Harry Potter and the Spirit of Revenge
Chapter Eleven: Echoes of the Past, Rumblings of the Future.

Please Read and Review. I'd like to know what I'm doing right (to keep doing it), and what I'm I doing wrong (to correct it).

Note: "{Parseltongue}"

St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries
Room 12 (Dimensional Pocket)

The Spectre walked around in a place that didn't exist anymore. The place and several blocks around it had been obliterated into dust during World War Two. He pulled back his hood, exposing his face to the cold night air. In an instant, the Spectre reverted to his original form, a small boy of 14 years old, thin and smaller than the average. And instead of his Champion robes, he was once again wearing Dudley Dursley's cast-offs.

The place was a small conglomerate of tents and carts, all brightly painted, and managed by smiling carnies; but the scent of subtle decay was all around him, and the smiles and the joyful voices clamoring for attention sounded fake and hollow to his ears. The crowd milled around excitedly. He could see their emotions in their eyes. "{Nagini?}" he said, "{Where are you?}"

"{Mast… Harry? I am here. I can see you.}" Her disembodied voice answered. "{Can't you see me?}"

"{No. But I can feel you all around me. Where are we?}"

"{This is a place I would really like to forget.}" she sighed. "{The circus.}" she spat the word as if it was as bitter as ashes in her mouth. And it was.

"{I have never been to one.}" He answered, as neutrally as he could, "{The closest I have been to a circus is a dead acrobat. And I just met him a few hours ago.}" Harry looked around, "{Where are you?}" he repeated.

"{Look for the Big Tent… the show is about to start.}"

Harry walked about, until he found the tent. "{I'm going in. U… unless you'd prefer I wouldn't.}"

"{…No. Please go in. I have carried this shame for a long time. I am sick of it. I… I need you to understand who I am. Who I was.}"

Harry shook his head sadly, "{A… are you sure..?}"

There was a small measure of a broken pride in her voice. "{I am.}"

Harry entered the tent. No one reacted in any way to his presence. The ringmaster, an ugly, balding man with a dirty and unkempt beard, wearing a threadbare suit, brandished a whip and a baton, walked around a round cage; while in the dark tunnel of canvas that was the performers' entrance, an exotically beautiful young woman, , wearing a sequined green dress, waited for her cue. Harry thought she had to be close to 16 or 17 years old. She looked around. It was clear to him she was scared, and wanted to be anywhere else.

"Good Ladies and respectable Gentlemen!" the ringmaster bellowed, turning around in the spotlight.

"{This, Harry, this is what I had to endure for years, just to have something to eat and a place to sleep. Paraded as a monster, as a freak, for the entertainment of the jeering masses.}" She said. A cold growl sounded from Harry's throat.

"{Freak.}" he spat the word. "{I've been called that. I was not a freak then. I am now.}" he said bitterly. Nagini waited until Harry shook his head.

"{Are you okay, Harry?}" she sounded worried, "{Do you want to stop?}"

"{No.}" He wiped his face with a hand, his eyes shone green in the bright lights of the tent. "{Funny. When I was a kid, I always wanted to see a circus. Now…}" he said, sadly.

"{The lights and colours hide many things, they dazzle you into not seeing the dirt, the pain… the sadness. The show must go on, they say.}"

"{…I realize that now…}" He sighed.

In the ring, the fat ringmaster kept on with his spiel. "Now, in our little show of freaks and oddities, I present you, a Maledictus!" The audience gasped when Nagini entered the cage. "Once trapped in the jungles of Indonesia, she carries a blood curse!"

Harry tightened his fists while Nagini walked meekly to the center of the cage. Her naked feet stepping over dirty straw and wood shavings. "Such Underbeings are destined, through the course of their lives, to become, permanently, into beasts!" The public gasped again, delighted with the small chill running down their backs. "But look at her," the man continued, injecting a note of pity into his voice. Harry was sure that pity was fake. "So beautiful, yes."

The young Nagini looked around. Her mouth set in determination. If this was her lot in life, she would face it with dignity.

