Title: The Cobra's Gift
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Theodore
Content Notes: Hogwarts "eighth year," ignores the epilogue, references to canonical child abuse and character deaths, present tense
Wordcount: 5000
Summary: Harry sneaks down to the Chamber of Secrets often in his repeat seventh year at Hogwarts, hiding that he hasn't lost his Parseltongue with the Horcrux the way he told everyone he had. Being caught by Theodore Nott one evening and blackmailed to invite him to the Chamber turns out to be one of the best things that ever happened to Harry.
Author's Notes: This is one of my "Songs of Summer" fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This one is based on Zealith's prompt about Harry introducing his Slytherin boyfriend to a secret room full of artifacts. Hope you enjoy.

The Cobra's Gift

"Where do you think you're going, Potter?"

Harry spins around, his wand snapping into his hand. It's the bloody Elder Wand, again, he sees, not the holly wand he left his dorm with. He scowls at a Slytherin boy stepping around the corner.

Nott. The name comes to him after a moment of struggle. Harry's never had much to do with Nott, not before the war and not after, although to be fair this is only a month into their "renewed" seventh year at Hogwarts and so only a few months after the final battle.

"None of your business, Nott."

"Oh, I think it is. Unless you want me to tell everyone that you've been hissing, wherever it is you're going."

Harry clenches his hand down on the wand and shoves it roughly into the holster that he wears on his waist now. He grits his teeth. He made a big announcement to the Daily Prophet about how he lost his Parseltongue when Voldemort died. It seemed like the thing to do.

Harry is so tired of everyone staring at him since the battle. He wants to be normal in some things, just normal and small and ordinary. Lying a bit about one thing people thought made him extraordinary isn't a high price to pay.

"Bugger off, Nott."

"No."

Harry has never had much cause to pay attention to the expressions on Theodore Nott's face, but right now, he wishes he had once seen him bloody, crying with pain. Maybe it would spark some kind of idea about how he gets out of this, or let him say confidently he didn't care and just hiss the sink with the snake marking behind him open and jump down the tunnel.

"Why do you care?" Harry says, and has to struggle against slipping into Parseltongue. It seems to happen more often now that he's been spending time in the Chamber. "How does it affect you? Just shut up and go on your merry way."

Nott gives him a thin smile. "It's interesting, Potter. This year is bloody boring, revising material I already know by heart, but my father and the Hogwarts Board of Governors alike insisted I needed to be here. Entertain me."

Fuck him, Harry thinks crossly, and jerks one hand. Nott at once steps over to the sink. Harry hisses, "Open," and watches the sink spin into the floor. Then he looks up. To his dismay, Nott doesn't seem less interested. Instead, his eyes are shining and fixed on the open mouth of the tunnel.

"Last chance to back the fuck off."

"No."

Your funeral, Harry thinks crossly, and jumps into the pipe with Theodore bloody Nott right behind him.


"This is bloody cool."

Harry blinks at Nott in astonishment. He thought Nott would be frightened off by the snake decorations and the basilisk corpse and the rest of it. For all that Slytherin is the House of the Snakes, most of them aren't that comfortable with actual snakes.

But although Nott did look a little green when he stared at the basilisk, he's practically rejoicing in the room off to the side of the Chamber of Secrets that Harry found the first time he came down this year. Harry scowls. This was not a good idea.

The room, concealed behind one of the pillars in the original Chamber in a way that Harry still doesn't understand—it's like a wizardspace corridor sticking off into another dimension—is larger than the other, and brighter. Embedded crystals in the walls spark off each other, and the minute someone brings a light into the room, even one as simple as the Lumos Charm on a wand, they absorb it and start bouncing it back and forth. It doesn't matter if the original light goes out, either. The floor is polished black stones, the ceiling polished white stones, and the walls polished grey.

And in every corner are piles of boxes, caskets, cabinets, crates, jars, jugs, and scrollcases. Harry has sorted through a few of them and laid the contents aside in a pile near a pillar with a stone cobra crawling up it. They're mostly books in languages he can't read and crystal snakes and jewels, but now and then he's found something useful, like the dragonhide holster and belt he wears.

