Switched

Of course, the only one of “today’s challenges” that hadn’t yet been addressed was the matter of the horcrux, and Dru’s mysterious plan to keep Bella in check when she left Azkaban.

“Soooo...” he said, as soon as they returned to Dru’s flat.

Simply ask whatever you’d like to ask, she chided him. This leading reticence is entirely unnecessary. 

Is it even necessary to ask? he sort of suspected that she already knew what he was about to ask.

No, but asking unnecessary questions isn’tquiteso annoying asdrawing outthe asking of unnecessary questions. She waved her wand, and the horcrux they had retrieved from Lucius Malfoy’s study fell out of a little knot of twisted space he hadn’t noticed, just above the kitchen table.

Harry snatched it up at once. He hadn’t gotten a very good look at it on Christmas. It was a thin, muggle book, bound in black leather, a bit shabby and banged up around the edges of the cover — a diary, with the year 1942 embossed on the front. The magic, though, gave the lie to its unimpressive appearance, light preservation magics interfering with the darkness of the thing they contained and vice versa, oscillating and sort of... pulsing, like a heartbeat. He could just make out the name T.M. Riddle on the first slightly-yellowing page. The ink was faded and...actually, was that ink? The faded brownish colour looked more like the old signatures in the Bookshop’s book than normal ink in old books he’d gotten from the library.

Indeed, Dru confirmed. Not strictly necessary to prepare the vessel, but knowing Thom, he would have thought it appropriate to strengthen the bond between himself and the vessel which would become a sort of second body for him by marking it in blood with his true name. He always was rather superstitious like that. I expect it comes of being a muggleborn ritualist, that unique combination of awareness and ignorance... In any case, set it here, she instructed him, indicating the little circle of runes she had “drawn” on the table with conjured chalk.

The moment he did, the runes flared to life, drawing magic into the circle and forming a sort of... It felt like an illusion, but one that didn’t have any actual features, or at least...not at first. As he watched, it twisted itself into the form of a bloke, tall and dark-haired, with light eyes exactly the same shape as Danny’s. He was a bit on the thin side and gangly, as though he’d only recently become so tall, but he held himself straight and proud, looking down his nose like Draco bloody Malfoy. Unlike Draco, though, Harry got the impression that Riddle’s confidence in himself wasn’t complete dragonshite based on a lifetime of empty praise. It might have been the way his sardonic little half-smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, cold and hard as ice.

“You must be James,” he said. “Druella’s told me so much about you.”

“Has she really?” Somehow, that didn’t really strike him as likely. He just couldn’t imagine Dru telling Tom any more about Harry than she’d told him about Tom.

“All good things, of course,” the horcrux added, the little smirk-like expression broadening into an actual smile.

“Okay, now I know you’re lying.” 

“Good is subjective, James,” Druella reminded him.

Tom nodded. “Granted, most people probably wouldn’t think that being assigned to kill someone by the Dark Herself speaks well of your character and potential, but I am not most people. Besides, if Druella’s impression of the effects of the tynged laid upon my corporeal twin by his unacknowledged bastard daughter is the least bit accurate, which I have no reason to doubt, I can assure you that he would rather have been killed than subjected to the influence of public opinion in such a way. So far as premeditated killing goes, giving that twisted parody of me the mercy stroke is perhaps the least morally objectionable murder I could possibly imagine.”

“Er. Even though it means killing you, too?” Harry asked, feeling rather as though he’d lost the plot.

Tom laughed. “Well, no, obviously not.”

Dru sighed. “Honestly, James? Do you think I would have allowed you to meet like this if I intended to destroy this horcrux?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Harry huffed. Clearly the implication was no, she wouldn’t have, but, “I thought we had to get rid of the horcruxes before we could kill Riddle, and obviously we are meeting like this, so yes?”

“While simply destroying the horcruxes is by far the most direct and easiest way to render them useless as anchors for the primary soul, embodying the horcrux and severing the connection between the two will also serve.”

“You can do that?”

She raised an eyebrow at him, like well, obviously.

“I’m not sure if you realise this, James,” Tom drawled, “but your grandmother is obscenely good at magic.”

“Oh, and here I just thought everyone else is ridiculously bad at magic,” Harry shot back, equally sarcastically.

