As far as Harry was concerned, this was the best holiday he'd ever had. Yes, he was still having weird dreams about being Voldemort, and he still hadn't really figured out whatever was going on with Blaise, Lyra had been increasingly...Lyra-ish since he'd found out about the Lestrange thing, and spending more than a few hours with his godfather was kind of exhausting. Also, he still had to write his summer essay for Potions.
But he had a plan to deal with the dream thing — he'd read that book Snape had sent him, had been writing down his dreams in as much detail as he could remember (and he thought he was actually getting somewhere because he was starting to remember a lot more than he had in the beginning). And regardless of how awkward Harry was around Blaise — because just snog him was terrible advice, and it was kind of impossible to imagine Blaise being concerned about scaring him away, so that couldn't possibly be the problem — Blaise pretended not to notice, so that was...fine; Lyra had spent more days in Britain or France in the past six weeks than she had here, so he hadn't been subjected to that much disturbing Lyra-ish-ness; and Sirius actually kind of seemed to be avoiding him a lot of the time. Blaise thought it was because he didn't know how to deal with being a godfather, or kids in general. Harry thought it was because he reminded Sirius of his parents, and that was just...awkward (in an entirely different way than his awkwardness around Blaise). So it wasn't too difficult to get time away from him, anyway.
But he really had nothing to complain about: no matter how weird and awkward everyone around him was, they were living a life of luxury and there wasn't a Dursley in sight. They'd actually gone to an amusement park for Harry's birthday. And Blaise had told him that Lyra was going to be marking their Potions essays, because Snape had blackmailed her into it. (He didn't want to know.) So he was far less concerned about failing his summer homework than he might otherwise be — he'd just flat asked her what references to use, made the whole thing much easier.
That was what he was working on when she wandered into the living room and flopped onto the sofa with a heavy sigh. Well, he was mostly trying not to be annoyed that Blaise had gone to dinner with Mira and her husband and some business people and their kids, and Harry hadn't been invited. Not that he thought he would have enjoyed going, he'd met Blaise's American 'friends' (the term used very loosely, because Blaise acted like a completely different person around them, they hardly knew the real him at all). Most of them were kind of insufferable — reminded him of Parkinson more than anyone. Blaise didn't actually seem to like them much, either, they just happened to be thrown together at dinners like the one he was at now because their parents worked together in some way or another.
Even if it wasn't quite being told to sit in his room and pretend not to exist until everyone else had eaten, it still would have been nice to be invited. Nothing to complain about, he reminded himself sternly. You didn't even really want to go.
"Hey Lyra. What's up?" he asked, glad for the distraction. He probably would have welcomed it even if he'd really been writing his essay — it had taken until this past year to realise it, but his hatred for Potions was almost entirely independent from his hatred for Snape. Trying to understand Potions theory textbooks was like trying to understand bloody poetry, all weird metaphors and associations and shite. It was terrible.
"I've been trying to figure out this Occlumency thing. It's not going well."
Harry gave her the most skeptical look he could muster at that, because seriously? He'd never met anyone who was better at Occlumency than Lyra. He'd tried to read her mind a few times recently. He'd spent two weeks or so of the holiday, after that first Voldemort dream, accidentally slipping into Blaise's mind, and Sirius's, and even Mira's, once, before he managed to train himself to just stay in his own damn mind-space all the time. But that meant he really couldn't do legilimency at all, and he had to pay attention to his own mind all the time, so after that, he'd started intentionally poking around the edges of other people's minds, not intruding (or at least not intentionally), just peeking at their surface thoughts and emotions, practicing relaxing his control without losing it completely. (Which, yes, meant he was back to falling into other people's heads when he didn't pay enough attention, but everyone around him knew Occlumency, so they mostly just pushed him back out. He'd decided it was fine because there was no way he was going to get better without practicing, but it still made him feel a bit shite, just...barging in like that.) And it hadn't taken long at all to notice that Lyra wasn't kidding when she'd told him forever ago that she hadn't learned normal Occlumency.
