Accidental Harrycrux with a Bloodsucking Snake (long)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 155095

[massive snipping]
> Carol:
> Yes, but as the snipped quotes indicate, LV intends to feed Harry to
> Nagini in place of Wormtail, who would have been killed and fed to
> Nagini as punishment for his blunder. Voldemort is consoling his pet,
> telling her that she can eat the boy instead when Voldemort is through
> with him, one body in place of another. Or are you suggesting that
> Wormtail might be a Horcrux, too? (Pippin thinks so, but she's working
> from an ESE!Lupin perspective that most of us don't share.)
>
Pippin:
Actually, I wasn't thinking about ESE!Lupin at all, and I haven't tried to
figure out whether the two theories are compatible.

 Wormtail  simply popped into mind when I had asked myself what 
happens if you eliminate both Harry and Nagini as horcrux candidates. 
The convenient thing about it is that if neither Harry nor Nagini
are horcruxes, then the same mechanism could have been used in 
both cases: Voldemort accidentally transferred some of his powers
to Harry, and then, when he found out from Wormtail that Harry is a
parselmouth, he realized what had happened and managed to
intentionally transfer some of his powers to Nagini. That would
certainly have been useful when he was  Fetal!mort

I think the canon Carol quoted that the venom and the unicorn blood
are being used in a potion shows pretty clearly that Voldemort wasn't
drinking the venom straight. As far as I can gather,  snake venom 
is not toxic when ingested, only when it comes in contact with 
underlying tissue. I would assume that Nagini is a magical 
snake and her venom has magical properties aside from its 
toxicity just as Aragog's did. Presumably Slughorn was not intending
to poison anyone when he collected Aragog's venom!

One of the nagging frustrations of an otherwise contented life
is that I can't remember where I read, sometime before GoF came
out and I joined the fandom, an interview with JKR in which she
was asked if there was anything she would change if she were 
to do it all over. She said that she hadn't known when she wrote
PS/SS  that Boa Constrictors weren't poisonous. Perhaps
Harry's released boa and Nagini were once the same character,
and  Nagini's part was rewritten when JKR realized they
couldn't be. 

Pippin