Previously in the Darklyverse: Mary planned to domesticate the basilisk Dumbledore tasked her with hatching in order to extract its venom with which to destroy Horcruxes.
xx
April 10th, 1982: Mary Cattermole
"Are you sure you'll be okay alone in here with—that thing?" asks Alice warily.
Mary is in Emmeline's bedroom, whose sole occupants at the moment are—of course, with Em still off gallivanting with Dumbledore—Mary herself and the toad sitting on top of the basilisk egg. Alice hovers in the doorway, her wand in her hand, ready to enclose Mary and the creatures within impenetrable metal when the egg hatches. The toad will be the basilisk's first meal. After that, Mary will feed it with rats she'll conjure out of the air.
"Communication might be hard," Mary admits, "because I don't speak Parseltongue, but we'll figure it out. It'll learn my scent and the sound of my voice. Really, Al, I'm going to be fine."
The egg gives another great wobble, and Alice says hesitantly, "Well, if you're sure…"
"Do it before it gets out," says Mary, sounding braver than she feels, and then everything goes dark as iron springs up in a dome around her, the toad, and the egg.
And just in time: she can see fissures appearing along the surface of the egg, and she pulls out her wand. Everything is going to happen quickly from here forward, and if she's not careful—
The fissures crack fully, and at the first flash of scales, she whispers, "Stupefy."
All the tension goes out of the basilisk, still barely peeking out of the crumbling eggshell. Mary's hands shake as she reaches forward, digs her thumbs into the shell, and clears the pieces away. The toad has hopped off the egg and is unconcernedly lounging a meter away, blissfully unaware that it's about to become serpent food.
"I'm so sorry for this," she tells the basilisk, and she pulls the penknife out of her robe pocket.
She'd considered using the Reductor Curse to blind it, but Mary could too easily hit a much wider area than what she'd need to blast, possibly killing the thing that she's invested so much energy into breeding and preparing to raise. The small knife will be easier to angle at the basilisk's eyes alone, but it will be messy—she'll have blood on her hands, literally.
The basilisk isn't awake to feel Mary dig the knife into first one eye, then the next, thanks to the Stunner, but Mary curses bloody Dumbledore and his bloody plan to breed this thing just to get its venom. She holds its head in one hand and gouges out the bulbous yellow eyes with the other, blood spurting everywhere, the Stupefied basilisk lying motionless enough to be dead, and she hates herself. She debates keeping the Stunner in place for a while, so that it doesn't have to feel the freshest part of the pain, but doing so would only prolong the inevitable. "Ennervate," she mutters, and the basilisk springs to life, snapping its jaws, coiling itself around the only part of Mary it can reach—her index finger—and squeezing.
Its teeth locking onto her middle finger only stings a little—its fangs aren't anywhere close to fully developed. She feels the blood rushing to her index finger, but she ignores it. "That's it," she tells the basilisk in her calmest voice. "No more pain—not for another three weeks, at least, until it's time to harvest the venom from you. It's just you and me, and I'm going to take care of you, okay?"
Obviously, she knows the basilisk can't understand her, but it's like she told Alice: she thinks it will help to teach it the sound of her voice. "I'm Mary," she adds in the same mollifying tone. "Would you like me to give you a name? Hmm? How about… Hatcher?"
Hatcher's only response is to try and squeeze tighter, bite harder, but it's too young to make much of an impact. Mary responds in turn by keeping her hand completely motionless—not giving Hatcher the satisfaction of seeing itself inflict any pain.
After about ten minutes of this—Mary counts the seconds down on the watch on her wrist, barely breathing with concern for it—the fight seems to go out of Hatcher, and its grip on her finger loosens. "There's a good boy," she says quietly. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"
It may not be able to see her, but it still points its face at her with the most accusatory expression Mary has ever seen on a creature. "I'm not going to try and touch you yet," she tells it. "That will come later, when we've built up some trust. But I'm going to sit here with my journal and talk to you and watch you grow. How does that sound?"
Hatcher, of course, doesn't reply. Mary conjures up her journal and a quill and doodles idly, keeping one eye on the basilisk as it rams itself at the confines of the dome and grows, faster than Mary has ever seen anything grow. Within two hours, it's doubled its length to about the length of Mary's own hand; its teeth may not be venomous yet, but it still manages to clamp its mouth onto the toad and chew it up with sickening crunches, blood splattering everywhere.
