Chapter Text
“Get the bacon and sausages ready!” a shrill voice ordered through the wooden door of a cupboard under the stairs of No.4 Privet Drive. “And don’t you dare let it burn, I want everything perfect on Duddykins’ birthday.”
Harry Potter sighed softly. Dudley’s birthday, how could he have forgotten? His cousin hadn’t shut up about all the new toys and computer games he wanted for the past month. Harry found a pair of socks under his bed, gently shooed a spider off them, and pulled them on. Harry didn’t mind spiders, because they ate moths and flies, and because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where he lived.
Dressed in Dudley’s too-large hand-me-downs, Harry opened his cupboard and went down the hall to the kitchen. He was surprised the dining table hadn’t collapsed underneath all the presents. Judging by the size, shape, and sheer amount of boxes, it seemed that Dudley had got the new computer he wanted, along with the video games, the games console, the plastic action figures, the second television and - most out-of-character for Dudley - a racing bike, of all things. Harry gave a mental shrug and went looking for the bacon and the frying pan.
The reason why Dudley wanted a racing bike was beyond him, since Dudley was very fat, had tantrums whenever anyone suggested a diet, and hated exercise. Unless he got to punch someone, that is.
Dudley’s favourite punching-bag was Harry, but the young boy had gotten very good at avoiding being caught. Harry didn’t have a note that stopped him from participating in P.E lessons after all, and though he didn’t look like it, he was very fast. His small size and skinny frame were useful in avoiding Dudley and his gang of friends, who were all big (and stupid) like Dudley, except Dudley was the biggest (and stupidest), so he was the leader. Harry’s ‘running around a corner and climbing out of immediate eyesight’ and ‘run into the park and don’t run out again’ strategies had served him faithfully for over two years now, provided he had enough of a head start.
Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen as Harry was trying to crack the eggs in the pan without burning his fingers.
“Comb your hair!” he barked, by way of a morning greeting. Unlike his relatives’ blonde hair, which was always easily brushed and kept neat so the neighbours wouldn’t think them messy, Harry’s black hair seemed to have an aversion to neatness, and simply grew all over the place, like the stubborn dandelions in the lawn that Aunt Petunia hated.
Harry was taking food out of the pans by the time Dudley and his mother arrived in the kitchen. Dudley looked a lot like his father; a large, pink face, small, watery blue eyes, not much neck and thick blond hair. Aunt Petunia often said he looked like a baby angel - Harry privately thought Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.
While Dudley was counting his presents, Harry made room on the table for the breakfast, setting out the toast, bacon and fried eggs onto the three plates with practised efficiency. Dudley’s face fell, and Harry, sensing an impending tantrum, shoved a spare grilled tomato in his mouth and began chewing furiously just in case Dudley turned the table over.
“Thirty-seven,” he said, looking at his parents. Harry surreptitiously put some bacon in his pocket. Score two. “That’s four less than last year.”
“Sweetums, you haven’t counted Auntie Marge’s present, see, here, it’s under this big one from Mummy and Daddy.”
“Thirty-eight, then.” Toast between his teeth (score three!), Harry began his careful retreat out of thrown-objects-range. His Aunt obviously saw the wind changing too, because she quickly added;
“And we’ll buy you another three presents while we’re out today. How’s that, darling? Three more presents, is that alright?”
Dudley held up his fingers to count, and thought - presumably quite hard - for a moment. Eventually, he said slowly; “Then I’ll have thirty… thirty…”
“Forty-one, popkin,” his mother said, as the telephone rang.
“Oh,” Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest wrapped box. “All right then,”
Harry chewed his stolen toast surreptitiously in the corner, and watched Dudley unwrap his numerous presents, including, but not limited to; the mystifying racing bike, a cinema-grade camera, and a remote-control aeroplane. Harry would’ve bet five pounds Dudley would crash it within ten minutes, if he’d had any money.
Dudley also got a video recorder, even though he had shown no interest in photography or film, aside from television. The card’s envelope said it was from his grandfather Jeff, likely a companion gift to go with the cine-camera his grandmother Henrietta had sent, which was quite thoughtful. It was a pity Dudley would probably never use, or think about it, beyond today - he hadn’t even opened the cards.
