Chapter 9
Home Alone
The parselscript was still impossible. And it certainly wasn't any easier with his painful hands. Harry wondered if it was possible to heal his hands faster. First he tried some muggle methods (first jumping from the bed so that his feet weren't vulnerable from snake attacks) he made his way to the bathroom and tried wrapping his hands in wet cloth. The pain was all inside his joints though and it didn't help an awful lot. Running his hands under cold water did a little but as soon as he moved the pain was just as bad as before.
Harry didn't know any magical healing spells. Despite spending so much of his time in the hospital wing. The only spell he had seen which might have helped was the one that idiot Lockhart had used to remove the bones in his arm. Harry was also pretty sure that that wasn't what Lockhart had been trying to do with that spell in the first place.
On the other hand, Harry had heard stories of magical children healing themselves. That was before they had wands too. If he could try one of that kind of spell, then he might be able to force out the curse. So he tried to concentrate on his fingers, envisioning little fires in his joints. He felt the pain flare up instantly and tried to imagine cooling them and smothering the flames. He couldn't extinguish them entirely but he could imagine the fires as small and contained. His hands did feel slightly better and although the curse wasn't completely expelled, it was possible to flex his fingers.
Harry was quite surprised that it had worked as well as it had and added it to his mental list of things to tell Hermione when he saw her again.
It was quite a short list, comprising only; the existence of parselscript, the death of the Basilisk, Tom Riddle's true identity and now his magical advances in first aid. Harry was quite proud of being able to focus in on his magic like this, McGonagall was always talking about 'channelling magic' and he hadn't understood before.
Harry snapped the top off his quill out of irritation. Why was parselscript so stupid? He was still having problems with the letters, they didn't come out quite right. He absently wondered if Nagini would be willing to help. It wasn't like he was going to ask her though – even the sight of the tip of her tail, flicking about just past the end of the bed was making him shake with fear.
He hated feeling so scared. He was supposed to be a Gryffindor after all, house of the brave. How brave could he be if he was so scared of a snake easily a twentieth the size of one he had killed easily less than a month ago?
It had taken Harry an embarrassingly long time to realise that the parselscript wasn't a code like he had thought. Knowing that this shape made an s sound (that shape appeared a lot) didn't necessarily mean that the equivalent word in English had an 's' in it. Harry supposed it was a bit like learning French or another language. He felt pretty stupid that it had taken until now to get that, when it should have been obvious.
The sentences were even harder to understand. Some words just didn't work in parseltongue. From Tom's examples the word 'knife' was the same as sword and dagger and most things pointy. Harry drew a small snake on a spare piece of parchment, to try out words on. He had to try saying the word out loud first, try to only hear the hissing and finally work out how the word was probably spelt in the parselscript letters. When he had a string of words, he had to say the whole sentence and try to hear which order the words actually came out in.
All in all it probably took him about an hour to write the first sentence. He tried re-writing it a few times to get the shapes of the letters before admitting that one of the words didn't look right at all. Tom had said that some words had their own shapes instead of being made up from lots of smaller parts, Harry thought it was like & signs in the muggle world and resigned himself to not working this one out. He couldn't be bothered trying to fix it with a different word so decided to leave it for now and see if Tom would make a fuss about having to spell it out. Well, a bigger fuss than usual.
The next sentence went a little faster, he was half way through the third when a large shape sped out from underneath the bed.
"Would you shut up?" Nagini hissed at him, swaying up to an intimidating height of 4 and a half feet. "I'm trying to sleep down here. If I hear one more word from 'The crow of the rooster is fatal to the basilisk.' Then I'll bite you and actually get some sleep."
Harry froze in place, his eyes wide and his knees drawn up to his chest, "Sorry."
If the snake had had eyebrows, Harry had the feeling it would have raised one. "Is that how you killed the queen of serpents, Boy? With a rooster?"
Harry shook his head, "No, with a pointy thing"
The snake frowned to the best of its ability. "You have neither fang nor claw, what pointy thing did you use?"
"There isn't a word for it." Harry moaned, "A long, thin, metal pointy thing, it's sharp too. Do you know what I mean?"
"You mean a 'blade'" The snake said. Somehow Harry caught the meaning of this. It was more like learning a new word in English than noticing he was missing a word. A bit like learning the word 'custard' instead of calling it that 'creamy, eggy thing you have with rhubarb'. He thought it was strange that this word wasn't hardwired into him like all the others but he thought he might be able to write this one down. He thanked the snake for helping him.
"Will you be quiet now, Boy?" she grumbled, "I would like a few hours to sleep without you burning the walls down. It already tastes of smoke in here, even after the Master cleaned it."
Harry nodded dumbly and put the parselscript down to one side, picking up the Charms work. The snake slid back out of sight and Harry couldn't tell if he felt more scared or reassured by their encounter.
The Charms essay was actually quite interesting. He picked Wingardium Leviosa as his simple charm, mostly because it was the first he had learned and he couldn't think of anything easier than that. It was definitely versatile too. Harry and his friends had used it for everything from bringing objects from across the room (Flitwick refused to teach even Hermione summoning charms until 4th year), to knocking out that troll in their first year.
