The Snake and the Emerald Apple

The Dark Ritual

"Keep your mouth wide open, Harry," growled Barty, completely stripped of the 'Moody' disguise.

Meekly, Harry opened his mouth further, trying not to flinch as the older man entered his mouth with a steady hand. Barty held a pair of tweezers between his fingers and a mirror in his other hand, similar to the small round mirrors Harry had seen dentists use.

"Now keep quiet..." the man muttered absently, "Don't move."

The cold mirror pushed Harry's tongue aside as Harry got the impulse to use his tongue to eliminate the poking and stinging sensations the tweezers caused. He swallowed uncomfortably his saliva that collected at the bottom of his mouth and tried to regulate his breathing better.

"Look at that," Barty said with wonder in his voice.

Harry looked at Barty with a questioning look, "Wha- d'ou ssssseee?" he tried to say, his tongue wrestling with the mirror. He was rewarded by a raised eyebrow and low chuckle, but the instruments were eventually withdrawn from his mouth.

"You said you could find additional information about your environment by tasting the air with your tongue, didn't you, Harry?" said Barty quickly, a tinge of excitement in his voice. "And what did you do with your tongue? Did you press it against the roof of your mouth? Precisely.... here?"

"What do you want to do, what- Aargh!!" Startled, Harry pulled his head away from Barty's grasping hands, but the man had already pressed his index finger against a small hole in his palate. Leastwise- hole - it felt more like a dent in his palate that the tip of his tongue fit right into.

"That felt... very uncomfortable!" Harry said, obsessively pushing his tongue against his palate. He could taste exactly what Barty had eaten, what he had drunk, and knew exactly how the man felt. He could literally taste the pheromones the man had been releasing, he knew how he'd felt after having an "invigorating" discussion with Snape- a feeling Harry preferred not to taste.

Barty frolicked energetically around him, his hands fluttering frantically around him. The man looked blissfully at Harry as if Harry had just offered him the most interesting piece of text, ready to parse. "This is unparalleled, never described before..." Barty said, searching through his large pile of parchment. The man let out a cry of happiness when he found an empty piece of parchment and placed it on his desk.

"The implications that such traits can mean to a wizard is... overwhelming! Your description of the mission, the use of this organ in search of the egg- if I can isolate the working part of this gift from your blood, maybe it's repeatable..."

Barty began to write, and Harry seemed to have completely forgotten. Harry used this moment to look through some of Barty's work, very interested in finding out what the man was working on. He found several texts about the ritual they were going to use.

The two worked in silence next to each other, the desk large enough to accommodate two people. Harry understood from Barty's writings that two of the three sacrifices had to be linked to Vol-Tom, this could be done in several ways. The advantage of such sacrifices was that there was no need for physical contact to pass on the powers. All they needed was an anchor, a vessel to transmit the powers of the sacrifices to Tom.

Harry understood from Barty's previous conversations that he was this anchor, a fact Tom had personally told Barty. Harry had felt a twinge of jealousy when Bary told him he was in contact with Tom face-to-face - and hadn't spoken to Barty for the rest of the day out of spite. However, Barty's bubbly and energetic personality had quickly pulled him out of his jealous bubble and was soon back to normal in his interaction with the older wizard.

The last sacrifice was twofold, on the one hand, they had to use the death of the sacrifice to send power to Tom, on the other hand, they had to brew a magic potion to give to Tom. Barty had circled the words "bones" and "blood" on the third sacrifice as well as possible sacrifice options. Harry gulped when he saw that these sacrifices were all human- an option Harry already knew about but had ignored until then for the sake of his own guilt.