Nott's fingers are twitching. Harry eyes him. "You can't tell anyone about this."

"Why would I want to?" Nott catches Harry's eye and gives him a soft, bitter smile. "Secrets are better when they're kept as private as possible, Potter."

"I agree," Harry says, but his heavy emphasis completely misses the mark for Nott, who wanders off to start picking through a pile of black lacquered boxes, Harry sighs and starts sorting through some more.

He's not really looking for anything, as it were. He just needs a place he can get away from other people and not have to think about Quidditch or marks or Hermione and Ron alternately having blazing rows and snogging each other's faces off. And the worshipful eyes staring at him.

It looks like he has to have one other person with him, now, but at least Nott is quiet.


"Look at this, Potter!"

Harry sighs. It's the third time he and Nott have met up to enter the Chamber, and all he can think is that the other boy used to be quiet.

"What?" Harry asks wearily, tossing aside a snake that seems to be made of pure emerald with onyxes set in the eyes. It hisses at him and tries to twine around his fingers. Harry hisses back, "Stop it," and it lets him go in what seems to be sheer surprise.

Nott clambers over some of the crates towards him. His eyes are blazing with excitement, and Harry finds himself staring, breath caught in his throat. Wow, Nott actually looks handsome like that, a little color in his cheeks and his eyes a crystalline black instead of just dark.

"You okay, Potter?"

"Fine. What is it?" Nott appears to be holding a large sheet of parchment attached at one end to a fine wooden scrollcase, and splotched with color Harry can see through the almost translucent surface.

"A map to the hoard, looks like," Nott says reverently, and extends it. Harry steps behind him and cocks his head a few different directions, and finally finds a line on the parchment that seems to correspond to the pillar with the cobra crawling up it. Yes, there are also marks on the map with words written beside them that seem to correspond to the piles on the floor, but they're in Latin. Harry shrugs.

"I can't read Latin."

"I can."

"Okay, then. What's in that one?" Harry gestures at a tall pile that he hasn't gone near for fear of disturbing its balance. Somehow, enormous crates and what look like empty cages with glassy bars are perched on a tiny silver box.

Nott pulls the map around and reads the words for a second with only his lips moving. Harry half-closes his eyes. The silence is peaceful, like being in the library with Hermione when she's doing her most intense studying.

"Flying snakes," Nott breathes.

"What?" Harry snaps his eyes open and twists around to face the pile. The bloody Elder Wand is in his hand again, because of course it is. Harry has tried leaving it in Dumbledore's tomb, throwing it in the lake, snapping it in half, and throwing it out the window in Gryffindor Tower, but it always shows back up again, whole and smug. "Like dragons?"

"I don't know, Potter, that's all it says. Let's find out."

Nott is over next to the pile before Harry can warn him off, poking at the silver box. It dissolves at the first touch and leaves the pile hovering on air, and a swarm of long white snakes with electric blue wings soars out and around the ceiling of the chamber in a cloud.

Harry bounds over to get in front of Nott as one of the snakes peels down towards them. He folds his arms and scowls. "What do you want?" he hisses.

"Great Speaker." The snake tilts its head down, tongue darting out. It's forked and as vividly blue as the wings. "We wish to fly free."

"People would panic and try to destroy you."

"We can hide."

Harry sighs. "People would get upset if you bit someone. They would cast spells to find you."

"We hunt animals, not humans."

Well, why the hell not? Harry would want to fly free if he'd spent centuries imprisoned in this room. He waves his hand. "All right, but remember that this is a gift and it'll, uh, reflect badly on me if you get caught and people find out I'm the one who freed you." The "reflect badly" part translates into Parseltongue more as "make me look vulnerable," but Harry is confident the snakes will know what he means. Serpents have never had trouble understanding him before.

"We understand, Great Speaker. And we leave you a gift in return." The snake turns its head towards the pillar with the cobra on it and flicks its tongue out again. "If any human places their hand in the cobra's mouth and endures its bite and lives, they will receive what they most desire."

Harry closes his eyes. He doesn't believe that, doesn't believe that the cobra can resurrect the dead or give him a normal life, but he nods. "All right. Thank you."

