Work Text:
The thing is, that even after that year- that year, which is blocked off in her memory by the sharp knives of t and h, wrapped carefully like one of her mother’s Christmas jumpers and dripping of ink, the memory of red blood and feathers on her hands and sibilant consonants on her tongue, that year which must always be that year- even after that year she can still talk to snakes.
She found out by accident. She had walked out of the Chamber into a summer that seemed too bright, meant to restore color to her Weasley hair and freckles, forgetting how she had hidden in shadow all the past year, blending into the background, feeling the chill of castle walls, Chamber floor. Over the summer she had stolen her brother’s brooms and gone flying, wanting to feel the air whistling beneath her feet, wanting to feel powerful. (She was a tiny bit afraid she had felt powerful with KILL hissing under her tongue, but she couldn’t remember either way. Anyway, that was never her power, just a loan of it. With the worst kinds of interest.) But there was a little voice in the back of her head, remembering Harry’s Quidditch skills and how she had nearly killed him. He, the bedtime story she had been told as a child, had saved her. Had saved himself from her, and he must hate her now. The voice sounded like Tom. She wavered, and fell, and slid into the grass, got dirt on her clothes. Hissed an exclamation of pain to herself under her breath, and a small garden snake hissed back. Something about hunting rats and strange magic. A small exhalation of sympathy for her pain. She had understood, still. Parseltongue was supposed to have died in the Chamber with her (Tom’s) diary.
She ran inside, not even putting the broom back, and tried desperately to pretend she had been spooked by the hissing of the wind. And then her father won the Daily Prophet Galleon Draw and they went far away to Egypt as if the whole of that year could be dropped and left behind in England. At the home that had once been a home and now become an almost-living symbol of her guilt, crooked fingers around every corner, whispering about Dark magic and how it seemed to have burrowed (ha!) into her chest, how she worried she jinxed too quickly and too well, how Parseltongue is the mark of a dark witch. (But she wasn’t supposed to think about that.)
Tom, you see, had left bits of himself inside her even when he was killed. He had spent that whole year filling the empty spaces left by her thoughts. He had invaded. Grown like a cancer. He had left the whisper of his advice in the darkest corners of her mind. He had left bits of her knife-sharp temper. He had left Parseltongue. She was almost glad when they went to Grimmauld Place and there were no snakes and no gardens.
It was words, she gave to him and he took. (It was words, some of them, he left. But she doesn’t think about them.) Thick ink like blood. She started using multicolored quills, purple and blue and green, in her second year, but never black, never red. And it was words, she uses to drag herself back up. She shoots down his little asides in her brain and hones that temper into a quill-point, learns the art of the witty retort and the art of the things said when not said, pruning practices that ought to be prohibited, naming Dumbledore’s Army for the Ministry’s worst fear. She begins to write poetry. She is glad Parseltongue cannot be put on a page. She knows how words have power.
When Tom comes back, she not-thinks very hard about the bits of him inside her, how sometimes she can’t bear to look at Hermione Granger without seeing her unmoving in the infirmary. She is glad there is no opportunity, that year, to speak to snakes- until Harry’s vision, the frantic heart-pounding trip to the hospital, her father’s pale sick face. Tom’s pet snake’s venom in his veins. Harry worries about being possessed. She is loud about everything- those once unheard learn to shout well- except how she shares the same guilt, as if being able to communicate with the species that hurt her father caused the attack, somehow. Or, she thinks, somehow, if she could have stopped it, even though the basilisk never listened to her, only to Tom.
When Tom comes back, she, having once been his tool, fights him with every ounce of her being. After the Department of Mysteries, she wonders what place she has on his hit list.
It’s irony-adjacent, her dating Harry. The only other good Parselmouth she knows, her savior in the Chamber (besides, she is beginning to think, her own fighting), the other person who knows Tom’s mind and his cruelty and his marks. Still, she cannot bear to tell him of the way snake-speak still rolls off her tongue like an ocean wave. Still, Parseltongue is a trauma, not a power. There is no use for it but guilt and pain. When, at the end of the year, Harry breaks up with her and leaves to kill Tom’s soul, she is glad she never told him. Wants him not to have to look at her and see a reflection of his enemy.
Now, for all her life but that year- and even, sometimes, that year, because the monster in the castle was not attacking her except in her mind, she was the one with the monster- the castle has always been safe. Hogwarts feels like home, even a guilty one. Kingsley’s patronus and Death Eaters interrupt her brother’s wedding. Still, she goes to school. For all five years of her education she has been able to trust that she will get help at Hogwarts.
Sixth year, though. Sixth year is different. It already has the makings of a new that year in the Cruciatus never far from the Carrows’ tongues.
It starts when she gets on the train, to find that the little muggleborn firsties, not knowing any better, have been escorted out “for their own safety.” She doesn’t like the audible quotation marks. Remembers the honey lies of Umbridge. That year, the train is dark, clouds as they ride. Wind not powerful on a broom, not hissing like a snake, but pounding like curses. In the entrance hall of Hogwarts there are posters decrying Harry as Undesirable No. 1. She meets Luna Lovegood’s eyes, Luna who also knows the power of words from cruel taunts, their father’s magazine, when they realized they needed to be called they. She meets Neville Longbottom’s, Neville who is trying to be Harry and Ron with Harry on the run and Ron with “spattergroit.”
