Author's Note: As usual, some warnings. First, this is a side fic of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" and if you aren't past chapter 50 you will be confused and probably spoil yourself. Second, this is obviously NOT CANON
"I will not stay here," this was the first thing Wizard Lenin, in his gloriously new corporeal form, rasped out to Lily as he lay back on the floor of the room underneath the Default common room.
Lily blinked, blinked again, looked at their surroundings. Admittedly, it wasn't the greatest place she'd ever been in. In fact, if she squinted and tilted her head at the right angle, then it did kind of look like a larger version of the cupboard underneath the stairs. Still, there was room, no one would come looking for him down here, if he wanted she could make some furniture for him and give him a nice mattress to lay down on and maybe bring him some books from the library. So, really, all things considered, it wasn't too bad.
"Lily, are you listening?" Wizard Lenin asked, now glaring at her in a way which was rather familiar if slightly surreal in that it wasn't inside of her head and not accompanied by a headache, "I will not stay inside of this room like your secret pet goldfish!"
Lily pursed her lips, again looked around for some other sort of solution, then asked, "Well, where else are you supposed to go?"
As far as Lily knew this was just about the only place she could comfortably stash him while he was a sad little invalid that someone wouldn't eventually stumble across. Sure, she could stick him in an unused classroom, but people walked into those all the time, and if she left him in the Forbidden Forest there was a high chance he'd be eaten by giant spiders.
So really, when your other options were discovered by horny teenagers looking to make out in broom closets and unused classrooms or else eaten by spiders, Lily thought Wizard Lenin wasn't in a bad position.
She opened her mouth to tell him as much then, given the force of his glare, decided not to.
He sighed, a long pulled out thing that looked like it had been torn out of him against his will, and with his eyes squeezing shut as if preparing for a truly heinous blow he bit out, "There is… one other place left in this castle."
Lily blinked at that, wherever this place was he'd certainly never brought it up before. Of course, Wizard Lenin was very guarded about his past and his secrets in general, so she hadn't really expected him to tell her something like this. Still, you'd think a secret place in Hogwarts where you could stash a body would have been very useful.
With herculean effort he lifted himself into a sitting position, reaching out with an arm towards Lily, "Help me up, we have a lot of stairs to walk down unnoticed."
"Stairs?" Lily asked, even as she helped hoist him up, all too aware that their height difference was not making this task ideal. Honestly, it might be better to just float him places, but she had the feeling he would not appreciate that.
He wasn't kidding when he meant stairs.
With grueling effort, a rather heavy notice-me-not in place, they trudged down not one, not two, but seven flights of stairs all the way to the dungeons and then into the girl's deserted dungeon bathroom.
Lily, naturally, hoped that his new bachelor pad was goddamn worth it because both of them were dripping in sweat and panting heavily as Wizard Lenin motioned them towards the sinks.
"I can't believe you want to live in a bathroom," Lily said, looking around the place, not only a bathroom either but the bathroom everyone loathed and avoided. Something about the place just felt… kind of obnoxious in a way that had never made any sense to Lily but was none the less true. Even just standing here she could feel the place getting on her nerves.
"Not the bathroom," Wizard Lenin scathingly retorted, as if she was an idiot for thinking her dragging her to the bathroom meant he wanted to live in the bathroom, "No, beneath it."
"Beneath it?" she wanted to point out that they were about as far down into the castle as you could get but he wasn't paying attention, instead was focusing on one of the faucets, and carefully hissing sweet nothings to it.
And it was, sweet nothings, his face looked almost reverent as well as nostalgic as he leaned in a little too close. Like he was talking not just to an old friend but to an ex-lover who he still thought of quite often and with fondness.
Lily, grimacing slightly and feeling a wave of secondhand embarrassment, really didn't know what to say the uncomfortable tableau Wizard Lenin was making.
However, before she could open her mouth and ask if she was being the third wheel in Wizard Lenin and the bathroom's relationship he was stumbling backwards, practically falling onto her, while the basin of sinks groaned, shifted, and parted to reveal a great dark pit.
"Holy shit," Lily said as she leaned over, peering down into the dark and trying to make out a hint of something inside.
"The entrance to the chamber of secrets," Wizard Lenin agreed, almost in a reverent whisper, "A place that only the heir of Slytherin can open, and myself, the last descendent."
