Harry Potter And The Descent Into Darkness

Chapter 2

The rest of the school treated him... oddly after that.

Everyone was still staring at him, but the looks were wary and hesitant. The Slytherins, especially, were all giving him strange looks. They weren't taunting him nearly as much though, and for that he was grateful. The Hufflepuffs still glared angrily at him. He figured it was a mixture of them not trusting someone with such a blatantly dark talent, combined with the fact that his near-perfect performance only put Cedric's performance that much more into the shadows of obscurity.

The fact that every time one of them scowled at him, he responded by smirking smugly at them, probably didn't help much either, but he liked goading a reaction out of them. Anytime one of them actually got the guts to try and say something obnoxious to him, or show off one of those idiotic Potter Stinks badges, he'd hiss at them, and they'd practically wet their pants trying to get away.

Harry laughed at how ridiculously terrified the children at school seemed to be of parseltongue. He also delighted in his new discovery of the parseltongue magics he had access to.

It was a wonder to him that he'd never realized he could do it before. But he acknowledged to himself that before very recently, he had tried to pretend with all his might that he didn't possess the strange dark skill at all. He had wanted so badly to just be normal that he had completely ignored the powerful skill.

But he no longer feared it. It was a dead useful ability. The most remarkable thing he discovered about calling on his magic using parseltongue was that he had no need to use a wand when he did it. A quiet hiss and a little wiggle of his fingers and he could direct the ebb and flow of his magic in dozens of different ways.

Harry realized that his new knowledge and awareness of the parselmagic had undoubtedly come from the dark presence in his mind, and it got him wondering. Was the dark presence the source of his ability to use parseltongue?

If it were, he realized that the prospects were mildly concerning. The headmaster had told him at the end of his second year, that Harry had gained some of Voldemort's powers the night the man had given him his scar. Was the dark presence those powers that he had gotten from Voldemort?

It would certainly explain why he might have been afraid of the power when he was younger. If the dark presence was associated with his parent's murder. But there didn't seem to be anything about it to fear now. It was his power now. He didn't care where it had come from originally. He wasn't going to be afraid of it any longer. He wasn't going to hide from it, or exert all his energy fighting against it when it wasn't even a threat.

Embracing it was so much easier and it made him so much stronger. He felt better. Happier. More confident. His magic came to him with incredible ease, and it was so much more powerful. His mind worked better and he understood things so much faster.

He refused to give that up just because the power might have originally come from Voldemort. So what. It was his power now. It was his and he wasn't going to give it up. He liked it too much. It felt too good.

Still, when Harry went to bed that night and wrapped himself in the presence, he told it of his concerns. His theory on where it had come from. His assumption that the power had once been Voldemort's before it became Harry's. The presence didn't respond much. It seemed hesitant, and Harry almost got the impression that it was worried.

The presence didn't want to be separated from Harry again. It was afraid that Harry would build the walls back up and it would be left alone again. Harry could just sense that this was true and quickly assured the presence that he had no intention of rebuilding the wall.