Chapter Text
Over the days that followed, the occupants of Dark Headquarters could scarcely say they’d seen their Lord at all. Or Assistant. They were secluded in Sir’s quarters on his private floor of the main building, with its well-stocked kitchen in one room and its vast bathtub in another, and even Nagini got sick of them and their ‘wizard mating rituals’ after the second sunrise spent in bed, grumbling that if Assistant were going to lay eggs he would have done it already, “there’s no need to keep fertilizing them, you beast.”
Assistant had only barely managed to get Sir to “explain” what was making him laugh so hard, before he too gave in to giggles.
...But he kept thinking about it.
He kept thinking about it a lot.
To the point that, some hours later, he went and asked her how, exactly, she’d expected such a thing would work.
Nagini perked up from where she’d coiled herself over an impressive pile of pillows beside the crackling hearth. “So you are trying for hatchlings,” she exclaimed. “See, I’d thought so, with how he’s been behaving - but Voldemort is such a juvenile, he gets too flustered to even discuss it-”
“Er,” said Assistant, with all the prowess of Parseltongue that had been (allegedly) bestowed upon him in that very hot ritual a couple of days ago. (It had involved a lot of kissing.) Whatever he’d intended to say was lost in favor of the question of how exactly had Sir been behaving that Nagini thought he-?
She harrumphed, sprawling out over the pillows and halfway onto the floor with a heavy thunk. “And clearly neither of you have any experience, if it’s taking you this long to be done with the mating process,” she concluded. “I suppose I shall forgive you for pushing me out of the nest with all the noise. Come sit down, Assistant,” which more literally translated to he-who-slithers-beside in Parseltongue, “and the great Nagini will tell you what you need to know.”
Assistant sat.
The next several hours proved… educational.
Lord Voldemort looked up from his outline of the next four Professor Riddle episodes at Assistant staggering into his office and all but flinging himself onto the divan. He remained there, unmoving, for several minutes, shrouded face in his hands.
The Dark Lord set his paperwork aside. “My dear, are you all right?”
“I, erm,” Assistant stammered, slipping absently into Parseltongue in a way that sent a hot shiver down Voldemort’s spine. (It was a most enjoyable sound.) “I think so? I was talking to Nagini…”
This was significant, as Nagini rarely cared to talk to anyone for very long, even him, much less for the three hours it had been since Voldemort last saw Assistant. He stood up and re-seated himself on the end of the divan, the better to card fingers through Assistant’s hair. “And what did you talk about?”
Assistant hesitated, then shifted so his head lay on Voldemort’s thigh. Even through the layers of fabric between them, he could feel the heat burning on Assistant’s cheeks. “...I may have promised to lay eggs by next week?”
Harry’s mind was still whirling with too much information about seasons and hemipenes and mating plugs for him to notice how Sir flinched at his words and went distinctly pink around the face and ears. He barely registered the quaver in the Dark Lord’s voice as he murmured, “You… did, did you?”
The twitching of a certain appendage in the front of his trousers, however, was rather more obvious, as was the vague scent emanating from the same place. Harry didn’t have a word to describe it, but since he’d started noticing it, ahem, after Samhain, he’d developed a bit of a Pavlovian response. He swallowed, feeling a matching reaction beginning on his own body, and moaned hot against Sir’s muscled thigh.
“Is there,” Assistant panted, “maybe some kind of ritual, that would make it seem like I-?”
He glanced up to meet Sir’s gaze, then, through the hood, and so was in the perfect position to see the way red eyes went wide and dark at the mental image, before Sir swiftly repositioned them on the divan, and activated the locks on the library’s doors.
“There is - a particular scroll,” Voldemort admitted, “elsewhere in my collection…”
Contrary to the narrative spun by the Ministry, the creation of basilisks did not involve hatching chicken eggs under a toad. This was well-known in certain Darker circles, but the actual creation method had been more or less lost to time, as basilisks in the wild were more than happy to reproduce biologically. And often.
“Is that why Nagini was telling me about basilisk courtship dances, specifically?” Assistant wondered, running his hands down the sides of Voldemort’s neck. “Are they the horniest of the serpents? Like how bonobos are the horniest of the apes?”
“I should think humans are the horniest of the apes,” Voldemort observed distractedly. “I cannot speak to Nagini’s motivations.”
But he suspected it was because Assistant, through some curious quirk of the Parseltongue ritual, smelled like a basilisk, to the serpent senses Voldemort had retained from his previous body. And basilisks were, like humans, always in season.
(Always ready.)
He set that train of thought aside for now.
