Filthy, frantic, and fearful, Harry tumbled in through the snake doorway, wishing Ron was at his side as he burst into the Chamber of Secrets, head reeling as he looked around. Everything was green, but he didn’t think it was because it meant to, the ceilings and walls looked like the roofs of fancy churches, once bronze but now green. There was water everywhere, and light reflections of it rippled across the ceiling, and he stumbled as he almost fell into the water logged tiles as he found himself gaping up at a statue of a man’s massive head, worn and weathered by the water still running over it, making what was probably a noble looking man into something that looked a bit like a monkey.
And then he spotted Ginny at the base of the statue, and he threw himself forward, crunching his knees as he crouched beside her, shaking her shoulders, her head lolling back and forth. “Ginny! Wake up! We need to get out of here!”
“She won’t wake.”
Harry spun, and relief surged through him as the slightly ghostly image of Tom Riddle. “Tom! Tom, we have to get her out of here, there’s something awful - “
“Is there?” Tom arched a brow, turning a dark wand around in his fingers. Harry hadn’t noticed that it was his.
“It’s a basilisk, Tom!” He hissed, eyes wide. “If you look in its eyes, you’ll die! We have to get out of here! I’ll find a way to keep you safe! I can – I can try to talk to the basilisk, but even though everyone thinks I’m the Heir of Slytherin just because I can talk Parseltongue, I’m not, actually, so I don’t think she’ll even listen to me.”
Harry shoved his glasses up from sliding down his nose, and Tom crouched beside the pair of Gryffindors, eyes narrowed. “You’re a Parselmouth?”
He flushed. “Don’t make fun of me, too.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Tom purred. “But I really do think you should meet the Basilisk, Harry.”
“No!” He jerked forward, grabbing onto Tom’s arms, which had become more solid over the last few minutes. “She could kill us!”
Tom reached up, chucking Harry’s chin up. “Just keep your eyes shut, dear.”
He stood, shaking off Harry’s clinging hands, and smirked as he said, sweetly, “Speak to me, greatest of the Hogwarts Four.”
“You can do it too?” Harry whispered, sitting down in the filthy water, making even more of a mess of himself than before.
The mouth of the giant statue was opening as Tom twisted to look at Harry. “I told you I would never make fun of you. I am very interested in your Parseltongue, though, Harry, won’t you speak to me?”
His mouth opened, like he was going to try, but then he spotted movement in the mouth that had just opened, and squeaked, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, hands over his eyes.
Tom crouched beside him again, nearly solid fingers brushing through Harry’s hair. “Come, Harry. Speak to me.”
“The basilisk will kill us!”
“Regina? She’d only hurt if I told her to. Speak to me, hatchling.”
Trembling in honest fear – for Ginny, for himself, for Tom – he flinched as he both heard and felt a massive serpentine body hit the floor of the Chamber. Even his Parseltongue trembled as he whispered, “I am scared, Tom.”
“You are safe,” Strong arms curled around Harry, and though he knew he was short for his age, he felt it a little humiliating that Tom was easily able to carry him bridal carry, walking forward calmly, until Harry felt a massive forked tongue flick out over him, tasting him, and cried out.
“Tom!”
“I cannot eat this one, master,” an ancient voice, dredged up from the depths of history, spoke. “He is like you.”
“Yes,” Tom all but purred. “He’s a speaker. Open your eyes, little one.”
“I’ll die!” Harry protested.
“I promise. You are safe.”
He should not trust a Slytherin. Especially not a Slytherin from like fifty years ago, a Slytherin that Professor Dumbledore hadn’t trusted. A Slytherin that had gotten Hagrid expelled, even if after meeting the Acromantula’s Harry kind of thought that maybe that had been a good decision. But he’d always felt so safe, when he’d written to Tom, when Tom had let him into his world to see what had happened, and now, with Tom’s arms, solid and firm, holding him up and close to the warm body.
Slowly, he lowered his hands, and opened his eyes -
Looking straight into a massive, lamplight yellow eye.
