A Darker Form of Magic, book two: Parseltongue

Chapter One

A/N: The picture at the top is something I drew for this series.

Harry felt his lips twitch into a smirk as he tried the door to his bedroom and found that it had been left carelessly unlocked the first night of his return to the Dursleys after ten months spent at Hogwarts. All of the boy's school things had been locked away in the cupboard under the stairs by his blundering Uncle Vernon and the boy's shrieking Aunt the moment that the wizard had walked through the door. In the pair's haste to erase any evidence of the boy's freakishness, the Dursleys had forgotten to lock the door to Harry's room that night.

It wouldn't have mattered even if they had.

Moving down the stairs silently, Harry crept out into the backyard and climbed over the painted fence, just as he always had in the past, before running down the silent street, feet quiet on the pavement. The wind tangled the boy's hair in a way that Harry thought felt a bit like flying.

The field was just as Harry had remembered it from the last time that he had been there nearly a year ago now. The grass was still just as tall and thick as it had been before, the earth just as warm from the summer sun, and the tree line surrounding it just as haunting and enticing as always.

And the boy standing in the middle of it with his back to Harry, his frame encased in moonlight, was just as familiar as ever before.

Harry moved through the grass silently - he knew that he did - but when the younger boy got closer to the other, he was met with dark blue eyes and a searching hand cupping his face in lieu of a proper hello. Truly it felt like more of one than words could ever hope to as the other checked for any signs of damage on the younger as he had so many times before.

" Jude ," Harry breathed, tasting the name on his tongue like an ancient language that hadn't been spoken in a long time, yet he still knew the words to.

Though he'd looked at the same stars that hung over their heads now every night, Harry knew that after a certain point he'd stopped thinking of the boy, and of the Dursleys too. Surrey had become something of a dream to him; a nightmare with silver edges created by the boy before him.

" Harry ," the older boy said softly, and there was something desperate in that softness, something that Harry didn't quite know but had heard from him before.

And maybe another boy if he were to be honest, but magic - Harry decided then - was a dream during the summer, and so were all those attached to it.

Jude's hair was longer than it had been the last time that they had seen one another, brown locks swooping in front of the older boy's eyes as the hair closest to the nape of his neck had begun to curl. The blue in his eyes looked duller than it had before and Harry wondered if the past year had taken a toll on the other boy as well, as it felt as if the dimness in the other's eyes matched his own.

Fingers laced together as if either of them could ever be something sacred to another, Jude pulled Harry silently along to the treeline, just a step ahead of the younger boy. Harry thought that they should feel worlds apart after all of this time, but as he ran his fingers across the familiar bark, the boy couldn't help but think that they were more like the trees that they so loved. Time that felt like an eternity to some passed like it was nothing between them, as if they had only seen one another yesterday.

"I was going to meet some people tomorrow," Jude said suddenly, their eyes somehow impossibly finding one another in the dark. "I want you to come with me," the boy says simply, though they boy knew that Harry had every choice in the matter.

Harry raised a brow that he knew that the older boy couldn't see, but could tell was there nonetheless. "And just who are we meeting?" He asked, never entertaining for a moment the notion that he wouldn't be by the other boy's side for as long as he was wanted there.