Herpo the Foul, as the Britons called him, had first created a basilisk as a proof-of-concept for the more elaborate rituals he used in embodying drifting souls. Voldemort had referenced many of Herpo’s works over the years: integrating the ancient wizard’s work with the modern understanding of soul magic, and tweaking various rites and circles to suit his own purposes. A year ago, when Lord Voldemort became aware of the flaws in his immortality, he had revisited the library of scrolls and tablets containing Herpo’s original records, and this time been certain to copy even the documents he had once thought irrelevant or silly.
“This latter group included the original ritual for the creation of basilisks,” he murmured in Assistant’s ear, breathing in the subtle hints of lust emanating off of just-bared skin. “It is that scroll which I believe we may… adapt to our purposes.”
It was the only one of Herpo’s rituals that used sex magic, which had made it passingly interesting to a young Tom Riddle, but he had had no desire to employ such magic in his pursuit of the darkest arts, back then.
Oh, how times change.
“Tell me, Assistant,” he hissed again, “what do you think of conducting such a rite? Of being laid out, thus, and remade beneath my hands?”
Assistant squirmed beneath him, hot breath tinged with venomous vapour. Why exactly the Rite of the Forked Tongue, meant to bestow only a fraction of serpentine traits upon the recipient, had changed his Assistant thus, Voldemort had not yet discerned, but the diluted venom in his saliva when he was aroused had aphrodisiac effects upon the Dark Lord’s body that he knew pure basilisk venom did not.
“Ah, I want it, Sir,” Assistant hooked a leg around his waist, twisting, baring his stomach in a way that Voldemort suspected Nagini had just taught him, because it pinged instincts he didn’t know he had. “Please.”
The Dark Lord ran blunt teeth down the side of Assistant’s neck, the bittersweet flavor of his own venom welling up in the glands under his tongue. “Then I will have to go obtain the materials,” he said, in English, “and we will have to - abstain from this, until the rite.”
“F-fine,” Assistant groaned, even as the perfume of his desire grew heavier. “Fuck. Go quickly, then.”
That had been the morning. Some twelve hours later, well past sunset, they reconvened in Voldemort’s bedchamber.
Modern sex magic was fairly intricate in its ritual circles, often featuring inscriptions of runes on both the inner and outer lines of a rite’s border shape. The Iridian Order had popularized such trappings in the sixties, as ways to verify participants’ consent and specify their aims; by now, they were so standardized that even the Samhain rite had included those inscriptions around the orgy floor’s border lines.
Voldemort used none of them for the ritual he and Assistant were doing.
He had sealed the room they were using against outsiders at sunset, lining the walls with conjured soil that mimicked the earthen burrows of a basilisk’s nest, and – before Assistant Apparated in – marked the corners with drops of his venom in a faint perfume. The clutch of snake eggs Voldemort had bought from an apothecary sat in a stone bowl beside the bed, gleaming with painstakingly-imbued energy just outside the chalk circle he was presently drawing on the floor.
(Voldemort had decided, after much deliberation, that despite it being further underground, and therefore better in theory, it would be best not to use the main ritual chamber until after the traces of the Samhain rite faded away. Just in case.)
Assistant sat curled up in an armchair in the corner of the room, watching him work, waiting for the turn of the hour. Voldemort found himself keenly aware of both of their nudities in a way he had not been in a good while. For they had read through the scroll for the ritual together, and the knowledge of what Assistant had been up to, in order to prepare himself for his part, was surely burning in the back of both their minds.
The clock in the hallway outside chimed for seven p.m., and the lights in the room began to dim. Voldemort caught only the briefest glimpse of Assistant as he rose from the chair and approached the bed: his last view was of the gleam of oil that dripped down Assistant’s thighs, before the room was plunged into true darkness, human sight discarded in favor of serpentine hearing, smell, and taste.
Such heady senses they were, those three. Voldemort sprawled out within the circle he had drawn, and, already dizzy with anticipation, heard himself give the hiss of welcome that summoned Assistant into the bed.
Nagini had taught Assistant so many things in three hours. He wondered what this rite would have been like, if he had attempted it a day ago, without the benefit of her guidance.
Would he have known the implicit meaning of that hiss just now? Would he have recognized the come-hither in it, the way Sir made it sound like he was in such dire need? I want you, Sir said, and smelled, and sounded, shifting sinuous against the sheets in the dark of their bedroom, their nest. Want, want, want. Come to me.
He knelt over Sir on the bed, knowing by scent alone that he was there, and shivered in his own delight at the novelty of rediscovering Sir’s naked skin beneath his hands. They embraced each other, slowly and then quickly, softly and then tightly, entangling, entwining – and Assistant wanted to explore every inch, to press his face into the warmest parts, to drag his tongue over the curve of a shoulder, the line of a throat.
These were not only Assistant’s urges. He twisted and rolled with Sir on the bed, letting him take his turn to do the same. He arched up into the hand that slid down from his neck to his chest, lower, lower still; when Sir’s broad palm rested below his navel, he caught him with his legs, constricting his waist between his thighs, and hissed his own welcome back at him.
