[START]
The gates creaked open long before he came into range. Not opening to beckon him in and welcome his return, flung apart by the force of his power as he stormed back onto the grounds.
Dust and gravel crunched under the pointed boots of the tall, aged man. The transition from the tracks outside to the cold stone of the castle doing nothing to dislodge what he had stuck in the soles of his boots.
Another message in blood had been discovered on the walls of his school, and a young girl had gone missing. Dragged down into the unknown depths of the Chamber of Secrets.
Though he ensured none could see this conflict on his face, his mind was awhirl with curses and dark condemnation. Self-loathing and regret an almost physical weight on his shoulders, his failure to discover the location of the Chamber of Secrets at the time of its first opening (as well as the decades since) could possibly lead to another young girl's death on his watch.
Worse still, the culprit had been staring him in the face for months on end before making this move, and he'd been too blind to make the connection.
With a sweep of black robes and an unusually hard look in his near black eyes, Severus Snape fell into step alongside him when Professor Albus Dumbledore strode into the Entrance Hall to the gasps of Professor Flitwick and the assembled students travelling in his wake. He breezed past them all wordlessly, but Professor Snape was far from silent,
"Filch and most of the staff are scouring the halls for potential entrances to the Chamber. The elves have entered some of the pipes and confirmed a serpentine beast has been using them to travel, and any stragglers not in their Common Room are being escorted to the nearest fortifiable position before transfer off campus commences."
"Quirinus?"
"He snuck out of the staff room whilst I was dealing with your bird's flashy entrance." The haughty tone of the Potions Master was laced with an accusatory strand. One Albus pretended to ignore, "Minerva and I were certain to tell the staff to steer clear of him. She convinced them he was seeking the monster himself."
The headmaster resisted a snort but offered a nod as acknowledgement of the briefing, his mind elsewhere,
'Tom is smug, but to go so far as to replicate a kill he got away with so many years ago… No, Miss Warren was simply killed, why has he taken Miss Weasley's body?'
"Are we expecting a ritual?" Snape's uncanny ability to pick up on thought Albus knew he was concealing rearing its head once more,
"It is a distinct possibility, as he has taken her to the one place no one but he can access." The tone was low, "Yet…"
"Why would he announce it?" The man grumbled, "The Dark Lord is one who revels in outmanouvering his foes, but usually after he has completed the task."
Dumbledore couldn't even pretend to know the answer, honestly shocked that Miss Weasley's corpse wasn't left on display for the world to see as they dealt with the aftermath of the Dark Lords latest escapade. But for all he knew of this infamous Heir of Slytherin, there were still many things Albus Dumbledore neither knew nor wished to know about the actions of Tom Riddle. His confidence in his success clearly the reason he felt so content in announcing his actions, leaving a cold feeling of apprehension as the two Professor's stalked the corridors.
The portraits were renowned for their tendency to spy and gossip, and Quirinus Quirrell was not an especially inconspicuous individual.
With Professor Snape peeling away from him to cast a Disillusionment Spell and move on ahead, the Hogwarts headmaster ascended to the second floor and called out to the man halfway down the corridor,
"I worried that I would have to scour the school in order to track you down." The man with the purple turban stopped dead, Dumbledore hearing muttering before he turned to face him, "Yet here you are."
Albus recognised an immediate deviation from the alabaster skinned man who had been in his employ for a number of years now; he stood straighter, his fingers fidgety tendencies were absent and as he was looking him dead in the eye (another deviation from the flickering gaze the man usually offered) he noted the lack of a nervous twitch,
"P-Professor Dumbledore, sir. What a surprise!" A loopy smile, "I t-t-t-trust, considering the circums- considering the circumstances, the Board and M-Ministry approved your return?"
"Considering the circumstances, I'm sure you understand why I didn't wait for the 'ink to dry' as the saying goes?"