She rips the posters down that night. Amycus Carrow, their new Dark Arts teacher (no one is bothering with the Defense Against part) catches her. She gets detention.
The Cruciatus is about as bad as having your own autonomy removed, waking up with blank spots and inky, bloody fingers. Especially when cast repeatedly.
As she, shaking, walks back to her dorm, not even bothering to avoid Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom as she usually does, she sees a snake slithering through the halls. She asks it what it is doing.
“Seeking warmth,” it replies.
Tom is famous for his Parseltongue. But she’ll bet more than her brothers ever did to Ludo Bagman that he might remember Harry, but he’s forgotten about the third Parselmouth (as far as she knows) in Great Britain. His soldiers will not be looking for snakes.
She tells Luna and Neville she has a safe way of communicating, of looking out. Luna, who has always been called strange, immediately adopts one of the snakes as their new pet. Parseltongue is so fascinating, they tell her. They wonder if Nargles know it. Neville, once dropped out a window for being a Squib, is sympathetic to non-standard forms of magic. He points out warm spots in the greenhouses. And she?
Well. At first, it felt wrong to have those long hisses tripping so easily like stones skipping on water across her tongue again. To rely on Tom again- except she is not relying on Tom. She is relying on herself. She is relying on piecing together like a puzzle of a complicated spell the little scraps of information the snakes- no, her snakes- give her. She is relying on her own words to come up with slogans to paper over Death Eater propaganda. She is relying on her own bravery, her own quiet feet and nasty hexes, her heart to not stop beating.
One of her snakes, from the Forbidden Forest, has met Tom too. It tells her that she is a much better Speaker. They end up commiserating in Parseltongue over mutual bad Death Eater experiences- and she learns where Tom is staying this week, passes the information on. Hears via Potterwatch of an Order raid, and smiles to herself, the secret kind, the proud kind, the victorious kind she thought she’d lost in the Chamber.
She gives her snakes treats, and warm places to stay in the winter, and the Carrows put up a poster in the Entrance Hall with Harry’s face on it, this time with other posters of muggleborns on the run. She, Neville, and Luna rip them down. This time, no one receives detention because a snake was hiding in the castle walls and hissed to her when the Carrows approached. She still has tremors, from the Cruciatus. This is still another that year.
But Parseltongue, which once hurt her, which once unmade her and made her remake herself, has become a weapon on her tongue, as good as a wand. It is her weapon. Tom left parts of himself behind and never expected they would be stolen, reappropriated. Made from Dark to light. She has turned what once made her unsafe into a tool she can use to guarantee her safety. The safety of others, when a muggleborn fourth year’s false papers are found out and a snake overhears the Carrows plotting to go after them. She, Neville, and Luna teach the children of Death Eaters and pureblood supremacists Muggle songs to sing, how to pass information, and healing spells for their detentions in the Room of Requirement. She thinks of snakes in the grass, how the best weapons are the ones you least expect. The ones that were thrown at you and that you turned around.
When Luna is taken off the Hogwarts Express, coming back from Christmas, she is puking in the bathroom when the snake Luna adopted comes to tell her that Luna is still alive, the last it saw, because Death Eaters tend to think the only Parselmouth in England is Tom and didn’t bother to search them for pets. Luna is shaken up but alive, the snake reports. They are being held in Malfoy Manor.
As of this moment, there is nothing she can do. But the future? She cries and cries and keeps Luna’s snake close to her at all times and plans an attack on Malfoy Manor and sends via snake- the DA coins are too possibly compromised- a message to Neville to have this term’s first DA meeting.
When Death Eaters meet in Hogwarts, as she burns in the Room of Requirement with fury about those bastards in her school, her snakes are listening. When Potterwatch reports a sudden rash of Order raids and an escape of muggleborns from Azkaban, she gives each of her snakes a special treat. When first years are being chained up, she hears hissing in the walls in the middle of Transfiguration and does not think of that year but of the power and responsibility she now has, and comes up with a rescue plan. The winter is especially cold this year, but she knows how to seek warmth.
The battle comes. In the heat of the fighting, she is pretty sure Tom never noticed how a viper killed the Death Eater who killed Fred.
After the war ends- if wars ever end- and after the second iteration of that year, she gets a tattoo. Tom has made marks on her, never physical. She has learned how to make marks on herself, writes a poem (in a Muggle notebook because she’ll never quite trust magical ones) about the new snake tattoo on her ankle. Where it can warn her, keep her safe because she will never stop looking over her shoulder for Tom and Carrows, but where she can take off her socks and remember how she has made herself again. She shows it to Harry, hisses an explanation in Parseltongue. For a couple of moments, he blinks, even looks scared, probably remembering his own experiences with Parseltongue and the now-finally-dead Tom. Then, he tells her about a vanishing zoo glass and the first thing that ever called him friend. She tells him to get a tattoo next to Umbridge's I must not tell lies.
She gives Luna back their snake. Then, she goes to the shop and buys a new one.
“What’s your name?” she hisses to the animal in the display case. “My name is Ginny.”