06.18.2003

Until that summer, there had only been three and a half Parseltongues in the history of wizarding Britain -- first, Salazar, the original, followed by Tom Riddle in the 1930s. Harry Potter in the 1980s, perhaps as a result of Tom, and Ginny in the 1990s, most definitely as a result of Tom Riddle.

The thing was, though, that Ginny hadn't really become a Parseltongue. She knew it well enough in the first months and weeks after his possession of her finished, but her mastery of it had been slipping from her, word by word and sound by sound ever since then. She used to be able to string entire paragraphs together; in the beginning, she could have made speeches to the garter snakes in the Burrow garden if she'd wanted to, but by the time the summer of her sixteenth year comes along, she's forgotten most of what happened to her in the year with Tom. She only knows a handful of phrases in Parseltongue.

;

The hints that a Parseltongue was resurgent in the Weasley family had been coming for weeks: first, the garden gnomes started to show up with curious sorts of bites on them. Chunks taken out of them. Mr. Weasley was coming back from a night raid one night and found a gnome finger lying in the pathway up to the house - long and grey-green and still sort of twitching. There wasn't much blood on the gravel, nor was there any sign of the gnome, so Mr. Weasley just wrapped it up in a bit of a kerchief and gave it to Mrs. Weasley over the breakfast table, and after dinner, she let Ron test out some of the Vivifying Potion he had made in class on it.

After that, though, the cat that Mrs. Weasley kept to keep down the mice disappeared. Two or three of the hens stopped laying, then a few more of them stopped, and in about a month, the whole flock had stopped cold. There wasn't an egg to be had, and the best locating charms that Mrs. Weasley dug up out of Ye Old Bag of Householde Tricks couldn't find anything after.

In fact, a few of the chickens started to shed feathers and look generally poorly. That, though, might have been from the stress of Mrs. Weasley dosing them with mineral potions twice a day, just in case it was some sort of deficiency that was keeping them from laying. Mrs. Weasley doses them so much, in fact, that they turn into feathery bags of nerves, prone to temporarily turning into stalagmites whenever they're startled.

Molly is so grim about it, though, that no-one dared to make any jokes about it. Nobody even suggests that it's her efforts that were turning the chickens into stones -- nobody mentioned it; nobody breathes a word or so much as cracks a smile about it, just as nobody cracks a smile about having Ginny being hard on chickens, too, especially roosters, and so, the chickens go on declining. The gnome finger goes on twitching in its bowl of Vivifying Potion, and the summer turns muggy and almost unbearably hot.

Ginny actually develops circles underneath her eyes from worry. She takes to tying her wrist to her bed frame with a little bit of string at night so that she can tell if she gets up during the night. Also sneaks Bill's old class recorder-charm out of his trunk upstairs and sets it down on the floor at night with her to see if she's talking Parsel in her sleep.

;

Late one afternoon, Mrs. Weasley wants to do a bit of charm-cleaning in the house, and even though Ginny is wary of going into the back garden now, Mrs. Weasley coaxes her to go sit in the front yard and get a bit of sun. She fixes Ginny up some lemonade and gets her an old cushion to sit on and spends about fifteen minutes talking to her and soothing her until Ginny agrees to go out.

Ginny doesn't get ten steps away from the front door, though, before she drops her book and screams so loudly that Mr. Weasley drops his tools and comes running out of the shed in back.

The old cat that had run away had come back, and it looked like she had been on her way back to the Burrow, perhaps to have the kittens that they find her swollen up with. Therefore, Ginny finds her lying on the front path, much in the same place where her father found the gnome finger, with all the life squeezed out of her, and what looks like snake tracks laid down in the dust nearby.

That afternoon, Ginny goes to her father's workshop that night and puts a Muggle deadbolt on her door. She puts it on the outside of her door and ties a string to the knob - the string stretches through her door, and at night, Ginny yanks on the string until the deadbolt snicks home, then cuts the string so that she's locked in at night. After that, Ginny goes and turns on the recording charm, and then she ties her wrist to the bedframe.

In the morning, her father has to let her out of her room and give her a hand with the string because Ginny's thrashed around during the night and ended up binding her wrist to the headboard so tightly that her fingers are a little purple.

In the morning, there are dozens of snake tracks in the garden, and half the chickens are gone.

;

The topic of learning Parseltongue comes up in conversation at the end of the year. Ginny, Hermione, and Ron are all riding in a clicking railway compartment together, with the door shut, and the shades rolled up so they can see the British countryside flying by outside.

"I hope Harry's having a decent time," Ginny says, shifting a little uncomfortably. She has her arms wrapped around her knees, and she's wearing her school sweater even though it's getting on in June, but she's been prone to getting cold easily. "I bet it's not fun to get taken off by Dumbledore and have to spend all summer at school, even if he'd have to go back to those beastly relatives of his if he got that special dispensation. A summer of potions with Snape is no fun at all, and he has to learn all those spells and charms and languages."

She looks at Hermione as she says this. Hermione is reading one of the class texts for next year, and she just sort of shrugs noncommittally. In fact, though Ron knows that she's secretly glad to be heading home because she misses her parents and is looking forward to holidays with them. It's Ron who answers, though.

