Really long A/N: Sorry for this update being a day late. I'll try to get the next chapter up in time. It's a longer chapter than last time (it'd be hard for it to be shorter, after all :P), but I'm not sure if it qualifies as an "extra-long" chapter. Ah well, these things happen.

This chapter was a nightmare to write. I wanted it to go one way, it wanted to go another, and as a result it's – in my opinion – a meandering mess.

I've found several different versions of the order in which Voldemort made his Horcruxes and I can't remember if it was ever mentioned in canon, so for the sake of the story, it was: diary, ring, cup, diadem, locket, Harry, Nagini.

I assume that the teachers all know about the Room of Requirement, but usually have no reason to use it (how would Dumbledore's Army have learned anything if their teachers were popping in and out every few minutes?).

If Pansy's parents were given names in canon, I can't find them, so I invented ones for them.

Chapter 25: Lucius Pays a Visit

But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do. - Kenneth Oppel, Skybreaker

Severus had endured many horrific things. He had served a megalomaniac, been tortured so many times he'd lost count, survived prolonged exposure to Bellatrix, and spent time in Azkaban. After all those things you'd think he would be able to cope with anything, yet one eleven-year-old brat was going to succeed where the Dark Lord and his most ardent followers had failed and drive him to an early grave.

"HE DID WHAT?!"

Not for the first time, something Sirius Black said had made him lose his temper. For the first time, Black was every bit as furious about it as he was. And of course a Potter was responsible.

Severus paced the length of Black's hospital room. He thought in exclamation marks, like Mrs. Lynde in a Muggle book Lily made him read once. Potter made a deal with the Dark Lord! He lied to Dumbledore! He was hiding You-Know-Who somewhere in Hogwarts! Great Merlin, where would this end?

Black was speaking. Severus forced himself to listen in case the brat – the reckless, suicidal, imbecilic brat – had confessed to any more misdeeds. He would prefer not to have any more nasty surprises.

"He wasn't thinking clearly at the time – I know, it doesn't justify it, but he's eleven and one of his friends was dying. I would have done the same," Black tried to make excuses for the boy.

"Yes, because you haven't a live brain cell to your name," Severus retorted.

Black scowled, but didn't throw a tantrum, to his surprise. He had clearly grown up somewhat in the past eleven years. He opened his mouth, clearly dying to say something that would get him hexed, thought better of it, and said instead, "You'll have to question the boy. I'd advise Veritaserum, but since you're such a clever Potions Master you'd have thought of that on your own."

Severus hardly noticed his pitiful attempt at sarcasm. "Question him?" he shouted. "What do you mean, question him?" Black's frantic gestures brought him back to reality and he lowered his voice before someone got suspicious. "He needs an Avada between the eyes, not an interrogation, Veritaserum or no Veritaserum. Have you forgotten that the only reason he's walking around and causing us all this trouble is because he killed a student?"

"But he'll also know what You-Know-Who's likely to do," Black said.

Severus scowled. He hated it when a Gryffindor said something intelligent. It gave him the sense that he'd fallen down a rabbit hole to a world more bizarre than any Muggle author could imagine, and he might find a delegation of Death Eaters – masks, robes and all – having a tea party with Muggle politicians. While sitting upside down on the ceiling of the Great Hall. While the Dark Lord played Quidditch with Potter and Dumbledore beneath them.

It wasn't a feeling he enjoyed.

Black continued, "And I can't do it. Dumbledore would wonder why I was at Hogwarts, and anyway, these-" he said a few words that would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap if Molly Weasley ever heard them, "-healers won't let me out. They say I "over-exerted" myself when I went to Hogwarts. I'm not a child, for Merlin's sake!"

"That's debatable at best," Severus muttered.

The conversation quickly devolved into childish name-calling. On both sides, it must be said.

When Erasmus Parkinson first read his daughter's letter, he thought she'd taken leave of her senses.

"What does Pansy say?" Delfina asked after he'd stared blankly at it for several minutes.

He tossed the letter – and the other, slightly charred letter that came with it – over to her. "Read it yourself. If you ask me she's spent too long in those dungeons."

