A/N: Sorry this took so long. It's been a long hard summer so far, but hopefully I can get more done now!

"Come on Harry, you can't be that tired!" mocked a grinning Ginny some time later after a long dinner. Harry, Ron and Hermione had relayed to the rest of the Weasley family the results of the impromptu interview and the failed journey into Gringott's. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley had listened carefully, but weren't able to offer anything more than opinions. Mrs. Weasley had seemed baffled into a rare silence that her efforts to rid the world of Bellatrix had not been permanent. This made it much easier when the time came to excuse themselves to the privacy of Ron's room where Harry could add the details that he would eventually break down and confess anyway.

"Ginny, this is serious!" snapped Harry, absolutely confused, and angry that she had not taken the day's disappointments as seriously as he would have imagined.

"I know it is," she said, stifling her laughter instantaneously. "Harry, I don't know why you can't see it…" She paused as if giving him time to figure it out on his own. Harry shrugged expectantly, and she continued. "Think about it…can you think of any other place that only Voldemort could get into?"

Harry's exhausted mind was drawing one blank after the next.

"Perhaps no one except maybe Voldemort and you…"she prompted, and then her face went deadly serious. "…and me…under his power?"

And finally it came to him. The Chamber of Secrets! He beamed at Ginny.

"Parseltongue!" he exclaimed. "Of course! I don't know how I could have been so dense!"

"Tonight you can blame it on the trial...the two Death Eater attacks...the assault of a goblin and a house elf in your presence...oh, and the three trips into other people's memories," she said ironically. "But the next time all that happens in one day, you're expected to think for yourself." He threw his arms around her and kissed her deeply. She kissed him back.

"Are you two finished yet?" came Ron's voice from the hallway. "Mum's about to make me and Hermione listen to Melena Button's Advice for Lovelorn Witches, and if I have to suffer through that…"

"We're done!" Ginny grumbled, pulling away reluctantly. Ron stumbled in gratefully. "We weren't doing anything anyway." She kissed Harry innocuously on the cheek and slipped out the door. Ron brandished Harry an accusatory glare.

"You better not be letting her think that she can help us with this," he said. "She's still underage, you know."

"I know," said Harry with an excited smile. "But she just helped me figure out the locket!"

"What…" Ron began.

"Parseltoungue! I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but Ginny figured it out before I was even done telling her!"

"Of course she did," Ron replied huffily. "She's a Weasley, isn't she?"

The next morning, promptly at nine, Harry, Ron, and Hermione were in the Atrium to meet Kingsley, who looked like he had already had an eventful morning.

"The Profit did a report on our excursion yesterday and now the aurors are bombarded with hundreds of sightings of Bellatrix, Rodolphus…We've even had nine or ten sightings of Voldemort!" He sighed deeply and headed toward the lift. "One 'Voldemort' was a hag who was furious that we knocked over her cauldron full of…who knows, and one turned out to be a Dementor projection from your brothers' shoppe, Ron!"

Ron looked guiltily at his feet. Harry smiled. "Well I've got some news that may cheer you up," he said. "Ginny figured out how to make the locket work."

"Really!" exclaimed Kingsley as the elevator announced Level Three: Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. "How?"

"I'm going to speak to it in parseltongue," said Harry. Kingsley looked just as shocked as Harry had felt the night before.

"Six years as the head of the auror department, and it never occurred to me!" he said regretfully. "I sent the locket with Minerva to Hogwarts." All three sets of shoulders sank in disappointment as the lift slowed to a stop on Level One. "I'll have Percy send an owl immediately. The headmistress is just as eager to find out what purpose that thing serves as we are. In the meantime, let's have a look at the rest of those memories, shall we?"

When Percy had been sent running to the owlery, and the three of them were successfully shut in Kingsley's office once again, Harry stared over at the three remaining viles…one grey-brown, one white, and one jet black. He closed his eyes and grasped one. Cautiously, he poured its grey-brown contents into the Pensieve. They gathered around unenthusiastically and plunged their faces into the bowl.

Kingsley's cheerful, quiet office disappeared. It was replaced by a thick, musty darkness and the steady sound of a rainstorm. They looked around and found themselves in a narrow back alley. The rain poured down around them, soaking cloth overhangs, flooding the cobblestone beneath their feet and dripping from every outlying feature with the exception of the four figures superimposed in a memory. Aside from the rain, there was nothing moving within eyeshot.