There was nothing normal about the way her thoughts were just so...solid. Or, well, they were probably normal once you got past the...shell, was a better way to think of it, he supposed. He was pretty sure if her whole mind was like that, all the way through, she wouldn't be able to think at all? Thoughts and memories and emotions, they tended to kind of flow as you were thinking, new ideas coming out of the intersections between old ones. The shell thing was still fucking weird, though. Normal people, their minds were soft, open. The whole point of Occlumency was to firm up the division between yourself and everything else, keep them separate. By that definition, Lyra's totally-not-normal ritual magic cheater Occlumency was basically perfect.
(It kind of freaked him out, actually. Not as much as accidentally wandering into other people's heads, but that just wasn't right.)
She rolled her eyes at his silent skepticism. "Oh, shut up, I mean real Occlumency. Like, the organising your thoughts, actually controlling the barrier between self and other thing. Not just keeping people out." She sighed again. "Mind magic is hard."
"So, what are you actually trying to do?" Harry asked. Talking about Lyra being bad at something he was actually pretty good at was way more interesting than Potions theory.
"Er...not keep people out? Well, not keep myself in, more like, but that sounds weird."
Harry snorted, he couldn't help it. "Lyra, when don't you sound weird?"
Lyra stuck her tongue out at him, but it was true, and she knew it. "Ignoring that, there's this thing called omniglottalism, it's one of those inherited abilities like Parseltongue or metamorphy or legilimency, and I've been informed that I probably am one, because apparently it's not normal to speak as many languages as I do—" (Which probably meant this omniglot thing had something to do with languages... He knew omni meant all, but glottal...mouth? Er...throat? That was just a guess, he didn't know. Whatever, it was clearly a language thing, anyway.) "—even though I only speak like, two more than most Blacks, and Sirius speaks Greek too, but whatever. Also, that would be why I could understand everyone back in February when everyone got potioned."
"When you potioned everyone, you mean."
"I'm sure I couldn't possibly admit to having done such a thing. But yes. And Snape pointed out at the time that yeah, I'm pants at mind magic, but that's kind of what happens when you accidentally turn your mind inside-out, so."
"You did what?" Harry exclaimed — a knee-jerk reaction, he didn't really understand how that was possible. He didn't think it should be, really. It sounded as wrong as, well... Okay, yeah, maybe that made perfect sense.
Lyra rolled her eyes. "You are a legilimens, I assume you've realised that minds and metaphysical space don't exactly exist in the same dimensions as our physical bodies. The ritual that did this to my head basically inverted my mind in one of those dimensions. What you perceive as the 'outside' boundary between my mind and the world is basically what would be the centre of my mind if I hadn't done the ritual. My thoughts and memories still kind of expand from that point, though it's not really the origin of them, just, you know, the middle. And because everything's turned around, 'expanding' actually means 'contracting' from your perspective. Er...I think. Maybe? Like I said, mind magic is hard. And it's not like there's a book on this. But anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to not occlude all the time, because someone just reminded me that omniglottalism is a thing, and I can't use it to cheat at languages if I can't not occlude."
Right, definitely a language thing, then. And, weirdly enough, Harry thought that actually kind of made sense. Even more weirdly, it kind of gave him an idea. "Want me to try?"
"Try what?"
"Legilimising you. Obviously."
She snorted. "Well, I doubt it will work, but sure, why not."
He glared at her — would it kill her to not be a patronising bitch, just this once, when they were doing something he was pretty sure he knew more about than she did? He channelled his annoyance into determination, set about trying to figure out how best to go about this. Basically his idea was, if it was always opposite day in Lyra's head for whatever fucked-up reason, clearly, instead of trying to make his mind match hers and push 'inward' toward the 'centre', he should try to make her mind match his, and pull. Granted, he wasn't really sure what he expected to happen, but it seemed like something should. It might end up being more of a legilimency something than an occlumency something, but...whatever. It sounded like the omniglot thing was more legilimency-y anyway.
The problem was, he wasn't exactly sure how to go about making her mind resonate with his. He and Blaise had done reciprocal legilimency loads of times, but that was more like both of them actively trying to match the other. This, theoretically, seemed more like trying to...he didn't know. Force her to match him.
"Er...are you doing anything?"
"No, shut up, I'm not— I just need to figure something out, let me think for a second."
The only thing that he could think of that was remotely like anything he thought he needed to do was actually compelling someone, which was, technically speaking, just pressing an imprint of an idea — your idea — into someone else's mind, twisting a little bit of them to become like the bit of you that was that idea. He hadn't actually practiced it much, it kind of bothered him, the idea of forcing his ideas and the shape of his mind on someone else.
