While Draco, Harry, and Ron stood in a loose cluster around the enormous shed snakeskin, Lockhart slipped quietly out of sight.
"Children!" When they turned at the sound of his voice, Lockhart was holding up the wand Ron had kept tucked in his back pocket — that bent, battered old thing — with a smile that carried a distinct edge of threat. "Your adventure ends here. No, no, no — Malfoy, keep that wand down. I know what your Disarming Charm can do. Lower it, or I cast immediately, and I assure you, you won't enjoy it."
What could Lockhart possibly manage with a broken wand? Draco thought with contempt.
He kept still anyway. Wand tip lowered, he watched Lockhart's face in silence, trying to work out what this particular fool intended.
"Very good. I do prefer cooperative students." Lockhart's expression settled into something self-congratulatory. He announced, with evident excitement, "That settles it! I'll take this snakeskin back up to the school and tell them I arrived too late to save the girl—"
Ron went rigid.
That was his sister Lockhart was talking about.
"You useless—" Ron started.
"—and that the shock of finding her corpse drove you all completely out of your minds!" Lockhart finished, smiling pleasantly over Ron's interruption.
"You spineless coward!" Ron snarled.
"You really should have been kinder to me, Weasley." Lockhart's smile didn't waver as he swung the wand tip toward Ron. "Students who insult their professors ought to face consequences."
"What—" Draco moved without thinking, grabbing Ron by the arm and yanking him back behind him before Lockhart could act.
It was only in that instant that he registered, properly, how dangerous Lockhart actually was. Not powerful — but ruthless, and entirely willing to harm a wandless student to protect himself. He should have Disarmed him the moment they came down the pipe.
"You are a Hogwarts professor," Draco said sharply, pulling Ron further back. "Raise your wand at a second-year student and I will—"
"Obliviate!" Lockhart cast with a broad, eight-toothed smile.
The wand exploded.
The blast sent a shockwave through the tunnel. Debris rained down. Everyone scattered, shielding their heads from falling rock, and the air filled instantly with dust and a low, groaning vibration from the ceiling above.
When it settled, Draco was covered in grit and rubble. He sneezed twice, eyes streaming, and cast a Scourgify on himself before he could see properly again.
Then he looked up and saw what had happened.
A wall of collapsed stone blocked the passage entirely — the path to the Chamber, sealed.
Merlin.
Harry's voice came through the rubble, muffled but clear: "Ron? Draco? Are you alright?"
"We're fine!" Ron shouted back.
Draco looked around. Ron was pulling himself out of a corner of fallen stone, dishevelled but uninjured. Lockhart lay slumped against the opposite wall, only partially conscious, blinking at the ceiling with a vacant, unconcerned expression.
Ron walked over, looked down at him, and kicked his calf. "Lockhart's not doing well," he called to Harry. "His own wand backfired on him."
Harry's voice came back through the wall: "Wait there. I'm going on ahead. If I'm not back in an hour—"
He was going in alone.
Draco did a swift and uncomfortable calculation in the back of his mind. In his previous life, Harry had survived the Chamber. But had he been alone then too? How much had already changed? If the events had shifted enough — if Harry went in without something he'd had before — the consequences were unthinkable.
Harry Potter was the one person who absolutely could not die in the depths of Hogwarts at the age of twelve.
"Wait — I'm going to try to clear this wall!" Draco called out.
Ron was already back at the rubble, shouting: "Harry, hold on a moment!"
Harry didn't wait. His voice drifted back, thin and urgent: "See you later."
Draco understood the pressure driving him. Every minute Ginny Weasley spent in that Chamber was a minute closer to something irreversible.
"The diary!" Draco pressed himself close to the wall of stone, shouting through it. "When you get in there — watch the diary. You know whose it is. It's more dangerous than anything else in that room. Don't trust what you see. Don't let go of your wand!"
Silence from the other side.
"He's already gone," Ron said, face tight with worry.
"Oh, I thought someone swore they were cutting ties with me," Draco said, glancing sideways at Ron. "And yet here you are, talking to me."
Ron's face went red as his hair. "You pulled me out of the way. Lockhart had his wand on me and you just — you didn't have to do that."
"I simply didn't expect him to actually raise his wand at a student," Draco said, with a carefully maintained air of detachment.
A Slytherin had standards. He would not be admitting he'd panicked.
"Right," Ron said quickly, quietly. "Well. I've unilaterally decided to forgive you."
"Noted," Draco said, expression flat.
They both looked at the wall.
"What happened to your wand?" Draco asked. "Why did it explode?"
"It cracked when I fell down the pipe," Ron said, slightly embarrassed. "It was already old, and not brilliant to begin with."
"Then we owe a great deal to it being old," Draco said, with genuine feeling. If Lockhart's Obliviate had connected cleanly, they'd have been left wandering the tunnel with no idea who they were. "That wand may have saved both our memories."
His own memories could not be casually lost. The secrets he carried were far too important.
"So it's just your wand now," Ron said, glancing at it with the uneasy look of someone who had just realised he was standing in a dangerous place without a weapon.
"Yes," Draco said. "Stand back."
He started methodically. A simple Wingardium Leviosa — useless on something this size. He worked through what he had: Confringo split the larger boulders apart. Diffindo sheared through the jagged edges. Descendo dropped loose debris to the floor. Reducio shrank the smaller chunks to manageable sizes. Reducto blasted through the densest sections. When he'd gone too far in one direction, a careful Reparo corrected the structure enough to keep the ceiling from caving in entirely.
The wall came down slowly. Ron stood to one side with Lockhart, who watched the whole process with the bright, uncomplicated interest of someone who had entirely forgotten what a wand was for.
"Your little stick makes sparks!" Lockhart announced, delighted. "Are you some sort of extraordinary conjurer?"
"Shut up," said Ron, who had entirely lost patience.
Lockhart was right about one thing, at least.
"Are you actually a second-year?" Ron asked, at one point, watching a particularly stubborn section of granite crack neatly in two. He sounded like someone revising a long-held opinion. "Hermione said you were the most gifted wizard of your age. I thought she was laying it on a bit thick."
"Did she?" Draco kept his eyes on the wall, but something in his expression eased slightly.
"She compares us to you all the time," Ron muttered, not entirely without resentment. "Usually to make a point. Usually a point that isn't flattering to us."
Draco said nothing, but allowed himself a small, private smile, and cast the final spell.
A passage opened — rough-edged and low, but passable.
"Read more, practise more," Draco said, by way of explanation, as he rolled his shoulders and tried not to show how tired he was. A second-year body was not built for that many consecutive spells. "Any professor at this school could have managed it faster. Don't go telling people."
He looked through the gap at Ron. "You'll have to stay here with Lockhart. He's got no sense at all right now — we can't have him wandering loose in here. No telling what he'd blunder into."
"My sister is in there!" Ron said sharply.
"Your sister is with Harry," Draco said. "And Harry—" He paused, searching for the right thing to say, then settled on: "Harry is more than capable."
He believed that. He wasn't entirely sure why, but he believed it.
"Can I come?" Lockhart asked, getting to his feet with great enthusiasm.
Ron looked at Draco with an expression of barely controlled desperation.
"Step aside," Draco said to Lockhart, not unkindly, and cast a clean Stupefy directly into his face.
Lockhart dropped like a sandbag.
Ron stared at him for a moment. "...I'm glad someone finally did that."
"Don't mention it to anyone," Draco said.
"Same goes for you," Ron said, surprising him. He stepped through the gap in the rubble, and almost smiled. "You're not the first person to raise a wand at him."
───────────────────────────────────────────
They ran for longer than seemed possible.
The tunnel turned and turned again, always damp, always dark, the sound of their own breathing the only company. At some point, a distant burst of music threaded through the air — something ethereal and unlike anything Draco had heard — and a crimson bird swept overhead, clutching something bundled in its talons, and vanished into the dark ahead.
"That's Fawkes," Draco said, watching the last trace of firelight fade. "Dumbledore's phoenix. He's sent it ahead to help Harry."
Ron processed this. "Which means—"
"Things are critical." Draco pressed on faster.
The phoenix's song grew faint, then fainter, and then simply wasn't there anymore.
Ahead: the sounds of a fight. Something enormous and furious, slamming against stone.
They rounded a final corner and came up hard against a set of stone doors carved with two intertwined serpents — and the fighting sounds pouring through them.
"Alohomora!" The doors didn't move.
Draco tried four more unlocking spells in quick succession. Nothing.
He stared at the two emeralds set into the serpents' eyes and understood.
"Parseltongue," he said flatly. "The doors require Parseltongue to open. Salazar wasn't taking chances."
"We can't speak Parseltongue!" Ron shoved past him, slamming his fists against the stone. "Harry! Harry, can you hear us? Harry!"
Nothing. The fighting sounds had reached a crescendo on the other side.
"He can't hear you," Draco said. "Not through that."
Ron kept pounding until he couldn't anymore, then pressed his ear against the door, eyes shut, trying to pick out any sound that might tell him what was happening inside.
Draco leaned against the wall and waited. There was nothing else to do. The helplessness of it settled into him like cold water — that particular kind of powerlessness where you can see the problem clearly and have absolutely no means of solving it.
Some time passed.
The sounds from within the Chamber changed. The battering and crashing tapered off. Then stopped.
A silence that was hard to interpret.
Ron lifted his head from the door. His face was pale. "Did you hear that? It's gone quiet."
"I know."
"Do you think Harry's still—"
"I don't know," Draco said. "We'll find out soon enough."
He straightened up, took his wand in hand, and moved to stand in front of the door.
"Get behind me," he said to Ron. "You haven't got a wand."
"I'm not hiding behind you." Ron scooped a large rock off the ground and held it above his head. His jaw was set. "No wand doesn't mean I'm useless. If a basilisk comes through that door, I'll cave its skull in myself."