Harry once again pushed down his jealousy, and the futile hope that he could get presents or mail sent to him one day, and started on washing the frying pan.
Dudley was snacking on jam-slathered toast as he tore the paper off a gold wristwatch when Aunt Petunia returned from the telephone, her face betraying a mixture of anger and worry.
“I’ve got bad news, Vernon,” she said. “Mrs Figg’s broken her leg - she can’t take him,” Petunia gestured at Harry. Dudley’s jaw dropped in horror, but Harry lifted his head from the washing up hopefully.
On Dudley’s birthday, each year, his parents took him and a friend out for the day, to theme parks, cinemas or fancy hamburger bars. And every year, Harry was left behind with Mrs Figg, a nice but somewhat mad old lady who lived two streets away.
Aside from her whole house smelling of cabbage, and the numerous knick-knacks and cat photographs everywhere, staying with the ‘Harrysitter’ was better than being locked in the cupboard - even if she always watched him closely as if he was going to steal something. Her flat-faced cats sometimes let Harry stroke them, he often got scones or stale cake to eat, and she let him look at her weird old books or draw with some ancient colour pencils. It was unfortunate that Mrs Figg broke her leg, and Harry figured he ought to feel sorry for her. But, he reminded himself, if he was careful, he might be able to be left alone in the house!
“We could call Marge,” Vernon suggested.
“Don’t be silly, Vernon, she can’t stand the boy.”
The Dursleys often spoke about Harry as if he wasn’t there - or rather, as though he was something very nasty that couldn’t understand them, like a snail or a slug.
“What about your friend, er, Yvonne?” Vernon said.
“On holiday in Majorca,”
“You could just leave me here,” Harry offered hopefully.
Aunt Petunia looked as if she’d been force-fed a lemon.
“And return to the house in ashes?” she hissed.
“I won’t burn down the house," he replied, quietly affronted, but they were ignoring him again.
“...We could take him to the zoo, and leave him in the car…”
“That car’s brand new, he’s not sitting in it by himself - ”
As if he’d been given a cue card, Dudley began to cry, loudly. He wasn’t actually crying, he hadn’t had the need to actually cry for years, but he’d learnt (rather quickly for Dudley) that if he screwed up his face and wailed his mother and father would agree to his every wish.
“Duddydums, don’t cry, Mummy won’t let him spoil your birthday!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms around him.
“I…d-don’t want… him to come!” Dudley yelled between big pretend sobs. “H-he a-always spoils everything!” he blubbed while giving Harry a nasty smirk through his mother’s embrace.
Harry spitefully calmed himself with the knowledge of the pilfered bacon in his pocket.
The doorbell rang moments later.
“Good Lord, they’re here!”
Dudley’s best friend (read: Harry’s most hated tormentor) Piers Polkiss entered with his mother, and Dudley stopped pretending to cry at once. Polkiss was usually the friend who held people’s arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them.
Half an hour later, Harry couldn’t believe his luck. He was sitting in the Dursleys’ new car with Piers and Dudley, with his contraband bacon, on the way to the zoo for the first time in his life.
Before they’d left, Uncle Vernon had put his large purple face in Harry’s;
“I’m warning you now, boy, any freakish nonsense, anything at all - and you’ll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas.”
“I won’t do anything,” said Harry, “honest…”
But his Uncle didn’t believe him - no one ever did. Strange things often happened around Harry and it was no good explaining that he couldn’t explain how they happened. He’d gotten into terrible trouble for being found on the roof of the school kitchens, for example. Dudley’s gang had been chasing him around as usual, when, to Harry’s surprise as anyone else’s, there he was, lying on the roof, out of reach. The Dursleys had received an irate letter from Harry’s headmistress telling them Harry had been climbing school buildings. But all he’d meant to do (as he shouted to his Uncle through the locked door of his cupboard afterwards) was jump behind the bins outside the kitchen doors. Harry couldn’t think of any plausible explanation, and thankfully no-one had questioned him further, secure in the young delinquent story his relatives had spread.