Harry used Mobilicorpus as an example of a more specialised spell of the same type. Mobilicorpus was used to move the bodies of people and animals for short distances. It used more energy to sustain it than the simple spell but it also gave you a lot more control. It would be dangerous to try to move any living thing with Leviosa because you ran the risk of putting too much or too little force into it and splatting the poor thing on the ceiling or floor.
Harry was starting to feel very tired and noticed that he had written his last sentence out four times. He scratched out three and tried to keep writing. He yawned and stretched out. Closing his eyes for a moment was a mistake as his eyelids refused to lift again. He had to force them back open and sit up straight to keep himself awake. It wasn't working though, he could feel his head nodding forward like it did in History of Magic lessons. He was spending most of his energy stopping himself from tipping forward over his work. Reminding himself of the snake didn't work anymore, he was just too tired to care about being scared.
Harry woke up nose to nose with Nagini. He let out a rather girly scream and rolled back out of the way, crumpling parchment as he went.
"Boy was thrashing in sleep, shouting. We had a deal- boy not wake Nagini, Nagini not eat Boy"
Harry was recovering from the shock in the 'safe' corner of his bed. Why couldn't he ever just wake up naturally, why did it always have to be so terrifying. "Um, I'm sorry. I had a bad dream. A bad, bad dream" apparently there wasn't a word for nightmares, bad dream didn't in any way cover the panic of being slowly dissolved by Basilisk venom. "Nagini can sleep now. Boy- I mean I- will stay awake. No more thrashing."
Nagini seemed happy enough with this and disappeared again. Harry relaxed slightly. Harry looked down at his screwed up sheets of work and was dismayed to see a large pool of ink spreading out over the covers. He must have spilt his ink pot while he was asleep. The ink was soaked into the bed and some parchment and Harry's robe as well. He should probably fix this now. Tom wouldn't be impressed by the mess, he would probably think Harry had done it on purpose and be as volatile as usual.
Harry gathered up the bedclothes and put all of the unspoilt parchment into a pile. He took his usual leap off the bed- earning a disapproving hiss from his companion- and went to wash his things in the shower.
Harry had plenty of experience with this sort of thing. The Dursleys didn't like him using the washing machine too often, so he usually washed his blankets in the bath and left them out in his room to dry. It would be easier here, it had always been way too much bother in the cupboard under the stairs. The sheets never dried in the winter and felt damp for days after and in the summer the cupboard became unbearably humid. It became difficult to breathe sometimes with the air so heavy.
Harry's hands were quickly stained with the black ink and there was a huge mark on his leg from where he had been lying in it. The sheets were quite easy to clean out but they were distinctly greyer than they had been, they would look better with some bleach. The robes looked like they were going to need magic to fix. Harry smiled, Mrs Weasley would have known exactly what to do to get them green again.
The mattress was trickier. Harry used the wet robes to try and draw out some of the ink. He figured in for a Knut, in for a Galleon. He hoped he made a bit of a difference but it looked like he now had a very wet, very inky mattress instead of just an inky one.
After a while, Nagini slid out and started to bask under the light, stretching out so she was as exposed as possible. She ignored Harry so he pretended not to notice her too.
Eventually he gave the bed up as a lost cause and sat at the edge of it, trying to finish his sentences off. He was pleased to find out that blade translated into a word he could spell out. Occasionally Nagini perked up a little and tried to make him sound less disjointed in his speech. He wasn't brave enough to show her his writing because he thought she might laugh at him for thinking she could read. Harry was pretty sure it would be common knowledge is snakes could converse like that. He was also quite worried she might look and then laugh at him for writing complete nonsense.
When he was finally done with everything he was supposed to have done for Tom, Harry finished off what he could remember of his Transfiguration list. He also wrote down the names of the potions he could remember having brewed from the last two years (apart from the Polyjuice, it would probably impress Tom but Harry couldn't replicate Hermione's results and that would make the older boy mad).
He couldn't think of anything else to do to waste time, and he didn't really want to have a conversation with Nagini that was longer than the minimum necessary for her to not eat him and also didn't really want to go to sleep. The vials of dreamless sleep were sitting on top of the dresser though, looking tempting. The orange flakes seemed to have coagulated into a single mass at the bottom of each glass, each blob looked perfectly spherical and slightly wider than the neck of the vessel. With any luck he would be able to drink the potion without the weird extra.
Harry thought about it carefully, he didn't want to fall asleep and be eaten by Nagini without waking up. The dreamless sleep might let that happen, he wasn't sure how strong the doses would be. On the other hand Nagini hadn't wanted to eat him until he had started yelling in his sleep so she might not attack if he was deeply under.
Balancing up the options, Harry decided that he would rather take the chance of not drinking the potion. He might be able to stop the snake from eating him if he was more alert. He crossed his fingers and stretched out, avoiding the wet part of the mattress. He covered his eyes against the light and drifted back to sleep.