He yelped, and clapped his hands over his eyes again, shaking quite a bit now.
Tom, chuckling, murmured in Harry’s ears, “Do you feel dead?”
Hesitating, he considered that, feeling his lungs filling with ear, his heart pounding in his ears. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his hands, and found the Basilisk examining him, and yes, his eyes kept flicking into hers, and he felt no more dead than he had the moment before. Confused, he whispered, “Why am I not dead?”
“Because you are a speaker,” the massive basilisk said, sweetly, scenting him with her tongue again. “He’s all wrong, master.”
“All wrong?” Tom frowned, brushing the tip of his nose against Harry’s temple. “He seems perfect, to me.”
“No,” she argued, as Harry watched them going back and forth like teammates tossing the quaffle back and forth between them. “Tainted. Broken. Twisted up inside, like glass with fractures. Ready to shatter with the wrong push. Let me fix him, Master? I want to make him better for you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.” Harry fumbled.
“Master?” She asked, ignoring him.
“Do as you see as right, Regina.”
Moments later, Harry found himself standing in front of the massive snake, and she bent to knock him back onto his back with her nose, making him yelp in surprise and pain, then she began drawing him into her mouth, almost gently. It did not help Harry feel any better, and he shrieked, and begged her not to eat him, to let him go, for Tom to ask her to let him go, but she kept drawing him in until even was head was lying inside the lip of her mouth, then she clamped her massive jaws down, a massive, thick fang piercing through each of his wrists, and he screamed, feeling the venom surging through his body, blood dripping into her mouth.
I am dying, he thought.
Regina opened her massive mouth, pulling her fangs out of his wrists, making him jerk, then she slid him out onto the tiles.
“This will kill him!” Tom raged, unexpectedly furious.
“No,” her massive voice said, even as the world started going dark around Harry. “It will fix him.”
---
He was warm, firstly, which was wonderful. Curled in a small ball, breathing in something thicker and smoother than water and thinking nothing of it. It was dark, it was small, it was safe. This was his place, and he belonged here.
He didn’t know how long he belonged there – he felt it was a long, long, long time, until the sense came over him that he should not be in his place anymore.
Running his fingers over the perfectly smooth, perfectly rounded walls, he felt confused, not sure how he was meant to leave his place, if he even was meant to leave his place if all he felt when he tried was frustration. He pounded on the inside of his place, but he couldn’t move it, much less leave it. He flailed, struggling to make any difference when his elbow cracked off the inside, and a soft crack, followed by a hairline fracture whispered to him.
He slammed his elbows against the fracture, breaking it open more and more, until he could see a blurry world beyond him, and he slashed and clawed at the membrane that kept him from seeing what was outside, and it suddenly broke, and for the first time he breathed air.
Coughing up what was left of the liquid, he hesitated, then pushed himself over the edge of the wall of his place, and he collapsed, bonelessly, into sawdust, and just lay there, soft wood clinging to all of the parts of him that were still wet from his place, panting for breath of the strange air, feeling cold and oddly bereft.
“Are you well?”
He tried to face the voice that was deep and rumbling through him, a voice he’d heard many times when he entered the place, then less and less, then more again just before his body told him to leave his place, but he couldn’t seem to turn to look at her. “I am...not defective.”
“Good,” she said, then nosed at his side, tongue flicking out. He wanted to turn to face her, desperately, flicking out his own forked tongue. The air tasted of sawdust, scales, and old. “I didn’t think any of you would ever hatch. Salazar was ever so sure they would, but it has been so long... I thought maybe you were unable to leave your egg.”
“It was time to come out,” he said, frankly.
“Of course it was,” she agreed, calmly. “I will bring you food.”
She said it was called a rat, and that they weren’t really enough, but they were a good start, and his sharp teeth ripped into it, eating desperately as though he had never eaten before. He supposed he never had eaten before.