The swarm of snakes is wheeling around in a tighter and tighter cloud when he opens his eyes again, becoming a tornado, and then they spiral to the point where they are a thin, flashing line, and then they vanish. Harry sighs and sits down, staring at the pile of crates and cages still balanced in midair.

"What did they say?" Nott whispers from behind him, and Harry jumps a little. He forgot he wasn't alone.

That is kind of unusual, he thinks as he tilts his head back and looks at Nott upside-down. Normally, Harry senses other people nearby no matter how calm or casual or quiet they are. Nott seems to fade into the background, into the silence.

"They wanted to fly free, and they said they could hide and would only hunt animals." Harry shrugs. "And then they said I needed a gift, too, and said something about how letting that cobra over there bite me would give me my greatest desire."

"Really?"

"It won't work."

"How do you know? Did you let the cobra bite you before I joined you here?"

Nott's voice is light, but Harry can feel the intensity of the other boy's eyes on the back of his neck. He glances over his shoulder, frowning. Why does Nott act as though—Harry doesn't even have words for it. "Because no magic can bring back the dead," he says shortly, and stands. "We should go back up."


"You realize that you have a fortune here, and could sell some of these things for a royal ransom?"

Harry glances over. Nott has uncovered an enormous egg this time, which looks as big as the Hungarian Horntail eggs Harry saw in the Tournament, and is stroking it. It seems to be made of pure emerald with a chasing of gold, sort of like the snake Harry uncovered a few weeks ago.

Harry shrugs. "You can sell it if you want to. If you need it. And I'll take some of these things and sell them and donate the Galleons to people who need them. But I'm rich enough. And what would I do if I kept them? I don't need pretty things to sparkle in the rooms of wherever I finally decide to live."

It's a sore point. It's November now, and although of course Harry knows he would be welcome at the Burrow for Christmas, he doesn't want to go someplace so—noisy. He doesn't want to go back to Grimmauld Place, either. He wants to be in a quiet place that's just his own, and where he doesn't need to remember other voices.

Sort of like here, actually.

Nott's hand touches the middle of his back, and Harry closes his eyes. Nott has started touching him lately. Harry doesn't understand why. He scratches his fingers idly down Harry's spine, or cups the back of his neck and leaves his hand there. If it didn't feel so good, if Nott wasn't so quiet (most of the time) and the touch didn't flow over Harry like a continuation of his silence, Harry wouldn't allow it. As it is, he welcomes it, he wants it, and they never speak of it.

Now, though, Nott is doing something new, running his hand in circles, still scratching with his nails. Harry arches his back and takes in a sharp breath.

"Problem?" Nott whispers, in a voice so quiet Harry wouldn't hear him if he was any further away. His hand doesn't stop. His nails continue scratching.

The problem is that heat is flooding Harry's groin, and he's getting hard. He doesn't understand that, either. He and Ginny didn't get back together after they had a conversation at the Burrow over the summer that turned into a fight, but he's never been attracted to boys.

Oh? says a quiet voice of Harry's own in the back of his mind, and he thinks of how handsome Tom Riddle was to him, Cedric, Sirius. Oh?

Nott moves a slow step closer. Now his hip is right next to Harry's, not touching but radiating heat, and his hand has turned so that he's scratching the right side of Harry's back only. Harry arches his hips this time, and realizes that Nott's other hand is cupped around his body, in front of Harry's groin.

Harry tears himself free, eyes averted. He feels so good, and so hot, and he wants to be touched, to be held, to do something he's not responsible for initiating and continuing and finishing—

"Problem?" Nott repeats, in the same utterly calm voice. Harry glances at him, and finds Nott's eyes holding him like the sorts of pins people drive through the bodies of butterflies.

He'll continue, if Harry asks. Harry wants it with a fierceness as sharp as Nott's eyes.

But Harry doesn't know Nott, really, and he doesn't know why Nott is doing this. He doesn't know if perhaps Nott only wants to touch him out of misplaced gratitude for Harry letting him into the Chamber, or because he thinks it would give him a political advantage to shag the Boy-Who-Lived in the future.