The two shared smiles that only they would be able to call 'strained'. Like a drop of water on pane of glass, the grandfatherly smile dripped off the kindly man's face, a look of both deep disappointment and unrestrained contempt settling in to replace it,
"Which of you am I regarding today? The misguided servant or his resurrected master?"
A pause. Then there was laughter.
The laugh.
It unnerved him.
For this was not the high, cold, and callous peals he remembered from the misguided student he had seen fall to evil. It was warm, in a fashion, riddled with true amusement; tinged not with sadistic psychopathy, but fatigue and genuine mirth. Its tone translated to the tired look he was gifted to when Quirrell's face turned back to him,
"I suppose 'the jig is up' as the saying goes." A snort followed the statement as he wagged his brows at the headmaster, "To think THIS, actions far outside of my own hand, would be my undoing?"
Quirrell's laughter nearly bowled him over, but his hunched back eventually straightened; his eyes taking on a level of sharpness one may expect from a predator animal. Though the features of it had not changed, Quirrell's face was even less familiar to Dumbledore now with, accompanied by a new crisp tone that rolled past his lips in Quirrell's voice,
"Greetings, Professor Dumbledore. It has been some time."
"Hello again, Tom."
There was a twinge, a slight movement of the lips and furrowing of the brows, far from the expected reaction to the name Lord Voldemort had sought to bury all those years ago,
"I suppose, my teacher, that is the name you will always chose for me." A mock pout, an expression that further spun Dumbledore at the oddity that it was to know the malicious evil man he'd once taught would now make such a face,
"It is your name Tom, no matter how far you run from it. A half-blood masquerading as the heir of an ancient line, a pureblood one at that."
"But that was a different time, Professor Dumbledore." A smirk, odd (for him) in the way his eyes crinkled and took on an almost faraway glaze, "And I was a different person."
"Oh? Is that so? And what, pray tell, are you now?"
Toothy, bright, and smug, a grin Dumbledore received was not one he believed Tom Riddle capable of,
"On occasion, the Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts. And to be exceptionally modest, one of the best in decades, if my test scores last year are anything to go by."
"For example. Did you know those under Disillusionment only hide themselves and not their shadows?" There was no change to the headmaster's expression, even as he noted Severus's long shadow in his peripheral vision (where Voldemort must have noted it also), "I was, ironically, teaching my sixth years this earlier when the message was discovered."
With the Disillusionment well and truly broken, Severus's scowling raise was visible to them both as the Dark Lord turned his head to view his former servant, even as Dumbledore raised his wand,
"Hello Severus, it's nice to see you like this, I have much I need to say." His smile was genial and there was a twinge and downturn in his expression, "I owe you an apology."
"A-Apology?" Snape, vocalising the disbelieving thought he shared with Dumbledore,
"I made a mistake regarding Lily Potter; one I know I won't be forgiven for." Snape stiffened to stone long before the Dark Lord's gaze turned over his shoulder to him. A sea of unwelcome sympathy that sharpened ever so slightly, "Regardless, stand against me at your own peril, Severus."
The conflict in the man's coal black eyes was present for seconds, but in response to it, the face Voldemort was wearing softened. The steely sharpness of before mellowed when he next spoke,
"I understand now, to a certain degree, what it is you lost when I took her life. And for that, I do apologise." A quieter tone. Feather-light, striking like a physical blow with its earnest delivery, the man not flinching when Snape's wand wordlessly rose again. Levelled at the back of the man's head with a visible tremor running up his arm,
"Love and camaraderie have never been elements you understood, Tom." An icy tone met by an uncharacteristically warm smile. The Dark Lord's grin dripping with nostalgia as he turned to face the stony visage of his former teacher,
"Indeed." His smile turned coy, "But this is a place of learning, no?"