More than that, it bothered him how easy it was. Almost as easy as slipping into their minds in the first place.
Blaise had done it to him a lot when they'd first started practicing occlumency, mostly because it was obvious, easy to detect, even if you weren't a legilimens and hadn't the faintest idea what mind magic was. It kind of felt like tweaking his thoughts into a different pattern, like...like being put in a body bind, when your arms and legs were pulled into a specific place, your spine forced into a particular shape as the spell pressed in around you. But not nearly as all-over, and much easier to break. Your thoughts were still your thoughts, even if they were shaped in the image of someone else's. All you had to do to break a compulsion was notice that it was there, and decide you didn't want to do whatever it was the compulsion was meant to make you do.
There were a few things you could do to make it harder to break them, or harder to notice them — he'd asked, after the whole (attempted) mugging thing — and those were trickier (though not trickier enough, in Harry's opinion), but it wasn't really difficult to compel someone if you weren't trying to be subtle about it. You just...reached out and sort of pinched a bit of their mind and...
It was much easier to do than to explain, really. The closest thing he could think to compare it to was casting a spell (and he couldn't really explain how exactly he did that either), except instead of channelling outside magic you sort of channelled the magic that made up the other person's mind, and it was still theirs, it didn't get thrown out into the world like a spell.
When he'd mentioned this to Blaise, asking more about how it worked — because at first he'd thought he was doing something wrong, surely it shouldn't be this easy to compel someone — Blaise had been completely surprised. Apparently he'd never noticed before that it was so similar. He said it wasn't actually that easy to do, Harry was just unusually good at it, but that he shouldn't really be surprised, because he was really good at casting magic in general.
Which was true, he guessed. Next to everyone else in their class... Hermione definitely knew more about how magic worked, all the theory nonsense that Harry found so confusing and useless, or else obvious and really boring. But when he wasn't trying to think about how to do a thing, when he just focused on what he wanted to happen, he was always the first to get a new spell down. Well, after Lyra, but she'd learned almost everything they did in class years ago. (Some of the Slytherins definitely had, too, like Theo, for example, but they only ever had Potions together, so he couldn't say for sure how good they were at learning new spells.)
He'd asked her about it, after Blaise had pointed it out, the him being really good at magic thing. She'd just stared at him for about five seconds, as though she didn't understand what the hell he was talking about, before saying that of course he was good at magic, he didn't think just any thirteen-year-old could learn the Patronus Charm, did he? Magic didn't just show people how to cast a spell, either, apparently. He'd asked back in the spring if she'd ever heard of anything like the way the spell had kind of caught and tugged on that memory of Blaise being hurt. Back then she'd smirked and asked him how he thought mages had learned magic in the first place, which he'd taken to mean, yes, obviously that was a thing that happened. But when he asked if he was actually really good at magic, or if Blaise was just...he didn't even know, she'd said, "Are you fucking with me? Of course you are, Magic likes you. It likes you enough to teach you things. If you'd been raised with magic, well, you wouldn't be better than me, but I'm a dirty fucking cheater. You'd be able to give Theo a run for his money, though."
Which was kind of saying a lot — he'd seen Blaise's memory of Lyra and Theo fighting, and Theo was really fucking good. Like, he'd known he was good from that one time he'd come to their little unofficial dueling club, but Harry had also seen Lyra and Sirius sparring by now, and he couldn't really see a difference, besides Sirius being much faster (casting silently) and using more elemental spells. If it was true that Harry could have been that good if he'd been raised in a magical family, he was starting to see why Lyra and Sirius (and practically everyone, it seemed like) thought it was terrible that Dumbledore had sent him to live with the Dursleys.
But that wasn't the point. The point was, compelling someone was easy — far easier than Harry thought it had any right to be — and Harry was pretty sure that if he just kind of...started compelling Lyra, but didn't let it go, he could kind of use the connection to pull at her mind instead of pushing like a normal legilimency probe, which, if he had understood her little ramble, would end up pulling him into her mind, since out was in and up was down and Lyra was a crazy person.