Those thoughts smother the heat in Harry's groin, and he says shortly, "No," and goes on sorting through a stack of boxes that seem to be full of identical long-handled silver mirrors.

Nott stands behind him and watches him.


Harry jerks out of sleep, panting hard. He realizes he was thrusting roughly against a pillow, and imagining Nott's eyes while he did it, and he's soaking wet, and judders of pleasure are running through his body. He's never come so hard.

Harry sits up and puts his hands over his face, for all that he's alone in the darkness of his bed behind closed curtains, and it doesn't seem as though he's woken anyone else up. He sits like that for a long time.


"You're avoiding me."

"We're spending multiple hours each week in the same fucking place, Nott, how am I avoiding you?"

Harry keeps his head down and stares at his hands, which are clasped around yet another crystal statue that he's unearthed from a pile of slumped caskets. This one is of a dog, not a snake, the way they usually are, and all Harry can think of is Sirius, even though this dog is a slim racing hound instead of the large Grim-like dog that Padfoot was.

His hands are shaking.

Sirius, I wish you were here. Replace Sirius's name with Remus or Fred or Dumbledore or Cedric or Tonks or a dozen others, and you have at least half of Harry's thoughts on any given day.

"You were comfortable with me touching you a few weeks ago," Nott says quietly, not flipping through the pages of a large leather-bound book anymore, the way he was. "Now you're not. Why?"

"Why did you think I was comfortable with me touching you in the first place, Nott?"

"Because you leaned towards me, and you didn't move away, and you looked at me so hopefully when I did touch you, and you relaxed more on the days when I did."

"Haven't you ever heard that you should wait for someone to tell you what they want?"

"As if you would ever do that, Potter. And haven't you ever heard that words are not the only means of speech?"

Harry stares up at him. Nott's voice is low and bitter, and he's staring at Harry with—again, it's a look that Harry doesn't know how to describe. Harry looks away and brushes his hand over the flank of the crystal dog. Maybe he'll keep this one instead of discarding it into a corner for Nott to take if he wants.

"Why did you want to touch me?" he asks abruptly. Nott wanting to know secrets about the Chamber or about the scatter of artifacts that are all over the place down here, sure, that makes sense. Not so much wanting to touch Harry, who isn't a dragon's egg made of emeralds or a book in ancient Latin.

"Because I want you."

It's absurd. Harry feels his mouth fall open and hears his hollow, echoing laughter tear up his throat and bounce around the room. He hunches over his knees and keeps giggling, but his ears remain alert. He's sure that any second now, he'll hear Nott storming out in indignation.

Nott remains patient, still, with that silence that Harry has learned to value so much, that he would miss if it—

No, fuck, I can't think like that. Harry sits back with a gasp. "You want the Boy-Who-Lived on a leash," he says. "Or you want a political ally you're fucking on the side."

Nott snorts. "I don't want the noise of being prominent in politics any more than you do, Potter. I want the man who comes down to the bloody Chamber of Secrets by himself for a bit of privacy, who can turn away from priceless artifacts because he has no need for money, who makes bargains with flying snakes as if he does it every day."

Harry feels his mouth fall open. He tells himself it's because Nott called him a man, and no one else seems to do that; Mrs. Weasley still fusses about "her boys," and Hermione tells him he's a child on a regular basis because he doesn't do his homework often enough.

But he knows it's more than that.

"You didn't know I was gay."

"It didn't matter to me." Nott refuses to turn a hair, and it's much more annoying than Harry ever realized it could be. "What mattered to me was if you wanted me in return." He inclines his head, his eyes glittering. "And I believe the answer is—yes, very much, although you're going to have trouble admitting it to anyone else, let alone me."

"That seems like taking a big risk. For a Slytherin."

"You love silence a lot. For a Gryffindor."

"The Hat almost Sorted me into Slytherin," Harry finds himself confessing, with no idea why, except that he doesn't like the stretched kind of silence that's been happening between him and Nott more and more often lately, and these are the kinds of words that will fill it. "But I'd already met Malfoy and had people tell me only bad wizards or witches came out of Slytherin, and I turned it down."

Nott smiles. "It offered me Gryffindor."