"So desirable…" the ringmaster raised his voice again. Despite himself, Harry felt drawn to the narrative he was presenting. Even knowing what would surely happen in a few seconds. "But soon, she will be trapped forever in a very different body. Every night, when she sleeps, ladies and gentlemen, she is forced to become…"

Nagini raised her head, hey eyes fixed on the distance. She missed her cue, and the ringmaster repeated his words. "She is forced to become!" and banged the bars of the cage. The sharp sound broke her revelry. She arched her back, and threw her head backwards. Her arms wrapped around her torso, as if they had no bones!

Harry gasped. Nagini's head descended, lower and lower, as she contorted her body, until her head passed under her own legs! Her arms fused with her torso. Her head elongated and her shoulders and neck fused together. Coil after coil appeared around her. Scales covered her legs as both fused into a long serpentine tail. Her beautiful dress disappeared, turning into scales covering her skin. Only a few seconds passed before the woman had been replaced by the snake. A gigantic snake that raised her head six, eight feet in the air, and hissed threateningly to the audience, showing them two sharp fangs, each one as long as a dagger.

The audience went mad, clapping, whistling and cheering.

Satisfied with the audience's approval, the fat ringmaster continued. "Over time, she won't be able to turn back. And she will live forever, trapped in the shape of a snake."

The lights dimmed, and the circus disappeared, leaving Harry standing in the dark.

"{This was my life. Night after night. Two shows, with a matinee Saturdays and Sundays.}" she almost sobbed. "{He didn't care that each time I changed, I risked becoming the snake forever!}"

"{I had a brief reprieve from this fate when I got involved in the fight against Grindlewald. I met wonderful people who didn't care about the snake. They cared about Nagini, the woman.}"

Several faces floated around in the dark. Two women, one blonde and one brunette, they looked like they were sisters. A fat man with a pencil moustache, whom Harry immediately compared to his hateful uncle, but this man seemed jovial. A man with a narrow face, unkempt red hair, and sad blue eyes, who seemed somehow familiar. A teenager with dark hair and deeply set eyes who somehow echoed Harry's own facial gestures.

Then, almost like an afterthought, a man with a short beard, full of authority.

This last man disturbed Harry for some reason. He looked very familiar. He shook his head. Most probably, the men and women Nagini remembered were dead by now. The Grindelwald War had happened decades before. Long before Harry, or even his parents, had been born.

"{I can barely remember them now; I forgot their names, and barely can remember their faces now, when the curse has a complete hold on me.}" Nagini continued; "{The last years of the Grindelwald War are clouded to me. The next thing I can remember clearly happened in the 70s.}"She laughed bitterly. "{And no, I was not a hippie snake in the 60s…}". Harry kept silent.

"{I was enslaved by a would-be-Dark Lord. Taken to Albania, of all places. He was an idiot, and when he was killed by an angry mob of the same muggles he had tried to enslave, his hold on me broke, and I managed to escape. I lived from rats and rabbits and other small animals. Until Voldemort found me, and bound me to his will. He was always talking about how the only creature good enough to be his familiar would be a snake, a magical snake. He knew I was one as soon as he saw me. He never even asked if I wanted to be his familiar. He forced me. Then, with the help of his servant, he killed a British witch to make a Horcrux out of me. I…}" She fell silent for a long time.

"{I…}" she sobbed. "{I had to…}" she steeled herself to say the next few words. The words that would seal her fate. "{I had to eat her for the fragment of Voldemort's soul to bond with my own.}"

Harry's fists trembled. He raised his head and somehow, his bright green eyes locked into hers, even though they were invisible in the dark. "{Did you try not to…}"

She sighed, helplessly, "{I couldn't even try to resist. The bond was total. I was barely an extension of his will. I couldn't do anything but watch myself…}"

"{Until you freed me, I was practically a part of him. His thought, his wishes, his arrogance, they were mine too. I couldn't even think otherwise. He didn't even need to speak to me. He only did so for the feeling of power ordering me around gave him,}" she paused, and continued with vehemence in her voice. "{Do you have any idea of what it means to me to be free of that? To be myself again? Even in this cursed body? Even if you decide to release me from my curse the only way it can be done? To die being myself again is something I had lost hope for.}"

