Summary: A thoroughly impossible freak accident transports our favorite attractive psychopath forward in time from 1942 to 1996. Harry Potter/Tom Riddle slash. Harry meets Tom in the Chamber of Secrets.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, Tom Riddle, or any other people, places or objects that may appear in this humble work of fiction.
Warnings: Possible spoilers up to the fifth book. M/M, obviously. Rating is down as T for now but may, possibly, increase to M as things progress.
Author's Note: I'm hot, I'm sick, and my hands are so clammy that I'm having trouble typing because my fingers are sticking to the keyboard. I hope Tom and Harry are doing better than I am :( Thanks for the reviews, and enjoy the long chapter!

Chapter Nineteen: Into the Snake Pit

Tom walked casually from the Great Hall to avoid attracting attention and then broke into a sprint, nearly toppling an entire group of first-year Gryffindors as he bowled around a corner on the way to the stairs. He went up one flight and then raced down the mostly empty hall, into an entirely empty hall, and then into the second-floor girls' bathroom, a crumpled piece of parchment clutched tightly in his hand.

Once he entered, he heard someone sobbing uncontrollably from the stall across from his sink. Who would be crying in this dirty, dingy bathroom? Tom gritted his teeth in frustration and tried to tiptoe in front of her stall toward the entrance to the Chamber, but then a mournful voice cried, 'Who's there? Thought you could just come in here and ignore me, did you?'

And then Tom yelped in surprise as a ghost flew through the stall door toward him. The ghost gasped. 'You're a boy! You're not supposed to be in here!' The ghost, which seemed to have been a female student, sounded both scandalized and overjoyed. 'I'm telling!' she said with relish, flying out of the stall and into the hallway.

'No, wait!' Tom cried. It was too late; she was gone. What does it matter, anyway? I won't be in here by the time she tells someone, and she doesn't even know my name. Tom hurried over to his sink, hissed at it to open, and climbed inside.

Tom walked slowly through the dark, underground tunnel, his wand lighting his way. He knew he shouldn't be down there, but he just couldn't take it anymore. He was overcome with frustration; why did he have to be in this time? He had been perfectly happy where he was. He had made plans, and now nothing was going the way it should be. Now he was stuck at Hogwarts with Gryffindors on all sides, and they all adored him except for the only one who was even remotely interesting, the only one who knew who he really was and what he was really about.

That Gryffindor disliked him. He put up with Tom, woke him from nightmares that had only caused the orphanage workers to throw his bed into a cupboard under the stairs so he wouldn't wake the other children with his wails at night. The curtains on the beds at Hogwarts muffled the noise, and his dreams weren't as loud as they once were; when he had learned he'd be sharing a dormitory at Hogwarts he had been terrified that he would wake someone, and his subconscious had responded positively to him begging it to be quieter when it tormented him nightly. He had also noticed a marked decrease in his nightmares since he had begun delving into the Dark Arts, which only encouraged him to delve into them more. Those occasional days when he had to hide his eyes because of how red and monstrous they looked after he'd been practicing a particularly Dark spell, he slept dreamlessly at night.

Yes, Harry Potter helped him sleep at night like a good casting of Cruciatus on a rat never failed to do, but he only did it for the sake of maintaining his high Gryffindor standards of morality and not because Tom was anything special to him. It was nothing personal. The last time Tom had felt even a glimmer of hope that he might gain a friend (Tom sneered as he thought the word), he had told one thing too many about his past; oh, Rosier could put up with him being a half-blood if Tom did his Transfiguration homework for him, but to rub shoulders with a penniless, parentless wretch who lived in a Muggle orphanage swarming with Muggles was a bit much to ask ('Listen, Riddle, I don't want to hang around you any longer. You're just not the kind of fellow a Slytherin trying to climb the ladder should be associating with. It's nothing personal.' And he had patted Tom on the back, very lightly, as if he were contagious, and sniveling, hopeful eleven-year-old Tom had run off to cry about his hopes of not being lonely anymore being smashed to pieces because even here he was strange and he scared people, and he was found, and…). This time was even stupider because he was practically an adult and Harry had made it clear that he hated him from the get-go and he had told many more than just one too many things about his past. What had he hoped to accomplish?

Tom kicked a rat skull as hard as he could, and it smashed on the stone wall as it hit it. Had he thought Harry would like him if he knew that Tom's past had been bizarrely similar to his own? Tom wondered, before he could stop himself, if he should have told Harry that they had both slept in a closet, too. Maybe Harry would have liked him more if he said that? Or would his dislike deepen?