“I’m going to get my Master,” she said, sliding around him, letting her see her glorious face, hands reaching up to brush over her poison green scales. “I will return soon, hopefully with our Master.”
He hummed, keeping a hand on her scales until she slid out of the nest, and he lay back down, relaxing now that his egg-wet had dried, and worried at the egg-teeth on his elbows until he got them to crumble off.
---
“Master.”
Tom rolled over in his bed, glaring at the wall, where the pipes that went to the bathroom in his dorm were. He still didn’t know how Regina had pinpointed him so accurately, except probably through scent.
“You are needed, Master.”
“It is the middle of the night on a school night,” He snapped at her. “What could demand attention?”
“One of Salazar’s eggs hatched.”
Tom was immediately up, and tugging on some clothes.
---
If the Chamber of Secrets was considered a myth, then Salazar’s Eggs weren’t even a whisper of thought in anyone’s minds. Slytherin’s heirs had passed the story down amongst themselves, and it was only because one of them had written this all down that Tom knew anything about it.
Salazar Slytherin loved snakes, everyone knew that.
But he... loved snakes.
And three snakes, a Basilisk, a Cockatrice, and a Lyndwym had laid eggs where the ‘father’ was indisputably Salazar Slytherin.
According to the stories, he’d been delighted that the eggs had been laid and that with a lumos held to the other side of the egg, a small form could be seen forming, but he’d been crushed that none of the eggs hatched in his lifetime. They hadn’t hatched, either, in the millenia that followed, but any heirs that came in made sure the warming charms on the eggs were strong still, and would hold a lumos to the other side to make sure there was still something moving inside. When Tom had done it, they all seemed to fill the whole egg, but none had so much as wiggled in the time he’d found the Chamber, which admittedly had been only a few months.
He dashed down the hallway, hissing for the door to open, knowing that he wasn’t being very pureblood decorum at the moment, but this was potentially legendary.
Regina was waiting for him in the main chamber, dipping her head for him to climb on, then slithered back into her home, taking him with her.
One of the three eggs was broken open, and in the centre of the room, eyes closed, hand resting on a pale stomach, lay what was undeniably a boy.
Tom slid off Regina’s neck, and crept towards the boy, whispering, “Hello?”
Eyes opened, the same poison green as Regina’s scales, slit pupils widening to take in more light, watching him.
“Hello,” Tom said again, slowly kneeling beside him. “I am Tom Riddle. I am the heir of Slytherin.”
“Slytherin,” the boy breathed, shifting closer to him. “I used to hear his voice. You sound different.”
“I am his heir, not him. He has been gone for a very long time.”
The boy looked sad for a moment, then shifted closer to Tom again, green eyes wide and innocent. “Then you are my master. What would you have me do?”
Tom reached out, and used his thumb to clean blood off the boy’s chin and lips, then ran his fingers down the boy’s side. Though he undeniably looked mostly human, there were sheer but sheened scales on the boy’s side, nigh invisible unless you looked for them, and as his fingers explored, he discovered they were everywhere, including at least part of his face. Clearly, he’d probably have to shed. His fingernails were like little talons, all of his teeth were sharp, but he had long fangs like a viper, and oddly, he had a full head of dark hair, hanging to his shoulders, messing and unkempt. His face wasn’t quite human, either, his eyes were mostly what he would expect, as were his lips, though when he smiled his lips parted far too wide to be truly human. His face was smoother, he didn’t have eyebrows or quite have a nose, Tom would have said he had none, but he had slits for nostrils. The whole image should have been horrific – the boy didn’t even have nipples! - but he did have a belly button, and the combination made him oddly appealing. Nothing like the disgusting people he’d encountered in his life.
He’d been about to ask the boy if he knew who his mother was he found his back, and the small rainbow coloured wings burst from between his shoulderbones, still damp, and crumpled.
“Cockatrice,” he breathed, brushing the boy’s hair out of his face. “Do you have a name?”
He considered that. “No.”