"{Is there any way to revert the curse?}"

"{Not even Merlin himself could release me… The best I could hope before was for me to lose my mind completely before I die. And the curse I carry in my blood is so cruel that I cannot die except by violence.}"

"{I am not Merlin.}" Harry said through clenched teeth, his head low and his fists still trembling. "{I am the Spectre!}" He changed to his other form in a blink. "{I wield the wrath of the murdered dead! I am the avenger of innocents! Destiny has played a cruel joke on you, Nagini!}" He turned to smoke and came out from Nagini's soul. He reformed back into the dimensional pocket."{And I won't stand idle while you suffer!}"

He waved a hand, and the dimensional pocket was no more. They stood on a tall tower.

Nagini looked around, her snake eyes drinking the landscape as a man dying of thirst would drink the sweet water of an oasis. "{This is a beautiful place.}" her voice smiled. "{I… I feel like I have been here before. With friends. But so long ago… So long ago…}"

"{The Astronomy Tower, at Hogwarts. No one will disturb us here.}" He licked his lips. "{I am very sorry for what I have to do, Nagini. Forgive me. For I can see no other way.}"

"{Free me, Harry. I am ready.}"

The Spectre raised his hands over his head. An eldritch wind surrounded them, the green robes flapped around him like the wings of an infernal bat.

Nagini screamed.

The Moon
JLA Watchtower

The Flash yawned, and drank a cup of sugar with some coffee in it. "A new Spectre? Well… I don't know about the rest of us, but am very willing to welcome our new eldritch overlord." Several JLAers rolled their eyes at his antics.

The Batman gritted his teeth. "We have to try to establish contact with him. The sooner the better. I worked with his predecessor several times. Such power cannot be left unwatched." He pushed a photograph towards the third Flash. it was a square jawed man, with brown hair and a notorious skunk stripe. "Corrigan was active from the early 1940's to a few weeks ago. He received the power as an adult, and had time enough to get used to manage it. The new Spectre is a complete rookie."

He thumbed a remote control embedded in the desk, and a series of pictures appeared in the screens around the table. Each screen showed the same images. "I don't want a repeat of this fiasco." The face of an emaciated clown appeared in the screens. Batman's voice grew tense. "A few months ago, the Spectre tried to judge the Joker. It backfired. Spectacularly."

Superman leaned forward. "What do you mean?"

"Briefly, the Joker managed to usurp the Spectre's power. God-like power, in the hands of a homicidal maniac."

Not a single hero failed to gulp heavily. Even Superman wiped his forehead.

"We are indeed lucky the Spectre managed to reclaim his power soon enough to prevent a catastrophe."

"However, this new Spectre, a teenager, according to the Phantom Stranger, has no experience with handling such power. We must make sure he won't abuse the power he now posseses."

Wonder Woman tapped a fingernail on the polished surface of the table. "The Stranger asked us to wait for him to contact us."

"Yes. I propose we send somebody to keep him under vigilance. England's metahuman community is small, compared to the USA, and somewhat bizarre. I will contact the Knight to alert him and the other heroes about this new Spectre. I also propose we reactivate Zatanna's membership. As a magic user, she is better equipped to watch over a magical entity. I will also contact the JSA to get them involved, the original members still active worked with the Spectre during WWII, and are familiar with his abilities. I propose to ask them one of them to accompany Zatanna."

"All in favor?"

Author Notes:

The addition of Nagini to the cast of the Fantastic Beasts movies changed her from a monster into a victim. I tried to extrapolate what has been shown of her story so far, and leave some wriggle space to try to avoid contradicting the next part of the story. I will probably fail anyway, but I like to try to anticipate this kind of stuff. Probably a consequence of being a Game Master for several RPGs.

The story Batman alludes to is an official part of the pre-Flashpoint canon. It happened in The Spectre Vol 3 #51 (March, 1997). The cover is really striking, with a Joker the size of a building, wearing the Spectre's cloak and hood, and wielding a gigantic mallet, about to strike a Batman who doesn't know he is in danger.