Of course, he couldn't really get a good 'grip' on Lyra's mind, surrounding or mostly-surrounding a little bit of her metaphysical mind-space like he would for a normal compulsion. He couldn't just completely surround her, either. Regardless of whether the 'outside' of her space was all theoretically kind of a single point or not, it still felt like it was about the same size as anyone else's, trying to wrap his mind around all of hers seemed like a fantastically bad idea.
Instead he kind of just...established contact, brushing his mind up against the edge of hers and... The image that came to mind was like a suction cup, getting a grip on her thoughts by kind of glomming onto one. He wasn't trying to do anything with it, just...get a better 'grip', really, but—
"Okay, what are you doing? That feels — felt—" (He'd lost his focus when she'd spoken, dropped his hold.) "—really fucking weird."
"Shut up, you're distracting me." He could try to explain, but he was pretty sure it wouldn't make sense, what he was trying to do. It only half made sense to him.
Lyra sighed, but shut her mouth. Harry closed his eyes, trying to focus on just the magic and reached out again, inspecting the shell of her thoughts more closely than he had before, looking for any flaws he might exploit, because, well...that had felt weird — he hadn't been focused on any specific bit of the shell when he was trying to suction-cup himself to it, but it had felt like just a little bit of it had pulled away from the rest.
He didn't find any like he would expect in a normal person occluding, stray thoughts or areas where her focus was weak, but after a few minutes he realised that the shell wasn't exactly just a single point — she had said it was the middle but not the origin, or something like that. He thought it was kind of more like a tornado, the currents of energy and thought that made it up turned away from him so that he just kind of glanced off of them when he tried to push his way in, but there were multiple...threads, there. No, he liked the tornado comparison, he decided. Like it was all one thing, but it could be divided into different sub-things, individual thoughts like separate gusts of wind with their own currents, but they were still all one bloody huge, solid wall of wind and...
Okay, maybe Lyra had a point about mind magic being hard. Talking about it was hard, even trying to articulate it to himself was bloody impossible, here. People who actually needed to understand the theory behind their magic and how it all worked for it to work probably couldn't do mind magic at all. (And Harry was pretty sure Lyra was one of those people, except she already did understand how it all worked, so it was just as natural for her as it was for him, but she could also talk to Hermione about nerdy magic theory dragonshite when he'd just spent half of first and second years wondering why the hell they wasted so much time on it.)
Actually doing mind magic, like doing any magic, was much simpler once you stopped overthinking it.
Case in point, he stretched out a legilimency probe and just sort of...wrapped it around one of those could-be-separated-even-if-they-aren't-really-separate currents of energy and teased it apart from the rest, enough to get a hold on it and shape it enough to make it more like him than her (though he couldn't say how) and pulled, as though it was an extension of his own mind that had gotten away from him, dragging it inward, toward the centre of his mind.
Lyra shrieked, but Harry barely heard her as she yanked back, pulling his probe inside the shell along with the...thought stream thingy he had grabbed, which snapped back into place as soon as he lost his hold on it, trapping him like slamming his arm in a door — it fucking hurt! He hissed in pain at the sudden...he didn't even know what to call it, and then things started getting weird.
On the one hand, he had a line into Lyra's mind, and Lyra's mind was entirely unlike any other mind he'd ever been in before. He couldn't exactly move freely, try to explore her memories or whatever, but he could 'see' (seeing wasn't the right word at all) the way her thoughts moved, all part of a shifting, multi-dimensional shape that made him kind of sick to look at for too long and the depth which was just... Minds were finite, okay, they just were. They might have a fuzzy, undefined boundary, but they did stop somewhere, and this... It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, staring down and down and when you thought you were looking at the bottom you realised that wasn't the ground, but the sea, and the bottom might as well not exist because it was so far away you'd never see it, lost under the water, and then you realised that it wasn't water, but the blackness of fucking space, just, endless, but not empty like space, there was definitely something in there, he just— He could feel it, staring back, and—
And then it spoke to him, magic cutting him apart as the meaning drilled its way into his mind, two words: Get. Out.
Ah! Lyra?! Lyra, what the fuck— I can't— I'm stuck!
And on the other hand, well, Lyra had told him she was trying to do some weird mind magic language shite, which Harry was only just realising that Parseltongue was also kind of weird mind magic language shite — it wasn't just the sounds, he'd heard Lyra and Luna say words in Parsel before and it was missing something, some meaning conveyed by magic. Which made sense, because snakes didn't talk. They didn't even make that many sounds, for God's sake!
