Author's Notes: Here it is - the much awaited time jump. The real divergence starts now. For those who have some doubts about the first and second years – they were similar to canon, not exactly the same. There were some noticeable differences. They will come up as flashbacks at appropriate places.

I haven't done anything special with Parseltongue, except for italicising it. The difference between Parseltongue and normal speech will be clear from context.

I have no knowledge of Latin – or any other language which can be used for spell creation. So I meddled with the spellings of English words and some existing spells to create new ones. Hope you don't mind.

That said, read, review and enjoy.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter and associated characters are NOT mine! So lawyers, keep away!

Chapter 4: Two Years Later : The Chamber of Secrets

"Open," said Harry, in a low, faint hiss.

The serpents parted as the wall cracked open, the halves slid smoothly out of sight, revealing the mythical Chamber of Secrets.

He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with carved serpents rose to support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long, black shadows through the odd, greenish gloom that filled the place.

His heart beating very fast, Harry stood listening to the chill silence. Could the basilisk be lurking in a shadowy corner, behind a pillar? And where was Ginny? He wondered – not for the first time – if coming alone had really been a good idea. But there was hardly anyone he could go to. Dumbledore was gone, McGonagall would have been sceptical and probably locked him up in the Gryffindor Tower, Lockhart was an idiot and Snape – he'd rather face the basilisk twice than ask Snape for help. Harry couldn't ask Ron – he would be more of a hindrance than help – especially with a broken wand. He wasn't there in Gryffindor Tower anyway. But Harry couldn't leave Ginny to die. She was his first – and best – friend. He felt guilty for not paying her more attention. They had hardly talked throughout the year. Now that he thought of it, he couldn't remember why he had avoided her.

Harry heard a faint sound of crying coming from the far end of the hallway. His heart leapt. Ginny was alive! "Lumos!" he muttered, and sprinted towards the source of the sound.

He kept his eyes narrowed, ready to clamp them shut at the smallest sign of movement. The hollow eye sockets of the stone snakes seemed to be following him. More than once, with a jolt of the stomach, he thought he saw one stir.

Then, as he drew level with the last pair of pillars, a statue high as the Chamber itself loomed into view, standing against the back wall. Harry had to crane his neck to look up into the giant face above; it was ancient and monkey-ish, with a long, thin beard that fell almost to the bottom of the wizard's sweeping stone robes, where two enormous gray feet stood on the smooth Chamber floor. And between the feet, sat, huddled, a tiny black robed figure with flaming red hair. She was crying silently.

"Ginny!" Harry broke into a run.

Ginny looked up and gasped, "Harry! Go back! It's a trap, he – he wants to kill you!"

Harry didn't stop until he reached her. He hugged her tightly. "Thank goodness you are alive! I thought I had lost you." Then Ginny's words registered to him, "Who is it, Ginny?"

"That would be me, Harry Potter," said a cold voice.

Harry jumped and spun around. A tall, black-haired boy was leaning against the nearest pillar, watching.

"Tom Riddle?"

Riddle nodded, not taking his eyes off Harry's face.

Harry noticed that Tom didn't look solid. In fact, he could have passed for a ghost, except that instead of pearly white, he was coloured like a normal human. "But you lived fifty years ago!" Then it struck him –

"You are the heir of Slytherin! You framed Hagrid!"

"Figured it out, have you? Too bad you can't do anything with the information."

"Are you a ghost?" Harry said uncertainly.

"A memory," said Riddle quietly. "Preserved in a diary for fifty years. He pointed toward the floor near the statue's giant toes. Lying open there was the little black diary Harry had found in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Realisation hit him like a bolt of lightning. "Ginny! What have you done!" He said weakly. Ginny didn't look up. She sobbed even harder.

"You possessed her. Didn't you? You made her open the Chamber. You made her kill the roosters. You made her set the basilisk upon the students. Didn't you?"

