The moment the words left McGonagall's mouth, Ron felt like all the air had been sucked from the room, the warmth sapped from the crackling fireplace, the life drained out of all three people in there. He jumped to his feet, eyes wide and mouth agape.

Why not anyone else? Literally anyone else? His little sister? Now three of the four people closest to him had been attacked by the serpent and he didn't know what to do. He just wanted them back.

His eyes were wild, pale skin ashen and sickly looking. There was an echo in his ears, something like McGonagall's voice calling worriedly at him, but it was drowned out by the need to run. Briefly, his eyes met Harry's and a silent, panicked message passed between them. McGonagall's eyes flitted between them; she knew her students and she knew better than to interrupt them in that moment. So she just let them leave as fast as their little legs could carry them away from her office, maybe back to wherever they had been running in the first place.

McGonagall slumped in her seat as she watched her door clatter shut, the loud bang barely registering as she sighed a laboured breath and put her face in her hands. She wasn't sure who was more trouble: those kids and their friends or Dumbledore himself. Either way, she wished them all the best, God knows, for all their recklessness and self-destructiveness, they needed it.

Ron almost fell over himself as he rounded the corner, Harry hot on his tails, but eventually the door to Myrtle's bathroom appeared in his sight and he crashed into it, pushing it open with his shoulder and far more force than was necessary. Myrtle made a squeaking noise as he all but fell onto the cool tile floor. He reached out to stop himself falling, grasping the cracked porcelain edge of one of the large, broken sinks. He looked up to Myrtle, questions burning at his throat, but before he got to ask them he suddenly felt himself falling slowly, like the sink was being lowered to the ground gradually. He blinked slowly, on his knees on the floor feeling like the floor had been violently ripped out from under him. The sink had actually sunk into the ground.

Harry came clattering through the door then, seeing his friend paralysed on the floor, staring, miffed, at the gaping hole in the floor. Their answers were right there before them and Myrtle, who had since disappeared with a cry Ron had been too stunned to hear into the U-bend, hadn't had to say a word. Harry neared the hole in the floor cautiously, peering over the edge into the darkness below.

Then the noise started.

It was quiet, slow, deliberate and it sounded like… clapping? Harry looked up from the hole and canvassed the room with untrusting eyes as Ron clambered to his feet. His hands found Harry's arm, sticking close to him as they looked for the unknown third figure. Harry wondered if it might be the heir as he scoured all the shadowy corners in the room for the barest signs of life.

That suspicion died when a man rounded the corner Harry was staring into, all blonde hair and smarmy, taunting smile. "Bravo, bravo," He said, voice like oil, slimy and sticking uncomfortably to Harry's skin. "Well done, Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley. I should have known it would be you two that led me here. I should thank you, really, for my next book,"

Ron made a face, "Next book? But you're the great Gilderoy Lockhart, why would you need us to write a book? You can help us, can't you?"

Silence hung between them for a moment before something clicked into place in Harry's head. "Unless," he eyed Lockhart up purposefully, "You're a fake,"

And Lockhart, with all the arrogance in the world, threw his head back and laughed heartily. "Wise, Mr. Potter," he grinned, "Smart boy, you're more than just a famous name. It's almost a shame that I'm going to take all your credit and nobody will ever know any better,"
Ron blanched. "Why would we ever let you do that?"

Lockhart shook his head. "Of course not, Mr. Weasley," he reached into his pocket, drawing his wand with the elegance of a master of charms, not a master of combat. "I may not be a master of the dark arts, but I can make you forget you ever knew your own name," His wand was poised and threatening, "All there is to do is cast a spell on you and go see that headmaster of yours, I found the entrance to the chamber of secrets!" He made to wave his wand and Ron, fuelled by layers of blind panic, shoved him off balance.

His feet got tangled up in his elegant robe, the fabric tearing slightly as he failed to find his feet and his limbs flailed wildly in the air. His wand went flying, clattering to the tile as he fell with a sinking scream into the pit in the floor. Harry and Ron looked at each other, then back to the hole in the floor. The scream stopped eventually.

"Do we have to go down there?" Ron asked. Harry's answer was to grab his wrist and sink them both into the hole in the floor like it was a normal thing to do (if the current trajectory of their lives was any sign, it would become one soon).