It doesn't matter now, Tom thought, stamping out all other desperate wonderings flitting through his mind. I'm going to get in big trouble for coming down here. Dumbledore will probably expel me and I won't even see Harry again unless he's there to watch me being led away by Aurors to Azkaban. He didn't really think Dumbledore would go through with it; Tom was down here for peace and quiet, that was all, and he wanted to see his basilisk, his friend, again, and they could always hunt some rats together even if Tom didn't let him out. The basilisk wasn't a very good conversationalist when he was hungry, but when he was full he would tell Tom whatever he knew about Salazar Slytherin, the man who had hatched him and was like a father to them both, and what he had learned from Slytherin in the years he knew him to pass down to whoever someday came to this Chamber to claim his or her birthright.

Speaking of rats, Tom was suspicious when he saw the amount of rat carcasses littering the floor of the tunnel. He was sure there had not been so many when he had last been down here. His suspicions that something had happened were confirmed when he saw that part of the ceiling in the tunnel had collapsed; there was only a small hole, just big enough for Tom to crawl in, that led through the debris.

As he got up and continued to walk through the winding passage leading to the Chamber, to the snake, Tom considered the parchment in his hand. It was a letter, written in foreign handwriting. It was not Dumbledore's; he knew Dumbledore's from the extensive comments the man left on his essays and that Tom secretly relished reading behind closed curtains in the dead of night where none of the Slytherins could see that he was bothering reading something written by such a notorious Muggle-lover. No, it was someone else's, the same handwriting that appeared on every letter he received once or twice a week from his apocryphal parents. Even though Tom hated reading the letters, he knew he had to; it would look strange, even to Slytherins, to disregard a letter from one's parents, let alone Gryffindors. There was a masochistic part of him – the same part that enjoyed reading Dumbledore's comments in bed by wandlight – that ached for those letters, no matter how uncomfortable he felt when he read about how his father had been so proud when he heard that his son had made the Quidditch team or about how his mother had passed the spot where the two of them had found their pet kneazle, Bumblebee, when Tom was seven, and had broken into tears at the memory. But after everything that had occurred those past few days between Tom and Harry, the letter that morning at breakfast had been the final straw, and Tom's chest had gotten so tight he could hardly breathe. He had felt an overpowering urge to run, to go anywhere he wouldn't have to see Harry laughing with his friends and completely ignoring Tom as he had yesterday, or read about his 'father' messing up a Floating Charm and ending up with balloons blowing out his nose for hours because he had forgotten the counter-charm and Tom hadn't been there to put it right. And Harry hadn't been there last night, and Tom felt so foolish waiting for him like a stupid dog for hours, and he had barely read five pages of that stupid Prefect book, and did Dumbledore think it was funny writing fantasies about wonderful, loving parents when Tom would give anything for them to be real?

So Tom had gone down to the Chamber of Secrets, and as he reached the Chamber and saw the skeleton of the basilisk lying on the damp stone floor, his last living link to Salazar Slytherin, the only father he had ever had, he sank to his knees beside its head and sobbed.

Harry was panting heavily by the time he reached Myrtle's bathroom, what with all the running around the school he had been doing. 'Myrtle?' Harry called.

Myrtle floated out of her stall. 'Well! At least you have some manners! At least you didn't just creep in here like that other boy! He was probably planning to sneak up on me and throw another book at me!' To the best of Harry's knowledge, no one had thrown any books at Myrtle since his second year, but Harry knew Myrtle had a long memory for misery.

'Did you see him doing anything, Myrtle? Like crawling through a sink?' Harry gasped as he tried to catch his breath.

'No,' she said mournfully, 'he must have left after I told him I was going to tell on him. I wasn't really going to tell. I wish he had stayed – he was very cute.'

'Wait, you-you left, so you didn't see where he went? He might have gone down the sink, then?'

Myrtle shrugged. 'I don't know! I haven't seen anyone go down a sink, certainly.'

Harry sighed. 'Thanks, Myrtle.' He had been hoping that Myrtle might have scared Tom off, but no such luck. He shook his head; his run had taken a great deal of his fury away, and now he was mostly worried. It wasn't as if there was a basilisk down there for Tom to set loose, but it didn't seem normal for Tom to go down to the Chamber when he knew Dumbledore and Harry were watching him. It was… stupid, and Tom wasn't stupid. So why is he doing this? Harry wondered. I guess I'll just have to go down and ask him.

When Harry got to the end of the slide down to the Chamber, he fastened the Invisibility Cloak around himself and walked quickly through the dark tunnels by wandlight.