Hatcher rounds on Mary next, but she's ready for it: it chases after her hand, and she weaves her hand just out of reach, almost like they're dancing together. When it's almost gained on her, she pulls out her wand with her free hand and says, "Protego."
With nothing to snap at, Hatcher flags wildly in the air, slamming itself repeatedly into the barrier between them that it can't see. Mary keeps her wand aloft but talks in a slow stream. "We'll do this for at least a few more hours," she tells Hatcher as if it can understand her, "until you wear yourself out, and then I'll bring you a rat to feed on. Every time you come after me, the barrier goes back up. But you're not going to keep coming after me for the whole of the next three weeks, are you? I'm guessing it'll take you about three days to stop attacking me, and another few days to trust me, just in time to move you to the room of lost things. You'll like having all that space. It'll be a lot more interesting for you than this dome is. You'll see."
It's not a foolproof solution—her wand arm is going to get tired fast from holding the barrier up—but she's ready for that, too: she's got a few large vials of Dreamless Sleep Potion in her robes that should be able to soak through Hatcher's scales and put it down periodically as Mary rests her wand arm. She'll Disapparate when it's time to eat and sleep, of course, as it will be much better for her relationship with Hatcher to remove herself from the dome than it would be to keep using Stunners on it. Hatcher would be smart enough to catch on that the Stunners are coming from Mary even if it can't see the light coming from her wand.
She's already full of guilt for trying to domesticate Hatcher after she's blinded it, when she's already planning on Stunning it in three weeks' time to excise its fangs from its jaw. Mary still doesn't know where she's going to put it when it's fulfilled its purpose, but she's determined to find a solution that disables its venom while still letting it live somewhere that it can't hurt anyone. While it's in the room of lost things, she'll have to stay with it the whole time if she doesn't want any Hogwarts students to be able to get in and find Hatcher there, and she's already put in for a few weeks of vacation at work so that she has the time for it. But she hasn't figured out what to tell Reg to explain her absence, and she certainly hasn't figured out what Hatcher's ultimate fate is going to be.
By the time Mary Apparates to the other side of the dome near the end of the day, she's starving and in desperate need to bathe. (Christ, how is she going to shower when she's stuck in the room of lost things for a week? She can conjure and duplicate Vanished food while she's in there, and she can conjure a bed to sleep on too, but she might be pretty grungy by the time she gets out of there.) All she wants is to curl up in the water and doze off in the bathtub, but she knows she ought to eat something first, even though she's sure Remus and Alice will be full of questions that she won't want to answer.
They're both in the living room when Mary emerges from Em's room, and Remus immediately springs to his feet. "We saved some dinner for you," he says anxiously. "I made steak and kidney pie."
"Thanks," she says. After hours of using her most soothing voice on Hatcher, her voice sounds ragged and hoarse.
"How's the basilisk?"
"Well, it doesn't trust me yet, but I wasn't expecting it to this early. As long as I keep up the Shield Charms and keep talking to it, it should calm down eventually. It's almost a meter long by now, I reckon. Hatcher's growth will slow down soon, but it won't stop."
"Hatcher?" says Alice as Remus demands, "You gave the basilisk a name?"
Mary shrugs. "It's still a living creature. It deserves dignity."
"But Mare, you're treating it like it's your pet when it could kill you in the blink of an—"
"I know that," she says. Her fork and knife clatter down onto her plate. "I know. But I'm going to get it to trust me, and I need you all to trust me, too. Dragon tamer, remember?"
"Yes," says Alice weakly, "but basilisks aren't dragons. You've never dealt with them bef—"
"I'm going to take a bath," says Mary. She's barely touched her food, and her stomach growls at her, but maybe she'll feel more ready to be around people after she's had some time away from Hatcher.
She's always adored magical creatures, ever since Professor Kettleburn showed her class Jobberknolls on the first day of Care of Magical Creatures in third year. Mary was never very good with spells, but when one of the speckled blue birds landed on her finger and silently gazed into her eyes, she knew she'd found a piece of magic that she could understand—that she could love. Something about Mary, too, always seems to calm magical beasts, and being around them gives her a sense of peace—of control—that slips away the moment she's around other people again.
