A/N: perhaps I should have clarified before, but there will be Tomione later on. Bear in mind he's 13 now and she's about twenty, so clearly there's a way to go. Thanks to those of you sticking with me.

~oOo~

Dear Zorion,

The more time that passed, the harder this letter became to write. I'm so confused; I just wish I understood so many things.

I still don't know what to say, but I saw Cassandra leave this card on the table after dinner and I thought of you of course. It must be brand new, so perhaps you don't have it yet. She's been teased quite a bit since her father got shoved out of the Ministry… I'm trying not to find it funny, but not really succeeding.

I'll see you on the 21st of June.

Hermione

The card fell out of the envelope and he caught it neatly before it hit the floor.

Leonard Spencer-Moon (b. 1874) was elected Minister for Magic in 1939 following an emergency session of the Wizengamot in light of the worsening threat from the Dark wizard Grindelwald. The Minister enjoys country walks and fishing and lists Merlin as the person he would most like to meet.

Zorion smiled, both at the gesture of sending the card and at its contents. Merlin's reputation and popularity had only grown over the long years, and he was happy for his old friend. How he longed to summon him – Merlin would know what to do about this whole situation. Or at least he would make him feel better about it.

Should he write back? There didn't seem to be anything to say. He didn't even know what he was going to say face to face – still didn't even know how he felt. Didn't know what the plan was, didn't know what to do about Tom Riddle - didn't know how to occupy himself in a world where he no longer collected souls. It was a giant mess, and it was entirely his fault.

~oOo~

The first time he heard it, he was lying in bed and the room was dark. With a flash of fear he lit the wall torch and narrowly resisted the urge to check the parts of the room which still lay in shadow. Silence, then – but it took him hours to find sleep afterwards.

The second time was on the way back from dinner, following a few paces behind Slughorn along the dungeon corridor, so perhaps the Professor hadn't heard it. He hadn't wanted to bring it up.

The third was in Potions class, while the room was filled only with small shredding and chopping sounds. There was no way nobody else would have noticed it. Was it in his head?

Tom had always known that he could speak to snakes – they seemed to find him whenever he sat outside for more than a few minutes. It had provided the flashpoint for an uncountable number of playground taunts before he had learnt to send them away quickly, but nevertheless he liked them; liked their soft hissing voices and smooth warm scales and the especially fact that everyone else seemed to be scared of them.

This noise, however, was nothing like the sibilant voice of the grass snake. Not even anything like the harsher call of the adder. Now that he had heard it a few times, he began to suspect the species it belonged to… it sounded so big. He could never catch what it was saying, and it never seemed to hear him either. Frustrated, he began to research.

As it transpired, the Hogwarts library had very little to say about basilisks – at least, little about the existence of this basilisk in particular. He found only obscure references to Slytherin and a Chamber of Secrets and a monster inside, presented as to the reader as myth. Would someone really put a thing like that in a school? Apart from the improbability of it, wasn't it practically as dangerous to friend as to enemy? He couldn't make sense of it.

One thing was clear, though – if there really was a basilisk, then there really was a Chamber of Secrets. And if there really was a Chamber of Secrets, then he was absolutely going to find it.

~oOo~

Term dragged on for Hermione, with one day blending shapelessly into the next. Although she kept busy she felt listless, though that itself was, she supposed, better than the terrifying desolation of the year before. Zorion did not reply to her letter containing the frog card – but she hadn't expected him to. She could no longer tell whether she was looking forward to the summer or wishing it would never arrive.

In her free time, she studied hard and tried not to think about the future. Her wandless magic was beginning to be restricted only by her imagination, though progress on becoming an Animagus was painfully slow. Lessons themselves were tedious; the only thing that challenged her was trying to make each mediocre assignment a tiny fraction better than the last one. In duelling club it was hard to keep her performance believable, as they had begun at a level so much higher than the average student. Fortunately, people seemed to assume that she trained with Tom often and that he was teaching her – an idea that never failed to amuse her.

Tom. He was Tom now – just Tom. Not Voldemort, certainly, and not even Riddle, but simply Tom, and when had that happened? Had she really watched him grow for eighteen months now? Physically, of course, as well as mentally and magically; he was getting taller, gangly like Ron had been at that age, though he held himself immaculately as always. There was none of Ron's awkward slouching, no untucked shirt or crooked tie. The girls had noticed, of course, though the purebloods still refused to speak to him and the others were wary. It was easy to imagine how, in the original timeline, Tom would have already been phenomenally popular.

How different it was now. To his fellow Slytherins he spoke seemingly not at all; to other students, as little as possible; to her, seldom voluntarily, though they could reasonably often be found together. She supposed she was the closest thing he had to a confidant, which was odd given that she was still unsure whether they were friends or enemies – still unsure whether he thought they were friends or enemies, for that matter. Although now that she came to think about it, their interactions had grown considerably less false over time. His charm, which last year he had already begun to use on the other students, was currently reserved solely for the benefit of the teachers. Oddly enough he seemed to appreciate the way she refused to be taken in by his sanctimonious act.

Perhaps that was why Tom respected her, at least, as much as he respected anyone. And while that in itself was probably a good thing, somewhere along the way, without really noticing, she had sacrificed the element of surprise. He knew something of her character; knew she was smarter than she let on; knew she knew magic others did not. In the future it was no longer going to be simple to beat him at anything.

It seemed like her main aim for the years ahead had therefore swung fully from eliminate Voldemort to save Tom, and that made her head hurt for so many different reasons. Why had Zorion gone so quiet on the subject? Was he expecting her to help Tom get the Hallows? With every passing day the idea of Zorion being gone was harder and harder to accept, and on top of that somehow she was starting to feel uneasy about tricking Tom into that lonely future. It was all unequivocally – undeniably – incontrovertibly – a giant mess.

~oOo~

If he were hiding a… doorway, presumably – where would he hide it? Somewhere nobody would stumble across it, or somewhere in plain sight that nobody would ever look twice at? In the grounds somewhere? Maybe, but that would make it hard to come and go, particularly after curfew. It was over a thousand years old, too, so it had to be a part of the original castle that wouldn't get moved or changed around. Assuming it was inside, the dungeon seemed most likely, but there was still an awful lot of empty wall in the dungeon corridors. An awful lot of flagstones, and statues, and portraits.

He had been cultivating a relationship with many of Hogwarts' portraits since his first lonely Christmas holiday, and if that had taught him anything it was that the lot of them were gossiping idiots. There was no way he was going to let them catch onto what he was trying to find – no way he was going to go hissing parseltongue at them all in case one swung forward. At least, not until he had eliminated all the other options. Besides, the vast majority of them were far too recent.

If only the snake could hear him then surely it could tell him the way in, but instead he was condemned to wander the hallways like an idiot, staring at all the cracks in the stonework.

"What are you looking at?" The voice made him jump, probably visibly, and he cringed internally. It was Hermione, which was probably preferable to anyone else who might have snuck up on him, but he was still angry with himself. Not to mention he had no good answer – why hadn't he thought of a good answer? She was staring now, as if something was dawning on her. It was an expression she wore quite often, and it never failed to make him uneasy.

"I just saw something move. But it was only a spider." The lie was well told, he thought, but she looked doubtful. "What are you doing down here anyway?" Attack was always the best defence – why hadn't he begun with that?

"I wanted to see where this corridor went… you know, while everyone's at lunch. I don't like to run into your housemates." The way her words accelerated combined with her hilariously transparent expressions told him that she was lying, too – he filed the information away for later but decided against calling her out.

"Just to some storerooms. The ones you can get into don't have anything interesting in."

"Oh – oh. