Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the story.

Part Three

Harry sat on his bed, glaring at the silver bracelet on his wrist. Or in his wrist, really. It was almost welded to the skin. And it was covered with runes and wards and marks that Mum had described as prayers, all of them dedicated to making sure that he couldn't transform into a naga.

Harry tore at it with his fingernails. As usual, nothing happened.

Jordan knocked on his door. Harry ignored him. He hadn't told anyone in his family this, but his sense of smell had begun to develop, to the point that it was easy for him to distinguish any human he knew well from another.

The bracelet had only delayed his transformation, not destroyed it, and now his magic was getting out in any way it could.

Jordan flung open the door. Harry glared at him and then looked away. His brother had told him that while Madam Pince had indeed contacted Mum, Jordan had done the same thing, after he'd come up to talk to Harry during one session in the library when Harry was back among the shelves and seen the books he'd been reading.

"Harry."

Silence.

"Harry, come on. Talk to me."

What would you do if I say something in Parseltongue? But Harry restrained himself from the temptation to say anything. His family thought that the bracelet he wore prevented him from speaking Parseltongue. Harry wasn't about to disillusion them and make them try some other control measure.

Jordan sat down with a thump on the chair next to Harry's bed and stared at him. Harry stared at the wall.

"Dumbledore thinks that your transformation has something to do with why Voldemort was defeated," Jordan said out of nowhere. "He used to think it was Pettigrew's love, but then we found out Pettigrew was a traitor, so he knew it couldn't be that. But then we found out you're some kind of creepy snake-thing, and, well, Voldemort attacking a creepy snake-thing means that he's attacking his own kind. So it was your creepiness that kept him from killing us."

Harry took a deep breath. He remembered the alarm that had rung through him at the thought of the basilisk and the dragon being threatened, and for once, he thought the Headmaster was probably right.

It didn't make him any happier.

"You have to talk to us sometime." Jordan leaned forwards insistently. "You have to know that we don't really want you to become a creepy snake-thing. We just want you to stay here and be part of us.'

Harry said nothing.

"Do you really think that if you didn't matter to us, we would be trying to hold you back from transforming? We would just be waving our arms and urging you on if we didn't care! We love you, Harry!"

Harry couldn't help swiveling around to face Jordan at that. Dad and Mum said they loved them all the time, but it was something else for his twin brother to say it. Jordan had decided when he was nine or so that he wasn't even going to say that he loved their parents or Uncle Sirius and Remus, because it was babyish or something.

Jordan braced his arms on the bed and leaned forwards. He was as intent and earnest as Harry had ever seen him.

"Listen to me, Harry. I don't know if you thought we would stop caring when you were Sorted into Slytherin, but we didn't. And if you thought we would hate you because you were a Parselmouth, so that's why you kept that secret. But we don't. We just want you to stay human and not a creepy snake-thing! Why is that so hard for you to understand?'

Harry swallowed. Part of him wanted to reach out and hug his twin, say that his transformation had nothing to do with Jordan or their parents or fears of not being loved enough, wanted to say—

But he couldn't do that. He simply couldn't. He was going to be a naga no matter what happened. Although the rituals Harry had begun to look up would let him change faster, Harry was convinced that his magic would simply spill over his body someday and transform him if he never even touched a book of ritual magic again.

"Harry?" Jordan whispered.

Harry looked at him and wished that he knew the words to bridge the gap. To make them let him go.

"Can you please say something?"

Harry cleared his throat. Then he said, "You're saying that you love me no matter what I am, a Slytherin or a Parselmouth." Jordan nodded emphatically. "Then why are you saying that you couldn't love me if I were a naga?"

"Why do you have to be one? It's not like Remus, whatever you're going to say! It's not the same thing! He's human!"

"I'm a person, Jordan, no matter what form I wear. And so are goblins and merfolk and centaurs. Or are you going to say that they aren't people?"

"They aren't human! It's fine for them to be what they were, they were born that way! But you were born human!"

"And this will be the form that I hatch from, like an egg." Harry tried to soften his voice, to make it so that Jordan looked less miserable, but the devastated look on his face said it wasn't working. "It would have happened no matter what. Once I started hearing the song—"

"If you do it, Mum and Dad are going to disown you."

Harry stared at him blankly.