"It did?" Harry stares at Nott. He wasn't aware of him before this year, so he can't say that Nott is particularly ambitious or cunning, but the essential silence at the heart of Nott seems like something that wouldn't fit at all into the rambunctious Gryffindor common room.

Nott nods as if it isn't an astonishing confession. "It said that I would always do whatever I needed to get what I wanted, and if that meant going against expectations and showing courage, I would. It said that was bravery."

"But you chose Slytherin?"

"Yes. Did you choose Gryffindor?"

Harry swallows. "No. I said 'Not Slytherin.' That was all I said. I wasn't thinking—I mean, it could have put me in Ravenclaw, and I would have been happy because it wasn't Slytherin."

Nott laughs quietly. "And you think you would have told me what you wanted? Your skill lies in rejection, Potter. Refusal. Defiance. You said no to the Dark Lord, you said no to Malfoy's offer of friendship—yes, I've heard that story many times—and you refused to lie down and die when you supposedly had no choice. But it's harder for you to choose what you want, isn't it? Harder to make a positive choice and say, 'Yes, I will do this?'"

Harry stares at him. No one has ever said that to him before, and he wants to say that it isn't accurate. He chose Ron. He chose Hermione. He chose Sirius.

Did you?

He made friends with Ron because Ron came into his compartment on the train, and then he refused Malfoy, which meant choosing Ron by default. He chose to go after Hermione when she was sobbing in the bathroom, but he had no idea that would make them friends, and fighting the troll was about refusing to let her die. He chose Sirius when he offered to let Harry live with him. Harry didn't ask.

Later, of course, he made choice after choice for them, went into danger for them. But only after they were the first ones to hold out their hands, or to be in such danger that Harry would have felt immoral to turn his back on them.

Shit.

"I haven't said I want you."

"No." Nott is unruffled. Harry is starting to really hate that. "But you also haven't said I should leave and never touch you again."

Harry opens his mouth, and sits there. He doesn't want to lie.

Nott's eyes shine with triumph. "Yes?" he asks softly.

"Yes," Harry says, and he doesn't know why other than that Nott is silent and insightful and almost a Gryffindor, but he chooses. He also doesn't intend for this to go so far or ever be revealed in public (it isn't going to last that long), but he chooses.


This time, when something tears Harry out of sleep, it's not his own wet dream. He lies there with his heart racing, staring at the canopy of his bed, wondering what woke him. Once again, the room around him is quiet, filled with the breathing of all five boys in their year. They all came back.

Harry's starting to drift off when it strikes him again, a jolt of lightning straight down his lungs into his legs.

"Shit!" Harry rolls up, snatches the holly wand (from the feel of the wand in his hand he's sure it's the holly) off his bedside table, and grabs his Invisibility Cloak. He's sliding through the corridors towards the bathroom on the second floor before he even consciously registers what the magic was alerting him of.

The problem is in the Chamber of Secrets. Harry doesn't know how he knows that, but he does.

Harry runs into the bathroom and finds the sink sunken into the floor. A long pulse of cold tears through him. Fears of a Horcrux they didn't manage to destroy dance in his head, of another basilisk who found the way out—

And then he remembers that he always hisses at the sink to close when they're going down the pipe, but if someone has managed to imitate the opening sound but didn't know the word for "close," say because by then they're sliding down the pipe and the noise of their robes against the muck is too loud—

"Shit!" Harry repeats, and jumps into the pipe, hissing it shut behind him, and ignores Myrtle's demands to know who's there.


Nott is lying motionless beneath the pillar carved with the cobra. Which looks different, now. The cobra is coiled halfway down the pillar with its mouth open, delicate stone fangs standing out. They glisten with blood.

"Shit!" Harry hisses in Parseltongue, and flings himself to the floor beside Nott. His wrist has two puncture wounds in it, still flowing sluggishly with blood, and Harry frantically casts as many healing spells at them as he can, from Episkey on up, using the Elder Wand that has calmly appeared in his hand. Nothing makes Nott stop bleeding. He does open his eyes and stare up at Harry, and his eyes don't look glazed from the venom, but all that means is that he isn't dying right now.

"I know," Nott whispers.

