The Gryffindor versus Hufflepuff match was about to begin.
Draco Malfoy, carrying the urgent task Hermione had pressed upon him, pushed through the surging crowd toward the sea of gold and red in the stands — his Slytherin green a conspicuous mark among them.
"Longbottom." He caught Neville by the arm at the top of the Gryffindor stands — round-faced, startled, halfway through a nervous blink. "Have you seen Ron's sister?"
"Ma — Malfoy — I — I haven't seen her—" Neville tried to do what Ron had suggested and glare back, but one look at Draco's expression and the attempt dissolved entirely. "She's not here."
Draco let go of him and turned back down the stairs toward the waiting room below the stands.
Right. Find Ron and Harry first.
He arrived just in time to see Professor McGonagall steering a bewildered Ron inside. Draco stopped short. McGonagall had no patience for what she would likely consider a Slytherin stirring up trouble — she would want facts, evidence, a complete and reasoned account before she'd trust a word of it. There was no time for that now.
He hung back and waited.
From inside the waiting room came Oliver Wood's voice, rising sharp with indignation: "No! They have no right to cancel the match!"
Something significant had happened. Quidditch matches were not cancelled lightly.
A cold premonition settled in Draco's chest.
Professor McGonagall emerged a moment later, Harry and Ron trailing behind her. Her expression was closed, grim. Draco pressed himself into a gap in the scaffolding beneath the stands and held very still as they passed on the other side of the curtain.
McGonagall's voice came through, steadier than it had any right to be. "Mr. Weasley, I must ask you to prepare yourself. Your sister Ginny has been taken by the creature of the Chamber of Secrets. She is inside the Chamber."
The sound of Ron drawing a sharp, broken breath.
"I've already contacted your parents. For now, you and Harry will return to your dormitory at once. All students will be taking the Hogwarts Express home tomorrow."
"What about Ginny?" Ron's voice cracked.
"Professor Lockhart believes he has located the entrance to the Chamber. We have entrusted the task of her rescue to him."
Draco heard no hope in those words at all.
"Not him," Ron said, barely audible. It sounded less like a protest and more like a verdict.
"Mr. Potter, please accompany Mr. Weasley back to Gryffindor Tower and keep him there. The staff are convening now." McGonagall's footsteps retreated quickly down the corridor.
Draco stayed where he was for a moment, listening to the silence she left behind.
"Lockhart," Ron said, to no one in particular. "He might as well have handed her a death sentence."
Draco pulled out the Marauder's Map and studied it carefully. Ginny Weasley's name was nowhere to be found. She was already inside the Chamber — somewhere the Map didn't reach.
He folded it away, slipped out from the other side of the scaffolding, and did not go after Harry and Ron.
It was too late for the message he had been carrying.
What could he possibly say now? While Ron's sister lay dying in the Chamber, was he supposed to announce that she might be the one who had opened it? Ron was half out of his mind with grief already. He would reach for his wand before Draco got three words out.
None of that mattered anymore. What mattered was that Ginny was inside, and she was almost certainly innocent — a victim of whatever was living in that diary. And if Lucius had put the diary in her hands at Flourish and Blotts, then Draco had his own debt to pay.
The sins of the father fall to the son.
He had assumed Harry and Ron would know where the Chamber was — as they apparently had in his previous life. Their conversation made it clear they had no idea. Something had diverged. He needed another approach.
Draco turned away from the crowd flooding back to the castle, climbed the stairs in the opposite direction, and headed for Ravenclaw Tower.
The deep, quiet corridor in the corner of the tower was deserted. Only the Grey Lady drifted between the columns, as watchful as ever, beginning to drift away the moment she heard footsteps.
"Wait — it's me. Draco Malfoy." He kept his voice low.
The Grey Lady paused and turned, regarding him with her usual composed melancholy.
"Is there something I can do for you?"
"You know what's happened," Draco said. It wasn't a question.
She nodded, slowly.
"The last time I came to you, you said you had a sense of where the Chamber entrance might be. After everything that's happened this year — the attacks, the opening — you must have noticed something more definite." He met her gaze directly. "Tell me where it is. I'll go in. I'll find the basilisk, take its fangs, and destroy the thing you despise."
The Grey Lady looked at him for a long moment, her expression shifting through something complicated before settling.
"You could lose your life."
"That's my concern." He held her gaze without flinching. "It's worth the attempt."
A long silence. The Grey Lady seemed to look through him rather than at him.
"You know Moaning Myrtle, I believe." Her voice, when it came, was quiet and deliberate. "I passed near her bathroom today and heard something unusual. I believe the entrance is there." A pause. "That is all I can tell you."
"Thank you."
He was already moving, her faint sigh fading behind him as he took the stairs two at a time toward the second-floor girls' bathroom.
He was not expecting to find Harry and Ron there ahead of him.
He stopped in the doorway. Harry and Ron stood with wands raised, facing Lockhart. Between them and where a sink had once stood, a dark pipe mouth gaped open in the floor.
"What exactly is happening here?" Even having lived twice, Draco was slightly taken aback. "Are you two actually threatening a teacher?"
"Mr. Malfoy! Perfect timing!" Lockhart seized on him like a drowning man grabbing driftwood. "Disarm them — I know you can manage it, just as you did at the Duelling Club!"
"Don't listen to him," Harry said quickly. "Everything in his books is stolen from other wizards' memories. He confessed it himself and was about to Obliviate us."
