Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Two—The New Dark Lord

"Harry. Welcome."

Harry struggles to open his eyes. He's standing in the middle of a smoky dark room, and around him are crackles of fire and shrieks of pain, but he knows this isn't where he really is. He's really in his bed in the fifth-year Slytherin boys' bedroom, and up until a moment ago, he was dreaming about a Transfiguration exam they're going to have the next day.

The illusion, or the dream, doesn't fade, though, and after a long moment he hears Voldemort chuckle quietly. So Harry stops struggling and turns to face the deranged monster who's decided to inhabit his head.

"Deranged monster. I'm hurt, Harry."

"You were when Sirius used his magic on you."

There's a long snarl, and the image of Voldemort that stands there—unwounded, the way Harry is sure he would choose to appear if he had a choice—sends out a pulse of pain. Harry grits his teeth as it rides through his head, swiping at his thoughts and tattering them. It doesn't matter, that pain. He's acknowledged that it exists, and now he can wade past it and try to gain something from this conversation instead of just being Voldemort's toy.

Voldemort regains his composure a second later, but Harry doesn't think it's his imagination that there's something jerky about his arm as he gestures to the room around them. "Have you seen where I have brought you yet?"

I need to see. I need to see if there's anything I can do to help. And if I can't, then I need to bear witness.

Harry turns around. They're not in a room, after all. They're outside in the street of what might be a Muggle town, and he eyes the burning houses and swallows. There's no sensation of smoke stinging his throat, but he can smell it, and he can hear the cries of the wounded.

"Do you not recognize it?"

"Your handiwork. Yeah, I knew—"

"No, I meant, you do not recognize it, Harry?"

Harry recoils. He had no idea that Voldemort speaking Parseltongue to him would sound so wrong after hearing it mostly from the Speakers and Lion for months, but it does. And as if the disgust has cleared something more than smoke away from his eyes, he focuses on a house on the corner and finds that he does recognize it.

His breath catches in his throat, and he hears Voldemort laugh, although he doesn't know if that's because Voldemort heard his breath catch or because he can feel Harry's emotions through that twisted scar bond they're sharing. Harry ignores him and runs towards the house, and then stops as he hears no noise of his feet striking the pavement and remembers that he's not really here.

He turns back to Voldemort. He speaks it aloud so that it will lie between them and Voldemort can't continue this teasing game. "This is Privet Drive."

"Where you lived for twelve years."

Harry doesn't say anything, because he can't. Guilt grips the back of his mind and squeezes down so hard that he feels as if something is about to erupt through his ears. No one on Privet Drive would have suffered or died if he hadn't lived here. Voldemort wanted a way to take vengeance, maybe found out the Dursleys were dead, and then decided that here would be as good a place as any.

Harry wonders numbly if Mrs. Figg is dead. If Piers Pokiss is dead. If the woman in Number Seven who used to squint at him through the windows and tell him how much good Aunt Petunia did by taking him in is dead.

Then he pushes aside the guilt, and the questions. No. It's not that they don't matter. It's that they don't help right now.

He's here to learn information, if he can. And maybe learn something that will help more people survive. So he lifts his head and looks Voldemort in the face.

"You don't dare take on your equals, do you?" he asks.

Voldemort has been laughing, but Harry's words choke the sound in his throat. He slides a step forwards, gliding more than he walks, his eyes tracing obsessively up and down Harry's face as if he thinks that he'll figure out something that way.

"What?"

"You're torturing Muggles and killing them because you don't dare to face wizards," Harry goes on calmly. "Someone might hurt you then, and you've been bested enough—"

Voldemort's wand lashes forwards, or the image of his wand that's here with them in this strange in-between world, and Harry screams as he falls.

The pain of the Cruciatus Curse tearing through him is worse than any pain has ever been, and he writhes, his fingernails digging into his palms, his mind spinning around and around and around and around, and he hears—

"Harry! Wake up!"

There's someone calling out, and Harry rolls towards the sound. Voldemort swishes his wand and says some spell Harry doesn't recognize, but which he thinks is probably intended to keep him here. He screams one more time, and then the dream dissolves around him with a rush like flesh dissolving in blood.

Blaise watches as Harry screams himself awake. He glances around, and for a second, there's a look in his face that Blaise flinches back from. He doesn't think he wants to know where Harry was, what he saw in his dreams.

Then Harry gets hold of himself, and glances at Theo, who was the one who woke him up. Blaise thinks that Theo and Harry probably still have that dream-link between them that Professor Snape set up last year, and of course Theo would be the one to know when Harry was having a nightmare.

Not that Blaise thinks it would have stayed a secret for long, with the way that Harry was thrashing around and making the curtains of his bed ripple and billow.

Harry glances around the bedroom and grimaces. Blaise follows the track of his eyes. Draco is watching Harry with a pale, set face in silence; it's impossible to tell what he's thinking. But Crabbe and Goyle both have eyes full of fear.

