Harry Potter & Dueling Children
There is only one entry in Harry’s journal that Harry doesn’t think is true. Usually, whatever Harry chooses to write can always be assumed to be true, because he writes for his eyes and his eyes only. (He’d learned after the incident with Ethan. Now his book is charmed so that anyone who opens it without Harry’s consent experiences a bit of shock then complete paralysis. Madame Pomfrey is not impressed.) Harry has no reason to lie to himself -- often times his entries are his only version of an event and if that’s inaccurate, then he’s basically fucked.
For whatever reason, Harry thinks he lied. Or many someone lasted through the shock and paralysis (how is beyond him) and wrote it down as a joke. Or maybe it was in the journal before he got it. Harry isn’t sure. But he is sure that the entry can’t be right.
It’s dated his third year. Severus Snape has assigned Harry a lot of detentions -- takes a lot of joy in doing so too -- but he does not like to serve them. He hates Harry almost as much as Harry hates him. He wants to make Harry suffer through detention but he doesn’t want to suffer himself. He shoves Harry off to some other teacher and wipes his hands clean of it.
But once Snape did oversee Harry’s detention. Once and only once, Harry’s third year. Harry doesn’t remember what he did to piss off Snape that time and didn’t write it down. It’s lost, that piece of knowledge. This time it doesn’t matter. Whatever he did to piss off Snape, Snape is now pissed off. Harry thinks he’ll be scrubbing cauldrons until he graduates and Snape settles on two week.
Harry had written gloomy, He wants me to clean twenty cauldrons before I leave each night. Don’t they have spells for this shit? Or does he just not use them and have dirty cauldrons left lying around to torture children. What a prick.
Snape grades essays while he works. Occasionally he eyes Harry’s slow progress and makes demeaning remarks. He seems to feel much joy when Harry turns red in the face, scrubbing the cauldrons with grit, taking his anger out on them, biting his lip so hard a line of blood leaks down his chin. It will do no good to get in more trouble, to have to do more of this.
Snape enjoys his free labor and his reactions. But after five days of this, Snape hands him over to Hagrid.
Harry doesn’t remember why but he did make an entry, did give his future self an explanation. Harry reads it over one evening and furrows his brows.
He has no reason to lie when making entries. But this one is a lie. It’s wrong, all the letters looking fake and out of place and not even his handwriting. His handwriting has never been ‘masculine’ (whatever that entails) but this entry’s is feminine, all curly and pretty in a way he is sure his own hand could never manage.
Section: Thought log. Subject: Severus Snape. Ranking: Insignificant. Harry reads it over again. It doesn’t feel insignificant -- to him it feels like a breach of privacy (Who dared to touch his journal, his mind and memories in their purest form? They had no right.) and by the way it’s written, the author themselves didn’t think it was insignificant, either. It’s marked wrongly. Harry never does that, either.
Severus Snape is an old friend. He is equal parts old enemy. We are both to blame for that but I do not think he likes to think of it like such. It is my fault, I think. Me and your father’s fault that he treats you this way. But it’s his own, too.
I owe Severus an apology. We were alone during your detention, the first time in years, and I figured this could be it -- a perfect opportunity to resolve what should’ve been resolved years ago. Then he starts insulting you, my boy, my beautiful boy, and he does so under the guise of insulting your father. He called you a Squib and, all alone, I hear his voice clearly for the first time. I see him with eyes not my own -- if you are wearing rose colored glasses, red flags just look like flags** -- and. And I realize then that he is unfixable.
I realize Severus is a bitter, unforgiving man and no apology could mend his shattered heart because it’s him, too, that is broken. The wound inflicted has not even scabbed over yet. It’s been years. And the pain -- and there is pain there, Harry, underneath all that anger and malice, there is pain if you have the will and want to hear it -- is just as striking, just as deeply inflicted, as it was all those years ago, seventh year.
Oh, yes. Severus is broken. The people he is mad at are dead and you, your person in your own right, what should be a blank slate to him, are alive. His opinion of you gets lost in between. It is no fault of yours.
I almost took over then. I was a moment from confronting him, revealing myself, and in lue of apologizing, defending you and, to a lesser extent, your father. But then you did this very special thing.
You put your hands out and you squeezed and from his chest, his magic wept. It’s all so very familiar. You told him that you are not defenseless. “Do night fight me without expecting a fight back.” And then you challenged him to a wizard’s duel. A wizard’s duel, Harry! Oh, you’re so endearing. I’m proud of you.
He said he wouldn’t duel a child, then kicked you out of his classroom. He tried to act tough but in my opinion appeared quite shaken.
I worry what will happen when you are no longer a child. Still, I hold my confidence in you.
Despite what Snape will say, and what people might tell you, you are not your father. You are not me. You’re your own person. Let no one take that from you.
I love you,
Lily.
An entry from his mother. His mother having any sort of relationship with Severus. Harry pulling the magic from his chest -- which, mind you, isn’t a thing that happens! Harry had spent a small chunk of his third year fuming over it. It’s a joke. A cruel joke from some Pureblood child he had ticked off in one way or another and had gotten through his defenses -- perhaps by spelling the entry into his journal, not having to touch it at all, he’d have to fix that loophole -- and Harry is more ticked than they ever were. He finds it awfully rude to disgrace the dead. When he found who did this he would hurt them.