Tom didn't cry for very long; to most people, it would have sounded more like a handful of short huffs coupled with watery eyes, but it was more sadness than Tom had expressed for five years, and he felt utterly ashamed of himself for it. Afterward, he stayed still for a few minutes, his hand on the snake's broken skull, his eyes closed. Then he took off his backpack, unzipped the compartment in the front, and took out a pack of cigarettes.

He pulled one out and lit it with his wand, sucking in a deep breath as it slipped between his lips. Tom frowned; it tasted different – weaker – than the cigarettes he was used to. He had quietly bought them off a Ravenclaw girl in his Divination class; were all cigarettes in this time like this? Tom almost felt like crying again out of frustration – couldn't he even have a decent bloody cigarette?

Nevertheless, he finished the cigarette, and the one after that, and the one after that. He was on his fourth, smoking faster than he ever had in his life – though they weren't as heavy as the ones he was used to, he had only ever smoked one at a time and he was starting to feel a bit sick – when he heard echoing footsteps coming nearer, and looked up curiously, reaching into his robes for his wand.

Harry reached the mouth of the Chamber much faster than he had anticipated. It seemed to have taken forever to get there when he had rushed in before; then again, there had been Lockhart to put up with then, and the ceiling had nearly collapsed on top of him and Ron, and his legs had been shorter. He was surprised to see Tom looking at the entrance suspiciously with his wand raised when Harry walked in – then Harry remembered how echoing the Chamber was, and that being invisible didn't help dampen the noise. Harry tried to walk forward as softly as he could, but the noise his foot made on the ground still echoed loudly off the stone wall.

'Who's there?' Tom asked suspiciously, his wand inadvertently pointed right at Harry's chest. 'Show yourself.'

Harry decided it was probably time to give up; invisibility wouldn't help if Tom started throwing hexes toward the entrance just to be sure no one was there. He took off the Cloak.

Tom's eyes widened and his eyebrows climbed. 'You! How? You can't be –' he sputtered.

Then Tom looked to the basilisk skeleton, and looked back at Harry, and his eyes narrowed to slits. 'Did you do this to my basilisk?' he whispered dangerously.

'Yeah, well, it was trying to kill me at the time, so you'll have to excuse me for not being too apologetic,' Harry sniped, throwing the cloak over his arm. 'Come on, let's go. If we're lucky, no one will have noticed that we're missing yet.'

'How did you get down here?' Tom shouted. 'You can't get down here, it's impossible!'

'I'm a Parselmouth, okay?' Harry said impatiently. 'We can discuss it later, let's go!' Harry found his eyes attracted to the floor; near the basilisk's head, he saw a red cigarette pack.

'You came down here to smoke?' Harry said incredulously.

'What do you mean? You can't be a Parselmouth!'

'I'm your second cousin twice removed, remember?' Harry growled, reaching down to grab the cigarettes. 'I can't believe you came down here to smoke!' Harry shook his head, holding the pack between thumb and forefinger disgustedly.

'How did you find the Chamber? When? It took me years!'

'It was in my second year, and I have your diary to thank for it. Now, can we please move?'

Tom sat down on the ground and crossed arms over his chest. 'I'm not leaving until you explain! Wait,' his eyes widened again. 'You found my diary? You got possessed by my diary? But you're alive, that's impossible!'

'Someone is pretty sure of himself,' Harry grumbled. 'And no, it didn't possess me, it possessed Ginny. That's why she can't stand you.'

'My diary possessed Ginny? Really?'

'Yes, now can we leave?'

'But this is wonderful!' Tom cried, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

That wasn't the reaction Harry had been expecting. 'Wonderful? How is it wonderful?'

'All those experimental charms I used! I'll have to ask her how she felt, whether there were any side-effects, when she became suspicious, what the diary's reactions were, how far it got –'

'It nearly killed her!' Harry snarled, standing up and glaring. 'You aren't going to ask her anything! Don't you have any morals at all?'

'No,' Tom replied, sounding offended by the question, as if morals were as desirable as genital warts. 'You'll have to tell me all about it, then. Go on. You said it was you who killed my snake?'

Harry was about to start shouting at Tom when a little voice tapped at his head. He said he didn't have any morals, but he did agree not to ask Ginny. Don't expect miracles. So Harry closed his mouth, swallowed down the insults he had been prepared to yell out, and sat down on the stone floor in front of Tom. He told the story from the point when he first heard the mysterious, murdering voice that no one else could hear. He had to admit to himself that he had missed talking with Tom the other night, and he wondered whether Tom had missed it, too.