"It's more than just the thrashing around, isn't it?" Harry murmurs. "Why is everyone looking at me like this?"

Blaise might have paused to think about the consequences of telling him this, but Theo goes ahead and does it. "No. You were hissing in your sleep, and some of the snakes carved into the walls and floor were responding."

Harry glances sharply around. Blaise looks with him, but can't see any snakes that are still out of place. All of them seem to have retreated into the corners of the ceiling or the tops of the bedposts where they usually reside.

"I'm sorry that you had to hear that," Harry murmurs.

Blaise watches out of the corner of his eye. Crabbe and Goyle do not look reassured. Draco simply nods and closes the curtains of his own bed once more. Harry looks after him with a slightly wistful expression.

"Were you commanding them to attack us?" Goyle asks.

Blaise hides his shock. He didn't actually think either of them would ask a question about this. It's not their usual way.

"No," Harry says, calmly, firmly. "I was having a dream that involved Parseltongue, though, so it's not really a surprise that I was also hissing it." And he turns around and rolls himself into bed with a swish of his wand that shuts the curtains completely behind him.

Blaise raises his eyebrows at Theo. Theo gives a shrug and goes back to bed himself. He's still moving a little stiffly from the impact of his forced transformation all the way into a leopard, Blaise notes.

Crabbe and Goyle, on the other hand, sit there and refuse to go back to bed. Blaise turns around to face them. "What?" he asks.

They exchange glances. Whether they know each other well enough to communicate silently that way, Blaise doesn't know. He doesn't know them well at all, despite sharing a bedroom with them for years. Then again, he spends most of his time with Harry and Theo these days, and the others.

Crabbe finally grunts, as if their silent war of wills has chosen him as the spokesman, and faces Blaise. "Is he going to command those snakes to attack us?"

"No."

"How do you know?"

"Why did you bother asking me, if you think I don't know?" Blaise rolls his eyes when that only gets a scowl. "Listen, Harry has no reason to want to attack any of us with snakes. As long as you don't give him one, why should he?"

"But what would happen if we gave him one?"

Blaise pauses. This conversation is a little more interesting than he thought it would be, and he doesn't go back to bed the way he was planning. "Why would you? What kind of reason are you thinking of?"

Crabbe and Goyle exchange glances again. Then Crabbe mumbles, "When he comes back, we have to follow him. We have to obey him. My dad said so. Greg's dad said so. That's the way it is. Then maybe Potter will get angry and send snakes after us."

Blaise keeps from rolling his eyes, but it's a huge effort. He would like to say that Harry probably wouldn't attack other boys in his dorm even if two of them were Death Eaters, but saying that could make Harry look weak, at least in the eyes of people like Crabbe and Goyle who think they only have one option.

So Blaise sighs and shakes his head and says, "Then you need to decide who you're more afraid of, Harry or the Dark Lord."

Both Crabbe and Goyle freeze like small, frightened rabbits when Blaise names the Dark Lord. Blaise stares at them and then snorts. "Look at you. You're paralyzed of his title, not even his name. How can you actually think that you're going to become Death Eaters?"

"Our dads say—"

"And in two years you'll be adults," Blaise says ruthlessly. It might be sooner than that, even, but he has no idea when their birthdays are, and no desire to make himself look stupid by asking. "Are you just going to do everything your dads say even after that? Why do what they say at all? Why not resist?"

Goyle gapes at him. Crabbe is the one who says, stupidly, "You don't know what it's like to have someone who—"

"Oh, don't I?"

Once again, they fall silent in surprise. Blaise knows it's far more likely that they just forgot about his mum, the way a lot of people can when they don't live with her or in the same country as her.

But his mood is sour, and he doesn't want to talk anymore. Blaise rolls on his side and casts a spell at his curtains that will make them give a mild shock to anyone who tries to open them. Both Crabbe and Goyle aren't good with pain and will give up rather than bother him.

Blaise fumes as he lies there. Of course, the broader mind he's developed by associating with Harry and Theo and Zacharias and Hermione and the rest of them tries to tell him he's being stupid. He should probably try to reach out to Crabbe and Goyle, try to keep them from becoming Death Eaters.

But Blaise knows all about what it's like to have a parent who wants you to do one thing, and to decide early on that you're going to do something else, in defiance of them, even when they want to hurt you, even when they do hurt you.

He's not a Gryffindor, but he despises cowardice.

Harry keeps looking at his plate and doesn't look up when Blaise sits down on his left. He stirs his porridge around moodily. Blaise clears his throat, but Harry doesn't look up.

"I don't think the rumors are ones that Crabbe and Goyle started," Blaise says softly, leaning in. "They're ones that were already around before this, and Crabbe and Goyle just gave them new life."