In the bathtub, she sinks into the water as low as she can, which admittedly isn't very low because it's a small tub—filling it with enough water to cover her whole body would make it easy for it to overflow the moment she moved a muscle. She closes her eyes and tries to prepare herself to reenter the world of humans.
Because Mary doesn't really fit in the world of humans—never has. Oh, she's tried. She's probably even looked and felt, to an extent, like she was pulling it off, with how deeply she knows how to bury herself in gossip and human interest. But people make her feel lonely, unfulfilled. Magical beasts, on the other hand—it doesn't matter to them that Mary's words are all vapid because they can't understand them. What beasts understand is that Mary is their ally, as long as she does her job and does it well, and then the words don't matter—they have what they have.
xx
It takes a bit longer than she expected, but on the fourth day, the basilisk starts to settle. She's just lowered the Shield Charm again when Hatcher inches toward Mary and noses his head toward her. But his teeth aren't bared, and he's not making the jerky motions that indicate anger or arousal. His movements are slow—curious—and she allows him to run the top of his head along the length of her forearm once, twice, three times.
"Good boy," she breathes. "What a good, good boy you are, Hatcher. Lord, what am I going to do with you?"
He's much bigger by now, folded over onto himself in several places so that he fits within the dome at all, and Mary knows that their time in the flat is winding to an end. Reg is expecting her back home tonight, and she still has no idea what she's going to tell him. She knows she ought to at least Floo home and have a conversation, but the temptation to put it in a letter and avoid him is overwhelming.
What happens next is her mistake: she shouldn't let her guard down, but she does, and the next thing she knows, Hatcher has got his mouth around her forearm in a death grip. She hears the crunch before she feels it, but when she does—
Remus is at work, and Alice is on orb duty, so there's no one around to hear Mary scream. She recoils, but that doesn't do her any damn good, of course: the thing won't dislodge himself from her arm, and she's not exactly strong enough to shake him off or drag him away with her other hand. Hatcher is biting on her right arm—of course he is—and through the pain, she clumsily reaches for her wand with her left and points it at him.
"Relashio!"
Weak, purple sparks crackle from the tip of her wand, but all they seem to do is agitate Hatcher further; he lets go of her arm but in an instant has clamped his jaws around her elbow. There's another crunch, and pain absolutely floods her mind. "RELASHIO!" she says again, much louder this time—it comes out as a snarl—and Hatcher draws back as if burned, hissing madly. "PROTEGO!"
The Shield Charm goes up weak, but it's enough to keep him at bay for now. She collapses to the ground; it's all she can do to angle her wand tip upwards to keep the shield in place, but she's going to have to take it down if she wants to use her wand to do any more magic, like heal herself or Apparate to St. Mungo's or something. Not that she even knows how to heal herself. The only healing spell she knows is Episkey, and while that in theory should be enough to mend her broken bones—well, her arm is pretty mangled, and it's got basilisk venom in it, even if the venom isn't fully poisonous yet.
She can't go to Lily's—Lily is at work—and if she goes to St. Mungo's, she could get in massive trouble with the law if she admits that the wound was caused by a basilisk. It occurs to her that Lily does work in a Canadian hospital, Zoudiams—Mary could try to get in as one of Lily's patients there—but she doesn't know precisely where Zoudiams is located. Besides, Lily doesn't treat creature-induced injuries: she works on the spell damage floor.
It's about eleven o'clock at night, which means it's four o'clock in Alberta: Remus probably won't be home for another couple of hours, and Lily will be at the hospital for at least that long, too. Mary doesn't know if she can stomach another three hours of this agony. She doesn't even know if she can stomach another five minutes of it.
She really, really doesn't want to go to St. Mungo's, and she knows she's not supposed to be Apparating onto crowded streets without the protection of nearby alleys or similar hiding spots, but what choice does she have? Dropping the Shield Charm, she steps forward into blackness, feeling her chest compress just as Hatcher comes rushing back at her. Apparition feels like hell on her injured arm, and she holds in another scream.