But Harry doesn’t find out who did this, and he doesn’t hurt them. He promptly forgets about that promise to himself and forgets not soon after about the one entry in his journal Harry is sure isn’t true.
He will not find it again for years to come. It’s ranked insignificant, after all. Nothing else in that category has any relevance ever because Harry never ranks his entries even a level off.
But he will find it.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
She has been asleep for a long, long time. She can feel the cold tickling her bones. Hunger licks at her and she feels that she has shrunk and shrunk, taking up less and less space than before. She no longer feels like the graceful giant she once was. She wonders how she’s alive at all.
She opens her eyes. She is awake.
She has not been awake for over fifty years.
Who has woken her up?
She moves -- slowly, though, her bones popping every movement, sore from disuse -- peering around the corner as she moves amongst the pipes. She sees no one. Slytherin, she figures, is long dead by now. It was not him who opened her home, who woke her from a slumber that, sooner or later, would’ve turned into her death. Not him, but who?
“You must be hungry.”
She whirls around, jaw unhinging, but it is only another snake. The other snake is larger than a garden snake -- about nine to twelve feet, if she had to guess -- but smaller than her.
“I am,” she responds warily.
“What should I call you?”
“Berka,” she says. “And you?”
She tosses the corpse of a large raccoon to Berka and says, “I am Nagini.”
Burka swallows the corpse whole, but it does nothing to satiate her hunger. “Do you have more food, Nagini?”
“I will,” she says, “in time.”
She does not want to wait. “I should be going, then. I am famished.”
“There is no way out right now.”
That is surprising. Also a lie. “How did you get in, then?”
Nagini huffs. “There is no way out right now accommodating to your size. The pipes are small enough to fit me.”
Hm. Possible. But that’d mean -- “Is the Chamber not open?”
“I am afraid not.”
How unfortunate. Would she have to suffer the Chamber as her home until the Speaker arrived at Hogwarts? That could take decades. The day could never come. “I see.”
“I will bring you food daily and help you recover your strength, lest my Master never come to your senses.”
Burka perks up at that. “Your Master? The Speaker, you mean?”
“Yes. But do not get your hopes up.”
“Whyever not?” She sounds offended.
“My Master is… erratic. He is not what you are expecting.”
“Do not tell me he is a Mudblood--”
“He is not,” assures Nagini hurriedly.
“Oh… then what is the problem? Define erratic.”
“He is changing. Previously an ideal Slytherin heir in all ways but blood,” Berka assumes, disappointed, this means he is a half-blood, “he now acts with emotions he does not fully comprehend. He tells his followers that he will open the Chamber before he graduates.”
Before he graduates? He has been here for seven years, then. He left her to rot for seven years more than necessary. Burka tries to hide the smart that deals. “You fear he is lying.”
“He is lying about things more and more. It would not be unlike him to.”
“But -- does he not know the terribleness of Muggle on the wizard community, the disgrace they smear unto magic itself? Is he not aware?”
“He used to be. I am not so sure now. I am not so sure of anything about him. He is… so unlike the person I know. A shell of his former self.”
Berak is starting to get it. “You love him.”
“Loved,” she corrects. The one she loves is changing and she is not sure she can forgive him for what he did beforehand, not sure she can forgive him for changing while having prohibited her to do the same. “And I did not try to. In fact, I tried very hard not to.”
“You are both fools.”
“Maybe,” admits Nagini. “But I am a fool bearing food, so what does it matter to you?”
“It matters not.” Thoughts of hunger tear all thoughts otherwise out of her mind. “Will you convince him to free me?”
“I can try,” Nagini says. “But I make no promises able of keeping.”
Beerka coils into herself, trying to stop herself from killing what is now her only source of food. If this false heir does not free her, then who will? The next one; his spawn? Presuming there is a next one? She cannot imagine spending another month here, let alone what could be another two decades. With these empty halls her only company, she will lose her mind. She is sure of it. “Why did you wake me?” she hisses, heartbroken and furious. “Why did you wake me to sour news and worst case scenarios? I could have slept a decade more fine.”
“But after that decade?” prompts Nagini. “After that decade, what if there is no heir to come and the Chamber’s doors stay closed? What then?”
“Then..!”
“Then you would die. Even you cannot sustain yourself on magic alone forever.”
“I would then die. But perhaps that would be better than this.”
“You do not know that yet.”
“What is yet to be revealed of my situation? Basilisks are not made to be animals of captivity. I would rather this be a tomb than a prison. All alone, not hungry but never full, for nothing you can bring will ever surely satisfy me? Yes. Death is better than this.”
“You’re wrong.”
“About what?”
“Being alone,” says Nagini. “You will have me. Not of every hour of every day. But I predict I will prefer your company to my Master’s, so I will make time enough.”
Burka does not reject her offer of companionship. She does not say yes, either, but Nagini thinks it sounds close enough. “You really are a sappy snake.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliant,” Burka snipes. It is without much bite.
“Well,” Nagini hisses, coiling beside Berka, who relishes in the warmth (of such she has not felt in so, so long.) “It is to me.”