They crashed into Lockhart again at the bottom of the slide, Ron's screaming lingering for a moment after they landed in a tangled pile at the fraud's feet. Lockhart looked them over as they pulled themselves to their feet, eyes clear and cold, any prior sense of charm absent.

Harry walked past him, small animal bones crunching underfoot, determined to get something done that didn't involve losing his memory. He glared at Lockhart's pale face as he went, imbuing a bit of what he had learnt from two years of being friends with a certain Edward Elric. His skin went paler, visible even in the shadow dense passage they had found themselves in. There was very little light in the passage, only a lot of dark corners that could have been hiding any number of horrors in the inky depths. They walked through it together, not getting far before Ron gulped, nudging at something on the floor with his toe.

"Is that…?" Ron looked at it closer, looking vaguely green as his eyes traced the length of scales cast across the floor in front of him, semi-translucent and covering far too much of the floor.

"A giant snake?" Harry finished on his behalf.

"That thing has to be about 60 feet long!" Lockhart said and Harry wanted more than anything for Ed to be there to punch him in the face with a hard, metallic fist. But he wasn't so Harry just watched him with disdain, glad his wand had been lost in the bathroom. Harry looked away from the man and back to the creature on the floor. Then he looked a little closer.

"That's not a snake," he shook his head and his hair fell in front of his eyes, "It's a snake skin,"

A look of relief passed across Lockhart's face but very little change happened beneath Ron's fiery hair. "All that means," he said thickly through the stubborn lump in his throat, "Is that there's a giant snake somewhere else nearby. Lockhart paled again and Ron and Harry silently and independently set themselves the goal of turning him paler than the Hogwarts ghosts by the end of their quest. Neither of them was willing to explore the possibility that they wouldn't make it out. They would. They had to.

But Lockhart had other ideas. He waited until the boys passed him, looking determined and like they were actually capable of doing things for themselves. It really did seem like a shame to waste away the minds of two such promising young people, but it wasn't enough of a shame to discourage him from trying. He let them get a few paces ahead of him before leaping from lythe limbs, tackling Ron to the ground and pulling his wand roughly from his pocket. Maybe he forgot about the state it was in or maybe he's never noticed, either way he was busy brandishing a unicorn hair wand barely held together by a thick layer of muggle sellotape.

"Obliviate," he yelled, the purposeful, focused power of a master at his craft resounding around the room, making even the bones discarded across the floor jump and rattle as the power inherent to the air shook. It was a simple spell, really, but it held a lot of power, especially when you knew how to use it correctly. And, by God, did Gilderoy Lockhart know how to use it.

What he didn't know how to use, however, was a wand that wasn't his, barely kept in one piece by layers of non-magical adhesive.

The potent power of the spell worked its way up the wand like it always did, building and building as it pulled away from his hand and was sapped from the air, travelling along the unicorn tail hair and reaching a brilliant crescendo.

Then the tape got in the way. The building concentration of magic stalled for a moment, rolling in place, before it turned itself around where the break in the wood was and zoomed right back along the path it had taken only moments before. Gilderoy barely had time to register what was happening before the magic shot backwards into his skull and passed it, hitting the fragile wall. The very structure shook and started to fall apart. Chunks of stone and rock, pieces of debris and dust all came raining down from the ceiling and the walls, threatening to hit them or trap them as everything fell apart.

Harry ran without hesitation, dodging past the falling chunks of the passage as well as he could manage and ignoring the sharp edges of the stones as they grazed his skin. But Ron lingered for a moment. He had seen Lockhart get hit with his own spell and could see the sudden emptiness filling his face. Like there was nothing-neither charm nor malice-behind his clear, bright eyes. He didn't feel like he could leave the man and he quietly hated himself for that instinct as he spent a moment too long deciding and, right when he, Lockhart in tow, was gaining on his best friend, almost caught up to his panicked run, the tumbling shrapnel built up into a large, insurmountable wall.

Ron skidded to a panicked halt, too scared to touch the unstable wall of rocks and debris should it crumble into another dangerous ava;anche, with just as much potential to do them some serious damage as the last one. He peered through one of the largest gaps between the stones, watching the fear flash through his friends eyes as he looked around for a way to fix this. Ron shook his head.

"Go," he said with more conviction than he felt, "I'll find my own way. We don't have the time to waste,"

So Harry nodded and turned on his heel, trying to pretend like the absence surrounding him didn't make him feel like part of a person. Ed and Hermione were gone for the time being, and now suddenly so was Ron and Harry didn't love the loneliness.