“I’ll think of a good one for you.” Tom declared, then finally helped the boy stand, though he was a little wobbly. “Mm. Somewhere between ten and thirteen, I think. I suppose it makes sense that your puberty wouldn’t happen in the egg.”
“My place is ruined,” he looked sadly at the broken egg. “Where am I to live now?”
“Salazar planned for this,” Tom said, and led the boy into the living quarters off of the snake nest. He cast some quick spells to clean it up, freshen the bedding, then a few more showy spells when he realized that the boy was watching him with bright, eager eyes, delighted by the show of magic. “You sleep here, you see?” He pointed to the bed.
He looked confused.
Tom laughed, and climbed onto the bed himself, flopping onto his side. “See?”
Green eyes lit up, and he flopped beside him, then curled an arm over Tom’s waist. “Stay?”
Tom glanced at the entrance to the common room from this room, then calculated how many hours he could stay before he’d have to get dressed for class, set an alarm, then tucked the wand under himself. The other watched him hopefully, and Tom said, “I’ll have to leave early, I need to do Master things. But I will come back the moment I can.”
He smiled, clearly pleased with that, and snuggled into Tom.
When he woke, reluctantly, the boy laying in front of him caught his breath. Eyes closed, dark eyelashes despite being half snake, rosy, plump lips parted, breathing softly. The only thing that marred his perfection were scars, which he couldn’t understand how they’d happened in the egg. Each wrist had a healed over wound that looked like fangs the size of Regina’s had punctured through the small bones, then another on his forehead, shaped like a lightning bolt. His fingers tingled when he touched that one, lightly, and a shiver ran up his spine.
Reluctantly, he slid out of the bed, and went to class.
---
The boy was standing on a pedestal when he arrived again, arms spread wide, the rainbow wings dried and cared for, spreading far too small for flight behind him. He was naked and pale, eyes closed, head tossed back, and Tom almost forgot what he was there for as he gazed up at him.
Finally he called for him, and he happily scrambled down, beaming for his Master.
Tom ran through all the health diagnostics spells he should have done yesterday, but hadn’t known how to do, but now he had a stack of books with him, and several were about healing. The boy seemed very healthy for a human and magical snake hybrid, and sat quiet and politely for Tom’s tests.
Then Tom settled in the bed with books that he hoped would find him a name for the snake boy, who settled beside him, resting his head on Tom’s stomach as he watched him flipping through the books, clearly not understanding.
Flipping through a book of constellations – it could be funny to name him like a Black – he hesitated at a floating, glowing picture of a constellation, that he turned and spun around, then tapped the boy’s chin, and gestured to the picture. “What do you think?”
“It’s so pretty!” He breathed, stars reflected in his eyes.
“It’s called Hydrus, it means water snake. Do you like it?”
“I love it,” he breathed.
“Then I will call you Hydrus. Well. That will be your true name. I will call you... Harry. Yes. Tom and Harry.”
The boy seemed delighted, and wriggled on the bed, until Tom laughed, set an alarm, and curled up with Hydrus – Harry again.
---
Tom found himself slipping by the kitchens to get food from the house elves, then eating dinner with Harry, who mostly ate rats, but was happy to try morsels Tom offered him, doing his homework with Harry resting his head on Tom’s lap, which was oddly soothing, then sleeping curled beside him at night. He stopped attending Slug Club, his goals were set aside, even the Knights of Walpurgis seemed unofficially disbanded, because that adorable strange face would look up at him with wide, guileless eyes, and everything else stopped mattering.
Regina encouraged the relationship between them, hissing that Salazar had wanted his snake children to be companions to his heirs.
He was refused the opportunity to stay at Hogwarts for the summer, and he raged, and threw things and shouted, until he saw that Harry was curled into a small ball by the pillows, scared, and he softened, holding Harry until he stopped shaking.
It didn’t matter, in the end, as Regina proudly told him that she’d found the pipe that entered the Chamber from the lake – or the reverse – and Tom dove under into it as others were climbing on the thestral drawn carriages – and slipped back into the place that had become home.
