The Best-Laid Plans
By Tîldëshsmôo
Plans, Salazar reflected, never survive contact with reality.
The plan had seemed simple enough. Leave a tool hidden within the castle so that one of his heirs could eventually use it to clear the place of the muggleborn taint, but somehow hide it from Godric, Helga, and Rowena.
The heir part was easy: although his marriage had been a childless one, he had been quite the rake in his youth. He only knew for certain of one result of his many youthful indiscretions, but there had been so many that more heirs were almost assured. He certainly hoped so, anyway: the Gaunt bitch had stolen his mother's locket, which he had meant to use as an engagement gift someday—his wife had loved the ring, but he still wished he could have given her the locket—and he was fairly sure that anyone raised by her would turn out Dark. With so many other women, it seemed a good bet that he would be safe, but with the way the rest of his plans had turned out...
The first plan had been Hogwarts itself. A haven against the Darkness, and a place to educate the forces of Light, Hogwarts had been a brainchild of all four Founders, conceived when they first met while mourning their respective spouses, all of whom had been killed by Dark creatures or magic. Although their motivations were vastly different—Godric wanted to train heroes of the Light to fight the Darkness, Rowena to educate children in a way that would keep them away from Darkness, Helga to provide a haven for those affected by Darkness, and Salazar a base from which to fight back against the Dark forces—all four had come together on this one project, a school of magic and of Light that was also a fortress in which anyone could seek shelter, and from which the Light could fight back. Although none had met before, they had certainly heard of each other, as the Hogwarts Four were the greatest magical humans in the British Isles.
Come to think of it, Hogwarts had been Salazar's plan to begin with, in a way. It had been he who, after spending months too depressed even to cast any spells after his wife had died, had sought out the most powerful of those affected by the deteriorating state of the world and proposed that they do something about it. That had not turned out so well for him, either. First Godric had insisted on allowing the muggleborn—even the daughter of the one who had killed his beloved wife!—into the school, then Rowena had sided with him when Salazar called him out. Although Helga was vacillating, trying to avoid conflict, he knew that she would eventually come down on Godric's side, as well. So, he had hatched his new plan: he knew they would win for now, but someday, an heir of his—someone brought up as a proper pureblood, someone who knew the true danger of the muggleborn—would take up his cause when there was no more Godric to oppose him.
To that end, he had begun by constructing a secret chamber under the castle in which to house the tool that his heir would use to drive the muggleborn from the school. It had started simply, but he had begun idly expanding it as he thought about what the chamber would house, until it had become far too large and complex for an ordinary tool. Not that such an important thing could possibly be ordinary. He made the place a bit of a shrine to himself in his ennui and frustration, even making the place respond to commands in Parseltongue, and creating a gigantic statue of himself. He realized, when he caught himself charming the statue to open its mouth when given the ridiculously pompous command, "Speak to me, Salazar, greatest of the Hogwarts Four!" in Parseltongue, that it was about time to figure out what he would put in there. Just charming the entrance to remain hidden unless commanded to open in Parseltongue, and charming the bas relief of a snake to remain on the entrance no matter how the privy in which the entrance resided—for, who would ever expect the great Salazar Slytherin to hide the entrance to his secret chamber in a jakes, of all things?—had gotten Godric asking questions about the state of his digestion. The others were getting either worried or suspicious, with the amount of time he supposedly spent in there now.
Eventually, the Parseltongue theme caught up with him. After all, any true heir of his would be a Parselmouth. Or, at least, they had better be, or they would be unable to enter the chamber. It was the only way he could think of to make it secure against Godric's and Rowena's prodding without making it completely inaccessible. In keeping with the idea that whomever entered the chamber would have to be a Parselmouth, a snake seemed like a good choice of tool. The largest, deadliest, most vicious snake he could find, of course; anything less would likely be driven out by the muggleborn instead of the other way around. Oddly enough, finding such a snake had not been hard: a basilisk nearly twenty feet long had been terrorizing a village, and the local wizard—by trade, a maker of earthenware, of all things—had petitioned Hogwarts for assistance. Salazar simply took the basilisk; told the other Founders that he had killed it; quietly spent a small fortune on various basilisk parts to prove that it was not only dead, but already clothing and potions ingredients; and snuck it into his privy by sending it through the cesspit (with which it was not happy, but did comply). All had gone according to plan.
Right up until it had been time to get the damned thing into the chamber.
Part of the deal for getting it through the cesspit had been that he had to clean it when it came out before it would do anything else. Not particularly wanting a basilisk angry with him in such a small room, he complied, and spent a half hour rinsing the damned thing off, which was made all the more difficult by the fact that it could not uncurl at all in the small privy. When the task was finally completed, he opened the door to his secret chamber and ordered his basilisk to go down the tube.
Nothing happened.
He turned to find the basilisk unmoving. It was not dead, he could easily tell, for it was still breathing (and with breath that foul, he found it odd that it had cared at all about the cesspit), but it refused to uncurl for any order, no matter how much he prodded. Realizing that he was dead either way, he cautiously looked into its eyes.