The horcrux chuckled. “That, too. But yes. Moving me to a different object is the more difficult part. If I were to fall into the hands of an appropriate replacement, I might be able to simply steal their body, but an object which doesn’t already have a soul is trickier. I’ve managed to convince Dru to make a golem for me to animate.” 

“A living statue,” Dru corrected him. “The defining feature of automata, including golems, is the constructed pseudo-consciousness. A statue possessed and animated by an independent consciousness is an entirely different concept, even if I am using some of the same enchantments to facilitate its movement.”

“Fine, a living statue, then,” Tom agreed, illusory eyes tipping to the ceiling. “I tried to convince her to make a blood alchemy replacement, but organic bodies are squishy and disgusting and take time to grow, and require either a surrogate or a lot of very expensive equipment, so if I want one — which I do, statues can’t do wizardry — I’ve been informed that I’m going to have to make one for myself. But that’s getting ahead of myself. When the statue is finished, we’ll break the binding elements on the diary and she’ll invoke me into the statue.”

“O...kay. And breaking the connection between you and Mouldy Voldie?”

The illusion sighed. “Unfortunately I can’t break it myself. There are any number of disowning rituals which might work, or I could ask Angel to do it, but quite frankly I would prefer to renew my relationship with her by offering a gift, rather than asking for a favour, and both Dru and I are certain that excising the spell-anchor directly will be effective, if perhaps somewhat extreme.” He looked at Dru in a way which suggested to Harry that this had been her idea, and it would definitely work, but it was probably a little mad, like casually poking holes in the universe because all other modes of magical transportation sucked.

“The spell linking what remains of the original Tom to this horcrux is anchored in their souls,” she elaborated. “Excising it will not be pleasant and the original will certainly notice the backlash when it breaks, but it’s not technically difficult.”

“On a scale of freeform soul-magic,” Horcrux Tom noted. “Which non-legilimens generally find incredibly difficult. Actually, I don’t know many other legilimens, but I suspect a mind-healer would say it’s technically difficult and terribly advanced as well, even if it is conceptually simple.”

“Yes, well, fortunately for you, I’m obscenely good at magic.”

Harry giggled at Dru’s straight-faced delivery. (Tom played it cool with an equally bland, just saying sort of shrug.) But, “Wait. If Riddle would notice you breaking this anchor, is he going to notice me destroying the others? You know, when we find them.”

“I don’t know, we weren’t about to destroy one of the other horcruxes to find out, or at least, he didn’t while he and I were in regular contact. Still, I suspect it would be best if we find the others first, then destroy them all at once,” Tom suggested. “Just in case.”

“We?” Harry repeated, surprised. 

“Yes, whatever tracking or locating spell we eventually find will almost certainly use me as a focal object, and beyond the fact that Angie wants him dead, that idiot is an embarrassment to Tom Riddles everywhere.” Harry actually snorted trying not to laugh. “He has to go.”

“Alright, and then what?” he asked, still giggling.

“What do you mean, and then what? We collect the horcruxes and locate my idiot twin; you avada the fucking horcruxes, torch them with fiendfyre, dissolve them in alkahest, whatever ; and Dru breaks the anchor chain between him and me. How we deal with him depends on whether he notices the destruction of the horcruxes. If he does, he’ll probably run to each of the hiding spots to try to catch you before you destroy me — breaking the binding between us will take some time, so it’s likely that he’ll notice you destroying the other horcruxes and start looking for you before it’s finished. If he can tell which horcruxes have been destroyed, he’ll go straight to Malfoy Manor, you can set up an ambush or a trap for him there ahead of time. If he doesn’t notice, he’ll stay right where he is, just a sitting duck. Obviously we’ll put together a more detailed plan to take him out there once we know where he is.”

“What about Bella?” Harry asked. That much of the plan — the killing Riddle part — he probably could have guessed, but, “Dru said there’s a plan to keep her in check after he’s dead and she leaves Azkaban.”

“Ah, that. In exchange for her assistance in the matter of gaining my autonomy, I’ve promised Dru that I will act as Bella’s minder and ensure that she doesn’t indulge her penchant for chaos to the point of apocalyptic destruction in the midst of a fit of madness. Quite frankly, I suspect that Dru’s overestimating the likelihood of Bella breaking the entire bloody world because Bella’s too close to her Patron for seers to follow her and the likely outcomes of her decisions and influence on others, which makes her seem more chaotic and inherently dangerous to order and civilisation than her exploits objectively demonstrate her to be.” 

