AN: Here are the interludes!
-/-
Tonks woke up, as always feeling detached from her body, before she quickly reasserted her preferred form and opened her eyes.
The bright light assaulted her, she quickly closed them again.
“Ughh,” escaped her lips.
“You’re awake,” a young voice suddenly said from beside her bed.
“Harry?” Tonks asked as she opened her eyes again, adjusted to the bright light on the white ceiling and looked to the side.
“Got a patronus that you were at St. Mungos,” the red-head replied from where he was sitting next to the bed on a small chair.
“Hospital?” Tonks asked nervously, trying to remember, slowly things started coming back to her.
“Next time, you should consider blocking spells with a shield, not your face,” her friend snarked. “What do they even teach you at that academy?” He shook his head.
Tonks suddenly jumped up, “I saw the minister, it was him!” she exclaimed.
“Good, your occlumency is good enough that you fought against the obliviate,” Harry said. “Perhaps that means we’ll have our conversation soon.”
“What happened?” Tonks groaned, a headache assailing her as she tried to remember more. The minister, forgetting, an instruction. It was all blurry.
The boy beside her bed picked it up from her nightstand and flipped it around. “The Mystery Before Christmas: Escape from Azkaban, Potion Professor Dead, Minister Fudge comatose!”
Tonks stared at the headline with a confused look on her face, not sure if she was understanding. “Those really should have been three separate headlines. Fudge is in a coma?” she asked, before doing a whiplash to stare at the paper. “Slughorn is dead?”
“Fudge was found dropped off in front of St. Mungos the same night as you got shipped here. Hasn’t woken up since, completely unresponsive.,” Harry confirmed with a nod. “They found the corpse of professor Slughorn in his house, veritaserum in his veins and a petrification jinx still active on his body. On the same night, Peter Pettigrew disappeared from Azkaban, the anti-animagus wards on his cell broken.” He put a finger to a certain point in the fourth column of the article. “Look, this is you.”
Tonks squinted her eyes. “Auror trainee found unconscious outside Azkaban, taking a nap at the hospital alongside the minister!” She closed her eyes again, covered her face, and groaned.
“It’s alright,” Harry reassured her. “You got ambushed. You’re lucky Dumbledore visited the prison that same night and found you before a dementor gave you the old sucky sucky.”
“They’re going to rib me in the forces for the rest of my life!” the girl complained, mentally filling away that she really owed the headmaster a thank you letter. “Jerry accidentally said the muggle capital of Britain was Manchester once and they still call him Geoguesser Gerry!”
Harry raised an eyebrow at her. “Fainting Fonks? Sleeping Beauty? The obliviated and the oblivious?”
“Shut up!” Tonks exclaimed, before narrowing her eyes and looking around the room. White, sterile, empty. “How did you get in here anyway?” she asked. “According to protocol I’m supposed to have an auror guard at the door.”
“Snuck in,” her friend answered with a roll of his eyes, as if that was something that didn’t need elaboration.
“I have to tell someone it was Fudge,” Tonks suddenly realised. “They need to start the investigation.”
Harry closed his eyes. “Fudge is gone,” he said confidently, but why? “Don’t worry about him.” Then he suddenly stood up. “Someone’s coming right now, probably they had a spell on your bed to alert them about your waking.” He threw her a scrutinising gaze.
“You graduate this summer right?” he asked, before nodding as if that explained everything. “I’ll visit you in a few days when you’re back in your shithole. I went to water the plants. We’ll plan a proper party, it’ll be fun.” Then he just puffed away, like a fading mirage. What?
Tonks rapidly blinked her eyes, felt the magic, felt that he was truly gone.
The door to her room slammed open and a loud bang of wood on the floor announced the arrival of her mentor. “What did I always tell you, constant vigilance! Always pay attention to your surroundings!” Alastor Moody shouted as loudly as he could while storming into her room, fake eye spinning like a carousel drunk ballerina at a formula race.
The auror trainee could only lay her head back on the pillow and groan.
“I hate my life,” she sighed.
“You will after I’m done with you! You fickless halfwit!” Moody shouted angrily.
-/-
Harry reappeared back in his bedroom in Barcelona and threw himself on the bed while the dulcet sounds of 2Pacalypse filled his room, the hat loudly singing along. Thank god for silencing charms was all Harry could say, or his parents would be banging on the door already. This was not the proper pre-christmas-morning vibe, they would say, and he’d have to agree.
