Archive of Our Own

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The dusky stones wavered beneath his spell-covered lips parted and a strangled hiss gurgled from the back of his throat, rolling along his tongue and falling from him with familiarity. A thud echoed across the cavern in response.

His mouth quirked, the weakness of a smile spreading across it only for a moment. Only in solitude was it allowed.

He heard the beast coming closer, the sound of its thick body slithering across the rough rock of the chamber, sliding through the occasional puddle.

"My friend," Tom hissed with a laugh, his voice distorted by echo. "You must be hungry."

He dropped the animal held in his hand, letting it fall to the ground with a muffled, wet splat and a splatter of blood. The Hogwarts grounds were crawling with useless creatures. The caretaker wouldn't miss this one chicken.

Darkness spread across the wall stretching up across the curved ceiling as the basilisk edged towards him. And Tom saw her, saw the green of her scales glistening beneath the golden flames. He reached his hand out as she grew closer, his fingers stretching before the snake's large snout and her flicking tongue.

The basilisk eased towards him and he felt the scales beneath his touch. It had taken him years to earn this trust. Years and multiple offerings like the one he had brought with him this time. Now, he could rid this castle of mudblood filth. The wait had been worth it.

He watched the basilisk devour the offering at his feet. It was because of him that she had grown so large. So powerful.

And it was time for another.

She reared back, her body stretching upwards and Tom watched her, his sight — his body — protected by the spell he had cast on himself. It wouldn't do for his grand plan to be foiled if she accidentally turned him into a bloody statue.

"Our time is coming," he sneered. "But you will not be alone."

With his wand clutched in his hand, he raised it upwards, the tip pointed towards the beast's belly.

Tom drew in a breath, a smile bursting across his features, stretching maliciously across his lips.

"Fordus Subito!" His tongue twisted beneath the words of spell, free of the parseltongue that he had used all the while — a language the beast could understand.

Purple sparks streamed from his wand, reflecting against the scales of the basilisk, bathing both of them in mauve light before they were cast into near darkness once more.

It would take only minutes, that much he knew. Soon there would be more. Soon, there would be a multitude of serpents slithering about the castle, through the pipes and cracks that this basilisk before him could not fit. Soon, this place would be free of mudbloods. The half-bloods would be next. His time was coming.

He stared at the basilisk, waiting for a sign that the spell had taken effect. His stomach squirmed slightly in anticipation and shifted uncomfortably.

The beast turned, indifferent to the magic he had cast. With her meal gone, she had no reason to stay. Tom turned away, incapable of seeing through the stone that she would slither behind, and unwelcome in her den. He would return tomorrow, and if there was another basilisk, if his spell had, in fact, worked, then he could try for another. For now, he could only wait, and the comfort of his bed called to him.

His footsteps echoed through the corridor as he traveled back the way he came, his journey otherwise quiet until he met the serpentine pipes that connected to the girls' bathroom, the entrance that was supposedly more accessible than a bloody door. Why Salazar couldn't guard his beast with parseltongue and a magical fucking door, Tom didn't know, but he felt that the levitation spell used to lift him from the chamber and back into the bloody bathroom would only harm his quest for power if anyone happened to see him.

With nausea beginning to brew in his stomach, Tom stumbled from the hole kept hidden behind porcelain and rock, falling momentarily to the floor of the girls' bathroom. With a wave of his wand, the spell meant to protect his eyes fell away, and his surroundings went still. He lay there a moment more until the vomit building in the back of his throat began to quell.

Magic had made him sick before. He attributed it to the dirty genes his father — if the wretched muggle could be called such a thing — had passed on to him. If the person who had fathered him could reject magic, why not Tom's own body? It was a matter he needed to address, but that time would come. This was more important.

He forced himself upwards, clenching the rim of the sink to steady himself for a moment as the weakness he had foolishly allowed to overcome him drained away.

I am the Dark Lord, he told himself. People will know my name. They will fall to their knees when they see me. The thought lifted his shoulders and straightened his back, and he strode with purpose from the girls' lavatory and into the darkness of the Hogwarts halls.

He didn't need a Lumos to guide him. The soles of his feet had memorized every corridor, every room. Hogwarts was his home. And he had wandered the castle often enough in his six years here that, now, the light of the spell would only give him away.

He walked with only snoring paintings and the occasional star-strewn window leading him through the darkness, guiding his descent into the dungeon until he was faced with the unrelenting stone wall behind which his dormitory lay.

"Myrddin," he whispered, the letters of Merlin's true name soft beneath his tired breath. The wall before him shuddered with movement, sliding open to permit him entrance. He was welcomed by the remains of a fire, the flickers of flames now glowing embers.

He crossed only one more room, one more hallway, and then it was there: his bed. It was suddenly the most glorious sight his eyes had ever happened upon, garish green curtains and all.

With a quick changing of his robes, Tom fell beneath the heavy wool blankets, sleep welcoming him only after one final thought, distant and hallucinatory — the craving of a nice, juicy rat.

His dreams commenced in hisses, in words spelled by parseltongue and visions of green scales so dark they were nearly black. One sound rang out above it all, ricocheting in his tired mind, a name he had heard distantly somewhere before, but that had buried itself in the recesses of his mind to be forgotten until, it seemed, this moment. Now his mind outlined it with importance.

He woke again to darkness, his sleep disrupted by a sudden pain across his abdomen. Tom stared at the ceiling of his four-poster bed, his palms tightened against the sheets in disoriented agony.

He felt his insides turning, pulsating against each other as though they were trying to tear themselves in two. A gasp was torn from him, escaping his throat in a high pitched breath that caused the dorm mate beside him to shift in what Tom hoped was still sleep. It wouldn't do for him to be overheard. Tom clenched his teeth, clapping a hand over his mouth as another wave of pain flooded through him.

Clarity began to pull from the reaches of his mind, and he fumbled for his wand beneath the feathers of his pillow. With a flick, a shimmer of blue fell around him, throwing him into a bubble that muted him from the room and castle beyond. A bubble that would contain every gasp, every protest of pain, as he tried to figure out what the bloody hell was wrong with him.

With a third, and what he begged Merlin to be the last pang in his stomach, Tom's hand fell towards it, toward the cotton of his pathetic PJs that bagged around him, meant for a person much taller and broader than he.

Instead, he found buttons now pulled tight, gaping and exposing the flesh beneath — the flesh, of what he realized, with horror, was him.

Any shriek of horror that could have come from him died beneath astonished confusion. He rubbed at his eyes, willing away the last tendrils of sleep. Surely that was the problem. He had been awake too often, too long, and it had taken its toll. He was seeing things like the bloody divination professor claimed to.

But that wasn't this.

The scene from mere hours ago flashed across his vision, the image of purple reflecting across the great snake's scales before dissipating into the air. With another flash of pain, he knew. Knew what he'd been too afraid to imagine.

It would not be the snake expecting.

No. It was him.

I am the Dark Lord, Tom told himself again, this time with hesitant horror. He was… immune. He was…

Pregnant.

His second hand fell to the ball that had become his stomach, the want of many women — the want that had always disgusted him. Children were wretched things. How could he have one of his own?

One? Is that how many there would be? Salazar, he hoped so. And, how, were they… it… going to… exit?

He felt a pang of fear, the sensation unfamiliar. He was meant to be powerful, and fear made him feel the opposite.

The original spell had been easy enough to create. He had fine-tuned it for the snake herself. It had been successful on the serpents he'd found in the forest, but those hadn't been armored and a second plan had been unnecessary. Hadn't even been considered.

Tom looked at the wand still held in his hand, spells flitting across his mind. Spells that he hoped would end the life growing inside of him, but that he knew would extinguish his as well. There was nothing, and he knew it was useless. Knew, that any further action would have to come after… birth.

The thought of birth seemed to be the worst yet.

His body held a series of holes and Tom was unsure which one this… thing… inside of him would choose. He wished momentarily that it would be his nose. It seemed the least painful, least embarrassing, option when his penis and arsehole also rested on that list.

The pain inside him shifted suddenly downwards, suggesting that his nose was not a possibility and that if there wasn't a hole, whatever this was would make one. the thought of fear, of how his nose - or lack of - would affect others vanished and a new one took its place.

He could feel his lower half stretching, preparing itself for the inevitable. He found himself moving, shifting to make himself more comfortable as every muscle inside of his belly seemed to convulse, the fibers of them stretching, protesting against what he had done.

The world around him blurred. He was wrapped instead in pain that blinded him, that stole his attention from the present and placed him somewhere where he could pretend this was some morbid dream, a laugh at his own existence that could be wiped away.

He succumbed to the fact that this was neither of those things, his delusions ruined by the knowledge that he was a seventeen-year-old boy laying a bloody egg like some fucking chicken.

At least it wasn't human. That much he could tell in its half-birthed state. The spell that had been designed for snakes hadn't changed the creature inside him just because he wasn't one.

With a tortured scream in his silent world and a final push, he was free.

No longer did his stomach swell outwards. His shirt bagged against him once more. It was the waistband of his pants that dug into him now, the back of them pooching outwards. Not once had he thought to get undressed. He had been too preoccupied with labor.

Hastily, Tom pulled his pajama bottoms and the pants beneath free of himself, cradling the egg that they had held gently in his hands.

It was smaller than it had felt. It was almost disappointing. After all that agony, the egg was relatively normal in size. It had felt like it belonged to a bloody ostrich.

The thundering inside his body began to fade away, the pain suddenly distant and not his own. His attention was stolen instead by the egg he cradled against himself. The egg that already began to tremble with life. Fractures spread across its glossy surface, the shell of it breaking away. And Tom was frozen. Frozen by disgust, embarrassment… curiosity.

He watched the cracking of the egg, watched it flake to his bed in bits before a green snake, not all that unlike a basilisk, tumbled from within.

She was soft against the skin of his hands and he stared at her with wonder. She flexed, exploring the parts of her body that hadn't existed for more than a few hours and that, now, he couldn't bear to extinguish. She was not a wailing infant with incessant needs. She was a cornerstone, another part of the foundation for his domination of the wizarding world.

He was grateful for her. Grateful that her existence had come to being in nine hours rather than nine months. Any power that he had dreamed of would have been extinguished had he been destined to waddle around this castle. He would have been awarded with mockery and a fame he had never wanted rather than a dictatorship. It was a monstrous thought, a nightmare he never wished to dream of again.

The name that had flared to life in his dreams pulsated in his mind once again, replacing the nightmare that had come over him, and he knew it was hers without question. He lifted her higher, gazing at her beauty as he spoke, his voice billowing with a renewed power beneath a whispered hiss. "Hello… Nagini."