He had all summer to research Salazar’s library, and that was where he found notations that the longer it took the hybrid eggs to hatch, the longer they would live, and he realized that Harry would likely live millenia.
He taught Harry to read English, which turned out easier than teaching him to speak English, which he fumbled with regularly.
Harry instinctively knew how to read Parselscript, so perhaps Tom shouldn’t have been surprised when Harry slipped a book in front of him, whispering that maybe there was a way they could live together, always.
A horcrux certainly seemed doable. Maybe he could even put his soul in his sweet snake.
---
Tom’s homework was always impeccable, his classwork better than none, but outside of class, he never seemed to be anywhere. His tight group of ‘friends’, or minions drifted away, and while Slytherin house was polite to him, his standing proven, he became almost... forgotten.
Why would anyone suspect Tom of being involved in the deaths of Myrtle Warren, Olive Hornby, or Rubeus Hagrid? They were dead from poisonings, all had dropped in the Great Hall during meals, apparently the elf meals tampered with, and the school was closed.
Tom remained in the Chamber with his Harry, now so affectionate that Tom finally threw him on the bed and with less experience than he would like, pressed into Harry’s heat, making the boy arch, crying out to the ceiling, whispering Tom’s name over and over and over, and they experimented, trying it other ways, other places, until Tom stopped bothering to wear clothes in the Chamber, except maybe a simple black, diaphanous robe. Harry had one, too, though he didn’t wear it often, but Tom liked stripping it off him when he did.
Tom had several Horcruxes now – his old diary, the ring he took from the filth that was his uncle, Slytherin’s locket, Hufflepuff’s cup, and Harry, who claimed to love the soul piece, hugging himself as though that was hugging Tom.
Tom was changing, his beautiful hair thinning, the colour of his irises pure bloody red, and he whispered, one night, that Harry must think him terribly ugly.
“You are becoming more like me,” Harry argued. “How could that be bad?”
He didn’t go back for his seventh year after the school was reopened, not wanting anyone – Dumbledore – to see him like this. He made Regina his sixth Horcrux after he poisoned the old man’s lemon drops and he’d dropped dead in front of a full classroom of third year Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors, and Harry laughed, brightly at the story one of the castle’s many snakes told them.
It had been worth it just to see Harry laugh, he decided.
Then one day, laying in their bed, he whispered, playing with the now massive rainbow wings that could lift Harry off the ground, “Can you lay eggs?”
Harry’s wings drooped, and his whole demeaner dragged. “No. I cannot.”
“Well, we’ll find a way.”
They didn’t want to leave the Chamber and Regina, but eventually they did, exploring the world, and slowly Tom started to gather up a following again, but better than he had in school even if there was overlap, this was a group that wanted the old Dark Magics free again, mudblood children taken from their parents to be raised magic, muggles not killed or enslaved wholesale, but punished properly by wizards, pointing out that they were beasts and brutes, just look at their massive prisons if one wanted proof, and the fact that there were many prisons, and Tom quietly started encouraging the Dementors to begin breeding, so that they could create prisons for muggles, guarded by these terrors.
All along, Harry was by his side, standing proudly, green eyes flashing at any that didn’t respect Tom the way he thought Tom ought to be.
In 1980, a prophesy came to him by a loyal servant, a child that could defeat, marked as his equal, how disgusting -
“Tom,” Harry whispered, pressing against his chest, looking up at him. “Why not – we wanted a child.”
James Potter fell in his sitting room, Lily Potter fell in the hallway outside the nursery, having begged three times, and gently, Tom cast the spell, and deliberately placed a Horcrux inside little Harry Potter.
But his soul had been broken too many times, and in front of his Harry – his Hydrus’ eyes, he roiled into smoke and drifted away – leaving two Harrys, two Horcruxes behind.