Although, to be fair, nothing currently going on was very christmassy.
“What the fuck is going on?” the boy muttered to himself as he tried to assemble the timeline of the things that had happened.
First, the locket-possessed Fudge had been having a late private dinner at his house with Slughorn. Sharing a cuppa, having a laff, classic british geezers having a lark, sure.
At the same time Harry had been walking towards Stonehenge to meet Dumbledore. Then, when he’d meet Dumbledore at exactly midnight, he’d told the man that Fudge was the one possessed by the locket.
This had caused Dumbledore, who’d possibly wanted to talk with Charon longer, if not even possibly capture him for interrogation, to have to suddenly leave.
Dumbledore had arrived too late at Fudge’s house, as the murder had occurred at exactly midnight, or so the papers said, and Fudge had already disappeared.
As he now knew, he’d disappeared to Azkaban, where he’d obliviated and stunned Tonks before entering the prison to free Pettigrew.
Then Dumbledore also appeared at Azkaban, found Tonks, alerted the warden, then, at one in the morning, Fudge was found comatose in front of the hospital and still hadn’t woken up.
A guilt emerged within Harry. Would Slughorn have lived if he’d told Dumbledore sooner? Or would doing so have changed the scenario into Fudge escaping.
One thing he was sure of, Dumbledore had not known that Fudge had the locket, which meant that neither did Slughorn. Thus, even if Voldemort had interrogated Slughorn, he wouldn’t have been harbouring any suspicion as to his identity being exposed. No suspicion, no need for counter-measures.
Harry’s theory was that Dumbledore had found Fudge, divested the man of the locket, and destroyed it. Unfortunately, this had occurred after Fudge had freed Pettigrew. The reason for that?In the books it had been Pettigrew who’d found Voldemort in Albania, although why Voldemort liked hiding there so much was a mystery to Harry. Maybe he liked beaches, crumbling infrastructure and badly made seafood?
Following this theory, Voldemort was all out of Horcruxes… Which was good. But, Harry had arranged for the day he’d told Dumbledore during his time high on felix felicis, which as more time passed, seemed more and more like a fever dream to him. Why had the potion not had Harry meet Dumbledore immediately when he’d received the information, but instead two days before the winter solstice?
Had Slughorn needed to die? If so, for what purpose?
His head hurt, and he was starting to realise why Grindelwald had preferred to stay away from the potion. Although, Grindelwald was rotting in jail and Harry was free… Was this what they called the midwit diff?
He sighed, before deciding that what he needed right now was a shower.
The worries could come after. It was Christmas time with his family and that took precedence over things he had no control over anyway.
-/-
One hot shower later Harry got dressed in some sweatpants and a jumper and made his way downstairs.
The new house the Dursley’s had bought was, in his opinion, superior to the previous one.
It was smaller in diameter, but had one extra floor. There was the ground floor for the kitchen, the living room and the washing room. The first floor for the office and the master bedroom, and the second floor which would probably get a bit too hot in the summer which housed both himself and Dudley. Each floor had a bathroom, although the one on the first was an ensuite.
“Finally cheering up?” Harry asked Dudley once he’d made his way to the living room and found the boy reading the first volume of Akira.
Manga were slowly making their way in Europe, for the moment still holding the form of graphic novels rather than the small booklets they’d be in a few years when publishers decided to save on costs.
“Is it true that they read it from right to left in Japan?” Dudley asked curiously, flipping to the next page.
“Yeah,” Harry muttered as he went to the water pitcher on the coffee table to pour himself a glass in the pastel-red living room.
“But the story doesn’t make sense that way, I checked!” Dudley exclaimed with furrowed brows.
“They mirror the images for the American market, which is where I got this thing,” Harry paused. “Or they cut the panels and reassemble them, I’m not sure.”
Dudley snorted, a bit of his snot landing on the page. “That’s funny!” he exclaimed.
Harry grimaced. With magic he wasn’t going to have to worry about money in the future, but that first edition comic was still going to be worth around 400€ in the future. Thank Merlin for reparo.
“Breakfast’s almost done!” Petunia shouted from the kitchen, causing Harry to wander over and look at his aunt bustling around the slightly smaller space.