When he got to the part when he had come across Tom's diary himself, Tom started asking a lot of questions, mostly concerned with how the diary had responded to him, how believable it had sounded (Harry hated admitting that its story had been all too believable), and how Harry had felt when the diary had taken him through its memory of catching Hagrid ('That was one of the hardest parts to cast, you know,' Tom said wistfully. 'It was like making a Pensieve, and I had to do a great deal of improvisation. I'm so glad it worked out so excellently.'). He eventually let Harry continue through the story, and he listened with rapt attention as Harry told an extremely fudged version of how he had managed to defeat the basilisk and the diary in the Chamber (since it was difficult to tell much about his conversation with Tom's diary without giving away too much about Tom's current identity). Harry was glad when he was finished, because the echoing of his own voice in the Chamber was giving him a headache.

'What a wonderful story,' Tom sighed wistfully. 'I'm a bit disappointed that my diary wasn't able to kill you –'

'Thanks,' Harry interjected sarcastically.

'But your way of dispatching it was very inventive. I never thought to protect it from basilisk venom,' he continued, as though they were just discussing the weather. 'It seems like an obvious oversight now. And it really should have remembered about phoenix tears.'

Harry didn't think so, but he didn't bother replying. 'Can we finally leave, please? Dumbledore will definitely have noticed that we're missing by now. We'll have to make up some story so he won't kick you out –'

'Harry?'

'Or maybe we shouldn't; it's pretty hard to fool Dumbledore. We'll tell him the truth, that you came down to the Chamber to smoke and that you had no intention of doing anything. He's a reasonable man, he'll understand, and I'll back you up. I'm sure it'll work out fine –'

'Harry?'

'And I still can't believe you came down here to smoke!' Harry continued. The pack of cigarettes was still in his hand. 'Hermione's right, you know. She can act like a know-it-all and just go on and on, but these really are bad for you. I don't want you smoking again.' Harry tossed the pack of cigarettes into the darkness. 'I can't believe that someone who likes the idea of immortality so much would insist on killing himself eight minutes at a time –'

'Harry!'

'What?'

'You would back me up with Dumbledore?' Tom asked softly.

Harry frowned; Tom's voice sounded funny, like he was hopeful and disbelieving at the same time. 'Of course, why wouldn't I?'

'Why do you care if Dumbledore expels me?' Tom shot back. 'You don't even like me!'

'But you didn't come down here to hurt anyone!' Harry said exasperatedly. 'That doesn't even make sense! You know you're being watched too closely to get away with it! Why wouldn't I back you up? You haven't done anything wrong – well, except make me really worried.'

'You were worried about me?' Tom asked in amazement.

'Of course I was worried! You disappeared, and I was sure you had gone to the library, but you weren't there. Well, that's not true, at first I thought you had taken my Invisibility Cloak and you were trying to leave Hogwarts, and then Dumbledore and I would have to find you before anyone tried to hurt you –'

'You were worried about me?'

'Yes, yes, you big idiot. I was worried and mad as hell. But you didn't take my Invisibility Cloak, and you weren't in the library, so I figured you would be here. If I catch you smoking down here again – hell, if I catch you smoking anywhere again –'

'If you dislike me so much,' Tom said slowly, tilting his head and looked at Harry curiously, 'then why would you be worried about someone trying to hurt me?'

'Is that what this is all about?' Harry asked bewilderedly. 'Of course I like you. Don't be stupid.' What, did Tom think Harry regularly went around spilling his guts to people he couldn't stand? Maybe he hadn't liked Tom in the beginning; maybe he had even disliked him, but he hadn't honestly disliked him since the first night or two after they started discussing their lives. He didn't know when he had started liking him – Harry hadn't actually realized he did until he said it.

'But you said you didn't like me just a few nights ago!' Tom protested.

'Did I?' Harry tried to remember. 'Well, I didn't mean it, okay? I don't see why you care since you don't like me, either.'

Tom looked at the ground. 'I don't mind you so much. You're… nice,' he said in a voice that was nearly a whisper.

'I am?'

'Do you think I would tell you all those things about me if I thought you were a total arse?' Tom asked angrily.

'Wow,' Harry replied, scratching his head. That was exactly why Harry had been thinking that Tom should know Harry liked him. 'But if you think I'm so nice, why wouldn't you tell me what you dream about every night? I wanted to help.'

'If you like me, why did you say you didn't when I asked you why you care about me having nightmares?' Tom retorted.

'Good point,' Harry sighed. He hadn't realized Tom would care whether or not he liked him. Knowing that he did care felt strangely good. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.' Harry had never had to tell Ron formally that he liked him before they had become friends; they just had, and it worked out. Why did Tom have to be so complicated?

'You didn't hurt my feelings,' Tom sneered. 'I don't have any.'

Like hell you don't. The thought took Harry by surprise, but he knew it was true. But if you want to delude yourself otherwise, be my guest. 'Let's just go,' Harry sighed. It was probably better for them to get out of the Chamber before they got into another argument.