When Dru frowned at him, he added, “Honestly, she seems like a rational actor to me, and I can count on one hand the number of memories I’ve seen where she deviated from that neat little list of priorities you gave her.”

“With de Mort acting as a stabilising influence on her,” Dru pointed out.

“Yes, yes,” Tom muttered, turning back to Harry. “I must admit, however, that neither of us are certain to what degree her apparent ability to compensate for her instabilities before her tynged-induced deterioration was due to her own mastery of occlumency, and how much was my alter-ego’s influence. Moreover, we don’t know how deeply their soul-bond has affected her. From Druella’s memories of Bella’s behaviour interacting with my alter-ego, I strongly suspect that he has been holding her in thrall to some degree since she was younger than you, and they’ve been soul-bound for over twenty-five years. Having him torn away from her in death is likely to be deeply destabilising even if she is normally capable of coping with the Black Madness without outside assistance. I’m not him, obviously, and I’m not planning on trying to replace that bond or restore it with myself in his place, but we suspect that I may be familiar enough to at least catch her attention and help her regain some semblance of equilibrium.

“There’s also really no way to predict how the breaking of the tynged may affect her. The best case scenario, obviously, would be if she simply woke up with her faculties and priorities fully restored to those she held in Nineteen Seventy-Eight. Worst case — which doesn’t seem likely given Angel’s expectations — it won’t change anything. She’ll still be at the mercy of public opinion. Second worst, she’ll be capable of becoming something other than the spell and public opinion dictate, but she’ll be starting from what she is now, rather than her pre-tynged self. Most likely the outcome will be something between best and second-worst, and it will take some work to restore her mind to what it should be, based on the impression I have of her from Dru’s memories. I’m not a mind-healer by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m the best help she’s likely to get. We’ll muddle through, I’m sure,” he said, giving Harry a reassuring smile.

Surprisingly, it actually was a little reassuring. He’d been sort of afraid that keeping Bella in check meant convincing her not to do anything fun, but if it just meant making sure she recovered from all the mind-fuckery and got back to being herself, that was, he thought, probably fine. Good, even. Still, just to be clear... “Okay, just so you know, though, Angelos wants her to leave Azkaban and stop being boring, so...”

The reassuring smile broadened into an evil grin. “Oh, I know. I believe I said I would prefer to renew my relationship with Angie with a gift. What better than restoring Bella to the perfect work of art she once was?”

Well, when he put it like that...

“I have no intention of picking up their war where that idiot left off, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something fun to work on when she’s feeling more herself again.”

“Project Atlantis,” Dru suggested. “De Mort’s original cloud-castle solution to the problem of most governments frowning on subsumption and human sacrifice was to build a self-sustaining, travelling island outside the control of any governmental entity. New Avalon was the more realistic alternative.”

“Why stop at Atlantis?” Tom asked excitedly. “Why not make an actual cloud castle? Well, not actual clouds, obviously, but a magical air-ship town or flotilla or whatever would be ace!”

“Ooh, that would be so cool! And I bet it wouldn’t even be that hard. I mean, we have flying carpets and charms that alter gravity.”

“Well, if it were easy, I expect someone would already have done it, but with enough resources, I shouldn’t think it impossible.”

“Very few things are actually impossible,” Dru agreed. “But there are reasons mages haven’t already built such a thing. Atmospheric magical currents are far less stable and powerful than geomantic currents, which makes writing suitable enchantments more difficult than you’re expecting, James, and rather limits the wizardry one can do beyond a certain elevation. And of course putting a floating object of any significant size in the air while secrecy is intact runs the risk of a collision with an aeroplane — a mid-air space-warping spell to prevent such accidents would be even more energetically problematic than keeping a sizable platform afloat. 

“Also, I’m not entirely certain how magic and satellite communication signals will interact, especially in a low-magic environment, and I’m not as up to date as I probably should be on the state of muggle remote detection technologies, but I would imagine they’re more difficult to circumvent now than they were before the end of the Second World War. The Americans and the Soviets have both managed to make it to space,” she informed Tom. “The Soviets had managed, I should say. The Union has been falling apart for years, but it was officially dissolved last December. In any case—”

“Wait, what?” Tom interrupted.

“You’ll have to be more specific, Tom.”

“They made it to space? I mean, I’m sure the reds calling it quits is big news and probably more important, but they made it tospace?”

