Summary: A short story written for AStitchedUpHeart's Create-A-Potion Challenge. Set during, and in, the Chamber of Secrets movie version.
Potion: Draught of Living Death
Prompts: Water, Harry Potter
Words: 393
Drip, drip.
The only sounds in the Chamber of Secrets were the deep, rasping snuffling of the wounded basilisk and the slow pitter-patter of water percolating through the cracked pipes to fall into the puddles below. Harry was holding his breath. He couldn't afford to chance Slytherin's monster hearing him.
He watched with morbid fascination as it ponderously slithered toward the alcove he had taken refuge in, swinging its head back and forth, searching for the boy ensconced not twenty feet away.
Harry risked drawing in a long, slow lungful of air, being as quiet as he could. The beast's head continued to sway, like a pendulum on an old grandfather clock, ticking away your allotment of life. It was a constant, yet varying motion, like waves in the ocean.
The snake paused, it had caught the spoor of its prey. As it began to move forward, Harry looked around wildly for any means of escape. The short pipe he had backed into was barred by a grate, and the basilisk was now nearly upon him, leaving little possibility that even a scrawny twelve-year-old could sneak past.
He moved his foot, unwilling to simply wait passively like a lamb for slaughter, and stubbed his toe on a rock. It was a very ordinary rock, green and slimy with algae from sitting in the stagnant water for perhaps hundreds of years, but for him it meant an opportunity to live.
He tossed it down the pipe, away from the massive serpent which was now very nearly touching its snout to his chest. The rock clattered on the wet stone before coming to rest with a splash in one of the deeper pools. The basilisk sniffed, then followed the noise, and Harry ran in the opposite direction, out of the pipes and into the main hall. He nearly slipped on the slick floor in the process, and came sliding to a halt, panting, against a tendril of Slytherin's beard. A glint of silver, coming from inside Gryffindor's Sorting Hat caught his eye.
When the beast crashed into the reservoir below Harry's feet, droplets of the filthy water splashed Harry's face, not very differently from the way his blood drizzled from the small puncture made by the basilisk fang. That, in turn, plopped onto Tom Riddle's diary as he stabbed it, causing ink to ooze like blood from its pages.
Drip, drip.