“Can I get a coffee?” he asked, looking at the moccapot on the stove which was seductively glinting its metallic chrome at him.
Petunia paused in her cutting of what looked like a whole family of carrots and turned to look at him, blowing a strand of fake blond hair from her face.
“You drink coffee now?” she asked.
Harry couldn’t really tell her he’d snuck into St. Mungos to check up on his friend in the very early morning, before the sun had even come up.
“Flavor’s growing on me,” he said instead.
“Suit yourself!” Petunia exclaimed and poured him a medium into the blue and red FC Barcelona mug.
Harry took it, wondering if he should wake up early again one day to conveniently lose the abomination one of Vernon’s colleagues had gifted him. Then he had an idea and twitched his fingers on the cup, recolouring it to proudly show the colours of AC Milan instead.
AC Milan next year, Ajax after, then Juventus, as it should be. He nodded, satisfied, before opening the fridge and unloading an ungodly amount of whipped cream into his coffee, before topping the whole thing with chocolate flakes, cinnamon, nutmeg, and marshmallows.
“That’s not coffee,” he heard Petunia mutter as he left the kitchen straight into the small front-yard of their house to look at the street to take in the fresh air.
Harry took a sip from his abominaco americo and sighed in content. “Now that's a coffee!”
-/-
Long before it became the dreaded monster of the Chamber of Secrets, the basilisk had a deeply unfortunate life. A life that might have been tragic, had it not been so absurd.
It hatched on a Monday.
This was already a bad omen, as nobody liked Mondays. The egg, improperly incubated beneath a particularly unmaternal toad, cracked open to reveal a scrawny, big-eyed snake. The first thing it beheld upon hatching was its own reflection in a polished bit of metal nearby.
It immediately petrified itself.
This set the s/tone for everything that followed.
After eventually thawing out -a process involving a very confused Salazar Slytherin, a kettle, and a, at first improperly brewed mandrake potion- the young basilisk tried to integrate into magical society. Unfortunately, socializing proved difficult. Every attempt at making eye contact ended… poorly. Playdates were short. Friendships were shorter. The Hogwarts robes wouldn’t fit and the basilisk’s crush refused their invitation to Hogsmeade calling it, and I quote “an affront to god.”
Desperate, the basilisk turned to self-improvement. It tried wearing sunglasses. These weren’t invented yet. It tried a blindfold, but kept falling down the stairs. It attempted knitting as a hobby, but had no hands. It went to the gym, but couldn’t inject the steroids due to its tough hide and thus got ostracised by the other gym goers. It even attended a “Confidence for Creatures” seminar, but accidentally petrified the instructor halfway through a breathing exercise on gratefulness.
Matters worsened when it matured and its direct gaze started killing, instead of petrifying. It was forced to drop out of school before graduation, making it unemployable.
“Any experience?” the recruiter would ask.
“Yes,” the basilisk would lie, nervously looking up from the floor.
“Please stop looking at me!”
“I’m not, oh no.”
Another corpse.
Do you have any idea how much food it takes to feed a snake that's a dozen meters long and half a human thick?
A lot.
Do you know how much that food cost?
Also a lot.
Eventually, the basilisk had to rely on the power of guilt-tripping to secure a living. “If you don’t give me a job I’m going to hang myself!” it hissed accusingly at Salazar, who’d been observing the tale with a somewhat baffled expression.
“Would that even work considering your… size?” the monkey-looking asshole replied.
“Are you calling me fat? Fuck you! You brought me into this cursed world, take responsibility damn it!”
“Alright, alright.”
Eventually the basilisk received what it desired, a stable job: live in a secret chamber, scare intruders, and maybe commit the occasional act of terror. It wasn’t glamorous, but it came with job security, a roof over the head, and a meal budget.
The basilisk refused to kill, writing in the contract that all acts of terror would be temporary, in other words, of the petrifying variety. Life was finally looking good.
Obviously that was when Slytherin died, trapping the basilisk in the chamber.
So there it sat, counting the years in a slow hibernating fever dream. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 692, 693… You get the point.
On quiet nights, the basilisk would sometimes stare at a blank stretch of wall, imagine a reflection, and sigh.
Then some assholes came to kill it.
The End.
-/-
AN: It wasn’t as easy to write a sad backstory for the basilisk as I was expecting! Hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. Kind of a chill chapter, things pick up again in a bit.