Dru nodded, smiling at his amazement. “Humans have walked on the moon, now.”

“On the moon?” Tom repeated. “Criminy...”

Harry laughed, both at his expression and the old-fashioned not-swear. “It’s been, what? Almost fifty years? You’ve missed a lot.”

“Well, catch me up, then!”

Harry was still catching him up when Dru rejoined them in the morning. She went to bed at some point, but Harry wasn’t tired and horcruxes didn’t need to sleep apparently, so they’d just...kept talking. All night. About everything. Harry didn’t know all that much about politics beyond the bits Uncle Vernon liked to complain about, but even he hadn’t missed things like who Thatcher and Major were, and King George had still been alive when the horcrux was made, so he guessed he sort of knew more than he thought he did, just by existing in this country. And he knew a lot more about daily life in the muggle world — how people dressed and talked now, and what was popular on telly (that television was a thing now, in colour and everything, and the state of technology in general) and what plastic was and that they didn’t even have orphanages anymore, really, and about the NHS (which hadn’t existed the last time Tom had spent any time in muggle London), and all sorts of shite.

When it came to Magical Britain, he knew there was still no separate magical Ireland, the Wizengamot was still just a House of Lords, and the new Minister had just been appointed a couple of years ago. His name was Fudge, and Blaise said he was pretty much just there because everyone thought he was relatively unobjectionable and would be easily manipulated. Rumour had it the position had been offered to Dumbledore, but he’d turned it down because he would have had to give up being Chief Warlock and whatever his position was called in the magical EU. (Tom had been furious to learn that not only was Dumbledore still alive, he was actually stupidly influential in politics and also the Headmaster.)

They were talking about the shops Harry had seen around Charing over the summer — the Bookshop had been there when Tom was a kid, and he (the original) had apparently gotten a job at Borgin and Burke’s after he left school, and the bank was the same, obviously, but it sounded like pretty much everything else had changed — when Dru interrupted. 

“Anomos is still there? I mean, that’s definitely the same bloke,” Tom said, peeking into Harry’s memories of the man. “But he was old when I was your age!”

“Maybe he has a horcrux, too,” Harry suggested. 

“I doubt it. A horcrux won’t keep your physical body from ageing. And if he was doing whatever Dru’s doing to stay young and pretty, I’d expect him to be, well. Young and pretty.”

Dru smiled faintly at the compliment. “He’s not. He’s been under a tynged for millennia. That much is known in certain circles, though I suspect only the Morrigan and Anomos himself know the details anymore.”

“Wait, the Queen of Nightmares cursed him, and he’s still in Britain? Christ, I’d be on the other side of the world...”

That was apparently funny, though Harry wasn't in on the joke. Obviously someone called the Queen of Nightmares was probably scary as hell, but. 

She's a legilimens who's been living in Ireland sincebefore it was an island, Tom informed him. Scarydoesn't really cover it. If you annoy her badly enough for her to curse you, the other side of the world might not be far enough away, honestly. 

“No, I don’t think she was the one who cursed him, she just tends to keep up with the other immortals and knows more or less everything about all of them by now.”

“Which you would know...how, exactly?"

"How do you think, Tom? I have been to Éire on occasion."

"Where you just casually struck up a conversation gossipping about other immortals with the bloody Morrigan?" Tom said, as though this was completely ridiculous and possibly insane.

“So says the wizard who casually strikes up conversations with Aspects of Magic?”

“It’s one thing to ask Hecate to teach me magic or share in Angel’s appreciation of my art. Going to Ireland and just introducing yourself because you happen to be in the neighbourhood is a very different thing. What did you do, think Morrigan save me from endless tedium somewhere she would overhear and then just hit it off?”

Dru gave him a rather exasperated sigh. "No, she noticed me opening a portal to Éire from the Beyond and wanted to know who I was and exactly what I thought I was doing, showing up in her back garden unannounced. I apologised for startling her and asked how I ought to have contacted her ahead of time, which struck her as hilarious and opened the doorway to further conversation. I'm still not sure why. I wasn't being funny."

“Druella, if you can’t see why it’s completely hysterical to apologise to the single most terrifying person in the world for startling her and then essentially asking for her telephone number to call ahead next time, I’m not sure I can explain it.” Well, okay, when he put it like that, Harry could see how it was funny. “Obviously Bellatrix comes by her insanity honestly.”