Harry nods. Intellectually, he knows that. There were rumors about him last year, after Chaos burned Greyback, and after he returned from facing Voldemort. He knows that a lot of people think he's a Dark Lord because of Parseltongue, even. He saw the staring and pointing and whispering from the corners of his eyes. He just ignored it because people didn't do it so openly that he had to pay attention to it. And anyway, he should care more about the fact that Voldemort attacked Privet Drive. He's sent an owl off to the Ministry about it and told Severus. That's all he can think of to do right now. He feels so helpless.

But last night he had that dream, and this morning he came down to the Slytherin common room on his way to the Owlery, and one of the new firsties looked ready to throw up or faint or maybe both at once at the sight of him. Harry wondered what that was about until he heard two of the second-years whispering in a corner. "Potter," "Parseltongue," and "Dark Lord" told him quickly enough.

Then he walked out of the common room, and it was everywhere. And so were the glares from people who ignored him before, or maybe agreed with the Ministry that he was spreading rumors about Voldemort being back but didn't care that much.

"It doesn't mean anything," Blaise insists from next to him.

"Until someone decides that I need to be reported to the Ministry for the rumors or something," Harry mutters, and stabs a wedge of potato with a fork. Blaise jumps. Harry tries not to feel bad about that.

"Is the press all that bad?" Daphne asks, and yawns.

"Yes," Theo answers before Harry can. His eyes are a little too bright, his smile a little too sharp, as his eyes travel over the tables and focus for a moment on the Gryffindors. Harry knows without looking over that some of the Gryffindors will be muttering furiously about him, and Ron and Hermione will be valiantly defending him, because that's the way they are.

He feels a rush of warmth at the thought of them, and almost misses what Theo's saying. But he mentions the Ministry, so Harry turns around and tries to listen.

"It wouldn't be a good idea because the Ministry is balancing on a knife's edge with Harry right now," Theo is saying. "Sure, Fudge decided that he had to cave and play nice with Harry because Harry could have made his life miserable for employing Umbridge. But they'd love a chance to walk back all they said and decide that Umbridge was right or that Harry really is spouting conspiracy theories."

"All this because of a little Parseltongue," Harry mutters.

His friends exchange glances. Harry sighs, waiting for someone to tell him that because Parseltongue gave him Lion and would let him command the snakes in Slytherin, it's a huge gift.

"Do you know why Parselmouths have been feared?" Daphne asks slowly.

"Slytherin and Voldemort. Yeah, I know." Harry ignores the wave of flinches traveling up the table.

"There are also legends about them using snakes in battle," says Theo. Draco looks up briefly at the sound of Theo's voice, and his eyes track over to Harry. Harry jerks his head a little, inviting Draco over if he wants to come, but Draco shakes his head and turns back to his plate. Fine. "Summoning giant part-human snakes that I think must be legends of the people you know." He lowers his voice. Even Harry is wary about mentioning the Speakers in public, so he understands. "Conjuring snakes out of thin air to assassinate their enemies with. Sending venomous snakes among armies and killing every wizard or witch before they could wake."

Harry blinks. "Why didn't anyone tell me this?"

"It's the sort of thing that most people would think are just pooka tales." Theo shrugs. "The association with Parselmouths is Slytherin and the Dark Lord, as you pointed out. People see no reason to tell what they think are silly stories when they have something else that explains it well enough."

"Then will the Ministry take notice of it?"

"They could," Daphne says, frowning deeply. Harry supposes she thought he could use the legends of Parselmouths for power and is only now seeing the downside. "They could use it to justify—I don't know. Maybe bringing you in for another trial. Maybe locking you up."

Harry swears softly. He can't regret being a Parselmouth, not when it's brought him so much, but he could do without the bollocks that's passed around.

"Could you do that?"

It's Blaise who's watching him. Harry stares at him. "What?"

"Command snakes to attack people in their sleep? Crabbe and Goyle were concerned about it. They stayed up last night to ask me questions and seemed terrified of you."

Harry closes his eyes and doesn't massage his forehead only because he doesn't want to spark more rumors about his scar. For fuck's sake…

"I won't do that," he says. He knows that if he denies he can do it, people won't believe him, and if he says he could, they'll be afraid. Better to stand on his principles. Harry shoves back from the table, his appetite gone.

"Look at Shacklebolt."

Theo keeps his voice low, so Harry turns around slowly and lets his gaze pass over the professors as if he just happens to be looking that way. Shacklebolt is staring straight at him, and he doesn't seem to care who knows it. When Harry looks back, Shacklebolt gives him a long stare, mouths something, and goes back to eating.

"Did anyone catch what he said?"

His friends hesitate for a moment, and then Daphne sighs and mutters, "He said Don't be a Dark Lord."

Harry stomps out of the Great Hall. Fuck acting strong in public, just for this one morning.