The zoo was the most amazing thing Harry had ever seen in his life, a rush of sounds and sights from a wide variety of perplexing and extraordinary creatures. Whether it was the lazy, lethal grace of the Zoo’s pair of orange-and-black striped Bengal Tigers, the tall, gentle, seemingly stretched giraffes, the antics of the penguins, otters and monkeys, or the delicate, jewel-bright wings of the butterflies in the Butterfly House, Harry gawked at them all in wonder and astonishment.
Currently, he was trailing after Piers and Dudley in the reptile house, trying his best to be ignored by them.
He peered in at a large glass tank, careful not to touch or bump the glass, like a zookeeper had said earlier. After a bit of careful searching, he saw a small greenish tail sticking out of a log.
Smiling at successfully catching a glimpse, Harry looked over the photograph attached to the sign, reading underneath his breath. “Boomslang,” he sounded out, “means “tree snake” in Dutch and Af-, um, Af-ri-kaans, and is native to sub-sa-ha-ran Africa.”
The snake in the photo had shiny brown and yellow scales, overlapping like a knight’s armour. He was coiled around the stem of a green-leaved, tropical plant, healthy and muscular, like a coiled spring.
Harry pressed his fingers against the plastic sign as he read; apparently they had a highly venomous bite…
The image was so bright and vivid, the serpent’s eyes so bright and large, venomous fangs bared so proudly, it was almost as if the photo was alive, and he could be bitten at a moment’s notice.
He wondered if that snake knew it was being photographed, or the photographer was just amazing.
“He ssspeaksss…” a quiet voice whispered, and Harry nearly banged his head on the glass, so urgently did he look around for the owner of the voice. Neither the Dursleys or Piers were visible, thankfully. There was a small family consisting of two little girls and their father or uncle, cooing at geckos some distance away, and a bored reptile house keeper taking notes on the equally-bored Mangshan viper down the corridor…
“In here.” Dry-mouthed, Harry turned back to the tank, where the Boomslang was sticking their little brownish-green head out of the log.
“Hello there.”
Harry stared.
“What?” he whispered.
“Whatever do you mean, “what?”? It is polite to reply to those who greet you, scruffy human.”
The snake had…talked?
Harry looked around him again - no-one seemed to be watching. The little family had moved on, and the reptile keeper was as bored as ever, though how that was Harry didn’t understand, as snakes could apparently talk and -
Oh. Right.
He looked back at the tank.
The snake. The snake that could talk. The snake that had called him a scruffy human. The snake that was ….waiting for a reply and flicking its tail in… Annoyance?
Just to verify, Harry leaned closer and whispered; “Sorry, my name’s Harry Potter. I didn’t know snakes could talk.”
“Of course I can talk!” the Boomslang replied, seemingly miffed. “All snakes can talk, and in our own refined tongue, I might add. None of that noisy barking and chattering you humans use.”
Harry adjusted his glasses and blinked at the snake, who didn’t blink back - snakes didn’t have eyelids.
“Oh. Are we not speaking English?” Harry said, confused.
“... No, scruffy human, we are speaking in Parseltongue, the common language that all serpent-kind are born with.” the Boomslang explained patiently, slithering over to the glass, tongue flicking in curiosity.
“Oh.” said Harry. “But I’m a person, not a snake. How come we can talk?”
“Snakes consider themselves people, Harrypotter, just as humans, scruffy or not, do, and you will do well to remember as such.” the snake rebuked.
Harry curled inwards on himself a little. It seemed the awful manners Aunt Petunia was always berating him for stretched to conversations with snakes too. “Oh. Sorry. I… I guess that makes sense.”
“Apology accepted.” The snake’s hissing tone seemed to soften. “Even rude, scruffy humans must ask questions, I suppose.”
Harry frowned. There wouldn’t be many other snakes to talk to, would there? “How long have you been here?”
“I am uncertain. I believe it to be several moons. I have escaped my previous prisons with relative ease, but have yet to find a way out of this boring box.”
Harry felt a pang of sympathy - he knew what it was like to be trapped.
“Regardless, you are not a snake, for no snake would have such a weak jaw.” the Boomslang hissed, seemingly amused. “You, Harrypotter, are a Parselmouth.”