Dru glared at the horcrux’s grinning illusion (even though Harry thought that was a pretty uncontroversial observation) and changed the subject. “I should probably teach you Parseltongue this morning, James. I’m not certain how long it will take for you to recover, and I imagine traversing the floo network with a migraine is even more unpleasant than the average floo traversal.”

Harry shrugged. He was sure it couldn’t be that bad, even if it did take longer to floo up to Hogsmeade from London than it did to get from London to Dover or Calais to Paris. (His train across the Channel wouldn’t get in until after the Express had gone, so he was planning on visiting Missy and everyone in Knockturn for a while before just flooing back to the Three Broomsticks and catching a thestral-drawn carriage up to the school with everyone else.) He didn’t really think that learning Parseltongue could be that bad, either, but.

“I thought Parsel was a blood-mediated trait,” Tom said, sounding slightly annoyed about it for some reason.

“It is. Omniglots can learn it, but it’s not heritable,” Dru explained. 

Harry suspected that she filled him in on the feedback loop thing with legilimency, because the next thing Tom said was, “How the hell did you make it to the age of sixty-five without considering that you really might not be human?”

Harry wasn’t sure exactly what the little rhyming Gobbledygook phrase she responded with meant, but it felt like a ‘screw you’ sort of expression. 

It’s a very polite invitation offering a guest a seat...on the nearest stalagmite. 

So, yes, basically, was what he was hearing?

Dru pushed a little wave of exasperation at him in a silent sigh. Yes, basically. Did you want to learn Parsel or not?

“Yes, of course I do,” he said quickly, before she got too annoyed with his and Tom’s teasing and decided not to teach him.

“Very well. First, I would like you to lay out your clothes for tomorrow and pack your things to return to school.” I have no intention of prodding you to do so if and when you awaken feeling miserable and must rush to catch your train.

Harry thought that sounded suspiciously like she already knew what the outcome of this particular experiment was going to be, and quite frankly, he wasn’t certain if it was worth it, if it was definitely going to be miserable.

Well, Dru thought it was absolutely exhilarating and wanted to keep going, learning more things, Tom thought at him, which is why I made that comment about her being so incredibly obviously not human, and my twin distanced himself from the process enough that it didn’t leave him over-extended and miserable, but I don’t think that’s an option for you as the recipient. It’s probably still worth it, though. Maybe not if you weren’t going back to Hogwarts — most snakes are terribly boring conversationalists — but since youare, you’ll be able to use all the secret passages that open to Parsel. Also, you can visit the basilisk. 

Basilisk? Harry had heard of basilisks! They were in Grey’s, with warnings that their venom was one of the most corrosive naturally-occurring substances (which meant their flesh and fangs were naturally resistant to acid and shite like that) and that meeting their gaze directly let them hit their prey with an Avada-like bit of magic, just scaring the life right out of them. Basilisk hunters were advised to poison their lairs from a distance or set deadly traps, or failing that, go after them like Perseus with Medusa, using a mirror to approach them without looking them directly in the eye. They could live for thousands of years and never stopped growing, and the magical potency of ingredients harvested from them was greater if they were killed without magic. 

Tom sent a wave of amusement at him. Yes, basilisk. I suspect the Gaze of Death is voluntary on their part, because I didn’t know what she was the first time I met her, and I definitely looked her in the eye. He caught a memory of Tom, maybe a couple of years older than Harry was now, with a massive snake in a vaulted, underground room. It had to be fifty feet long, coiling around him in great loops, its head — glistening green in the light of his wand — and one yellow, slitted eye hovering somewhere above him, offering a greeting to the new Speaker. She’s under hibernation and stasis enchantments down in the Chamber of Secrets at the moment, but they’re intelligent beings — like acromantulae, they become more intelligent as they age, though they don’t really cross the threshold of sentience until they’re a couple of centuries old, so most people outside of India don’t know that — and she was delighted to have company when I discovered her. I’m sure she’d welcome you to visit and share her wisdom with you.

That isso bloody cool! Yeah, alright, definitely worth it. Also, “Can I take Tom to school with me?” It’d be awesome if he could actually show Harry around the secret passages and how to get to the basilisk and shite.

“Absolutely not.”

“What? Why not? It’s not like he’d be hurting anyone, and you don’t actually need him here while you work on the statue thing, do you?”