"Quite sharp for a Gryffindor, aren't we?" Tom said smiling.

"The hat did want to sort me in Slytherin." Harry smirked.

If Tom was shocked at this information, he didn't show it. Ginny looked up sharply.

"If you wanted to kill her, you could have done so silently. Nobody would have known until it was too late. Why did you leave that message?"

"To lure you down here," replied Tom.

"But why? And how did you know I would come?"

"To answer your second question, little Ginny here, has told me enough about you to deduce that you would come and come alone too. With the old fool gone, there isn't anybody you could turn to."

"I am s-sorry Harry. I didn't know he was e-evil. He s-seemed very nice." Ginny started sobbing again.

"It's okay Ginny. Now get up and get out of the Chamber. I'll deal with him. I have a feeling who he really is. And if it is correct, it could turn really nasty." He muttered the last part to himself.

"I c-can't. I feel too w-weak."

"What have you done to her?" Harry asked Tom, angrily.

"Well, that's an interesting question," said Riddle pleasantly. "And quite a long story. I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley's like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger."

"What are you talking about?" said Harry.

"The diary," said Riddle. "My diary. Little Ginny's been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes – how her brothers tease her, how she had to come to school with second-hand robes and books, how" – Riddle's eyes glinted "how Harry Potter – her supposed best friend - stopped talking to her." Harry felt a pang of guilt.

All the time he spoke, Riddle's eyes never left Harry's face. There was an almost hungry look in them.

"It took a very long time for stupid little Ginny to stop trusting her diary," said Riddle. "But she finally became suspicious and tried to dispose of it. And that's where you came in, Harry. You found it, and I couldn't have been more delighted. Of all the people who could have picked it up, it was you, the very person I was most anxious to meet…"

"So you really are the teenage version of Voldemort?"

Tom was shocked. He heard a sharp intake of breath and looked at Ginny; only to see pure horror on her face. "Don't worry Ginny. I'll take care of him."

"How did you figure it out, Potter?" asked Tom.

"How many people would want to kill a twelve year old? And my scar has been hurting slightly ever since I entered the Chamber. It hurts only when he is nearby"

"Interesting Potter. Very interesting."

"Imagine how angry I was when the next time my diary was opened, it was Ginny who was writing to me, not you. She saw you with the diary, you see, and panicked. "What if you found out how to work it and I repeated all her secrets to you? What if, even worse, I told you who'd been strangling roosters? So the foolish little brat waited until your dormitory was deserted and stole it back. But I knew what I must do. It was clear to me that you were on the trail of Slytherin's heir. From everything Ginny had told me about you, I knew you would go to any lengths to solve the mystery - particularly if one of your best friends was attacked. And Ginny had told me the whole school was buzzing because you could speak Parseltongue..."

"So I made Ginny write her own farewell on the wall and come down here to wait. She struggled and cried and became very boring. But there isn't much life left in her... She put too much into the diary, into me. Enough to let me leave its pages at last... I have been waiting for you to appear since we arrived here. I knew you'd come. Though I am surprised you came so quickly. I had expected to be solid enough to wield a wand by the time you came. I have many questions for you, Harry Potter."

Harry, to his horror, realised that Tom looked more solid than he did when he had arrived while Ginny looked much worse. He knew he had to end it soon.

"To business, Harry," said Riddle, still smiling broadly. "Twice – in your past, in my future – we have met. And twice I failed to kill you. How did you survive? Tell me everything. The longer you talk," he added softly, "the longer you stay alive."

"No one knows why you lost your powers when you attacked me," said Harry abruptly. "I don't know myself. But I know why you couldn't kill me. Because my mother died to save me. My common – muggle-born – mother. She stopped you killing me. And I've seen the real you, I saw you last year. You're a wreck. You're barely alive."

