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The Serpent's Gaze, Book Two: Slytherin's Secrets	By : DictionaryWrites Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 1582 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter and the characters therein belong to JK Rowling; I'm playing in the sandbox, as it were, whilst claiming no ownership and making no money.

Chapter List
- 7
- 8
- 9
"I know he's a bit, well, arrogant, but look at all the things he did in his books!" Hermione says, looking absently at the animated image of Gilderoy Lockhart on the cover of Magical Me, which she'd apparently ordered by owl. The collected sets they'd bought hadn't included the autobiography, a new publication, and frankly, Harry is glad. If he owned a copy, he'd feel obligated to read it.
"He hasn't taught us anything yet, though," Harry maintains, "And he's so self-centred. Hermione. If Professor McGonagall set a bloody test asking us her favourite colour and what sort of knickers she likes, we'd be out in a second."
"He never asked us what sort of knickers he likes," Hermione argues, looking horrified at the very thought, "That's not fair."
"You just think he's attractive, that's the only reason-"
"That's not the only reason!"
"It's the only reason! You see his lovely hair and his pretty face and you just swoon-"
"I've never swooned in my life, Harry, and I'm not about to-" There's a quiet cough, and Hermione and Harry irritably turn around. Draco has his hands in his pockets, and is looking casually at the both of them. If he wanted to look any more innocent, he'd probably start whistling, and Harry glares at him. Even if Draco isn't showing it, it's obvious he's amused at having found Harry and Hermione arguing about something.
"Sorry to interrupt your heated discussion," Draco says in an oily voice, "But I want some help with the Lockhart homework."
"Define help," Hermione says, raising her eyebrows and crossing her arms over her chest.
"I want the answers," Draco says, and Hermione tuts at him.
"I'm not going to help you cheat," she says disapprovingly, shaking her head, but Harry considers this, leaning his elbow on the table and looking at Draco thoughtfully. If it were usual homework help, Harry would just help him out, but giving Draco the answers to Lockhart's new test won't stop him from learning anything important, and taking into account that none of the teachers will punish him for telling Draco Lockhart's favourite colour...
"I will," Harry says, "But if I tell you what the answers are - just what the answers are, mind, I'm not going to highlight the passages in your books for you - you have to teach me something." Draco arches an eyebrow, and Hermione glances between them.
"Your house is very strange," she says, "I hope you realize that." Harry sighs.
"The Ravenclaws do this too, Hermione. It's not our fault Gryffindors have no concept of the quid pro quo." Hermione snorts, and she looks between them, expectant as Draco seems to think of what sort of knowledge he can offer in return. Then, he reaches into his inside pocket, pulling out the notebook he uses for his spells, and then he leans over, taking a piece of parchment and copying out some wand diagrams and some spell instructions. His notebook is then returned to his inner pocket.
Harry and Hermione both lean over, looking at the paper curiously. "Snake Summons? That sounds like high-level transfiguration."
"I can do it," Draco says defensively, "And this counts as knowledge."
"Prove it works," Harry says, and Draco stares at him. Harry, in truth, believes that Draco can cast the spell, or he wouldn't have copied it out from his little book for Harry and Hermione - he's not stupid, and he wouldn't try and pass off a spell as real without it being so. But Draco didn't know this spell at the end of last year, which means he must have learned it over the summer, and he wouldn't cast a spell for the first time in mixed company.
"What?" Draco says, indignant.
"Prove you can do the spell, and that it works, and I'll give you the answers."
"For Merlin's sake, Potter-" Draco pulls out his wand, and Harry's suspicions ae confirmed: Draco does cast magic at home, likely with his parents' tutelage. It doesn't really surprise him, but it's nice information to file away. "Serpensortia!" Harry watches Draco's wand movement as he casts the spell, and then he watches the burst of yellow light from the end of the wand as the snake bursts forwards.
In hindsight, this was probably a bad spell to request he perform in the middle of the Great Hall.
"What the Hell are you doing over there?" comes a sharp reproach from the other side of the room, and Draco, Hermione and Harry hurriedly stand on top of the Great Hall's bench as they stare down at the snake. It's perhaps three feet long, and it looks a bit angry about its situation. Francois Richelieu runs over, and he stops about six feet away, staring at the serpent, which is now coiling in on itself, raising its head and looking threateningly around the room. The Gryffindors further up the table begin to inch away. "Do you know the spell to Vanish it?" Frank asks Draco, and after a short pause, Draco rapidly, mutely, shakes his head.