“No, but if Dumbledore discovers that you’ve brought one of the horcruxes into the school, he will destroy it immediately.”

Tom’s illusion shrugged and nodded. “He never did like me much. He’ll probably think you’re suspect too, just for having had contact with me.”

Harry sighed. “Ugh, fine, I guess. It was fun talking to you, though. We should do it again sometime.”

“Hopefully by the next time you see me, I’ll have a body and we can do something more interesting than just sitting around talking all night, but sure.”

“Brill,” Harry grinned, skipping off to pack his shite. Most of it was already in his bag, he hadn’t really brought much stuff aside from clothes. “Later, then,” he threw over his shoulder, though he wasn’t sure Tom heard him over Dru telling him very firmly that more interesting had better not mean torturing and killing innocent muggles for Angel.

“Honestly, Dru. What do you take me for? I don’t sacrifice innocents to the Dark. We corrupt innocents. We sacrifice people it likes.”

Harry was going to have to ask him about that later, because wouldn’t that mean killing people who were selfish and hurt others? Seemed sort of like the opposite of furthering the interests of the Dark to him. 

Not right now, though. Right now, he only had a couple of books to throw back into his bag, and his robes to lay out, and— “Okay, ready!” he announced, hurrying back to the kitchen. 

Dru intercepted him in the sitting room, the illusion dispersed and no sign of the diary, so it was probably tucked back in whatever little pocket dimension she’d been keeping it in. 

Her response was a hiss, and an absolutely peculiar little twist of magic, worming its way into his head, some part of himself reaching back instinctively, interpreting the meaning behind the sound and the magic — You may want to lie down.

«The magic of parseltongue creates a superficial false-consciousness around the mind of the listener, imposing a sense of its meaning on the target, even when the target is not a conscious being,» she continued. «While the magic of omniglottalism integrates meaning into your understanding and replicates the knowledge and familiarity of the host with the language. It proceeds more quickly the more you already know, drawing new connections between established knowledge, and the effect of the parsel-magic becomes stronger as your own magic adopts the character necessary to replicate the false-consciousness and communicate the meaning. This means that—”

Harry tried to keep following what she was saying, he really did, but at that point he lost it, more and more of his focus drawn into the magic pressing in on him, on the knowledge it was forcing on him and countless connections being made between things he already knew and things the magic was showing him, associating meanings with new sounds and magical expressions, mimicking the pulsing and vibrations of those expressions unconsciously, reaching out to their source to pull in more information, a positive torrent of knowledge he was powerless to slow, an entire language attempting to cram itself into his head all at once, his own magic forcing him to remember it, integrating the information into his memory instinctively, in a way that he wouldn’t be able to forget it any more than he would be able to forget how to speak English or French or Gobbledygook. 

He could see how Dru might have found this exhilarating. For the first little bit, it was. But then it became abruptly un-fun. Like running down a hill, it started moving too fast for him and he simply couldn’t keep up. 

He lost his balance and he was falling, crushed under an avalanche of foreign grammar and vocabulary, his own magic pulling it into his mind compulsively, even though he wanted it to stop, now — needed it to stop, now — it just kept going, more and more. His head was pounding, he needed to stop, to take a break, take a nap, he simply couldn’t remember any more— But the magic wasn’t taking no for an answer, and even if it was, he didn’t think he could remember the word ‘no’ at the moment, and it was just too much!

He probably collapsed to the floor, might have hit his head, or something — he hadn’t actually had time to register the suggestion to lie down and do it before the wave of magic bore down on him — but he wasn’t aware of it. There was only the magic, completely overwhelming him, and then, after some timeless span of torture, when it finally stopped, there was nothing.

The next thing he was actually aware of was Dru standing in the doorway — he was in his conjured bed, still fully dressed, she’d probably just levitated him here from the sitting room — telling him, «You need to wake up,» and asking, «How are you feeling?»

«I think someone stepped on my head,» he admitted, startled to hear the words come out as a low, sputtering hiss.

She nodded, as though this was expected, and switched back to French to murmur, “Very good. This should help.”

He had no idea what the potion she handed him was supposed to do, but he really didn’t care. He sat up enough to toss it back without tasting it, then let himself collapse back to the bed. “I’m going back to sleep,” he muttered back.

“I’m afraid you really must get up if you’re to make your train.” English. Was she doing that on purpose? It really wasn’t helping his headache...