Draco looked at him for a moment.
"Fair enough," he said, and turned back to the door.
They stood side by side, waiting.
The door opened.
Fawkes swept out first, trailing light and a fading bar of song. Then Harry, filthy and blood-smeared, helping Ginny Weasley through the doorway — unsteady on her feet, but alive. In his other hand he carried an odd assortment: two wands, a diary with a hole burned clean through its centre, the battered Sorting Hat, and a sword with a rubied hilt, its blade dark with something that wasn't water.
"Ginny." Ron's voice cracked. He dropped the rock and crossed the distance in two strides, taking his sister from Harry's arm. "You're alive. Merlin, you're actually alive—"
Ginny burst into tears and wouldn't let him embrace her. Ron sat down against the wall, drew her to his side anyway, and began talking to her in a low voice.
Draco stepped forward and carefully lifted the diary from Harry's hand, avoiding the burned hole at its centre. He turned it over, studying it.
"You killed the basilisk," he said. It came out less like a question than an attempt to make something incredible feel real.
"Yes." Harry wiped his face with the back of his wrist, leaving a clean streak through the grime. "It's over."
"How?"
Harry almost smiled. "You told me to find its weak point. It's the eyes."
"The eyes," Draco repeated. He hadn't known that. Not specifically. He looked at Harry with something that might, from a distance, have resembled awe. "That's — yes. None of us worked that out."
Harry looked slightly embarrassed.
"And the diary?" Draco held it up. The hole went straight through.
"I used a basilisk fang." Harry grinned at him, a slightly exhausted, still-exhilarated grin. "Seemed like the right tool."
"It was." Draco turned it over once more and set it aside carefully.
Basilisk venom. One of the few substances known to destroy a Horcrux — though Harry had no idea he'd just proven that, or what a Horcrux was, or that he'd technically done it once already without knowing. Tom Riddle's diary was a Horcrux. Had been. Wasn't anymore.
Harry had done it by instinct, with a weapon he'd pulled out of a hat, in a room he'd found by following a ghost's directions.
Draco looked at the sword. The rubied pommel. The blade that looked like it had been forged for something more than decoration.
"Gryffindor's sword," he said.
"It fell out of the Sorting Hat." Harry frowned at it, still clearly puzzled by this himself. "I used it to kill the basilisk."
"Without a wand?"
"Tom — the thing in the diary — took my wand. He'd got solid enough to hold it."
"He became corporeal," Draco said slowly.
"I suppose so. I'm not really sure how it worked. Anyway." Harry looked at the sword again. "Luckily the hat had that. Otherwise it would have been very bad."
Draco looked at the sword. He looked at Harry. He thought about the Killing Curses that had glanced off Harry since infancy, the Dark magic that seemed to bend around him, the fact that Harry Potter had just killed a thousand-year-old basilisk with a sword he pulled out of a hat in a pitch-dark underground chamber at the age of twelve.
Something was forming at the back of his mind — something he couldn't quite bring into focus yet.
"I need one more minute," he said to Harry. "I want to see the basilisk while I have the chance. Will you hold the door?"
Harry blinked. "Of course. Fawkes already put its eyes out, so you'll be safe to look directly at it. Mind the fangs, though — even dead, the venom's still active."
"I'll be careful. Thank you, Harry."
He went in quickly.
He didn't stop to admire the stone pillars, or the carved serpents, or the great statue of Salazar Slytherin looming at the far end. He went straight to the basilisk.
It was enormous. Sixty feet, perhaps more. Even lying still and dead on the Chamber floor it dominated the room in a way that made the space feel small. He moved to its head, crouched, pulled on his dragonhide gloves, and worked methodically — drawing several fangs from its open jaw with careful, precise movements. Thin, curved, still gleaming. He placed each one into a crystal vial from his satchel and sealed them.
He straightened up, peeled off the gloves, and allowed himself exactly thirty seconds to look around the rest of the Chamber and feel the weight of what he was standing in.
A thousand years old. Real. Just as the stories said.
He had what he came for.
He walked back to the entrance.
Harry was waiting. "Well?"
"Extraordinary," Draco said, and meant it. He looked at Harry with something unguarded in his expression, just for a moment. "I genuinely do not know how you did that."
Harry shrugged, in the self-deprecating way he had when he didn't know how to accept a compliment.
Draco did not mention the fangs. The fewer people who knew, the safer — for everyone, himself included. If the Dark Lord ever rose again, the one carrying weapons capable of destroying his Horcruxes would be a priority target. That was not a position Draco intended to advertise.
He trusted Harry. Mostly. But trust had limits, and what he was carrying was too important for limits.
"Ron's taken Ginny on ahead," Harry said. "We should catch up."
"Yes," Draco agreed.
He followed Harry into the tunnel and walked in silence, weary down to his bones, the weight of the vials a steady, quiet presence in his bag.
The path back seemed twice as long as the way in.
He put one foot in front of the other and kept walking.