Milky white, and harmless.
So, it would be Godric who killed him, when he found a basilisk shedding in the jakes. Plans never survived the touch of reality.
On the other hand, necessity was the mother of invention. Later generations would never know that one of the most useful rooms in the castle would be born of Salazar's need for a place which could be used to keep Godric out of the jakes while the basilisk shed. Pure, raw magic, in the first accidental magic performed by any of the Founders in decades, created a room which—when Godric was passing it, thinking about how he shouldn't have drunk all that small beer with dinner—turned into the most palatial Roman bath he had ever imagined, complete with running water. He never managed to find the bath again, but it kept him out of the privy for the better part of two days, and he did twice find a library in that hallway while wondering what magic could have created the room in later years.
Unknowing of this, and thanking every deity he had ever even considered worshiping that no one had come upon his predicament, Salazar managed to get the basilisk moving nineteen hours later. He followed closely and shut the entry behind him, then proceeded with the daunting task of getting the basilisk to its final destination without it shaking the castle apart. Snakes, when they shed, tend to rub against things, and basilisk-sized snakes rubbing against the foundations of castles tended to cause noticeable effects. He frantically herded the snake, hoping that he could get it to the chamber—which was not actually under the castle itself, but carved into the bedrock under the grounds—before it started truly shedding.
No such luck: the snake thrashed up against the narrow walls of the maze that connected the original chamber to the newer, overly-improved one, shaking the very foundations of the castle. Resigned, Salazar spent the next several minutes banging his head against the wall until the giant serpent was done, then led it the rest of the way without incident. In a fit of vindictiveness, he finished the charm to open the statue's mouth and imprisoned the basilisk inside. When he returned to the surface, he left the skin, its usefulness being outweighed by his annoyance with the entire episode. He wanted to be shut of the chamber, and anything he associated with it.
Godric found him in his room later that night. "Hey, are you all right?" he asked. "I was searching for this wonderful room, and I think I searched too hard; the castle started shaking. Did I break anything?"
Salazar, stunned that his plans going to hell had not bought him a ticket there, cautiously answered, "No... Everything's fine here. What do you mean searching for a room?"
"Yes, it's very odd. I would have thought it would take at least a few more decades before the school built up enough magic to start changing on its own. We must be more powerful than we thought." Both Salazar and Godric laughed. Although they might be enemies philosophically, they were still friends personally. "Hey, listen, I know we've gone over this a thousand times before, but... About the muggleborn..."
"I know what you're going to say, Godric, and the answer is still no. I know you think everyone deserves an education, but after what they did to my wife..."
"Not all of them are like that, you know. You didn't have anything against letting werewolves in, and neither did Helga, and it was one of them that killed her husband."
"I'm not as forgiving as Helga. I've decided that I'm leaving. My heir can drive the muggleborn out when he or she finds the secret chamber I've hidden under the castle and uses that which I hid in it. You win for now."
Godric laughed at what he thought was a joke and gave Salazar a sad smile. "If that's the only way we can remain friends... I didn't want to drive you away."
"I know. I'm just in the minority here, so I can't do what I want. There's not much point in my being here anymore. I'll still be available when you need help. Now, what was so special about this room you found?"
When he heard how Godric had spent the last two days, he immediately joined the search. Anything to avoid the jakes during his final days in the castle.
NOTES: Darn, that took a while. Well, after over a week of FFN being down... Well, let's just say I never thought I'd put something on deviantArt before FFN. Anyway, this story began with me wondering about the twenty-foot snake skin near the entrance to the Chamber. Since the snake was fifty feet long at over a thousand years old, it didn't seem logical that more than half its growth occurred since Riddle let it out, so I guessed it was from Slytherin's first placing it in the Chamber. That got me to thinking about the mechanics of building the Chamber under the noses of the other Founders, why he would hate muggleborns so much, why he chose the method he did and made the Chamber so unnecessarily impressive, why the Founders joined together in the first place, and why Slytherin's heir wasn't named Slytherin. Also, it was kinda fun to use my knowledge of medieval terms and architecture. Bits of information:
1. Jakes and privy are both archaic terms for an indoor latrine (privy derived from "privy closet," meaning "small, private room"); a cesspit is, of course, the pit into which latrines empty.
2. Roman baths had running water of a sort: an aqueduct ran through a room at floor-level, and you did your business in there, then cleaned up with a small sponge on the end of a stick. The true luxury of the Roman bath, however, lay in the running, heated bathwater, the saunas, and the gymnasia (a remnant of Greek baths). And the servants (often female), but I'm afraid the Room of Requirement couldn't provide those.
3. Small beer was a grain-derived drink of low alcohol content, popular in the middle ages because it was much less likely to be disease-ridden than plain water, and less likely to get you drunk than wine.
4. And, yes, one of Harry's ancestors did make a cameo. Many surnames are derived from family occupations, and I kinda wanted to make a pre-Potter potter involved at least peripherally.