Chapter 12

Poisoned

The next 'morning' Harry was actually allowed breakfast food when he came downstairs. Despite the porridge and toast, Tom still refused to tell Harry the time. He wouldn't reveal the date either or even which day of the week it was. The strange patterns of food and sleep were really beginning to mess with the boy's head. It was hard to tell if Tom was actually eating meals in a strange order or if he was just leaving Harry out of some of them. Either way it reminded him of the days he had to sneak out of his cupboard at odd hours to snatch food from the kitchen cupboards.

Tom got annoyed quite quickly today. To be fair, Harry was pestering the teenager by pelting him with questions which he was refusing to answer. Asking about Hogwarts, his friends and all about the outside world. It took all of five minutes for Riddle to decide to put the twelve year old into his version of a time-out.

Kneeling down facing the wall with his hands behind his head gave Harry the time to reflect that pushing the older boy to his limits was not the way to have a peaceful life. He was however glad that he had finished his breakfast before deciding to be a complete idiot. Harry slouched a little and was jerked back upright by the spell.

Harry heard another page being turned behind him. Tom was flicking through pages from the piles of books littering the table. He had been doing that ever since Harry had come into the kitchen and hadn't really stopped except to cast this spell.

Nagini came into the room to be fed too and Harry yelped from the burns as he flinched away from her and his hand moved subconsciously to feel for the bottle of anti-venom. Tom make an exasperated noise, irritated by his lack of self-control but didn't say anything. Soon the room was filled with the screams of a dying rabbit and Harry had to put most of his energy into not bringing his breakfast back up. Eventually the screams stopped and there were a few shudder-inducing cracks as Nagini started to swallow it.

When silence fell again, Harry let out a deep sigh, glad it was over for now.

"You are very squeamish Boy," came Tom's voice, Harry could hear the laughter behind it. "Especially for someone who was very recently up to his own elbows in Basilisk fangs."

Harry was sick then. He threw up on the floor to the side of where he was, howling from the pain of the curse.

Tom appeared next to him suddenly, vanishing the mess and releasing the curse. Harry collapsed onto his side, curling up and shaking. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he cried out.

Tom looked panicked, Harry would remember later that he looked more unsure of himself than he ever had.

"Are you alright, Potter? Even you can't be that weak stomached."

Harry shook his head, "I don't know," he said, "I feel bad." He was sick again and Tom jumped back disgusted.

"Do you always react this badly to mildly disturbing occurrences?"

Harry didn't dignify that with a response and instead tried to bury his face in the tile floor.

"That was a joke, you aren't very interesting when you are sick. I think you should go back to bed if your only plan is to make as much mess as you can manage."

Back in his bed, Harry noticed that he still hadn't stopped shaking. He didn't feel cold or even very scared any more. Warming back up under his blanket, Harry was glad Tom hadn't left him to it after he was sick. Suddenly Harry felt a sharp pain in his middle and doubled up in pain, smothering screams of pain by biting the cuff of his robes.

After about thirty seconds of feeling like he was back being held under the Cruciatus Curse, Tom burst through the door and just stared at him for a minute.

"What is wrong with you?" He shouted. "You were relatively normal yesterday, what in Merlin's name did you do to yourself?"

Harry froze as still as possible for a moment as the pain subsided a little. "I don't know," he gasped. "One minute I was fine, then I just lost it."

"And your breakfast."

Harry didn't laugh.

"That was funny too, you would appreciate that if you weren't dying."

"You poisoned me!?"

Tom rolled his eyes, "Of course I didn't, and you would already be dead if I had poisoned you. Why would I bother keeping you around long enough to get sick everywhere? You probably poisoned yourself! Drink any Cleaning Concoctions this morning?"

"No." Harry groaned, "I make a point of not drinking random potions."

"Are you sure?" Tom asked, he picked up an empty vial from the floor next to the bed and looking doubtfully at the gelatinous mess at the bottom. "Was this one of yours?"

"Dreamless sleep, I had it last night. I was fine until breakfast though."

Tom sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. "Here, let me do some tests on you." He pointed his wand at Harry and ran through a few charms. Each one flagged up a flash of a different shade and Tom was muttering to himself about them.

There was a low hissing from the floor.

"Is the boy alright, no more sick?"

There was then. Harry had to lean over the edge of the bed, retching hard. Nagini moved faster to get out of the way than Harry had ever seen her go. At the same time, one of Tom's charms went haywire. Instead of the usual small flashes of light which had been coming out of his wand up to now, the whole room was bathed in a cyan glow for a couple of seconds. Tom almost dropped his wand in shock.

Harry recovered enough to speak, "What is it? What happened?"

"I was trying to identify any allergies you might have. It was blank until my Nagini started to speak, then it flared up like that. Does that happen with all parseltongue?"

Harry's instant decline was proof enough of that.

"Would you mind not doing that? Can't we just all not talk parseltongue?"

Tom laughed, though he looked oddly relieved. "Of course we can't. You were not allergic to anything yesterday. We have to find out what is causing this. Come downstairs, we will have a look at what is going on. I'm going to need more of your blood."