Ron, who had apparently shelved his grievances with Draco entirely in the last thirty seconds, nodded vigorously — watching him with visible anxiety, clearly afraid Draco would take Lockhart's side.
"They've gone completely mad!" Lockhart cried. "Desperate for attention — they think two students can waltz into the Chamber of Secrets and save a missing girl—"
Draco gave Lockhart a pleasant smile. In the half-second Lockhart spent returning it with hope, Draco cast a clean "Expelliarmus."
The wand spun across the room and clattered into Myrtle's favourite stall.
"Oh!" Myrtle shot up from behind the cubicle door and plastered herself to the ceiling with an indignant wail. "Don't throw things in here! Absolutely no manners!"
"Apologies, Myrtle. That wasn't aimed at you." He kept his wand level, tip still pointed at Lockhart. "I'll make it up to you once this is settled."
The three in front of him stared.
Draco turned to Harry, all business. "What's the plan? We're going in, I take it?"
He gestured toward the pipe with a tilt of his head, keeping his expression level while privately noting the proximity of the thing he'd been working toward for months.
Basilisk fangs. Almost within reach.
"Yes." Harry shook himself. He gave Draco a quick, grateful look, then turned back to Lockhart with considerably less warmth. "We were just deciding who goes first. We thought the professor should have the honour."
Lockhart's smile flickered. His facial muscles didn't quite cooperate. "Malfoy, surely you're not — you and I are on the same side—"
"I'm not on your side," Draco said simply. "Do as Harry says."
Lockhart's colour drained.
He didn't get a chance to finish his next sentence. An impatient Ron kicked him headfirst into the pipe.
Lockhart's scream echoed upward as he disappeared.
Draco listened to it fade with a critical ear. "If his admirers could hear that," he thought, "the fan mail would dry up overnight."
He glanced briefly at the pipe opening. In another lifetime, there had apparently been a witch among those admirers who had been rather embarrassingly devoted.
She had better taste now.
"Together?" Harry asked.
Draco nodded.
Harry gave him a brief, nervous smile and jumped.
"Mind yourselves," Draco said to the empty pipe, and then looked at Ron.
"I haven't forgiven you," Ron said, face pale, stepping up to the edge. "If it weren't for Ginny—"
"Later." Draco gave him a firm push and followed immediately behind, sliding through the dark, winding, sticky pipe with the echoes of Ron's startled shout ahead of him.
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He landed hard on damp earth.
Lockhart was a few feet away, covered in filth, his famous hair plastered sideways — nothing remotely resembling the man on the book covers. Harry and Ron were already hauling themselves upright and dusting off.
"Disgusting." Draco cast a thorough Scourgify on himself, then lit his wand. The beam cut into the dark stone tunnel ahead. "We must be well below the foundations."
"Miles below the school," Harry agreed, checking his own wand.
"My wand," Ron muttered, squinting at it. "It's bent. And completely filthy."
"Put it away for now," Harry said, already moving. "Lumos." A pale light bloomed at his wand-tip. Ron fell into step behind him.
"After you, Professor," Draco said pleasantly to Lockhart, gesturing forward. "You were so keen to lead."
Lockhart went, silently and without a single impressive thing to say.
Draco kept close behind him. He had no intention of turning his back on someone he neither trusted nor liked.
The tunnel stretched on. The ground changed underfoot — less damp, more brittle — and made a faint cracking sound with every step. Draco lowered his wand and saw the floor was thick with small bones.
He tightened his grip and said nothing.
The basilisk, it seemed, fed regularly.
"Basilisk!" Lockhart shrieked, lunging behind Ron.
"That's just the shed skin, you useless—" Ron stared ahead, jaw loose.
The snakeskin stretched ahead of them — a full twenty feet of iridescent green scales, glimmering dully in the wandlight. The shed of something old and enormous.
Even Draco, who had known what to expect, felt the breath go out of him. He had understood intellectually that a basilisk had been living beneath Hogwarts for a thousand years. Seeing the evidence of its size made it something else entirely.
Poor Hermione. She had seen those yellow eyes reflected in the hand mirror — had stood alone in that corridor, knowing what was behind her — and been frozen by it. It was no wonder she'd been shaking.
He pushed the thought aside. She was in the hospital wing, she was safe, and he had a basilisk to find.
"How do we deal with it?" Ron asked. His voice was steady, but barely. "How do we get Ginny back?"
Harry looked at the snakeskin for a moment. He didn't answer immediately.
Draco studied the shed skin in the wandlight and thought carefully. He had known fragments of the story — that Harry had somehow defeated the basilisk in his previous life, that a twelve-year-old had come down here and survived. But he had never known how.
The creature could kill with a glance. Its fangs were lethal. It was faster than any of them. A fully trained adult witch or wizard would think twice before facing one — this was, by any measure, a creature that even Dumbledore would approach with caution.
Draco looked at Harry, who was still staring at the snakeskin with a look that was half terrified and half something he couldn't quite name.
There was something about that boy, Draco thought. Something he'd never been able to account for. Harry was not especially gifted at classroom magic. He was often confused, frequently reckless, and regularly underprepared. And yet there was a body of increasingly compelling evidence that when it mattered most, Harry Potter managed the impossible.
Worth watching very carefully, when they found the basilisk.
Worth watching very carefully indeed.
"Let's keep moving," Draco said. "Standing here won't help Ginny."
Harry nodded and led them forward, deeper into the dark.