"What do you think…" Ron began, but a running shuffle from the back of the alley caused him to stop. A dark cloaked figure was walking quickly and determinately towards them. As they watched, a second silhouette entered the alley, clearly in pursuit of the first man.

"Brother, please!" the second man yelled. The first shadow did not slow his angry pace. "I didn't understand what he was! Please stop!"

The first man stopped and turned violently. His hood fell and the yellow lights revealed a handsome bushy haired young man.

"Harry! Do you know who that is?" asked Ron excitedly, but Harry recognized him instantly. His heart skipped a beat. It was a young Sirius. In fact, his godfather must have been about the same age as he was now.

"No, Regulus!" he shouted back. "I don't care! You made your choice years ago! I had to leave my own home! My own family!" There was a fire in his eyes that Harry had never seen. Twelve years in Azkaban had taken it from him by the time Harry finally met him. "I fight against you…people…now!"

"I'm not one of them anymore, Sirius!" Regulus pleaded as he followed his brother into the light. He was emaciated and haggard, but he had the same angry eyes as Sirius. His expression was grim and desperate.

"I don't want to hear it!" Sirius shouted. He was shaking with the force of his anger. "Once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater." He turned to leave the alley, thought better of it, and turned again toward his brother. "Be careful the company you keep, Regulus. The next time that I see you, I may be forced to kill you." His face was emotionless, and Harry knew that it was not an idle threat. "I've had years to make my peace with that."

"You won't see me again, brother," replied Regulus solemnly. "I'm on my way to Hell tonight."

"Good!" Sirius bellowed. "You were headed there eventually anyway!" He turned away and the fruitless pursuit began again.

"Wasn't much the forgiving type, Sirius, was he?" whispered Hermione.

"You wouldn't understand," said Harry. "You're family cares if you live or die."

"Sirius's did not have a good childhood," asserted Kingsley. "I was surprised he even lived through it. It was a miracle that he turned out so well."

The two brothers exited the alleyway followed closely by Hermione, Ron, Kingsley, and Harry. Regulus grabbed Sirius's shoulder and swung him around. Harry noticed a flash of gold as his sleeve pulled back—just a quick flicker and then gone. He blinked and looked again.

"Sirius, in case I don't return tonight you need to know that the Dark Lord has made…" But Regulus did not finish his warning. Sirius's fist came out of nowhere and hit him square in the face. He was thrown to the ground with his lip and nose bleeding.

"Voldemort will NEVER be a Lord!" Sirius shouted, and he disappeared into the night.

"Harry, I think he was going to tell Sirius about the horcruxes!" said Ron. The memory began to fade to grey, and then became clear again as Regulus faded in and out of consciousness.

"I think you're right," Harry replied absentmindedly. He was headed toward the prone shape on the ground in front of him. Regulus's sleeve had rolled up enough to reveal a chain tightly wrapped around his wrist. There was an open gold locket hanging from it. It was the locket that Professor MacGonagal had now in her possession.

Regulus curled in on himself, and then pushed into to a sitting position, dripping blood freely from what must have been a broken nose. To the astonishment of all three of the onlookers, he laughed and stood up.

"Kreacher!" he called into the night. There was a pop and Harry's inherited house elf appeared in the street.

"Master Regulus! You're injured terribly!" he whined, but Regulus rejected Kreacher's efforts to heal him.

"I'm fine!" he grabbed the elf by both shoulders. "Kreacher, I order you to show me where the cave is."

"Master, no!"

"I don't want to hear it!" shouted Regulus. "You are my elf. You follow my orders! Show me now!"

With a look of terrified reluctance, Kreacher grabbed his master. There was another faint crack and they both disappeared. The memory turned instantly grey and they came out again in Kingsley's office.

"Well, that didn't give us anything!" groaned Ron, settling into Kingsley's desk chair. "We already knew what happened to Sirius's brother."

But Harry was silent and stiff. "It did tell us something," he said menacingly. "It told us that the Bellatrix's locket and the one that we have aren't the same."

"What?" asked Ron, baffled. "How do you figure that one?"

"We should have figured it out before, of course," Hermion cut in. "The timing was completely off."

"But that doesn't explain why she's still looking for it," said Harry.

"Maybe she doesn't know," Kingsley speculated.

Ron let out a loud sigh. "Does anyone want to explain to me what they're talking about?" he said, aggravated.