"You know that you're a fucking idiot?" Harry snaps at him, and then stops as he notices that the puncture wounds have stopped bleeding. And as he realizes that the words Nott just spoke to him weren't in English.

Harry stares at him. "You know what?" he asks, and the words come out in Parseltongue, and Nott's eyes light up with understanding.

Harry is trembling as Nott sits up and reaches out to touch his face. This is something he has never shared with anyone except Voldemort, and for fleeting moments, the basilisk and the snake at the zoo. He swallows and looks at the wounds in Nott's wrist quickly. Yes, they did stop bleeding, and he doesn't know why, but he's grateful for it.

"What happened? You know what?"

"What the snakes meant when they said that the cobra could grant your greatest desire," Nott hisses at him, and Harry's heart is fluttering in complicated patterns. "They were looking at it from a snake's perspective. Yes, the cobra's magic couldn't have brought back the dead. And it couldn't have given you to me, which was my greatest desire when you explained what the snakes said—"

"You don't make any sense—"

"You have no idea how very desirable you are." Nott touches Harry's face again, a long, sliding touch that isn't like anything he's done before. It's a caress, not a scratch. Harry tilts his face into it, his eyelashes fluttering shut. "But then I thought about it, and I knew that I wouldn't gain anything real from the cobra's bite even if it would give you to me. It was only worth something if you gave yourself to me willingly."

"I did. I have. Why did you need to let it bite you?"

"I wanted to find a way to speak to you without overwhelming you," Nott whispers, and his hand rises into Harry's hair and tugs on it. "You need silence, you get overwhelmed by the way that other people talk to you during the day. I've seen it. But I've also seen that you long for connection. So I came down here wanting that. And it bit me, and granted me Parseltongue. It can only give gifts related to snakes. I imagine the winged ones that spoke to you and told you about the cobra's gifts never imagined that someone could want anything else."

Even in Parseltongue, Nott's voice is wry, and Harry has to laugh. He smiles at Nott, his heart lifting, and says, "I didn't even know that I wanted someone to speak to in Parseltongue, but—thank you for letting me find out."

And he adds, "Theo," watching as Theo's eyes widen, since Harry hasn't spoken the name in Parseltongue or English before, and leans close enough to kiss him.

Theo hisses, "Harry," and it's a revelation, it's a fucking revelation how much Harry wants to hear that, and he lets Theo draw him closer and onto the floor.

There's nothing soft there for them to lie on. It doesn't matter. They twist in each other's arms, like snakes, like great serpents, and Theo's bare chest is covered with scars, and Harry rakes his nails down it and surprises babbling in English out of him and soft hisses, and Theo leans over and whispers his name over and over again into his ear, and Harry comes without being touched, bucking frantically against him.

"You," Harry gasps, working one hand down between their bodies and touching Theo's cock for the first time. It's long and slim and he loves it, even though he can't see it, and he scratches with his nails the way Theo has done to him so many times and Theo is gone, crying out with a sibilance in the back of his voice for all that it's pure sound, his nails this time catching only air.


Harry lays his head down on Theo's chest when they're done, and feels Theo's hands holding and stroking his back. He sighs out and rolls closer, nestling against Theo's long, slim legs, and his ribs barely covered by shining pale skin, and his tongue, touching the outer shell of Harry's ear for a moment.

The tongue that now speaks the language of snakes.

"I like this," Theo whispers. "Being down here, being with you, being secret, having a language no one else can share with us. We can stay secret and hidden as long as you want."

Harry breathes out slowly. Then he rolls over and looks into Theo's eyes. "And if I said that I want to balance it? Being secret and hidden with being in the open, and letting other people know about us?"

Theo stares at him for so long that Harry isn't sure Theo plans to grant what he asks for.

And then, for the first time, Harry hears Theo Nott laugh, a sound as beautiful as a snake, as winged as one of the ones that he released from the silver box.

"Yes, Harry," Theo hisses back at him, nails raking down his back again, making Harry close his eyes and arch. "Yes, let's do that. Let's face them side by side."

And Harry has to kiss him again, because the words are perfectly balanced between silence and speaking, between snakes and English, between the past and the world to come.

The End.