Frank calls for one of the Ravenclaw prefects to run and get a teacher, and Harry focuses on the snake. Its head is weaving from side to the other, its tongue darting from its mouth every few seconds, and Harry doesn't think he's imagining it when he hears it say, "Where?"
"This is Hogwarts," Harry whispers back, barely aware of the way he draws out the sibilance in the words, and the snake turns to stare at him with its small, amber eyes. "Can you talk?"
"Of course I can talk," the snake says loftily, "We are not as dim-witted as you upright pigs." Harry's never been called an upright pig before: the insult strikes him as slightly ill-suited.
"Uh, can you, you know? Leave?"
"I was summoned here."
"Yes, but it's much nicer outside. There are mice, rats-"
"Rats?" repeats the snake, tilting its head to the side and seeming pleased at the idea, "Take me there."
"Can't you just, you know, go yourself? It's just out of that door and then through the next one."
"No," it says petulantly, "Too far." Frank, Hermione and Draco are all staring at Harry as he very slowly, very cautiously, steps off the bench. Harry creeps forwards, making his way closer to the snake.
"Potter!" hisses Francois, "What do you think you're doing? That's an adder!"
"It's fine!" Harry says quickly, and he kneels down, putting out his arms, "If you bite me, I'm going to drop you in the lake," he promises, and the snake nods its head in a gesture of assent, slithering forwards and coiling itself slowly around the length of Harry's arm. Harry doesn't feel scared any more: he likes snakes, and this one isn't quite as intimidating now he has it in his hands.
Harry walks quickly into the entrance hall and outside, leaning down to let the snake drop itself into the nearby bushes, and the snake doesn't so much as thank him as it disappears into the underbrush. Harry makes his way back into the Great Hall, and everyone in the room seems to be staring at him. There are maybe twenty students dotted along each of the tables, and Frank comes forwards, grabbing Harry by the collar and hauling him into the entrance hall again. Draco runs to follow them, holding both his own bag and Harry's.
"What? I couldn't just bloody leave it there, could I?"
"You spoke to it," Frank says, pulling him bodily down the corridor, and Harry tries to pull away from the older boy's grip, but Francois keeps tight hold of him.
"So? What else was I meant to bloody do?" The prefect holds tightly to the scruff of Harry's neck as he makes his way towards the potions classroom. Mercifully, Snape's classroom is currently empty, and the man himself is in his office, making disparaging comments in red ink on the essays stacked before him.
"Professor Snape," Francois says, and the potions master glances up, arching an eyebrow as he glances from Harry to Draco.
"What now?" he asks, curling a lip in disgust.
"Potter's just released an adder onto the grounds," Francois says. Snape stares at Harry, black eyes boring into Harry's own.
"I couldn't leave it in the Great Hall!" Harry says as a defence of himself.
"Why, Potter, was there an adder in the Great Hall?"
"Draco summoned it." Snape's gaze flickers to Draco, who shrinks slightly under his Head of House's gaze.
"Because Potter told me to!"
"Would you jump off a bridge if I told you to?"
"Shut up, both of you!" Francois says loudly, finally letting Harry go. "But the reason I brought Potter here is because he's a Parselmouth." Snape's expression changes just slightly, and he frowns at Harry.
"I'm not a Parselmouth," Harry says, "I'm not Slytherin's heir or something, am I?"
"Did you speak to the snake, Potter?" Snape asks briskly.
"Of course I did. How do you think I convinced it not to bite me?" Snape breathes in, and then he pinches the bridge of his nose, looking like he's doing his level best to remain calm.
"Potter," Snape says finally, in a low, even tone. "If you were speaking to the snake, and it understood you, you were speaking Parseltongue."
"I was speaking English!"
"No, Potter, you weren't," Francois says, and Harry stares up at him. "From what we know of Parseltongue, it's not like Draco and I speaking French. You might have heard yourself and the snake speaking in English, but all the rest of us heard were you hissing back and forth." Harry is silent, staring into the middle distance. He'd read the history of Salazar Slytherin, about the mythical Chamber of Secrets and about how he could supposedly speak to snakes, but...