His wife scanned Pansy's letter with a thoughtful frown. "Where is your brain, man? This is perfect!"

"Eh?" Erasmus blinked. "It is?"

"You wanted to bring Lucius Malfoy down, didn't you? Here's the perfect way of doing it."

Erasmus, never noted for his quick thinking at the best of times, stared at her blankly. "How?"

Delfina smiled. It was a smile that boded no good for the Malfoy family. "Leave that to me."

Severus decided that he couldn't possibly go to face a young version of the Dark Lord completely sober. He had no classes for another hour thanks to a joint Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff Quidditch practice, ostensibly to promote House unity but probably so each team could see how the other played and change their tactics accordingly. Because of this he was sure no one could object to him having a glass of firewhiskey as soon as he returned from St. Mungo's. He sat down, glass in hand, to look through an old Potions tome and do his best to forget the sixteen-year-old psychopath a few floors overhead. That was when the Floo roared to life.

At this unexpected call, he thought a few words that would make even Black blush.

"Severus? Are you there?"

His eyebrows shot up and vanished into his hairline. Why was Lucius calling him?

Oh no. Surely Riddle hadn't found some way to contact his older self's followers.

"What is it?" he asked, fighting to keep his tone free of the dread that suddenly gripped him.

"Can I come over?" Lucius asked in lieu of answering.

That did not sound good. Severus gave his assent and tried not to let his growing alarm show on his face. Why couldn't he be like other Potions Masters? All they had to worry about was making a mistake in brewing and blowing themselves up. He had to worry about a whole school almost entirely full of atrocious students, a maniac who wouldn't stay dead and had split his soul, one of the soul shards of said maniac which had regained a body, and an eleven-year-old who seemed determined to kill himself. It was enough to drive anyone insane.

Lucius looked uncharacteristically alarmed as he stepped through the Floo. He didn't waste time with pleasantries. That alone told Severus that something somewhere had gone very, very wrong.

"Is there a Cerberus in this school?" was the first thing he said.

That was most definitely not what he expected.

"…Er?" said Severus intelligently. He almost winced at how much like a Weasley he sounded. How does he know about that?

Lucius began to pace up and down the room. "I just received a baffling visit from the Parkinsons. They have a letter from Draco – and it is from Draco, or else it's an excellent forgery – which says she was almost eaten by a Cerberus which Dumbledore is keeping on the third floor. They appear to be under the impression I knew about this Cerberus and did nothing about it. As they left they said that they would not permit their daughter to be put in danger and if I did not do something about it they would. Now tell me, Severus, is it true?"

Severus wished he'd had a lot more than a few sips of firewhiskey before Lucius arrived. He was far too sober to cope with this.

"There was a Cerberus on the third floor," he acknowledged.

Lucius went a curious shade of white mingled with red. "You knew about it? And you allowed it?"

"Have you ever tried to dissuade Dumbledore from doing something he's set on?" Severus asked rhetorically. "I tried to talk him out of it, but he refused. It was Hagrid's-"

"Oh, of course," Lucius muttered. "What will he do next, keep a dragon in the attics?"

Severus forbore to mention that Hagrid had indeed kept a dragon, briefly, though not in the attics. "-And he couldn't keep it in his house, so Dumbledore offered him the use of the third floor corridor until he found a… more suitable accommodation for it."

That was a good enough lie, he thought. It was more or less true, and it didn't mention anything to do with Nicolas Flamel or his creation.

Lucius collapsed into a chair and buried his head in his hands. "Did it really attack Draco?"

"If it did, she said nothing to me about it," Severus said, which was perfectly true. In his mind, however, he went over the time Filch caught Potter, Weasley and Draco on the third floor corridor. Had the little imbeciles really met it then? If they had, why hadn't they been in shock? Or badly injured?

His friend sat in silence for a moment. "Is it still here?"

Good question. Was it? He racked his brains for any reference to what had happened to Fluffy after the Great Christmas Eve Turban Debacle.

"I don't know," he said honestly.

Lucius got up. "For Dumbledore's sake, it had better not be. I will tell the Board of Governors about this. And… Is Draco all right?"