"Ron, Regulus had the locket hanging from his wrist," Harry explained patiently. "He was headed for the cave, and from there, we all know where the locket went. How could that locket be around Bellatrix's neck years later when she asked Narcissa to erase her memory if it was stuck in the bottom of…whatever that potion was?"

Disappointed understanding dawned on Ron's face. "So we're back to the beginning," he said. "There's a Death Eater that's supposed to be dead who's looking for a locket that was supposed to have been in a cave for over twenty years!"

"Lets have a look at the other two memories," Kingsley suggested. "Put in the black one. That has got to be from one of the Malfoys."

Fighting back his own disappointment and wondering what good any of it would do if they didn't have the original locket, Harry poured the black memory into the Pensieve. The texture of the memory seemed somehow off—perhaps more smoke than liquid. He was reminded of Slughorn's modified memory from years before. Kingsley noticed as well, but he shook his head and moved toward the bowl. The only way to discover the difference was to continue. Harry fell into line behind the other three and delved into the next to last memory.

He fell into one of his own nightmares.

It was unlike any of his other journeys into memory. He hit the ground with enough force to send pain running up through his spine. Cringing, he realized that he had fallen into a dark room at twilight. The features around him were fast becoming nothing more than silouettes. He looked around for his three companions, and his eyes fell instead upon the cold, cruel snake-like face of Voldemort only inches away from his own...and what was worse, the red eyes saw him. He let out a terrified shout and inched backwards in a panic.

"Ron!" he shouted, looking around him desperately. "Hermione! Kingsley! What's happening?"

A high, maddening laughter was his only answer. "You should have expected this," Voldemort hissed at him. His voice did not have the same power behind it as when Harry had confronted him in the Forbidden Forest, but it was enough to turn every muscle in his body momentarily to rubber. "You could never have lived up to my expectations."

He pointed his wand at Harry's heart. Harry's reaction was more instinct than anything else. He kicked out with all his force toward the half-human form looming over him, and used the leverage to roll out of the path of the wand. Regaining his footing, he ran as fast as he could toward anything that could shelter him from the curse that he knew was coming.

At least, his reaction occurred perfectly in his head. He could feel the impact of his feet against the white, weakened chins of his nemesis. He could smell the dew in the grass as his body curled and rolled through it to maintain fleeing position, but when he chanced a glance back to see if Voldemort was in pursuit, he found himself suddenly prone on the ground in the same position as before with the "Dark Lord" glaring down at him and a wand now poking into his chest.

"What is this!?" he screamed in frustration. "Is it another Horcrux? How do you see me!?"

But, though Voldemort appeared to be able to see him, his words did not seem to enter into the same plain, and he received no response.

"No! My Lord, please!"

The cry came from a shadow that had been cringing in the corner. The voice was that of Bellatrix, and Harry had only heard it's particular tone once before. It was the same crazed panic as she had shown in the first memory. Harry tried to use the momentary distraction to strike out again, but, though his mind and body seemed to function, he found himself once again in the same place.

"You have no power to sway my decision, Bellatrix!" Voldemort responded without emotion. "Stay in that corner like a good servant, or you will receive more…training."

Bellatrix recoiled, but she did not remain silent. Instead, she tried a different, more docile approach "My Lord, I am only afraid that you lack the strength to perform the curse! What would happen if the scene with the Potter boy was…"

But Voldemort reacted instanaeously and furiously.

"Crucio!"

And Bellatrix was screaming and convulsing in the corner. Harry pulled his wand from his pants pocket.

"Stupify!" he yelled. Nothing happened. In fact, he discovered that he was confined to the same position with his wand still in his back pocket. His head was nearly exploding with an aggravating confusion. Why couldn't he do anything?

Voldemort had turned his attention once again toward Harry. This was a nightmare. It had to be—perhaps the memory of a nightmare. What else could it be?

"You could never be my key to immortality!" Voldemort hissed. He raised his wand above his head, but the tip was still pointed directly at his heart. Harry knew what was coming next. Voldemort only bothered with one particular curse when it came to him. He closed his eyes and hoped for the possibility that it would all end once again with a pleasant conversation with Dumbledore in King's Cross Station.

"Avada Kedavra!"

The light from it pierced even his tightly closed eyelids as it struck him directly over his heart.

Up next: The Immortal and the Thief