Well, that sounded ominous and exciting, but as far as Lily could tell it was, well, a pit. It was the kind of dark, endless, pit that you threw stones into and desperately waited for an echo as they hit the bottom. Or, barring that, it was the entrance to the labyrinth where somewhere inside the minotaur waited. It wasn't a place that exactly invited one in, or invited awe, for how much it drew the eye.
However, Lily had the feeling that Wizard Lenin wouldn't appreciate that sort of thought, so she kept her mouth duly shut.
Or at least until Wizard Lenin motioned to the pit.
"Oh, come on," Lily said, still supporting the majority of his weight, "You can't be serious, Lenin!"
Wizard Lenin was perfectly seriously, looking down at her like a commander who brooked no insolence among his troops.
"It's a pit! It's a giant, black, pit that could have anything at the bottom!" Lily said, motioning towards it, but Wizard Lenin just looked skyward as if only god could commiserate with his pain.
"There is nothing at the bottom, Lily," he said, with exasperation as if she was being entirely unreasonable, "The place has been abandoned for fifty years now."
"So, you mean anything could be at the bottom!" Lily said, eyes burning as she stared up at Wizard Lenin who was not nearly concerned enough about jumping into mysterious hidden pits at the bottom of Hogwarts, "You haven't been down there in fifty years!"
"Considering I'm the only one who can get down there," he said through gritted teeth, "Then no one else has been down there either! It is fine!"
Lily did not agree with his definition of fine, she thought with some petulance, still, she supposed there was nothing for it. Taking a rather large breath she pushed the two of them forward, dropping down into the black hole, which ended rather abruptly on top of a pile which looked like the bones of hundreds and thousands of rats.
Lily scrabbled upwards, looking down and counting the skeletons, one, two, ten, twenty…
"Lily, if you don't mind," a voice came to her left where, Wizard Lenin, entirely unamused, had been left sprawled on his back on the pile of bones. Lily scrambled and lifted him back up so tha the was practically squishing her.
"Lenin," Lily said slowly as he ushered her forward, onto the surface of loose jagged stones and down into a rather impressive cave system, "What ate all the rats?"
"What?" he asked.
"The rats, they're all dead, and I can't hear any down here so… What killed them all?"
"Oh, that would be the…" Wizard Lenin trailed off, seemed to catch himself, but it was too late as the shed skin of a giant snake came into view. Piles and piles and piles of it stretched in the cavern, leaving Lily wide-eyed and rather intimidated.
"Lenin, I have to tell you, I'm not a fan of snakes," Lily said, or at least, she was neither pro-snake nor anti-snake but she had the feeling that when it came to giant snakes that could shed that much skin she was leaning towards the anti-snake faction.
"You'll be fine," Wizard Lenin said, pushing a now rather unwilling Lily further and further into the proverbial lion's den (but non-proverbial giant snake's den).
"I don't feel like I'll be fine," Lily said, trying her best to maintain her footing in a place that really hadn't been designed for someone to easily walk through. More and more she was wondering why Wizard Lenin found the idea of this hell-hole more pleasant than the nice and comfy Default common room.
Oh god, and she was going to have to visit him down here, not only because he was a cripple and couldn't do anything for himself at the moment but also just because she had never really been without him. A world with him outside of her head, and her still out there in the world, for all that it was now reality it was inconceivable. She was going to have to visit him and he'd have some giant snake friend and they'd have to have tea while it contemplated devouring her.
"You'll be fine," he insisted, now beyond impatient, "You of all people should have no fear given your complete and utter lack of self-preservation. As it is, so long as you're with me, you will be perfectly fine."
"What do you mean so long as I'm with you?!" Lily did not like that statement, she didn't like it at all.
Wizard Lenin hesitated, paused a bit awkwardly, hissed at a vault door and then with a shrug admitted, "Well, it rarely gets an opportunity to eat anything other than rats."
Well, that sounded just delightful, Lily thought to herself. Especially as, when opening the vault door, she was looking out at what looked like it belonged on the set of Indiana Jones as some sort of an ancient temple devoted to the worship of giant snakes. And here she was, virginal maiden, being escorted by the high priest to her snakey doom.
"Slytherin was very… dramatic," Wizard Lenin finally settled on as an explanation, although whether he knew anything about the rather mysterious Slytherin or not was left something up to debate. Lily, continuing to grimace, just shuffled them inside.