That was the closest Lucius Malfoy ever got to showing real fear for anyone else's safety.

"She certainly doesn't act like someone who was almost eaten by a Cerberus," Severus replied dryly, thinking of the argument after breakfast. He still wasn't entirely clear on the specifics, but it seemed an idiotic second-year Ravenclaw (a Pureblood, no less!) asked Draco if she dyed her hair. It nearly ended in hexes being thrown.

After Lucius left, Severus found himself in a bit of a dilemma. Which should be done first: alerting Albus to the impending arrival of the Board of Governors, or interrogating the walking, talking Horcrux upstairs?

He scribbled a note to Albus explaining Lucius's visit, summoned a House-elf to take it to the Headmaster's office, downed the remainder of his scarcely-touched glass of firewhiskey, fetched a full bottle of Veritaserum from his stores, and set off for the Room of Requirement.

Tom was bored. The house-elves brought him food, books, a change of clothes and a selection of old wands to try without asking who he was or why he was there (he suspected Potter had something to do with that; the little nuisances praised "the Boy-Who-Killed-Bad-Mister-Dark-Lord" to the skies) and he could talk to Jormungand when the basilisk was awake, but nothing – not the books, not his basilisk, not practicing spells with wands that worked for him but felt alien and unsettling – alleviated the crushing boredom that settled on him.

Worse than the boredom was the unnerving feeling of… regret. It wasn't guilt (Tom Riddle had never been capable of anything so human), but he wished Sally-Anne was still there so he had someone to talk to. He ignored this feeling to the best of his ability.

After being trapped in a diary for fifty years (he conveniently ignored that he had no one to blame but himself for that), all that he really wanted was to go outside.

He was reading a book on Inanimate to Animate transfigurations when the door opened. That must be Potter at last. The boy had been away so long he'd thought he wouldn't come at all.

"Stupefy!" someone shouted.

Severus fought the urge to Avada the Horcrux while it was unconscious. Unlike Black, he didn't believe the boy could give them any useful information (how much did someone actually know about what they'd do fifty years in the future?), but he didn't know and had no wish to know how Horcruxes worked. An Avada might not harm one at all. Besides, the Dark Lord – the actual one, not this sixteen-year-old shard of his soul – might be able to tell if one of his Horcuxes was destroyed.

So he gritted his teeth, force-fed it Veritaserum, and tried not to throttle it.

"Ennervate."

The Horcrux woke up. Severus derived grim satisfaction from its shock, panic and anger when it found itself tied to a chair. He'd suffered much worse at the hands of its older self; it was only fair it got a taste of its own medicine.

"What is your name?" he asked, because that was the standard first question asked of someone under Veritaserum and not because he was in any doubt.

"Tom Marvolo Riddle," the Horcrux said through gritted teeth.

That was all confirmation of its identity that Severus needed.

"Are you a Horcrux?"

"Yes."

And that confirmed Albus's theory.

"How many Horcruxes did you make?"

"One."

Severus reflected that it was just as well Black wasn't in charge of this interrogation. The Gryffindor would have been satisfied with such an obvious evasion. "How many did you intend to make?"

The glare Riddle gave him was so deadly anyone else would have run screaming from the room. He didn't. He'd been on the receiving end of far too many glares from this thing's older self to be alarmed. No matter how intimidating Riddle was, he was only sixteen, and a sixteen-year-old would never look as intimidating as a snake-like humanoid with a sadistic streak a mile wide.

"Seven."

Seven? He intended to split his soul seven times? And knowing the Dark Lord, he'd have gone beyond seven… Severus suppressed a shudder.

"What objects did you intend to make into Horcruxes?"

"Anything that belonged to the Founders."

Harry walked up and down the seventh floor corridor with all the enthusiasm of a French aristocrat on his way to the guillotine. When the door appeared in the wall, he looked at it as if it was a man-eating tiger ready to pounce.

Deciding that waiting out here would only delay the inevitable, he gingerly opened the door.

He'd seen some strange sights since his introduction to the Wizarding world, but none of them could have prepared him for the one that met his eyes.

"What the hell?"