"Doesn't that matter to you?" Jordan sprang to his feet and ran his hand through his hair, then started pacing back and forth. "Isn't it important to you that you wouldn't be able to see the house anymore, or come behind our wards, or be considered a Potter, or have money at Gringotts?"

Harry swallowed. He had never seriously considered what being apart from his family would mean. Of course he wanted to return to the house if he was in danger. He wanted to be able to shelter beneath the wards. He wanted to—

Well, at least the money in his trust vault, which wouldn't remotely be spent by the time that he turned seventeen, would make it easier for him to purchase the kind of food and potions he would need in the wake of the transformation.

He hadn't found anything in the books he'd read that had claimed he would need to find a different home once he became a naga, or that wards that protected humans wouldn't protect him. Surely he would still be able to—

"They don't have to," Harry whispered, his throat rough and aching.

"Dad thinks that your transformation would probably sever the connection you have with us as bloodline relatives, anyway, but he's not sure." Jordan pounded a hand on the bed. "Come on, Harry! Do you really want to be poor and alone in the world? Do you really want to give us up for the sake of—I don't know, I haven't read much about nagas! What's even the advantage of this?'

Harry stared at Jordan and could think of nothing to say. Despite what Jordan claimed, he thought his brother was working from stereotypes of Slytherins right now, the kind of thing he would have decided Malfoy thought.

"I'm not becoming a naga for any kind of advantage," he said at last. "I'm becoming one because that's the form my soul takes, and I want my body to match it."

"Do you think Voldemort did some kind of damage to your soul that night?"

"What?"

"Dumbledore thinks that Voldemort used soul magic of some kind, that that's how he's still alive." Jordan dug his fingers into his hair and yanked on it. "So he could have done some kind of damage to your soul. If you're talking about it that way. Maybe he infected you with the desire to become a creepy snake-thing!"

Harry shook his head. He had no idea what to say, except, "Stop talking about nagas as creepy snake-things."

"You think that's the issue?" Jordan laughed bitterly. "You don't even know for sure that the transformation is going to work, do you? What happens if it twists you and gets you stuck in between forms like a Transfiguration accident?"

"Then I'll find something that will work," Harry said.

"Or you could just not do it!"

Harry let his silence speak for him. Jordan went on staring at him for a little while, then bolted to his feet with an oath and strode towards the door, his heels hitting the carpet with sharp thumps.

Before he went out, he paused and said without turning to Harry, "You know that Mum and Dad are going to make you keep that bracelet on for this year at school, right?"

Harry said nothing.

The door slammed behind Jordan. Harry lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

Oddly, it wasn't his brother's words that lingered with him. It was the memory of him walking away like Harry was the most exasperating person on earth.

Soon, I won't have legs like that.

The song of the flames was whispering and rasping in his ears, and Harry could hear Jordan's human words echoing around inside his skull.

He dipped his head and spread his fingers, his claws.

The words flew away and settled burning into the earth around him. If he turned his head, Harry knew he would see them inscribed there in golden fire.

He did not turn his head. He kept his eyes locked on the flames of the candles in front of him, and the world sang and danced, and when he opened his mouth and sang, those wordless notes flew after the words and burned and scribed over them.

He was free of human words, human voices, human concerns.

"James and Lily asked me to talk to you."

Harry leaned back in his seat in front of Dumbledore's desk and regarded Remus with no expression. He supposed it was nice, in some ways, of the Headmaster to have left his office so they could talk in privacy.

But with the portraits on the walls and the phoenix on the perch watching them intently, it wasn't the kind of privacy that Harry could feel any appreciation for.

Remus stared at Harry in desperation. Now that Harry thought about it, from the perspective of someone who was in the middle of his sixth year and would be seventeen in only a few more months, he had almost always had that look of desperation. Child Harry had thought Remus was calm and poised.

He wasn't. Not when Harry could smell the wolf beneath his skin, clawing to be let out, and the human who hated himself so much that it tainted his scent.

"They told me you were using me as some kind of—excuse for what you're doing." Remus shook his head and settled back in his chair. He moved like someone twice his age, but then again, the full moon had only been a few nights ago. "You should know as well as I do that a werewolf isn't the same thing as a human who wants to turn into a naga, Harry."

Harry leaned forwards. Remus wasn't talking about disowning him and keeping him chained up in his room. And it was true that Harry had used Remus's curse as part of his arguments to try and make his family accept him. That meant Harry owed him an answer.

"I know it's not the same thing. But they were going on and on as if leaving my human body behind would make me someone they could hate and turn their backs on. It's not rational, Remus, what they're feeling. It's just their own ideas about snakes talking, as much as anything else, and probably that Voldemort is a Parselmouth."

"I don't think anyone could expect them to remain rational—"

"Jordan keeps calling me a creepy snake-thing."

"Harry, you know that we—I mean, they call me a flea-bitten mutt, and Sirius too, and we don't mind that."

"I'm not an Animagus. But if I was, then maybe they would be upset about me turning into a snake, too. All those years of saying it didn't matter that I was in Slytherin, and this is the way they react?"

"That isn't the point," Remus said quickly. "You know that the point is that it's a permanent transformation, not something that will happen once a month with the moon and reverse the next day."

"I could still speak with them in naga form," Harry said quietly, for all that he was growing increasingly certain he probably wouldn't want to. "I could still be part of their lives, if they would make room for me. Why is that not enough?"

Remus closed his eyes, then opened them. There was a dim yellow glow in the back of them. "I'm the wrong person to ask."

"You're the one I have."

Remus hesitated a long moment, then gave a choppy nod. "I think it's because they're used to transformations that can reverse within a certain period of time, Harry. If James and Sirius weren't Animagi, if they weren't friends with me, or if they had Veela in the family—no, maybe that wouldn't make a difference, because the Veela can also shift between avian and human form." He leaned forwards, his voice suddenly urgent. "Harry, you realize that you're proposing to give up your human body forever?"

Harry breathed out slowly, never taking his eyes from Remus's. "I know."

"How can you?" Remus's hands shot out and closed on Harry's. Harry thought he might have been able to break the grip, but there was no reason to do that and shock Remus out of being willing to have the conversation. "Harry, if I could—if I could stop transforming and never become a wolf again—or if I could just be a wolf Animagus and able to take that form when I willed it—do you understand how great a gift it is, to be human?"

"Not in my case."

Remus closed his eyes. Tears shone around the edges of the lids before he blinked them back. "If you are absolutely set on doing this, I suppose nothing can stop you," he said tiredly, pulling his hands back. "But your parents and Jordan will never understand."

"Do you?"

Remus stared at him. "Of course not. Didn't you hear what I just said—"

"Don't speak as my parents' friend or Jordan's godfather, Remus. Come on. Speak as yourself. Just speak as Remus."

Remus shuddered, as if he wanted to look away from Harry's gaze but couldn't do it. Harry contained his smile on the inside. He had started to suspect that his eyes were already developing hypnotic properties, but it had been bloody difficult to confirm it.

Remus finally swallowed and said, "I do understand."

"Why?"

Remus went on staring at Harry, while the words got dragged out of him as slowly as honey. "Because I could never just give in and embrace the violent life that holds sway in the werewolf packs. Because I couldn't give up my dreams of studying Defense and Transfiguration even after I was bitten. Because the bite didn't define me."

Harry nodded and released his hold on Remus. Remus slumped back in his seat, trembling a little.

"I won't pretend that it doesn't hurt to hear all this shit from my parents and Jordan," Harry said carefully. "But their dislike doesn't define me. Their hatred of snakes doesn't define me. I am myself. Do you understand?"

Remus's smile was slower and sadder than Harry had ever seen it. "I do."

Perhaps I could stand to see Remus again.

Harry swayed back and forth, and the song welled up all around him, a song of present and past and their mingling, a triumphant cascade of notes that swelled through his head and burst out into the surrounding air. Harry's voice joined them a moment later.

Almost done, he thought, as fiery rivulets ran through the inside of his brain, shaping it into a predator's understanding. Almost there.

"You're really going to let them take you home and cage you up?"

Harry tucked the last of his books in his trunk and glanced at Theo. They had only talked a little during the last few years, here and there. Harry had spent far more time with Adda and Isobel.

But now Theo stood with his arms folded, as if he were going to prevent Harry from leaving until he got an answer.

He couldn't. Harry could have lashed him aside with a single stroke of his invisible tail. It was only that that let him smile and shake his head. "You think I would just give in meekly and let them do that?"

Theo's eyes narrowed. "You have so far."

Harry rolled his eyes, even though what he wanted to do was strike out. It was a naga instinct, and he would make sure that he suppressed it as long as he was still human. "They have legal custody of me, and it would be a huge mess that the Ministry could get involved in if I tried to run away. Then someone could try to get custody of me just to establish some kind of opposition to the Boy-Who-Lived."

"I've never heard you sound bitter about your brother's fame before."

Harry considered, briefly, telling Theo that he was probably more the Boy-Who-Lived than Jordan, considering that it seemed to have been his kinship to snakes that had kept Voldemort from killing him and Jordan that Halloween night. But while it would be hilarious, it wasn't really Theo's business.

"It's part of Jordan," Harry said instead. "I grew up with it, and I understand it. Understand him."

"Do you still understand him now?"

Harry considered Theo, eyes narrow. Theo looked back unflinchingly, and if he was going to run away and report this conversation to his father or Voldemort, Harry couldn't see a sign of it.

Or smell a sign of it, which increasingly he was growing to rely on.

"Yes," Harry said at last, quietly. "I understand what he and my parents want me to do. I understand their objections to my plans. It's just that I can't let those objections matter to me more than my plans do."

"I recognize that kind of bracelet," Theo said, nodding at the cuff that encircled Harry's arm and had all this year. Harry tensed his fist and scowled at the way the bracelet reached out to encompass his magic with its own. "It's meant to suppress someone's creature heritage. What did they do to you, Harry?"

Harry raised his eyebrows. He hadn't thought that someone else would see the bracelet for what it was. His family had seemed confident that it would allow them to keep control of Harry but not be publicly called out on that control.

"They object to my plans," Harry said. "They thought they could make me want to be human by caging my magic inside my body. They don't realize what they're messing with, and won't."

"What kind of creature are you?"

"Can you assssk that?" Harry let the sibilants slip between his teeth in a way that he normally never bothered with, and watched as Theo drew in a sharp breath, his eyes darting away from Harry's. "Do you not know?"

"I know, now," Theo said, and licked his lips nervously. "They really should not have done that."

"No," Harry said. "They shouldn't."

Theo studied him a moment longer, and then took Harry by complete surprise and bowed to him. "I hope that you will remember me when you come into your power, my lord," he murmured with a breathy accent.

Then he left, and Harry stared blankly after him before he shook his head and returned to packing. That was interesting, but he couldn't let it distract him from the apparent compliance he was going to present to his parents on his return home.

He'd been the good little boy all this year, except in his talk with Remus (which he knew Remus hadn't divulged). No arguing. No complaining. Thoughtful silence when Jordan or his parents spoke to him of the benefits of remaining human at Christmas, during the Easter holidays, and other times.

They thought he was considering it.

Harry snorted and gathered up the last of his clothes, glancing around the room for the last time. Then he nodded and walked towards the common room and the door out, his trunk floating behind him. More than one person watched him cross with narrowed eyes.

"Harry!"

Harry turned around, startled. Isobel, who he'd thought was taking one of her OWLS, skidded towards him and threw her arms around him, leaning on him so hard that Harry wobbled in place.

"You were really going to try and leave without talking to me?" she whispered.

"I thought that it would be best if we didn't say goodbye," Harry said, and gently rubbed her back. He could feel the twitch up his sleeve where Adda was hiding. She curled around his arm a lot and didn't say much, because she knew that Harry's family wouldn't accept that. Harry had pretended that he'd given her to another kid in Slytherin so they wouldn't take her from him. "You know I'm not going to come back next year, right?"

Isobel snorted as she pulled away from him, a habit that made Harry smile, because it was more like the young girl she had been than the young woman she was becoming. "Everyone knows that. If they're not blind or a Potter, anyway. But I repeat myself."

Harry laughed, for the first time in what felt like ages. Then he looked up as he felt the mood in the common room shift.

The fires were flickering low on the hearths. He sucked in a startled breath as the snakes on the walls and couches and mantels came to life, turning towards him and rearing up as if they would strike.

Harry instinctively called up his magic, as much as he could with the bracelet in his wrist suppressing so much of what he was, and shifted Isobel behind him.

Then the snakes bowed to him. Harry swallowed as he watched them all cant their heads, and the ones who were the smallest stretched flat out on the wood or stone surfaces they were bound to, hissing, "Master, farewell. Master, return for us when you can."

Harry blinked his eyes rapidly and then bowed back, a fluid motion of his body that provoked more than one startled cry from the Slytherins. Despite what Isobel had said, it seemed that a lot of them didn't know exactly what he was, and serpentine motions were new to them.

"My dearly beloved." The words came from his mouth without Harry having to consider them, much the same way that he hadn't had to concentrate to hypnotize Remus. "I will return when I am welcome."

The silence that stretched after that, as the snakes bowed their heads and went still again, was deeper than any Harry had ever felt from his family. Isobel hugged his waist, and Harry reached back and put his arm around her shoulders.

"If I hear of anyone missstreating her," he said, and let his voice rise to the point that more than one person in the room flinched, "or her cousssin Theodore, or my sssnakesss, I will be ssseverely upssset."

Frantic nods came back at him. Harry smiled down at Isobel and let her follow him out of the common room to say good-bye one more time.

It was hard for Harry to remember exactly what it was like to be friends with a human, as the song melted and dripped off him. But he could easily remember feelings of gratitude and being stronger when he was with someone, and he knew the desire to protect and defend those who depended on him or swore to him.

One day, perhaps, those feelings would extend to eggs and a mate. For now, Harry raised his arms, and the rivulets inside his skull met and rose around him in a medley of fire and song.

"Thank you, Harry. Thank you."

Harry looked up at Mum as she came over to his bed and hugged him. He smiled a little and leaned against her. He supposed, in a way, that she was being a good mother, searching through his room for the kind of forbidden books that Madam Pince had told her Harry was looking at in his fifth year.

The naga part of him just thought her foolish for not thinking that Harry could have memorized the ritual.

"I noticed that you have a lot of candles in your pack. Why is that?"

Harry swallowed. "I—I've been having nightmares about being lost in the dark and a snake coming to swallow me, Mum. I—just need a bit of light at night, and my Lumos dims the moment I go to sleep."

Mum smiled at him, gently. "You poor thing. Of course. Please let me know if you want me to set up a light enchantment in your room.'

"I thought about it, Mum, but I'm almost seventeen. And I'm going to be a human adult, so that means I need to get used to doing things myself, right?"

"Of course, but don't forget that you'll always be my little boy."

Harry waited until she was gone to sigh. Then he lay on his side and reached for Adda, who had been hiding beneath his pillow and came out to lay her head in his palm.

"She does not suspect?"

"No," Harry said softly. "I think that she thought I came back to my senses. I didn't behave the way she would have expected during the holidays if I was really going to—become what I am."

Adda coiled down the pillow and draped herself across his shoulder. "You are only doing what a good snake should when conditions are not favorable. Seek the ones that are. Wait. Hide. Eat the prey that comes to you."

Harry smiled. He had felt like rubbish a lot of times this year, like he was betraying himself or some greater vision of what he should become by not standing up to his family and running away to conduct the ritual the moment he could.

But Adda was right. He would have attracted too much attention and fuss if he had run away. He would have had people trying to use him against Jordan.

And despite what his family might think, Harry did love them. Just not enough to stay in the body he'd been born with.

He closed his eyes, and a night that stood between him and July thirty-first fled away.

Harry touched his throat as he sang the last notes of the song. He had known that one of the final steps of the change would be the way his neck lengthened, and his muscles grew strong enough to let him swallow things whole.

A flare of brightness moved across his jaw. Harry opened his mouth, and started a little at how much wider it went than it ever had.

Silly. Of course. You're a naga now.

There was one change remaining, Harry knew, but he thought he might not even feel it, in the flash of dizzy joy that consumed him more than the fire and the song had.

Harry lifted his head. He could smell Sirius coming up behind him, and he wasn't surprised. Jordan was overhead, circling on his Firebolt, hitting the Bludgers with a Beater's bat. He was frustrated about something.

Harry honestly hadn't paid attention to what. The fight with Voldemort was a lesser concern for him right now.

"You didn't want to fly?" Sirius sat down beside Harry on the rock wall that surrounded the Potters' Quidditch pitch.

"I like it less than Jordan does, you know that."

"That didn't used to be true."

"People change, Sirius."

Sirius gave him a doubtful glance. Harry ignored him, eyes trained on Jordan. The truth was that he hadn't wanted to break the rules to get on the Slytherin Quidditch team as a first-year, and he'd also been doubtful about playing for Slytherin when he'd have to compete against his brother. And then by the time second year came and he might have tried out for Seeker or Chaser, he'd already found Parseltongue.

"Have you given up your insane idea, Harry?"

Harry rolled his eyes and glanced at his godfather. "You're really going to make me have this conversation?"

"It's an important conversation."

Harry rolled his shoulders and leaned back. "Fine. The answer is that I still don't like the way Mum and Dad and Jordan went about it." He flexed his arm. "Would you like having a bracelet embedded in your skin?"

Sirius winced. "No."

"Well, then."

"But if it was to make me stay human, then I wouldn't mind."

Harry kept his doubt about that to himself. Sirius had run away from his parents because they'd done awful things to him. Harry didn't think they'd ever tried to make him stay human, exactly, but Sirius had left rather than put up with what they had done. It made his preaching about Harry's family and their right to control him pretty hypocritical.

Unless he just doesn't see his friends as capable of doing anything bad to their children.

Yeah, that was probably it.

There had been a time when Harry had felt betrayed by Sirius, especially since he was the one who had put the idea that Harry might be trying to transform in Mum and Dad's heads with his story about Regulus. But he had moved beyond that now. Sirius was human, no matter that he could change into a dog, and that meant he stood on the other side of a vast chasm from Harry.

Harry would always say he was a person as much as any human, but that didn't mean he was the same as they were.

There was a crack from above. Harry looked up. Jordan had hit a Bludger so hard that it had flown away and slammed into the Quaffle hoop. Harry shook his head. They would probably have to replace that before they played a serious game here again.

"So are you angry?"

Harry looked at Sirius and sighed. There was no reason to say that he was. First, he had got past a lot of his anger in the past year.

Second, there was no point in warning them.

"Some," he said, because Sirius wouldn't believe him if he denied feeling anything. "It's not something I really wanted to go through, you know?" He shook his arm so that the bracelet shone and flashed in the sunlight. "And I'm grateful that we didn't have OWLS or NEWTS this year, because this would probably have interfered with the exams."

"Your parents would remove it for that."

Uncle Sirius didn't look convinced. Harry wasn't, either.

Then again, it wasn't going to come up.

He dropped his arm back into his lap and shrugged. "And I wish that they had trusted me enough to know that I wasn't going to turn on them, or join Voldemort, or whatever they were afraid I would do."

Loved me enough not to push me into leaving.

Harry could have stayed with his human family for years, studying the ritual and preparing for the transformation and discussing what would be different after it and what wouldn't. But that wasn't an option now.

Adda, coiled around his arm under his sleeve as usual, tightened. Harry nodded to something Uncle Sirius was babbling about Quidditch and the Quaffle Jordan had started to toss around and leaned back.

He would reassure them if that was what was needed. Placate them. Play along. Pretend to be human.

In the end, he would be free, and that was more important.

Harry's teeth tingled and sharpened.

He reached up with one finger and touched the edges of his canines, smiling a little as they lengthened. He felt some of his teeth tremble and fall out, and he spat them free. They turned into streaks of light as they arced across the ground, not touching it. That would have disrupted the ritual.

When the streaks of light died away, Harry pressed his fangs into the back of his hand, and smiled.

Jordan glanced at Harry over the rim of the glass of Firewhisky that Dad had handed him. "He's doing it to make us feel more adult."

"Yeah." Harry swirled the glass, then drained it. The fiery taste didn't affect him much at all. Then again, nagas weren't easily inebriated, from what he knew.

"Do you feel more adult?"

Harry leaned back further. He and Jordan were in the back garden, not far from the Quidditch pitch, and not far, either, from the small pool where Harry had first heard the song beneath the silence. He tilted his head. The scents of the moonflowers were sharp, and he could hear the hoots of hunting owls.

He was going to miss this sharp clarity of sound, when he transformed. Nagas could still hear with their ears, unlike snakes, but not as well as humans. He would be able to feel vibrations fantastically, though.

"Harry?"

Harry glanced at his brother and tried to smile. "Yeah?"

"You didn't answer my question?"

"I suppose I do," Harry said slowly, as if thinking about it. "Not just because of the Firewhisky, though. No matter what Dad thinks."

"Yeah…" Jordan said, and then abruptly swallowed the Firewhisky and put his glass down and leaned forwards. "What we did to you wasn't fair."

Harry blinked at him. "I never expected to hear you say that."

"I—we were wrong. We should have known that you wouldn't see anything good about being human by forcing you into it. I'm sorry we did that, Harry. I can only say that we—we really wanted you back."