His chuckle wasn't the one Severus remembered. It resembled the high, cold cackle of a man deranged only in passing; the action more genuine than the performative gesture of a man inciting fear in his underlings. Snape's visible confusion seemingly caught the attention of the Dark Lord masquerading as Quirinus Quirrell once again, the smile turning graver as he addressed them both once more,
"Our dear Boy Who Lived has descended into the bowels of the school to do battle with Slytherin's monster." His words delivered with a rising urgency, dark eyes boring into the two men in the room as they regarded him with a mixture of surprise and resigned exasperation (for of course she would have), "He's seemingly discovered the hidden entrance within the second floor, girls bathroom and initially took Ronald Weasley down with him before sending him back to get help."
"Why would you tell us this?"
"As I was on my way to retrieve him when you rudely intercepted me."
He gestured a hand beyond the straight back of the older of the trio, the entrance to the location he'd sighted within the sight of all three of them, with only Snape (at his back) craning his neck to confirm this, "Contrary to what you may think, he is one of my students and I do not wish death upon him."
"But you were willing to endanger the lives of the entirety of the school?"
"I did not bring the artifact that opened the Chamber into the school. I sensed its presence upon my arrival today, but had previously written off this whole debacle as the actions of a copycat." There was a dark look on his face as he spoke, one that lead Dumbledore to believe the words that ran past his lips (even though they were news to him), "Quirinus only deigned to retrieve me when he caught wind of Harry and Weasley taking matters into their own hands."
"So Quirrell is-" Slow and leading, the Potions Professor was sharply interrupted,
"Gone. Loyally awaiting my return at a safe location," He waved Snape off, turning his disguised form's sharp eyes on the headmasters widened blues with a stern declaration, "You need to save the boy. And the hostage if possible, Ginevra's death would be a waste."
Dumbledore and Snape failed to respond, eyes searching as the silence ticked by,
"Now is not the time for hesitation, Dumbledore." A snarl, though delivered in the falsetto of Quirrell's voice, it was unmistakeable Voldemort, "I will not have him come to harm, and risk undoing all of my good work, because YOU saw fit to question my motives instead of defending your students."
A waver, the wand point trained firmly on his targets heart wavered just enough that a window opened to move. Snape had no way to react, only knowing what occurred by piecing it together in the aftermath. The cold chill of the outside breeze, the sound of shattering glass and the evidence of it at Dumbledore's feet as he stared out onto the grounds. Wand gripped tightly in his aged palms as a scorch mark was present on a wall.
He'd missed and Voldemort had escaped. A shrinking shape of smoke and billowing robes barrelling through the air all they saw of the Dark Lord as he flew away.
"As much as it pains me, I am willing to part with the treasures I have down there in order to see the boy rescued." A voice, reaching their ears as both an intimate whisper and a call from the far end of a tunnel, accompanied by a low chuckle that lacked both warmth and humour, "I'd hurry Professor. If you found me a threat before, I warn you I will be truly livid if you allow this trial of his to be his undoing…"
Older man's jaw was set firm as he ripped his gaze from the dark spot on the horizon, a shake of the head signifying that no further attempts would be made to apprehend him. The duo hastily moving towards the bathroom in half-sprint, its door thrown aside so harshly it left a dent in the wall. An echoing crash accompanied only by the wordless shout of a boy and duo of girls (one thankfully living, one deceased and transparent). A bird of glowing red and gold feathers squawked defiantly before returning to a long, slow croon for a dark-haired slip of a child, teetering on the edge of collapse beside an equally unwell looking redhead.
Against all odds, even as he collapsed to the ground in a dead faint before any of them could move to assist him, Harry James Potter stood alive and victorious besides the (as of hours before) unknown entrance to the fabled Chamber of Secrets and the rescued Ginevra Weasley. A book, sporting a large puncture wound (and leaking a black, gelatinous ichor in fat, steady droplets), in one hand and a glorious silver and jewel encrusted sword in the other.
Seemingly, to the visible (and far from) relief on his teachers faces, victorious over whatever horrors had awaited him in the castle's depths. The damsel was saved, the evil defeated, all being well with the world once again.
If only things could have remained so simple…
[TO BE CONTINUED]