Oh, he wanted.
They ground together, there, slow and impatient, as though to the echoes of drumbeats from their first time: Assistant shifted his position so that Sir’s cock could slide against his opening, where the oil of his preparations had made him twice as sensitive as before. Then, at last, they were aligned just right, so that instead of against, the next thrust pressed in, and he seized Sir by the shoulders and hauled him closer so he could sink his teeth into the side of Sir’s neck.
Harry woke to darkness.
This was not new: he had been waking to darkness every morning with Sir this week. Voldemort preferred his bedroom lightless, so he could sleep whenever he chose; and, despite years of morning sunshine filtering through the bedcurtains in Gryffindor Tower, Harry had never quite exorcised the part of him that had grown up in the cupboard under the stairs, and preferred the darkness, too.
He stirred sluggishly among the pillows, whole body lax and heavy with remembered exertion, vaguely sticky all over, and feeling at once hungry and – full.
Full.
His eyes widened. “Sir–”
The Dark Lord stirred sleepily beside him, an arm slipping around to tug Assistant closer to him. Something equivalent to a cat’s sleepy mrrr? resonated in his throat, which part of Harry found extremely cute. The greater part of him, though, was preoccupied with a growing sense of urgency involving what he was now realizing were the aftereffects of the ritual.
Sense-memories restored themselves as he further emerged from sleep: Sir’s slow coaxing of his body into the optimal, receptive state, desperately on the edge of orgasm, before he splayed his hand over Assistant’s lower abdomen and recited another line of the spell. It had done – something – to his insides, giving him room for the eggs, where there hadn’t been any before. How did snakes work, again? They had one hole for everything, didn’t they? Yet it felt different than just having something in his arse, now. Nagini had surely explained it, but just like the last half of last night’s ritual, Harry couldn’t quite remember–
He gripped the bedsheets, shuddering, as another wave of unnatural pleasure ran through his lower body, radiating from the strange place the eggs were coming out from, somewhere below his navel. Has to be wizard-space, Harry thought, biting down on his hand to stifle the sounds that wanted to escape. There’s nowhere else they would – fit.
(Sir’s fingers gently spreading him open, confirming he was loose enough, now, before he began to insert the enchanted eggs into him, one by one, murmuring further incantations under his breath. It had been as pleasurable then as now, electrifying all his nerve endings; Assistant had felt as though he were being filled for the first time.
It had been just on the verge of too much, Assistant's body held cruelly on the edge of orgasm for what felt like hours, until the sixth and final egg had taken its place within him. Sir had murmured the end of the incantation against his skin, punctuating it with the drag of his tongue over that sensitive patch of skin, and bitten down, and Assistant had cried out with a surge of lust the likes of which he’d never felt, begging Sir–
“In, in me, please, breed me–”)
Were it not for the hood still concealing his face, Harry thought his cheeks might be glowing, they felt so warm from that memory. He let out a high whine of a hiss, unintentionally clawing at Sir’s arm in his haste to wake him, as a conspicuous hot wetness slipped out from between his thighs and onto the (thankfully waterproofed) bedding. “Ah–!”
“...Assistant?” Sir hissed at last, sounding as though he was quickly blinking awake. “Is something – oh.”
The first cry from Assistant had seamlessly integrated into Voldemort's dreams. It was not until nails dug into his arm that he realized his slumbering fantasy had, in fact, come to life.
Assistant stank of pleasure, exuding it from every pore, as this last step of the ritual took its due from him. Basilisks, having come from magic, did not by nature experience pain; this was part of why they were so challenging to eradicate in the wild. For what beast would deny itself such ecstasy as Voldemort was witnessing in his darling Assistant, as he hauled him up into his arms, his lap? What creature, even a thinking one, would refuse the opportunity to writhe so, shuddering and jolting in orgasm as soon as they laid an egg?
“My darling,” Voldemort murmured into Assistant's hair, settling him so carefully against his chest, splaying Assistant's legs out over his thighs to hold him open. “How lovely. How dear. Let it come.”
Assistant moaned wordlessly, arching against him, a motion which pressed Voldemort’s erection into the small of his back. He dug his nails into Voldemort’s thighs, now, as he tried and failed to brace himself again, and laid his head back against Voldemort’s shoulder, panting. “S-Sir, it’s so,” Assistant tried to say. “I-”
Yes, it was so, Voldemort imagined, palming down Assistant’s body, relishing the feel of the muscles rippling beneath his skin. Briefly, he took Assistant’s cock in hand, but the high startled sound it earned him suggested Assistant was too sensitive for that yet – he slipped it lower, instead, fingering at the puffy rim of his dripping hole and feeling the end of the egg that was slowly, inexorably spreading him open from the inside.
“How lucky you are,” he murmured, stroking the straining edges of him. “I confess myself envious… if only Nagini had not made her expectations clear, I would have sought to take your place.”
Assistant took a shuddering breath as he convulsed again. “You’d let me-?”
Oh? Did he think Lord Voldemort above reciprocity? “Of course I would,” he told Assistant. “There is no pleasure of the flesh I would not seek, with you. Perhaps, after this spell is done with, we can repeat it the other way.”
The idea earned him a moan, and another squeeze of his thighs as Assistant arched against him again – and laid three of the six eggs at once, emitting a high, strangled noise as the pleasure passed through his body, before falling silent. Ah, had he lost consciousness? How fascinating. Yes, Voldemort needed to experience this for himself.
This was the singularly strangest experience of Harry’s life, thus far. He had read, in some of the books on sex magic, how pleasure could, truly, be too much; at the time, he’d doubted it, but he understood now that that was because his context had been limited to what he already knew.
He understood it, now. Fuck.
“...Did I black out?” Assistant asked, when he returned to awareness and found himself laid out flat upon Sir, even more exhausted and vaguely sticky than he’d been before. Or perhaps not vaguely sticky, anymore: there was the familiar sensation of cooling ejaculate splattering his stomach, up to his chest, and in the small of his back, too, where Sir had clearly rubbed against him. (Assistant particularly enjoyed when he did that.)
“Only for a few minutes,” Sir assured him, coiling his arms around Assistant’s middle possessively. “You did very well, my dear.”
Assistant blushed. “I – think I might have learned some new things about myself,” he confessed, tracing the mess on his thighs up to its source with a fingertip. “I didn’t realize I’d be so…”
Desperate, he thought, embarrassed.
“You were exquisite,” Sir insisted, and seemed ready to say more, except that there came the sound of the snake-door on the far wall opening. Sir gestured with a hand, allowing a dim, diffuse light to fill the room so they could see their visitor.
“Something smells weird on this whole floor,” Nagini declared. “Wait. Is that- oh!” She slithered twice as fast as Harry had ever seen her move, coiling up the bedpost to observe while staying out of the way of their legs.
“Happy now?” Assistant drawled, yawning. “These were… a lot of hard work.”
Nagini seemed to miss the sarcasm, her attention focused on the clutch of six eggs sitting at the foot of the bed. Sir must have moved them while Assistant was asleep. “This is excellent for a first clutch,” she declared, flicking her tongue over them to scent the batch. “And all thanks to the great Nagini’s sage advice!”
She descended to the mattress to coil around the eggs, which was the cue for Voldemort to heft Assistant up in his arms and carry him over to the bathroom, so they could both clean up. He must have started filling the tub a while ago: the whole room held an inviting cloud of steam, the scent of Sir’s perfumes wafting from the water’s surface.
Some minutes later, cleaned of all bodily fluids and luxuriating in the tub, Assistant remembered the question he’d had earlier in the day, before they started it all. “When will they disappear?” He threaded his fingers with those of the hand splayed on his stomach, leaning into Sir’s warm weight against his back. “The eggs, I mean.”
“Disappear?” Sir repeated, faintly, from above.
“Or, well,” he yawned again, “when will she expect them to have hatched, so we can replace them with real snakes?” It wouldn’t do to disappoint Nagini now, not when she’d been so unusually pleased by the development.
The hand over his stomach gave a little squeeze. “...We won’t need to switch them out, Assistant,” Sir explained quietly. “They will hatch.”
He blinked. “Eh? You got fertilized eggs from the apothecary?” Wasn’t that kind of weird?
Voldemort buried his face in Assistant’s shoulder. “...No, my dear,” he hissed, flustered. “They - they weren’t fertilized before the ritual.”
Assistant’s stomach swooped. “They – we–?”
Sir hissed wordless confirmation, sliding his hand down Assistant’s torso toward his lower belly, where a fluttering not-quite-unease was forming behind the navel, like a portkey slowly activating.
He’d laid eggs… for real. He’d been – gravid.
This whole situation had him feeling some kind of way. Assistant swallowed, beginning to feel… hot. “Is – is it just me, or is that kind of–?”
“Thank Merlin, I was worried I was the only one getting off on it,” Sir groaned, and descended on him for another round.
They splashed water kind of everywhere in the bathroom and then trailed it back to the bed, which had been helpfully vacated of Nagini and the eggs at some point, for another post-sex nap. It was a few hours after that, then, that Assistant squirmed awake to the same funny feeling as he’d had before.
It was shortly after that, as they peered down at the clutch of three more eggs freshly deposited on the bed, equally shocked, that Voldemort finally said, “There may have been an error with the ritual.”