“I’ll take a later one.”

“I already let you sleep through the earlier one,” she informed him, in Gobbledygook. “If you don’t get up, I’m going to have to apparate you back.”

“That’s fine,” he managed to croak out, pulling the sheet over his face. It was far too bright in here, even with a charm shading the windows.

“No, it’s not.” He hissed at the introduction of Russian, not a coherent objection, just a sharp intake of breath as he felt his magic instinctively seeking out more of the language he didn’t already know and the pain in his head spiked. He couldn’t feel her eavesdropping on his thoughts, but either she was or she could put together exactly what just happened without doing so, because she switched back to French. “You’re in no condition to be apparated along-side, and likely won’t be even after the hangover potion begins to take effect. If you’re lucky, you’ll have recovered enough to floo back up to Hogsmeade as planned without making yourself ill. Everything appears to be in order, however—”

He had to pull the sheet down to glare at her for that one, even if it meant more light. “I’m supposed to feel like shite?”

He could hear her trying not to laugh, though she at least managed to keep a straight face. “Well, that is the expected outcome, but I was referring to the fact that you are still capable of comprehending and speaking all of the languages you knew fluently before assimilating Parsel. You’ve almost certainly forgotten some rarely-referenced facts or experiences to free up mental energy to complete the process.” 

What? She hadn’t warned him about that possibility! What had he forgotten? How did she know it would be something unimportant? Now it was going to bother him... Maybe he could ask Blaise to check if there was anything obviously missing from his memories?

“The literature suggests that it may take a few more days for you to unconsciously sort out the connections to attain true fluency in Parsel, but you seem to have the basics; the magical aspect was clearly communicated when you responded a moment ago; and it seems you’re now conscious of when you’re using your omniglottalism, so yes, I would consider the experiment a success, generally speaking. Though it would still be advisable for you to learn as much of your summer languages as possible before-hand, I think. The rate of assimilation will be easier to control without the feedback loop in play, but I think we can agree that we have also demonstrated that there is a hard limit on the amount of information you can retain and integrate before you need to take a break to recover, so the less you have left to learn come summer, the better, I expect.”

The idea of learning anything else was making him feel a bit ill at the moment (along with being conscious in general — it felt like the world was spinning around him, even more so when he closed his eyes), so yes, he expected that not repeating this particular experiment would be for the best. Also, it was probably good he was going back to school. No one there would expect him to learn anything, so he would have plenty of time to recover. Though he might have to skip his plans to visit people this afternoon, or however long he would have when the train got in, now, he supposed. He didn’t remember when the later train was, just that the first one had been getting in at Dover at eleven fifteen, so he wouldn’t have time to get to King’s Cross and catch the Hogwarts Express. Either way, he was beginning to think it might be for the best if he just went straight back to school and spent whatever time he had left until Blaise returned to the Castle blissfully unconscious.

He dragged himself to his feet very reluctantly, glowering at Dru and her complete lack of sympathy. “Yeah, I expect so. That was only fun for the first few seconds, if you were wondering. Not doing it again sounds like a bloody ace plan to me.”

Her lips twitched in a poorly-suppressed smile. “Unfortunately, you can only learn Parsel once. Thunderbird and Phoenix and a handful of other magical languages are reputedly similar to acquire, but their native speakers tend to be foreign enough that you won’t pick up anything from them without their active participation.” When Harry gave her his best incredulous look, she elaborated, “That’s why I don’t speak Phoenix. If they don’t want to teach you — and I’ve never met one who was interested in doing so — you won’t pick it up unconsciously via omniglottalism.”

“No, that’s not the look, the look is, ‘Unfortunately —’?!” Harry said, perhaps somewhat inarticulately, but he was very tired. “How the hell did you make it to the age of sixty-five without considering that you really might not be human?”

“Picking up anachronistic colloquialisms is rather adorable,” she responded, apparently apropos of nothing, “but if you start picking up his penchant for teasing me, I’m going to start thinking young Tom is a bad influence on you,” she finished, with a tiny smile that made him think she was teasing him back. Though he still wasn’t sure what— Oh, right. No one actually said ace anymore. It was almost as dated as criminy, even if it was (in Harry’s opinion) a hell of a lot cooler. “Now, your train leaves in forty minutes, so if you want to have time to eat something before you leave for the station, I suggest you get dressed.”