"Five points from Slytherin for performing dangerous magic in the halls without supervision, Mr Malfoy."
"Aren't you going to do anything, sir?" Francois asks, and Snape stares at him, seeming mildly taken aback by the question.
"Do anything?" he repeats.
"About Potter."
"What is it you suggest I do, Prefect Richelieu? Gag the boy? Banish every snake from the castle? Call in the press?" Frank falters, and Snape returns to his desk, sitting down once more and dipping his quill in his pot of red ink. There's a pause as the three of them stand in the doorway, staring at their head of house, and after a few moments, Snape glances up at them, "Get out."
---
"Is this bad?" Harry asks quietly once they get into the common room, and Malfoy lingers to hear Frank's response. Francois had looked worried all the way back to the Common Room, and now he looks at Harry seriously before he sighs.
"It will be all over the school that you were involved in the summoning of a snake, and that you then talked to it. Parseltongue is an exceedingly rare skill, Harry, and virtually all Parselmouths are descended from Slytherin: people think of Parselmouths as dark magic practitioners as soon as they know what they are."
"It'll be all over the school by now," Harry says, and Frank nods his head, patting Harry's shoulder.
"Stay in here for now, okay? We'll see how the rest of the houses are at dinner, and then we can respond from there." Harry goes into the common room proper, and, seeing Harry's pale features as he walks past, he hears the other Slytherins ask Frank what happened. Harry stays in his dorm for a little while, taking the time to unpack the books and clothes from his trunk he hadn't yet done, and then he walks out into the common room again.
"Oh, cheer up, Potter," Blaise Zabini says as soon as he comes in, throwing an arm around his shoulders. "Maybe you sound smarter in Parseltongue."
"Shut up!" Harry says immediately, shoving the other boy, but by no means is the ribbing upsetting: it's actually comforting that Blaise is still making fun of him, even when it's about this.
"Come on, then," Theodore says, "You can't discover you're a Parselmouth and not demonstrate for us."
"He's right, you know," says Daphne Greengrass, "We'd just be terribly upset if you were to deny us a little whimsy."
"I didn't know whimsy was your thing, Daphne," Harry says, and she gives a little shrug of her shoulders, tossing her hair. "I don't think I can do it without looking at a snake - I've done it before. I set a boa constrictor on my cousin once."
"Well, he's just gone up rather a lot in my estimation," Blaise says in a light, conversational tone, "Nothing like snake-based attempted murder to bolster one's friendship."
"I didn't try and kill him," Harry says, pushing the other boy to sit down as he drops onto the arm of one of the green, leather sofas in front of the fireplace. "I just scared him a bit." He glances around for a good likeness of a snake in the common room, of which there are a fair few, and he settles on the Slytherin crest mounted over the nearest fireplace. The snake is carefully painted on the wood of the shield, and Harry focuses it on it, imagining its coil moving and shifting as he looks at it. "This is me speaking Parseltongue," he says, and the Slytherins around him each laugh and "ooh", nudging each other. Harry knows there are other people dotted around the common room craning their necks and straining their ears to listen, but for the time being he ignores them.
That is, until there's a quiet grind from the wall, and a large piece of stone beside the fireplace slides to the right, disappearing into the wall beside the chimney flue: a dark passageway is left open, letting cold air draught into the room, and the six of them stare, wide-eyed, at the opening.
"Go get Professor Snape, Blaise," says Afifa, coming up and putting her hands on Harry's shoulders, keeping him in his place on the sofa. Blaise all but scrambles towards the common room exit as the other Slytherins begin to gather around, all of them leaning to try and stare into the new hall that's opened up. It's dark, but Harry thinks he can see unlit torches lining its walls. "What did you say, Potter?"
"Nothing. Nothing, I just said that I was speaking Parseltongue, it was just so they could hear-"
"Shush," Afifa says sharply, squeezing his shoulder. "It's fine. They find secret rooms all the time."
"When was the last time someone found an official secret room?" Harry asks, glancing up at Afifa. Other Slytherins lean to watch her face, and Afifa breathes in. There's a short pause.
"Shut up, Potter."
"Yes, Ma'am."
- 7
- 8
- 9
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The Serpent's Gaze, Book Two: Slytherin's Secrets