"Your mother died to save you. So she probably used some sort of sacrificial blood magic. Never thought someone in Dumbledore's camp would use dark magic – especially blood magic. I wonder if the old coot knew about it. It doesn't matter anyway. Can't you see it Potter? You are nothing special. It was all your mother's doing. I wondered, you see. There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself… but after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me. That's all I wanted to know. Though I wonder how a mudblood got so much talent…"

"Now Harry, I'm going to teach you a little lesson. Let's match the powers of Lord Voldemort, Heir of Salazar Slytherin, against the famous Harry Potter"

"Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four." Riddle spoke in a soft, hissing voice.

Harry wheeled around to look up at the statue; he saw its mouth opening, wider and wider, to make a huge black hole. And something was stirring inside the statue's mouth. Something was slithering up from its depths. He heard Riddle's hissing voice -

"Kill him."

"No, stop," hissed Harry.

"Don't bother Potter. I have made sure it won't listen to anybody but me."

This was the moment; the moment Harry had prepared for, ever since he found out that the monster was a basilisk.

"Occulus Obscura!" His glasses clouded over. Now he wouldn't die instantly even if he looked into the basilisk's eye. He would have a couple of seconds to break the eye-contact. On the downside his vision had become poorer.

Pointing his wand to the basilisk's eyes – or where he suspected they would be – for he could not see them, he cast –

"Conjunctivitus Maximus!"

– twice in quick succession. The first one met its mark. But the pain caused the basilisk to turn sharply, causing the second curse to miss. It went berserk. Harry had to jump multiple times to avoid it.

"Diffindo!"

"Reducto!"

"Reducto!"

"Diffindo!"

Almost all the curses bounced off its skin. A couple of them managed to strike inside its mouth. But the great serpent merely shook its head, as if hit by a pebble, not a powerful cutting curse. The next moment, Harry found himself staring into a great yellow eye. The other one was swollen and closed. Harry found his body seize up. He fought with all his might against the basilisk's magic, which was trying to rip him apart from his body. In a daze, he felt himself raise his wand and murmur –

"Conjunctivitus Maximus!"

To his satisfaction, Harry saw the curse connect and basilisk's eye close. He breathed a sigh a sigh of relief and fell to his knees, panting.

Tom Riddle was livid. "Smell him, you stupid snake. Sniff him and kill him."

The basilisk moved around, its tongue darting from side to side. Suddenly it struck. Harry barely managed to avoid being eaten alive by rolling to his left. He stood up and moved backwards, trying to put as much distance between himself and the basilisk as possible. All the while his brain was working furiously on what to do next. He tried some cutting curses. But they all bounced off its skin. A normal basilisk would have died by now. But this one was a thousand years old - a basilisk's magic increases as it grows older - as Harry remembered, much to his dismay. The worst part was that with every passing second, Tom was getting stronger and Ginny was nearing death. Harry suddenly remembered something he had heard from none other than Voldemort himself, at the end of his first year.

At the End of the First Year

…hand over the Stone boy, unless you want them to have died in vain."

"NEVER."

Harry sprang towards the door as Voldemort yelled, "KILL HIM."

Quirrell raised his wand and shouted –

"Avada Kedavra!"

Harry heard a rushing sound and a green light rushing towards him. He barely managed to dodge the curse. So this was the curse that had haunted his nightmares! He realised that there would be no running away unless he incapacitated Quirrell.

"Petrificus Totalus!" cried Harry. But the curse bounced off Quirrell's shield.

In the meantime, Voldemort was yelling at Quirrell, "Not the Killing Curse you fool. It won't work on him. Kill him the muggle way. Throttle him."

Quirrell lunged at Harry, his hand outstretched. But Harry, being smaller and faster, managed to stay out of his grip. In the meantime he had managed to fire many body-binders at Quirrell, all of which were bounced back – several missing Harry by mere inches.

Now Harry was really panicking. There was nothing else for it. He decided to go for the kill. Pointing his wand at Quirrell, he cried –

"Avada Kedavra!"