Ron watched Harry's back as he travelled further into the passage, until it was entirely swallowed by the grim maw of darkness not far from Ron's own position. He sighed deeply and slumped, turning so his back would be dragging down a proper wall and not the stony hazard that was threatening to tumble on top of him before sinking to the floor, dejected and worn out. He trailed his eyes over Lockhart who was staring blankly at the nothingness, eyes wide and pupils too large. Disdain burned in his stomach as he looked at the man and his stupid shoes and his now slightly torn and sigfnificantly sirtied robes. Ron knew they'd probably been expensive. It felt in some way like vindication.

Then Lockhart turned his head, jaw slack and head falling to the side a little like his neck was too weak to hold it up. He opened his mouth and Ron was expecting another threat, an expression of ego, anger, or something. What he got was a grin, completely void of meaningful thought.

"Mummy?" Lockhart said, voice too high, and Ron was as close as he had ever been to pulling his own hair out.

Al quite liked Hogwarts. Or at least he was pretty sure he would have done were the experience not so thoroughly isolating.

Mustang spent most of his time in the infirmary, watching over Ed's unmoving face and trying not to let himself think that the young major looked like a death mask. Al couldn't blame him. He would have done the same if he could, but there were quite a few unfortunate things about the body he was stuck in and one of them was the sheer amount of attention it drew to him. It wasn't so bad in Amestris, where he was never caught up in these situations, but Hogwarts was like an oversized pen of children who knew next to nothing about alchemy and Al knew that, for his own sake and Mustang's and Ed's and theirs, he couldn't make too much of an impact.

So that left him the option of spending his nights in the infirmary and trying to keep himself occupied during the day, stuck in his and Roy's room. He felt like screaming, stuck in there alone and in relative silence as the sunlight outside grew brighter and dimmer, seemingly at random, as clouds passed in front of the sun. Then he heard a hurried clanging outside of the room, a hushed and oddly polite curse, and his mind, adolescent and thoroughly understimulated, wouldn't let him let go of it.

He pushed himself to his feet and cracked the door open. There was a stout woman outside, attempting to manage a cumbersome armful of all sorts of odd things that fell far outside his realm of understanding. She looked up at him from her place on the floor where she was kneeling in an attempt to gather the paper-wrapped packages she had dropped. He bent down to help her and she responded with a kind, polite, yet understandably quizzical smile.

He introduced himself and, after noting that the sun was all but set by this time of day, offered her some help. He admitted that he didn't know anything about anything but that he would be more than happy to lend her a spare set of hands. She responded eagerly and, for the first time, Al was making his way across the expansive grounds of Hogwarts, treading dew-laden grass underfoot as he made his way to one of many greenhouses with a woman by the name of Pomona Sprout.

"I'm helping the petrified students," she explained warmly, pulling on a pair of well loved dragonhide gardening gloves, "We've been growing mandrakes and they're about ready to be harvested. The thing is, they're something of a nightmare and it's going to take me absolutely ages to work through the entire crop myself. Especially since I am under strict orders from Snape," Al noted the odd tone in her voice when she said that name, "to carefully cut them all before handing them over to him to make the draught," She sighed and shook her head, "And I know that man: he will be expecting nothing less than perfectly cubed sections of Mandrake,"

And, in that moment it struck Al; an idea.

"Ummm, I don't know how much you know about Amestris…"

"Not much dear, but I know about that odd magic of your brother's-Alchemy, did Dumbledore call it?"

Al nodded excitedly, "Yep, that's it! Well, if you could give me a moment and a bit of space I could probably fix all your problems if you don't mind telling me a little bit more about the plants,"

She smiled brightly, looking motherly and welcoming with the dirt smeared above her brow and her hair a mess of flyaways. "Of course dear. Take all the time you need: you're saving me days of my time and an eternity of precious opportunity… I can't imagine how much you must want your brother back,"

A/N

Hey look, it's the second upload in the past few days! I'm doing things successfully! So I know that this chapter is pretty inaccurate to the canon (like Lockhart and how the chamber opens, etc.) but I felt like writing it this way so here we are. I am also sorry of there are any outrageous typos in here; one of my cats ran across my keyboard and I can't promise she hasn't typed anything. As always, thank you to everyone who has interacted with this story.

All the best,

~We'reAllABitOdd