Original word count version, for anyone who was curious.

Voldemort really should have had enough sense to resist the impulse to buy a real live baby basilisk from a stranger in a shady bar. In actuality, he did cave to the impulse and bought the thing.

And now he had a baby basilisk which he could talk to, and which talked back to him - in the language of snakes - with a lisp. How in the Seven Hells did a snake - whose language consisted almost entirely of sibilant sounds - manage to have baby-talky lisp to its speech?

But the basilisk - or, as he preferred to refer to himself, "baskaliss"- did lisp when hr hissed. And on top of that, he had nothing particularly interesting to say. Being a baby, he did not have much life experience and was mostly concerned with eating.

Of course, the Dark Lord quickly tired of caring for his new pet.

"Baskaliss hung-ee. Baskaliss need noms! OM NOM NOM, FEED BASKALISS."

Voldemort was particularly tired of this conversation, and after having it for what seemed to him like the 77-millionth or so time since he bought the baby basilisk, he snapped at it, "Oh, shut up and find your own food!" (He spoke in Parseltongue, of course.)

"Fiiiiiiiiiiiine," hissed the basilisk in a petulant tone. "Baskaliss gonna go nom Nag-neeny, see how you likes that!"

"You wouldn't dare!"

"Baskaliss likesssssss to eats nother snakessss….."

He should have fucking known it was a bad idea to buy the damn thing in the first place.

"Avada kedavra."