When he'd hissed in pain as Lyra's shell clamped down on him like a fucking bear trap (Goddamnit, Lyra! I'll get out, just let me go!) it hadn't been an actual word, but it had been conveying that meaning, and since he was already in her fucking head, it was enough like Parsel, he thought, that the weird magical language thing she was trying to do somehow latched onto him, in much the same way she'd grabbed this piece of him and wasn't letting go, and sort of started pulling at his understanding of Parsel, and Parsel being what it was, more and more meaning seemed to be drifting over to her, and the more she understood the more the Parsel magic wanted her to understand, and he could feel that it was hurting her, throwing this much information at her at once — information he hadn't even really known he knew, words he'd never learned, the instinctive magical part of the language that he wouldn't even know how to describe, that he couldn't even consciously use — but he didn't know how to stop it, and he also...didn't think she wanted him to? (He didn't know how he knew that — any of that, if it was mind magic or Parsel, or what.)
The voice from the infinite darkness hidden in the depths of Lyra's mind definitely did want him to stop it though. Oh, for fuck's sake, it...muttered, the sharp, terrible magic all...put-upon and annoyed? Yes, I'm annoyed, you're in Lyra's mind and Lyra's mind is mine, and your magic language thing is getting all mixed up in her magic language thing and it is hurting her, because she's being stubborn — stupid child always did have a habit of biting off more than she could chew — and Bella's going to say 'I told you so' because Lyra never learned to use mind magic properly and she doesn't know how to stop.
Before Harry could articulate a response beyond horror and pain and what the FUCK is THAT, the space around him, what he had thought was just...the background space of Lyra's mind, basically like ambient magic, something to give other things space to move...shifted, in a way that was just— That thing, whatever it was, it wasn't just in the endless pit of...darkness, it was all around him, it was touching him and doing something, and—
He snapped back into his own body with a suddenness that gave him a fantastic headache, like hitting the ground after getting knocked off his broom at half-stands by a stray bludger. He was lying on the floor, too, he realised, though not before he realised Lyra was still...holding onto him somehow, her magic tied up with his, sucking Parsel out of him like a fucking psychic vampire or something. Or, copying it out, he guessed, it wasn't like he was losing it, just like ideas and words flashing through the edges of his consciousness so quickly he could hardly pick out any specific one before receding back to...wherever it usually was, somewhere in his unconscious mind or coded into his magic or something (he really had no idea how Parsel worked at all).
"No," she moaned softly, almost sleepily. "Non, arrête! Almost — just...un peu plus. Because...fídia. Tantum...just a little more..." Her words, addressed, he thought, to the impossible, infinite voice in her head, trailed off. She, unlike Harry, was still on the sofa, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face buried in them, hands clamped over her ears as though she could physically stop her head from exploding from having way too much information magically stuffed into it all at once. He felt a little like that, and he already knew it, on some level.
He hauled himself to his feet, trying to decide what to do — this was way beyond his pay-grade. Killing a giant bloody snake, fine. Burning a possessed professor to death? He could do that. But he had no idea what to do when he was watching someone hurt themselves, willfully doing however much damage to their own mind in pursuit of what? The ability to talk to snakes? Snakes were bloody terrible conversationalists, talking to them definitely wasn't worth this — when he was helping one of his best friends hurt herself just by existing.
He was still staring indecisively, wondering if he could just leave, if that would stop it, when the connection between them, the one only she had been maintaining anymore, broke off. His head jerked back as though it had been a physical thing tying them together, one he hadn't even noticed until it was gone. She didn't react at all, just sat there with her eyes pressed into her knees. The shell around her mind was completely intact again, not a hint of mind magic coming from her, which he guessed was...how her mind was supposed to be, no matter how wrong it was... And, as his senses turned more fully to the physical world, he realised she was muttering something under her breath. It was so quiet he could barely hear it at all, let alone make out what she was saying.
"Er...Lyra?" he said, extending a tentative hand toward her shoulder. "Are you...alright?"
She groaned. «Yes. Maybe. My head hurts. Turn off the sun,» she demanded.