"Lenin, seriously though," Lily asked as they made their way down the stone walkway and up towards the front of the temple towards the carved face of what she assumed was Salazar Slytherin, "Why would you want to live here? This place is terrible, damp and terrible and filled with snakes."
"Salazar Slytherin's private library is here," Wizard Lenin said, "In the back of the chamber, and for the most part, left intact. When I was a student I barely had enough time to get through any of it but now, until I get strength back, I will have entirely too much time on my hands."
That was a reason, she supposed, but Lily could have just picked those up for him. That didn't mean he actually had to stay down here. Lily thought that, for the same reason Wizard Lenin insisted on liking a lot of terrible things, he liked this place.
It probably appealed to his sense of melodrama as much as it had appealed to his overdramatic ancestor's.
Lily was about to point this out when she heard the hissing. It was a subtler, softer, thing than the hissing of a kettle or a steam engine, but it was audible none the less and vibrated through her very bones. Lily felt her eyes go wide, her arm tightened around Wizard Lenin instinctively as he, lifting his head with an amused smile, hissed back.
It was an unnatural, inhuman, sound that did not belong from human lips. Yet it came out all the same, a long series of interconnected hisses, slow and leisurely drifting together and down into the dark unknowns past the dark stagnant water.
A rumbling then, from the deep, from some direction Lily couldn't see, like the slow uncoiling of a great beast that shifted rocks and debris out of the way while the hissing just became louder and more insistent.
When it finally emerged, this dark and gruesome god from its den, Lily decided in the aftermath she could not be held responsible for promptly lighting it on fire. It hissed in agony, looking down at her in vengeance but the flames grew higher and hotter, until soon all that was left of the thing was its charred carcass.
Lily, standing there, shaking, was breathing heavily, shaking, and whispered to herself, "I hate snakes, I hate snakes, I hate snakes…"
Wizard Lenin was having no such issues, after gaping at the giant dead snake he then cried out, "Lily, why would you do that?!"
Lily looked over at him, startled, remembered where she was and who she was with and couldn't help but ask, "Why wouldn't I do that?"
"I told you it was fine!" Wizard Lenin said, not having any of that apparently, but Lily wasn't about to have any of what he was having either.
"It was going to eat me."
"It was not going to eat you!"
"It was going to eat me and it was going to be painful and then I'd get brainwashed and have to go by Morgan for a few weeks and live in a sleazy brothel," she wasn't sure where that last part came from, but some part of her was absolutely certain that a confrontation with that giant snake would inevitably lead to Morgan, whatever Morgan was.
Wizard Lenin looked as if he had nothing to say to that, he just leaned against her, stared down, and looked entirely flabbergasted. Finally, taking a breath, he said, "First, even if it had eaten you, which it would not have, you would have been fine given your utter imperviousness to death. Second, how does that second part even relate to a fight with a basilisk?"
"I don't want to marry my fake cousin," was all that Lily said, again, not entirely sure why she was saying it at all. Except that Morgan, aside from being Morgan, also involved cousin weddings.
Wizard Lenin, for his own part, looked as if he had no idea what she was talking about either. Finally, with a rather defeated sigh, rubbing at the back of his head and staring out at the snake, he said, "Well, now I'm not staying here either."
"What?!" Lily asked, "But we just got down here!"
"That was before you blew up my basilisk," Wizard Lenin said, motioning for them to turn around, "I am not cleaning that thing up and if I wanted to read Salazar's ridiculously dry journals I would have done it when I was seventeen."
"This is bullshit, Lenin," Lily huffed as they began to slowly but surely backtrack to the Default common room.
"Yes, well, I blame you."
And that, as far as Lily was concerned, was the rather anticlimactic end of the chamber of secrets.
The unfortunate, unknown, consequence to Lily at the time was that when a diary wearing the body of a little girl would descend into the chamber, he would find the basilisk, and his one attempt at freedom and salvation, already slain.
This then, though Lily did not yet know it, was the story of Wizard Trotsky's plan b.
Author's Note: Now, a story that is so long, so unwieldly, that I had to cut it down into baby sections because even an Act I was too damn long. Expect... more of these. Anyways, written for a Lily/Trotsky commission by AlleyKat2014 and I decided to make it Phantom of the Opera themed, because I could. This, of course, being the prologue that gets us to the point where the plot itself can begin to occur.
Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter