Title: Tomcat

Rating: M

Warnings: Cursing, sexual situations (later on), morbid humor, dry wit, and predictable yet somehow still funny scenarios/jokes

Pairings: Lord Voldemort/Harry Potter (notice I say VOLDEMORT! Not Tom…get it? Good.)

Summary: Sitting naked before him was the Dark Lord Voldemort, most feared wizard of all time, with kitty ears sprouting from his head and a forked, white tail trailing from behind. This would be so much funnier, Harry thought, if I weren’t so dead right now.

Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling. I am not creative or awesome enough to be her. I own squat. Really.

A/N – Well, I'm back! After a good bout of inactivity and random one-shots which have been x-posted at my journal as well, I present to you a chaptered fic OMGWTFHOLYCRAPCHEESENIPS! This has been in my head for quite some time. Finally I got around to it...heh heh...yeah...

Nekomata: literally means “forked cat”. It is a normal, domestic cat whose tail has split into two (kind of like a snake’s tongue) and has acquired powers from this splitting. The nekomata usually grows to become a meter long (excluding the tail) and has the ability to control the dead to do their bidding. They are also the cause for mysterious fires. All of this will play a big part later on. Trust me.

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It was another dull summer at Number Four, Privet Drive. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, primp and tidy, were as Dursleyish as ever as they went about their daily duties: Mr. Dursley arrived promptly to work (as he always did) and Mrs. Dursley scuttled off to the window for her usual ‘spy on the neighbors’ hour. Their whale of a son, Dudley, had mistaken the hot sauce for pancake syrup three times this week and had, as per norm, thrown the offensive bottle out the window at full speed, nearly hitting the paperboy twice.

However, the fourth inhabitant of Number Four, Privet Drive, was quite possibly the strangest, the most abnormal, the most un-Durselyish person ever to walk the earth. Harry James Potter, with his untidy black hair and his oversized clothes, was a wizard, but not just any wizard. Harry Potter was the wizard destined to destroy the Dark Lord Voldemort, thus saving the world. Right now, however, said boy-savior was locked up in his room, sleeping.

Quite possibly as an attempt to keep themselves alive and not as frogs, the Dursleys had all decided to leave Harry to himself. No chores were ordered at him, no menial tasks were often dished out, no meals were kept from him. Every now and then, however, they’d ‘forget’ their fear and order him to pick up some groceries, but he was used to it. All the Dursleys mainly “asked” (a word that means, “vaguely threatened”) was that he stay quietly locked up in his room. Which, of course, he did, not bothering at all to point out that it was illegal, even after the age of seventeen, for a wizard to harm a Muggle in any way. It just happened to…slip his mind.

So, there Harry lay, sleeping. He didn’t get much sleep nowadays. His seventeenth birthday was fast approaching; it was only thirty days ‘till. For the past few days now he had been waking up to searing hot pain in his lightening shaped scar- the cursed scar given to him by none other than Lord Voldemort himself. The pain could only mean one thing: Voldemort was pissed.

However, at this moment it was none of his concern. Harry just wanted a few moments of rest before his mind kept him up, continuously going over the information his late headmaster had given him. The locket, the cup, the snake, something of Gryffindor or Ravenclaw’s, the ring, the diary…Well, the ring was already gone and the diary had faded from existence many years ago. The locket was God only knew where and the other things, oh how he didn’t even want to fathom where they resided. As for the snake, Nagini, she’d be the hardest to destroy, next to Voldemort himself. Being savior definitely wasn’t as glorious as it would seem to many.

As he slept, the boy was unaware of the newest creature within his room. His pet owl, Hedwig, was also asleep, locked up in her cage at Uncle Vernon’s orders (one of the few he had delivered all summer) and so did not notice the thing as it glided over to the old bed.

‘Harry Potter…’

The soft hiss meant for the boy went unheeded as Harry slept on.

‘Harry Potter, wake up!’

Again, the soft hissing sound went unheeded.

‘Wake up God damn you!’

A flare of pain went through the boy’s forehead, as the creature’s tongue became harsher. Immediately rushing his hand to his scar, Harry Potter took no notice of the creature that now sat angrily upon his bed. Upon retrieving his glasses, however, he was quite shocked to find a large, white snake with glowing red eyes.

‘I thought that would work,’ the serpent hissed, it’s black tongue tasting the air, ‘seeing as how you forget your manners when a friend is talking to you.’

‘What?’ Harry gasped, speaking the hissing language of the milk-white snake before him.