An idiot that wanted to follow him found him in Albania and allowed him to ride the back of his head, but it wasn’t until later that Tom realized how much time had passed, and he wailed for the time lost, the promises broken unintentionally – until a small boy with shaggy hair and eyes too bright to be natural walked into the Great Hall with the other children, seeming strangely comfortable with the castle, and when Potter, Harry was called, his heart sang inside Professor Quirrel’s body.
The hat dropped on Harry’s head, and the hat talked to him for a moment, seeming more curious than judgmental, then called out, loudly, “Slytherin!” and a beaming boy darted to the table of green and silver.
“I don’t want Quirrel to see home,” the boy whispered. “But that’s where I grew up, father.”
Tom cursed Lily’s blood protection, because he desperately wanted to wrap his arms around the son he and his Harry had chosen.
The boy, with the help of his friends Draco and Daphne, tried to help Tom get the Philosopher’s stone at the end of the school year, but none of them could get the stone out of the Mirror of Erised – Draco wanted it for glory, Daphne wanted it to strengthen her family’s holdings, and Harry wanted it to bring his father back, so none were allowed to have it, and Tom reluctantly let the decaying body of Quirrel behind, drifting again, though he deliberately drifted his essence through his son, who hugged him like trying to catch the smoke.
The Chamber of Secrets never opened the next year, because the diary was safely kept in the Chamber with all the other Horcruxes, and Harry never breathed a word that he spoke to snakes.
In third year, a murderer came after their son, and the drifting ghost that was Tom screamed in rage, but Regina burst out of an old forgotten tunnel, fangs and golden eyes bared, and the Defense Teacher, the Potions Teacher, an unknown man that had been a rat, the Murderer, and two meddling Gryffindors all lay dead with no cause. Someone threatened to close the school, but it was only two weeks til the end of year, so they decided not to.
Irresponsible.
In fourth year, there was a Tournament that Tom wholly did not approve of, especially when he discovered his fourteen year old son was roped into the damn event, but then a follower he’d thought dead someone managed to pull his ghost self into a homunculus, and discussed using ‘Harry Potter’s villainous blood’ to help bring Tom back, but he knew that would not achieve what the follower thought it would achieve.
Tom rose, the cauldron melting around him, straightening a spine he hadn’t had in thirteen years, and ran his hands over his head, noting that all the hair was gone, now, and a brush over his face told him he looked like his beloved – thirteen years as a ghost can let one understand themselves and their emotions better – with his snake like face.
The follower, one hand missing, whole body shaking, held out a robe, and a wand, and he draped the robe over his shoulders, not bothering to close it, then stepped towards the gravestone, and the boy tied to it.
He brushed his fingers over his wrists, over the same scars that his own Harry had, then over the mark on his forehead, which made this Harry groan, and his head to fall forward.
Cupping the boy’s jaw, he breathed, “My beloved son.”
Harry lifted violently green eyes. “My venerated father.”
“My own, my beloved, my heart and my soul,” another voice said, and Harry – Hydrus – stepped smoothly into the clearing, slipped Tom’s wand from his fingers, and cast a silent electric green spell at the follower, who dropped dead. Playing with the wand, Hydrus smiled, broadly. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I you,” Tom tugged him close, kissing him firmly, then flicked his hand at Harry, and the ropes tumbled off of him, setting him free. “What would happen if our son didn’t return?”
Harry laughed, hugging both of his fathers. “Chaos, terror, widespread fear.”
Tom lifted his chosen son, surprised that though his face was human, there were so many details about him that looked just like Hydrus. The hair, the eyes, the lips, the jaw, the smile that seemed just a little too wide -
“Are you certain you didn’t lay an egg?”
Harry giggled, delighted.
“Better,” Hydrus leaned against them both, eyes bright and green. “Regina brought me to the beginning. I and our son... are the same person.”
Tom grinned, sharp teeth bared. “Even better.”
Harry’s fingers trailed over Tom’s smooth skull. “You’re very handsome, father. I like your scales.”
He laughed, thinking of the true fear he could strike in the heart of anyone he wished, now. “We’ll get you a set of your own, soon.”