The result – nothing. Voldemort laughed. "Boy, what do they teach you these days? Don't you know that the words are not enough? It's your intent that matters. You need to mean them – the unforgivables. You need to feel the hatred. You need to have the murderous intent! And in any case, no eleven year old has enough magic to cast the Killing Curse."

While Voldemort was giving Harry a crash course in unforgivables, Quirrell had managed to come very close to Harry. The next thing Harry knew was that Quirrell's hands were clasped on his throat. And the next moment he had moved away as if burned.

Quirrell pointed his wand at Harry's throat and started, "Sectum-" but Harry grabbed his face before he could proceed. Quirrel quickly turned to dust and Voldemort fled.

Sometime during the Second Year

Fed up of Lockhart's classes, Harry was reading some defence books by himself in the library. The title was 'Defence against the Vilest of Curses'. The section Harry was reading was 'The Unforgivables'.It read –

The third Unforgivable is Avada Kedavra, or the Killing Curse. There is no magical shield to block it….

At the bottom a paragraph read –

The Unforgivables are so called because using them even once against a human being is enough to earn a lifetime in Azkaban. We would not provide instructions on how to cast these curses.

But it wasn't illegal to cast it against a basilisk, was it? Pointing his wand at the oncoming serpent, Harry summoned every single memory he had of the Dursleys' abuse, every single memory of Snape's unfairness, every single bad thing that had happened to him. A deep hatred welled up inside him. A deep rooted desire to kill! He yelled –

"AVADA KEDAVRA!"

A jet of green light emerged from Harry's wand and hit the serpent head on. It was blasted away. Panting, he turned to Tom whose face showed nothing but shock. A second later, the shock was replaced by a twisted smile.

"You are powerful, Potter. I'll have to give you that. Casting the Killing curse at twelve – and a powerful one at that – rare, very rare indeed. But, all your efforts were for nothing. A basilisk this old can't be killed by a single killing curse – no matter how powerful you are. Its scales have too much magic."

To his horror, Harry saw the basilisk stirring and slithering towards him. Tom on the other had had become almost solid. Only his edges remained blurred. He was panicking now. What was he supposed to do? Even the most powerful curse he knew had no effect on the serpent. And Ginny had only got a few more minutes left.

An idea hit him. He realised that the basilisk had some reaction towards the curses which had hit inside its mouth. This meant that the inside of its mouth wasn't as tough as the exterior. Taking his chances, he moved closer to the basilisk and pointed his wand straight towards the ceiling of its open mouth –

"AVADA KEDAVRA!"

He cast the curse twice, in quick succession, pouring all his hatred into it. Harry knew it had worked this time. Instead of being blasted away, the basilisk recoiled slightly and then slumped forward, lifeless. Harry had to move quickly to avoid being crushed by it.

"Well done Potter. You managed to kill my basilisk. But I am afraid it's too late for your little girlfriend now. She is too far gone to save now." Tom Riddle was smiling. But Harry could see anger – and was it panic – in his expression. Tom Riddle was panicking – which meant there was something Harry could do.

"Lacero!" muttered Harry, his wand pointed at Tom Riddle.

But the curse seemed to merge with Riddle. "How stupid are you, Potter? If I am not solid enough to lift a wand, how do you expect a lacerating curse to work on me? In fact, there are very few curses which could harm me in this state. I doubt you have even heard of any such curse. Ordinary curses will do nothing but strengthen me."

Harry panicked. He ran to Ginny, who was almost unconscious now. There, he spotted, lying near her feet, was Riddle's diary. In the coming months, Harry would never recall how he knew it, but he somehow knew the diary had to be destroyed. Taking careful aim, he spoke, "Incendio!"

Tom laughed. "Did you honestly believe I'd leave my diary unprotected against something as common as fire? By the time you find something destructive enough, it'll all be over. Only a few more minutes now, and you'll have the honour of dying at Lord Voldemort's wand. Why don't you stop struggling and spend the last moments of your life with your girlfriend." He smirked.