‘You don’t remember me? Pity,’ the snake rose to meet eye-level with the dark-haired teen. ‘I guess we’ll just have to remind you then, won’t we?’

Harry screamed as his scar suddenly flared ablaze with white-hot pain. Images of a graveyard, of hooded figures draped in black surfaced his mind. A man, pale as death with livid, scarlet eyes dancing with malice burned his memory. He knew now, oh did he know.

‘Voldemort?’ he gasped, head aching with the last remnants of the mental attack.

‘Behold the genius among us,’ was the sarcastic reply from the large snake sitting atop his bedcovers.

‘B-but, how are you here? I thought-Dumbledore…’ Harry stuttered, aghast. For years he was forced to return to the Dursley’s to insure the blood protection remained firm. It was supposed to wear out on his seventeenth birthday, not a month before.

‘Blood magic?’ Voldemort hissed, edging closer to boy’s face. ‘If you recall, less than two years ago I came back using your blood. That gave me an advantage, as you should remember.’ Harry nodded dully, remembering the pain the Dark Lord’s touch had brought. ‘I also used another’s flesh and bone to recreate my body. The blood magic Dumbledore placed on your filthy Muggle relatives and this house was meant to keep my body from ever entering.

‘However, the body I have now is not my own,’ he continued, flicking out his forked tongue at random. ‘It is an exact replica of the body I had before…’

‘I killed you?’ Harry offered with a sneer.

‘I’m right here, aren’t I?’ the snake replied shortly. ‘It is, what you might call, a clone, though with the same mind and spirit. The body these wards protected was the body born of the living flesh of my mother and my…father. The body sitting here now was created out of decaying flesh and muscle…and of course your blood. The wards never protected against anything of this nature.’

Harry stared at the serpent. ‘But, why are you a snake? Why are you here?’

Glaring as best a snake could, Voldemort rose so that he was looking down at the teenager. ‘I am a snake because of an accident. Wormtail, the fool, had come in holding a package, one that contained a certain valuable potion from the coast of Izu in Japan. It contained blood of the great snake Yamata no Orochi and was highly reactant. The rat, however, got scared because Nagini was a foot away from him and let the package slip. I, unfortunately, had to be in the room with him. So, I’m stuck like this until someone else can change me back. I am here because I have to be, not because I want to be.’

‘Then leave if you don’t want to be here,’ Harry hissed back. ‘Hell knows I won’t stop you.’

‘If you haven’t noticed, we are the only Parseltongues in all of Britain, perhaps the world! I need a human’s hands to brew this potion’s antidote, and since you are the only one I can convey the instructions to, YOU will brew the antidote and change me back.’

Harry sneered. ‘Why should I help you? You’ve made this world a hell, maybe this is a good punishment for you.’

‘Let me rephrase that,’ Voldemort hissed angrily. Soon, he began to grow in size until his snake body was near seventy meters long. ‘The Yamata no Orochi was a tremendously large snake with eight heads and eight tails. Its blood was in that potion, which is now in me. Tell me, Harry, would you really like me to test the powers of this potion on your little friends? Say, Ginny Weasley, for example?’

‘Y-you know about her?’ Harry gasped.

‘Why would I not?’ the giant snake nearly laughed. ‘I know your emotions, boy. You love her, whether or not you ‘break up’ with her. Pathetic.

‘Now, what will you do, Potter? Choose me or watch them die.’

Harry sat there, a battle raging within his mind. If he left Voldemort like this, the war would halt, at least for some time. However, his friends’ lives were at stake, he couldn’t let them die because he refused to brew a potion. But, if he were to brew the potion, Voldemort returns to his normal body and would most likely kill him. Then where would the horcrux hunt go? Hermione was a brilliant witch and Ron was a great strategist, but fate had assigned him with the task of killing Voldemort. Even if they destroyed every horcrux, what then?

‘Okay,’ Harry hissed softly. ‘I will return you to your normal body only if you swear not to kill me once I finish nor touch my friends.’

‘I cannot refrain from killing you all my life, Harry,’ the snake smirked as best one could. ‘I’ll give you…seven days after you have returned me to my body before killing you. Do we have a deal?’

Harry paused before slowly nodding his head.

‘Yes, deal.’

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A/N – Yes this will become a chapter fic, so don’t worry, the nekomata part will come up eventually. And the Yamata no Orochi is a real Japanese legend.

Well, seeing as how it’s 12:40 where I am, Happy B-day to Lord Volderz. Read and review, please! - Sadademort