Jordan's eyes were bright and painfully earnest. Harry smiled at his brother, and watched Jordan's eyes grow brighter and brighter, and then Jordan swallowed a little and asked, "You are human, now? Aren't you?"

Harry reached out and patted his brother's hand. "Sure."

It was done.

The candles sparked out around Harry and the flames died. Harry coiled slowly back on his tail and looked down at himself.

Glinting scales that could resist some magic, like dragonhide. Claws for his nails, fangs for his teeth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, he spoke easily in Parseltongue, but he shifted to English when he tried.

"It is done."

Harry slithered out of the ritual space. He had thought that it would take him some practice to learn how to move without walking, but it hadn't turned out to be that difficult. His body knew how to do it.

And this was his body now.

"Harry…"

He looked up. The humans who had birthed and sired him were standing in front of him, their eyes wide and their hands over their mouths. The human who had been born with him stood next to them. He looked sick and pale.

Behind them was the human who had sometimes cared for him. Sirius was sick, a second later, all over the grass, noisily and violently.

"Harry. How could you?"

Harry concentrated carefully to make sure that he didn't speak Parseltongue. "This is the body I belong in. The body I was born to wear." He shrugged when they just kept staring at him. Shrugging felt fantastic, a ripple of motion that ran all the way down his body now and then back up. "I wouldn't give up that because you misunderstood."

"We were just concerned for you."

"And now you don't have to be."

He noticed the werewolf standing near the back line of humans. Remus smiled sadly at him, and said nothing. Harry relaxed a little. Remus's rejection wouldn't have hurt, exactly, but it made Harry feel better not to have it.

He couldn't believe, now, that he had ever worried about living under the Potters' wards and using their money. That hardly mattered.

"You're a creature," Jordan said dazedly.

"You did think I was."

"I can't believe you went through with the transformation! After you vowed not to use Dark Arts!"

"Obviously isn't not Dark Arts, or the vow would have punished me for it," Harry said, a little bored. He knew that nagas couldn't Apparate, but they had another method of getting around, and he could feel the edges of it pulling and tugging at him, like an invisible mesh of silk against his scales. "Out of my way, please."

"Why did you do this?"

"I've told you and told you. It's not my fault that you never listened."

His sire started to say something, but Remus cleared his throat softly. "I think we should let Harry go."

"Remus, we can't! Do you think we can just let this creature who's replaced our son—"

Harry nodded distantly. That was the way they should feel about it, the right way. The way he felt. He was no longer the boy he had been, and no longer human, and so he was detached from it all.

Besides, he was starting to notice their pulses and throats a bit too much. Remus wouldn't like it if Harry bit humans belonging to him.

Adda had crawled down from the house to wait outside the pentagram. Harry went to her, ignoring the argument that dwindled into silence behind him. He picked her up, and she raised her head and nestled against his cheek, delighted.

"You are wearing the shape that you were born to wear! You smell happy!"

"I am," Harry hissed back, and heard the humans fall silent at the sound of his Parseltongue. He glanced back at them once, and then he reached out and tugged on the shroud of invisible silk that wrapped him.

He vanished into the gold. It was the gold of sunlight that stretched between trees and would warm his blood. The gold of the secret underground chambers where nagas performed rites no human had ever seen. The gold of the ritual that had cleared the last wrong thoughts from his head.

He was curious about where he would come out. He thought it might be the edge of the Nott lands, or wherever Voldemort was hiding. But instead, he opened his eyes to a chamber so encrusted with gold and light it was like being under sunlight after all.

"Welcome, young one. And your faithful companion."

Harry turned his head with a smile. An older naga was sliding towards him, her scales golden, her eyes larger than his and green-gold and intensely curious.

Harry bowed his head, spreading his arms and lofting his palms. "Thank you for the welcome."

"It has been years and years since any have joined us from the ranks of the humans. You must be powerful and determined."

"Thank you."

"Come with me, and we will speak of you to the others. And perhaps you will choose a new name."

"Perhaps I will," Harry agreed, although for now he thought he would keep his first name. It had never been the one he'd had a problem with.

The elder naga led him deeper and deeper into the gold, past shimmering streams of light, into a forest of tree-encrusted rocks, into warmth and radiance and a scent of food that made Adda coil delightedly on Harry's arm.

Harry smiled. He was home.

The End.