Harry was halfway through pulling the curtains, blocking out the brilliant orange sunset, when he realised she'd demanded it in Parsel. Actual, magical Parsel, not just the sounds. Which just— «What the fuck?» (Of course, he was pretty sure it didn't actually come out like that in words, but that was definitely the meaning of whatever he'd just spat back at her, and if she actually spoke it, somehow, she would get that.)
Lyra let her head fall back against the arm of the sofa, her shoulders shaking in silent laughter. After a moment she managed to pull herself together enough to say, "So, I guess Snape was right about me being an omniglot. Pretty sure that's not how that's supposed to go, though, that was...a lot."
"No, not that — I mean, yeah, that's weird, but freaky mind magic language things being like, ten times more freaky when you combine them is just... I get that, but— What the fuck are you, really?"
Her response, eyes still closed, tension still slowly easing out of her body as she almost melted into the cushions, was in French.
"I didn't understand that."
"Right, English, sorry. That's what I said, though. What do you mean, what am I? Like, explain the omniglot thing?"
"No, I mean, I was just in your head, Lyra. You can't possibly expect me to believe you're really human, not with— That's not what human minds are like, Lyra."
"I don't care if you believe me or not. But being created through bioalchemy doesn't make you not human."
"Being Lestrange's—" ("Black's.") "—daughter doesn't mean you are human, either. Maybe she's not human, too."
"Wha— Oh. You mean... Oh, come on, you just went and talked to him? ...Don't think so. Harry, would you believe the voice you were talking to was my imaginary friend?"
"An imaginary friend. With its own consciousness. That lives in a hole in the fucking universe at the back of your mind. No, I don't think I would." That last bit might have come out a bit more sarcastic than Harry had intended, but...honestly?
She opened her eyes just enough to glare at him before closing them again. "It's not a hole in the universe, it's the heart of the universe," she said waspishly. "Magic Itself. That ritual I did, the one that turned my mind inside out? That's what I was trying to do. Initiate that connection. It just...had some weird side effects."
That was just... Okay, maybe he hadn't been so far off the mark, then, when he'd guessed back at Yule that she was secretly a god. Because, he was pretty sure that if Magic Itself was talking to you, the only thing you could possibly call it was talking to God, or a god, or whatever. Weirdly human — hadn't it said something about being told I told you so? But still a bloody god. And it was living in her head. It had been annoyed with him because Lyra's mind belonged to it, and he was...trespassing.
"Ah... It's not still upset with me, is it? That voice?"
"What? No, she's not really upset, she just gets a bit overprotective sometimes when I do things neither of us really understand, and if she was upset, it would be with me, anyway, for telling you to go ahead and legilimise me and not trying to stop you." She paused for a moment before adding, "Also, you weren't the one who told her to piss off because you wanted to learn to talk to snakes. Seriously? It may not be talking to thunderbirds, but «Parseltongue» is neat. You let me see the entire bloody universe when I was ten. Doesn't matter if it was my idea, I still don't think you have any right to talk."
"Uh...huh." That was just— He didn't even know. Insane. The god — goddess, apparently — in her head got overprotective sometimes? There were things Magic Itself didn't understand? And who just went around telling a goddess to piss off? Or telling them they didn't have a right to do whatever the fuck they wanted? Especially when just her voice, talking to Harry directly, had felt like magic tearing him apart. He didn't think she'd been doing that on purpose, the Voice. Maybe at first, when she was telling him to get out, but it was still like that later, when she was grumbling to herself about the impending I told you so. He didn't know how Lyra could stand living like that all the time.
Not to mention he was still trying to wrap his head around the idea that she had a direct connection to Magic Itself warping the shape of her mind into something impossible. Humans simply shouldn't — couldn't — have a bottomless pit leading to the heart of the Universe in the back of their minds, he refused to believe they could. And had she just said something about the goddess showing her the entire universe when she was ten? That was, he didn't even know — impossible seemed insufficient, somehow. He'd just gotten slightly distracted by remembering that something living in the depths of that infinite nothingness, the very background noise of Lyra's mind, had kind of seemed like it wanted to kill him for breaking into her head.
Also, Parsel apparently had a name? Like, a proper one, in Parsel. How had he not realised that?
Lyra sighed. "I'm supposed to tell you that it's a fantastically bad idea to try possessing someone who's already being possessed by something much more powerful than you, and if you try it again, she might eat you."
"Eat me? And what do you mean possessing someone? I wasn't possessing you, I was just..."
