A Darker Form of Magic, book two: Parseltongue

Chapter nine

Even though the two Slytherin boys had realized what the monster was, the pair still spent most of the winter holiday leading up to Christmas Eve in the confines of the school library. The problem with finding a solution to the main task at hand, Harry found out then, was that - like with most word problems in math - there is almost always a part B, another problem waiting for them in the wings. The monster was most likely a basilisk - something that only Salazar Slytherin himself and his descendants could hope to control - that was easy enough to realize once thought through, but then came the problem of how to kill it... and how to find it.

Needless to say, Harry would take muggle math right now over another day of this .

"We could just stab it," Blaise offered tiredly from his spot on the ground, leaning against the shelf opposite to Harry, a heavy tome in his lap and more stacked on either side of the boy like a barricade, each as unhelpful as the last.

Harry held up two fingers to the other boy, two major flaws tk his plan that made Blaise deflate into a tired shell once more. This was how each of their suggestions had died, by the flaws that the other snake found within it.

"We don't have anything long enough to stab it," Harry pointed out, pulling one finger back down as he didn't even look up from the book in his own lap while doing so. "Also, I doubt either of us want to get as close to its eyes and venomous fangs as stabbing would require even if we had a sword of some kind laying around."

Blaise only hummed, a soft sound that admitted defeat as he turned to the next page, finding nothing useful within it, just as they had found nothing useful within the others. Basilisk had been gone from the wizarding world for so long that now all of the books pertaining to them had only the most basic of facts and nothing more.

"We could try the morning cry of a rooster," Harry suggested after a long moment, turning his book around for the other boy to see. "Says here that it would kill the monster instantly," he explains, running his fingers over the text, aware of how seriously the other Slytherin takes his suggestions.

Even after a year now, it was still strange for the boy to have his opinion values and be listened to in such a high regard, to be more than the boy in the cupboard under the stairs. He knew that some people only did so because of what he had supposedly done when he was one, but he knew that the snakes valued more what he had done since.

Blaise shook his head after a long moment. "All the roosters were killed around Halloween," the boy explains glumly, knowing that this could have been an easy, safe solution and that whatever Harry did instead was going to be anything but. "The grounds keeper hasn't gotten any more yet."

" Well fuck," Harry breathed and Blaise ducked his head to smile, having missed such vilgar words coming from the other's mouth in the months where the other boy had been all but docile for so long.

Harry wanted to say that in the days leading up to Christmas Eve that the pair had found something on how to kill the beast. He'd like to say that they found something on the Chamber as well. Neither of these things were true.

Some secrets remained hidden until it was too late to do anything about them.

—-

When Christmas Eve rolled around, Harry found himself dragging a limp Balise out of bed and onto the warm floor of the Slytherin dorms, up as the sun rose like every year before.

"Damnit Potter," the other boy cursed as he picked himself up from the floor, an annoyed look in his face that was usually reserved for when Professor McGonagall assigned homework, "have you ever heard of sleeping in on a holiday?" The boy asked as if they hadn't been waking up till close to noon for the past week.