Harry knew he was in serious trouble now. How could he destroy the diary? He needed something extremely destructive. Then it hit him! Basilisk venom! One of the most destructive things in the world! The real problem was getting to the basilisk without Riddle noticing what he was up to. He doubted that Riddle would have taken no steps to protect his diary. But seeing no other options, he decided to take his chances. If he had to die, he'd die fighting. Picking up the diary – he was surprised he could – he ran towards the basilisk.

"NOOOO! What are you doing!" Riddle lunged towards Harry. But Harry dodged and kept running. "Stupefy!" cried Riddle. A red-orange beam emerged from the wand clutched in Tom's hand - which cluttered to floor the next moment. Harry recognised it as Ginny's. The stunner looked terribly weak. But Harry dodged it anyway. Before Tom could do anything else, he had pierced the diary with one of the Basilisk's fangs. Ink poured out of it in torrents. With a inhumane shriek Tom Riddle vanished. Harry breathed a sigh of relief. It was over at last.

Harry ran to Ginny, who was unconscious now. Her face was deathly pale. His heart clenched. He remembered the little girl he had befriended at platform nine and three quarters. The girl he had written to during the first year – she had been his respite from Ron and Hermione's constant bickering. The girl who had become quickly became his best friend during the summer at the Burrow. Guilt and shame welled up inside him. Had he only talked to her, she wouldn't have had to go through any of this. Thinking back, he couldn't understand why he hadn't talked to her. He felt his thoughts drift away to other mundane things. It was as if something – or someone didn't want him to think about it. But who could it be? With all his might, he focused on Ginny – a fog seemed to lift from his mind. Realisation dawned upon him. Dumbledore – it was entirely his fault! He must have used some compulsion spell. He'd never forgive that manipulative old goat!

Harry realised he was tightly hugging Ginny. He knew he had to save her; no matter what it cost him. He silently willed his magic to pass through her, to revive her. The block on his magic tried to restrain him, but it couldn't stand against his resolve. Finally it gave way. Magic poured out of him. Though he couldn't see it, they were surrounded by a golden aura, laced with ruby red and emerald green. Then there was a blinding flash of white light and he knew no more. His last thoughts were, "I'm sorry Gin. I was too late."

Author's Notes: A heartfelt thanks to all those who reviewed.

To those who asked questions about first and second years, I'd say wait and watch. I can't say much without spoiling the next few chapters. Some of it has been explained in this chapter. I'll cover the remaining in the coming chapters.

For those who didn't get it – Tom Riddle was bluffing about not being affected by curses. That's why he didn't goad Harry into cursing him. The lacerating curse didn't work because it causes physical harm and Tom Riddle didn't have a physical body. He was made of magic. So curses like Avada Kedavra could have some kind of effect on him.

Another thing is that I am not going to have Harry throw an unforgivable at every occasion. He will use them when needed. But it wouldn't be like every other spell coming out of his wand will be Avada Kedavra or Crucio.That's Voldemort's job.

I have decided what I am going to do with Dumbledore. But I won't be spoiling it now.

Also, don't berate me for Harry's good knowledge of spells. There is a very good reason for that which will be explained soon. And he is not all knowing. He merely knows some more spells than his peers. He is NOT a bookworm.

The block on Harry's magic will be explained in next couple of chapters.

Alas, this chapter marks the end of daily updates. From now on, I have to create the chapters from a scratch. I won't have much to copy from books. So the fic will be updated once or twice a week.

Finally what do you guys think of Neville/Hermione pairing? Do you think it is better than Ron/Hermione? If yes, who'd you pair with Ron? If no, who'd you pair with Neville? If you don't like either then state your opinion about pairing for all three. Since most of this fic will be about H/G, the other couples won't get much "screen time." They won't have much consequence on the plot either. I have already thought about this but I'd like to hear your opinion.

Hope you enjoyed it. Please Review!