Well, he didn't know what he'd been doing, really, but it wasn't really like when Voldemort possessed Crouch at all. Which he didn't always do, apparently they were concerned that there would be weird transfiguration-y effects from too much direct contact with a thing that was not supposed to exist in this universe — like the face on the back of Quirrell's head (And if that was just a thing that happened, being in contact with something that wasn't supposed to be here, how the fuck was Lyra not like...some weird tentacle monster by now, or something? Contact didn't really get much more direct than that, and hadn't she done that ritual she'd mentioned a few times now years ago?) — so he was working on...something else, Harry still didn't quite know what, he was trying not to know, even though he really wanted to know. But the point was, he knew what it felt like to possess someone, and just that little bit of kind-of compelling wasn't it. Was it?
"Well, you weren't doing it very well, but... That's something you should ask Snape about, I don't know shite about mind magic, I think that should be perfectly obvious by now. And she probably won't actually eat you, but I'm guessing your head doesn't feel much better than mine at the moment, so, you'd have that to look forward to. I'm not going to just sit here and let you do it again, though, so you'd probably get stunned first."
"Don't worry, I'm not going to sit here and try, that was..." he shuddered slightly.
She giggled. (Harry hadn't noticed before this summer, but laughing at everything seemed to be the Black way of dealing with...anything. He was kind of surprised Sirius's animagus form was a dog and not a fucking hyena, and Lyra was every bit as bad.) "Totally worth it. I've been trying to figure out what the Hisses of Annoyance meant for years."
"Hisses of Annoyance?"
"Er...basically the sort of shite Snape mutters to himself in class, but in Parsel. You know the sort of thing — «You are less useful than a dead frog too rotten to eat,» «Why am I always the one who has to deal with this juvenile inanity,» «If I have to explain this one more time, I will ask the Queen of Serpents to eat you» ..."
Harry didn't think Snape had ever threatened to set a basilisk on his students, but he had to admit the comparison was...kind of apt.
"Then there's «tie yourself in a knot», which I think is basically the Parsel equivlaent to go fuck yourself. «May you never feel warm again,» which is kind of like go die in a fire. Um...kind of an all-purpose, «I hate everything.» But there's also more specific ones, like, «Star-child, we are not going off on that tangent again, no matter how interesting it is,» and «Stop talking, star-child, before I crush the air out of you to make you stop talking.» Apparently he had a pet name for me. I feel so loved."
Okay, wait. "Who the fuck gave you a nickname in Parsel?" Because the only other Parselmouth Harry could think of off the top of his head was Riddle, and that simply wasn't possible.
"It's not important, you wouldn't know him."
"God damn it, Lyra!" «Stop pretending you don't know what I'm talking about and answer the thrice-cursed question!»
Her lips twitched in a sleepy, half-hearted smirk. "Yeah, I heard that one a couple of times, too. One of my teachers, obviously. You didn't think you were the only «speaker» in Europe did you? I mean, you probably aren't even the only one in Britain. Luna's mother was one, at least, and I imagine there are a few common houses out there carrying the trait. And it's almost common in some places in India, and there's something similar in the New World, though that...might not be related, I don't know. Nor do I care, at the moment. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to pass out, now."
He did mind, actually. «This conversation is not over.»
Lyra didn't respond.
"Lyra?"
Still nothing.
He stalked back over to the sofa — he'd started pacing around the room at some point, hadn't noticed — to glare down at her. "Lyra. I was still talking to you!"
But apparently she cared as little about that as she did about the prevalence of Parseltongue in the Americas, because as far as Harry could tell, she was out cold.
«You are clearly not human,» he informed her unconscious body, then turned on his heel and stalked away because, well, she kind of had a point — his head was pounding, and sleep sounded like a much more attractive activity right now than anything else.
I really feel like I should have something to say here other than 'd'aww, our little Harry is growing up' but...I've got nothing. Maybe I'll write proper notes when we re-organise this clusterfuck of a 'book' — seriously, the document is titled 'Summer Vignettes'! It was supposed to be just a few short bits and pieces of shite happening over the summer! But no, we can't not write 350 pages of side-plot BS... There's still five more of them to post. *headdesk* (This is why I will never be a real author. Original fiction publishers would never let me get away with this sort of thing.)
—Leigha
