as it feels like right now.
Chapter One Hundred and Ten.
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