Ron has been picking at his mustard sandwich in sort of a half-hearted way, and he answers even though he won't look at Ginny while he does it. "Well," he says, " I'm sure he'll be quite comfortable and cozy in his own cottage at school, and, really. Neither Harry nor you seemed to have too hard a time picking up Parseltongue."

Hermione shuts her book then and looks up with a wrinkle between her eyebrows. "Harry didn't learn Parseltongue, Ron. Ginny learned Parseltongue, and she's forgotten it. In order to know animal languages like that and remember then, you have to have it in your bones. And anyways, they moved Harry after you said goodbye to him. He's in another part of the school now."

;

The night after the afternoon with the cat, Ginny is almost hysterical. She's convinced that she's speaking Parseltongue in her sleep even though the recording charm hasn't picked up anything, and she refuses to go to bed by herself because she's terrified that she'll wander out of her room and kill them all in their sleep - Mrs. Weasley points out that there's no reason to think that she's a danger to anyone, but Ginny refuses to go to bed and gets so wide-eyed and white-faced that she won't lie down and close her eyes until Mrs. Weasley threatens to make her drink some sleeping potion that will knock her out.

"It's not like speaking Parseltongue is a crime, Ginny," Mr. Weasley tells her, stroking her hair. "And we know you haven't been doing anything wrong. So just go to sleep: it doesn't matter that the recording charm didn't pick up anything. It's ten years since it was last used, after all."

So Ginny goes to bed as a wreck of nerves that night, and it's only about two hours later that she starts screaming again.

Her parents forbade her to tie a string around her hand because she'd gotten so badly tangled up in it the night before, and since she couldn't sleep, she got up out of her bed and went to the window to look out at the lawn to try and calm herself. When she sees what's there, though, Ginny screams and screams until her eyes are half-bugged out of her head, and her parents have to go tearing over to her room to try and get her out of the window and to stop that wailing.

What Ginny sees is, instead of lawn or flower-borders or a vegetable garden - what she sees instead is a solid massed carpet of snakes. Snakes in the trees, snakes in border, snakes so numerous that the moon glinting off their scales makes the lawn look like a field of a silver. It's a mesmerizing sight, and when Molly has Ginny wrapped up in a blanket and has cast a calming charm on her to keep her from screaming anymore, Arthur sticks his head out the window to have another look at the shivering, undulating mass of snakes.

There's an odd sort of strangled sound, then, while he has his head out the window, and Arthur twists around and sees Ron hanging out of his own bedroom window, staring and blinking and mouthing obscenities silently underneath his breath. He has a queer, queer expression on his face, and he's taking shallow little breaths, too.

"It's a sight, isn't it?" Arthur says up to Ron, then. "There's nothing to be scared of, my boy. Nothing to be scared of at all."

The Prophet the next morning is full of the news that Voldemort has besieged the Hogwarts building itself due to having slipped through some small, henceforth unknown breach in the Hogwarts magical defenses that took them within a stone's throw of the location where Harry Potter would have been sleeping if he hadn't been studying late with Dumbledore. "We have reports," the article read, "That the Boy Who Lived had shifted his quarters several times, but this Death Eater attack came right on top of his latest location."

The Death Eaters had erred in not checking to make sure that Harry had been in his quarters before they attacked, but Arthur Weasley had also made a mistake, too: the look on Ron's face the night before hadn't been fear or worry, and Ron can't quite keep the little quaver of hope out of his voice when he asks whether there's anything in the newspaper that morning.

;

Until that summer, there had only been three and a half Parseltongues in the history of wizarding Britain -- first, Salazaar, the original, followed by Tom Riddle in the 1930s. Harry Potter in the 1980s, perhaps as a result of Tom, and Ginny in the 1990s, most definitely as a result of Tom Riddle.

After that summer, there were four and a half Parseltongues in the history of wizarding Britain - there's Salazaar, first, of course. Then, there's Tom in the thirties, and Harry in the eighties. Ginny still comes along in the nineties, but what's different now is that four years after Ginny learns Parseltongue, Ron learns Parseltongue. He's the only one who volunteered to learn the language, and the only man in history to learn the language and to remember it until his dying day - Ron Weasley

Hermione was right, in a way. People can't teach themselves the language of animals; learned men who have tried have managed to cram a few basic words into their heads and maybe a grammatical construction or two, but as soon as they close their eyes and go to sleep, it's all out of their heads. There are some gifts that aren't meant to be taught, and Parseltongue is one of them - the ability to speak it is rooted deep in of the person who speaks it. This is why Ginny was able to speak it when Tom was worming himself into her mind and body and soul, and it's why she started forgetting it as soon as he left. That little seed of darkness that made it possible for her to command the basilisk flew away and out of her when Harry destroyed the diary.

Hermione was, in another way, though, wrong. It is possible to learn a language like Parseltongue in another way. It is possible to acquire a language like Parseltongue and to keep it through the rest of your life: it can't come out of a grammar book, though, or any sort of pronunciation exercises.

No, what has to happen is that you have to get your hands on somebody who's a Parseltongue already. Someone who is a Parseltongue down to the last bone of their body, and what they have to do is then burned with letters and sigils of fire and treachery into not your bones, but the other lasting part of you, your soul -- or rather, in Ron's case, in the black space where you used to have a soul before envy swallowed it whole.