Great, Harry thought, more bleeding. Hadn't Tom got enough to do without worrying about this? Why couldn't he let Harry die in peace?

"Come on," Tom pulled Harry along by the wrist. "Get up. I am not going to carry you downstairs. You made it all the way up here, you can get down again no problem." He pocketed the empty vial and one of the full ones before following the boy downstairs.

The lab was untidy for once. Tom took a bit of pity on Harry and transfigured a couple of stools into a low pallet for him to lie on. Tom lit up some fires under half a dozen small cauldrons and one huge one, telling Harry it was for a batch of undifferentiated Diagnostics Potion. He was going to use it to test both the vials of dreamless sleep and Harry's blood.

It took a long time for Tom to run through all of the tests he wanted. He kept remembering other spells and disappearing off somewhere, chasing up footnotes from the books. Harry was starting to wonder where on earth Tom had been keeping them all. Tom also took a ridiculous amount of blood to add to the cauldrons. He gave Harry Calming Draughts but not the Blood Replenishing one this time, Harry didn't know why.

After many more hours of brewing, the lab was full of fumes. It made a layer of smog just below the roof. Tom was still messing about, adding Bouncing Bulb shoots to one and Tree-frog livers into the others. Harry felt a little better as long as everyone stayed with English. Nagini was sulking outside the door after Tom had banned her from the room. She had kept coming in before to ask questions like a concerned parent. Of course that hadn't helped Harry at all, and he kept producing more bile and soured porridge.

"Ah, I've got it!" Tom shouted, collapsing onto a chair with a cup of something in his hands.

"Britain's next award winning tea blend?" Harry joked weakly.

"Oddly enough, no. I do however know what is wrong with you. Do you want to know?"

Harry sat up slowly, nodding for Tom to continue.

"Well primarily what is wrong with you is that you were hit with a fairly large dose of basilisk venom in the chamber. That bloody chicken of Dumbledore's managed to neutralise the venom, but not the chemicals left after it broke down. So you have a lot of random toxins floating around in your blood. That would have been fine being dealt with by your liver, except you had to drown yourself in a mix of Coccinellidae wings and Ceanothus Sap, that's what the orange stuff was- Cockatrice Camphor. It occasionally forms when you add those ingredients with too much force. The Dreamless Sleep was probably too potent without those combining properly, I am surprised that you woke when you did." Tom swirled the liquid in his cup, examining it.

"Hearing parseltongue seems to trigger a reaction. Parseltongue is its own magic, it affects both the venom and the orange gunk, combining them and making you ill."

"Are we actually going to do anything about it or were you just having fun doing the forensics?" Harry asked

"Behave, I'm saving your life."

Harry rolled his eyes and waited for Tom to get on with it.

"I'll give you that Blood Replenishing potion now. There was a possibility it could have made things worse before, but it should make you feel better right now. I think there is a potion I can make which should help, it'll take a while to brew though. It should help to keep the two substances from reacting for long enough for you to get rid of them. Only you would be able to make the one thing which could strengthen the venom."

Harry privately agreed. He had the worst luck, especially when it came to potions. Cockatrices were pretty similar to Basilisks, right? He thought they were created similarly anyway. Had he really made something to strengthen it? And what is the point in Phoenixes having super powered tears if it wasn't going to deal with the actual problem.

Tom gave him the Blood Replenishing potion now, "It could take a while though. I'll find you a Sleeping Draught, so you don't spend all your time complaining and annoying me"

"And Nagini? She won't be happy if you don't let her back in."

Tom looked less happy now. "She'll have to stay out of the room, she won't like it very much but her speaking would set you off again. I hope she doesn't make too much of a fuss about it, she can be quite difficult when she wants to be."

It was a bit of an understatement really. Nagini was perfectly capable of killing Tom, even if that wouldn't get rid of Voldemort for good. Death was usually a bit more than a setback to most people…

Tom walked over to his bookcase and took down a handwritten text. He flashed it in Harry's direction.

"This is why it is important that you learn how to read parselscript. This book one of very few which would contain a potion like the one you need. I found it in a small bookshop in Knockturn Alley. They of course had no idea what it was about, so I got it for a very low price. You are lucky I have this here and I do not have to try and adapt an antidote."

It was also a suspiciously huge coincidence. There was a huge possibility that Tom was lying to him about everything but Harry didn't think his captor would be willing to spend so long trying to keep up with so many potions if he already knew what was wrong.

Tom presented him with a new potion and made sure he drank it before leaving him alone. Harry watched the older boy walk back to his book and begin to collect new piles of ingredients. Tom had been promising to kill him soon. It was strange that he was bothering to save him now. If he didn't want Harry around anymore then he was sure to let him know. Probably right before he pulled the trigger.

A/N I've just gone back and updated the whole fic, there is quite a lot that has been annoying me for a while. I think it's been the best way to remind me of what was going on before I stopped. Thank you for the reviews, you're all amazing!