Mary appears on the sidewalk just outside Purge and Dowse, Ltd., with a deafening crack that attracts far more attention than she would like from passersby. Clutching her injured arm to her chest, she hurries toward and through the display window, collapsing to her knees the moment she emerges on the other side.
She doesn't know how long she stays there on the floor, first crouched and later puddled fully on the ground, but she stays conscious, agitated by the loud noise of the lobby and the poking and prodding of the witch who hurries to her from the Welcome Desk. "Can you stand?" the witch asks. "What hurt you?"
"I need Creature-Induced Injuries," says Mary in a choked voice. "I need somebody to tell my husband, and I need somebody to tell Remus Lupin."
"We'll worry about that after we've gotten you settled in," says the witch impatiently. "Can you walk?"
"I… it hurts…"
The witch tries to haul Mary up by her good elbow, but another scream escapes her before she can hold it in, and the witch sighs. "I'll get someone to levitate you over to the right wing. Silverling!" she bellows. "Take this one to Salman and Arbutus; they should have a bed open."
It hurts, and when the Healers tell her they need to reconstruct her arm before they can start managing the pain, Mary feels like she's straight up not going to survive it. "Can you Stupefy me?" she begs. "I don't… I can't…"
The woman Healer, the one Mary think is called Salman, obliges. She doesn't dream, so it feels like no time has passed at all between when her eyes close and when they open again, but the clock on the wall tells her over two hours have passed, and sitting at her bedside is a very anxious-looking Reg.
"You're awake," he says in a hoarse voice. "What in god's name were you and Lily doing at this time of night?"
That's right—Reg thinks she'd spent her long weekend traveling with Lily. "We split up," says Mary shortly. "I, uh—I got hurt at work. I'm doing a column on—on—"
"No, you didn't," barks Reg. Her usually mild-mannered husband looks to be beside himself, and his voice is cutting. "Your boss said you weren't back to work yet—that you requested three full weeks' vacation. Where have you been, and why didn't you tell me?"
"I can't tell you that," says Mary plainly. The pain in her arm has tremendously eased, but she still feels too exhausted to have this conversation with him. It's not like she has any lies at the ready—like she got anywhere over the weekend with figuring out where she was going to tell him she was. "I just—can't, Reg."
"That's not good enough. You're my wife. I'm supposed to know where you are at night! You're not supposed to get yourself injured by—by—by dragons or something, off on your own, without even having planned to tell me what you were doing!"
"It wasn't a dragon."
"Well, then, what was it?"
Mary balks. "I told you, I can't tell you. I don't expect you to understand."
"Good, because I don't, Mare. I really, really don't."
She's rescued by a knock on the door that turns out to be Remus, looking haggard. "I got an owl at work," he says simply. "Mary—"
They exchange a meaningful look. She can't tell him what's happened, not in front of Reg, but words aren't necessary: he already knows what Mary was doing. "I asked them to let you know where I was when they admitted me," she says quietly. "I thought—I thought you all should know what's happened."
"What's happened?" scowls Reg. "You won't tell us what's happened!"
"You should rest," says Remus, talking over Reg as if he hadn't heard him. "I left a note at home for Alice—she'll let the others know."
Too tired to really maintain a conversation, Mary collapses back in bed and allows Remus to awkwardly find small talk to make with her husband. More than anything, she wants to try again—to spend more time with Hatcher until he really, truly feels comfortable with her. After all, it's not like Mary has spent all that much time working with him: she can't expect herself to fully domesticate a basilisk in just four days, not when no basilisk has ever, to anyone's knowledge, been domesticated before. But there's no way Remus or Alice is going to allow her to try, not after this, and there's certainly no way she's going to be permitted to keep Hatcher after she's gotten his fangs.
It isn't Hatcher's fault he was born without a sense of empathy for human suffering—it's just his biology—and she absolutely doesn't feel right about breeding him just to kill him. But what else can she do with him? More importantly, how is she going to transport Hatcher to the room of lost things and stay there to keep others out if she can't be around him without risking grave injury? He can't stay in Emmeline's room: he'll be too big to fit there in a matter of days. And for that matter, how on earth can she get out of Reg's sight for another two and a half weeks without destroying the trust in her marriage?
There are a lot of things she hates about the Order of the Phoenix, but—this one might be the worst thing yet.