Harry walked toward the Chamber entrance. 'Where do you think you're going?' Tom asked.

'I was planning to get out of here?' Harry snapped, turning around.

Tom snorted, putting on his backpack. 'You can't get out that way. In case you didn't notice,' he threw out his arms, 'we don't have a phoenix here to fly us hundreds of feet up, and we can't ride the basilisk up the pipes like I used to.'

Harry paused, a horrible realization creeping into him. 'So how do we get out?' Harry asked warily.

Tom strode over to one of the walls, which had a barely visible picture of entwined snakes carved into it, matching the tall pillars that held up the chamber. Harry followed.

'Open,' Tom hissed.

The snakes on the wall moved, twisting away from each other, and the wall opened loudly between them, stone grinding on stone. A staircase was revealed: a narrow, very long staircase.

'Don't worry, the stairs move,' Tom assured him, probably seeing the apprehension on Harry's face about climbing a staircase that went up that far. 'It's like Dumbledore's office. Just step on. Go on,' Tom indicated with a swoop of his hand and a slight, mocking bow.

Harry stepped on tentatively, and the staircase began to move. The entrance started closing as well, but Tom stepped through before it closed too far.

'Lumos,' Harry and Tom said at once, lighting their way.

Although the staircase moved fairly quickly, it still seemed to be taking a while, and the stone stairs moved much louder than the ones leading to the Headmaster's office. 'There's something I should tell you,' Tom shouted at him over the noise.

Harry looked back at Tom, who was a few stairs behind. 'What?' Harry shouted back.

'It's about where this staircase leads.'

'Where?'

'A closet.'

'So?'

'It leads to the Slytherin common room.'

Harry paused. 'How will we get out?'

'There shouldn't be many people in there during class. We can walk out of the closet and Obliviate whoever's there.'

'I don't know how to Obliviate people!'

'Leave it to me. There will only be a couple students.'

Harry didn't like this plan, but there didn't seem to be any other option. 'Why would Slytherin build a staircase to somewhere so busy?'

'The staircase was built for emergencies, and he would expect his Heir to be able to hex a few people silly in an emergency.'

The stairs finally grinded to a halt, and Harry was faced with a stone wall with entwined snakes. 'Open.'

It did so in the same way the one below had. 'I've never heard anyone else speak Parseltongue,' Tom grinned.

They stepped into the closet. It was completely empty; Harry did think it was pretty stupid to have a closet in the common room, and so did the Slytherins, apparently. The door was made of metal, and was too thick for them to hear whether there were any noises outside. Why would a closet have a metal door? Slytherin was a weird bloke, Harry thought fervently. Tom reached for the doorknob, but Harry grasped his hand.

'Don't worry,' Tom said. 'I can handle it.'

Harry nodded nervously, let go of his hand, and Tom pushed the door open.

The chatter in the common room was deafening; it was full to bursting.

And, facing the closet they had stepped out of, Draco Malfoy was sitting in a chair, reading the Daily Prophet. He looked up.

DarkMarklv: Here's the way I view it: Harry feels Voldemort being deliriously happy or extremely pissed from time to time as it is, but I just don't put it in the chapters because it's not terribly relevant to us or to Harry. He's gotten used to it. As for the dreams, he only had those because he sucked at Occlumency, and now Snape is taking care of that, so no more dreams. That's not to say Voldemort doesn't (intentionally) pick up a few thoughts from Harry from time to time, like the dream he triggered previously when he tried to break through.

Raehli: The Marauders Map wouldn't help Harry much; when Harry went up to his dorm and grabbed the Invisibility Cloak, he could have taken the Map, but since he thought he already knew where Tom must be (the library), he didn't think to take it. And, of course, the Chamber of Secrets wouldn't be on the map ;)

Enola: Nope, Tom's dreams have nothing to do with what Big V is up to. Besides, Voldemort doesn't go out to kill the Muggles himself as a general rule; he's the kind of guy who likes to have his flunkies do the dirty work of terrifying the wizarding populace and torturing Muggles on a day-to-day basis. He only comes out for the big stuff, I think. Tom just disappeared when the attack was being discussed because he had the opportunity, with everyone so well distracted.

He knows that Hermione is a Muggleborn, but calling her a Mudblood isn't really the best way to ingratiate himself to the Gryffs. As for Myrtle, she wouldn't really remember some random (if attractive) Prefect very well; she's too fixated on her own death and the girl who teased her to think much about other old faces. And remember, she didn't see Tom when she died, just the snake's eyes; she doesn't know that he's responsible.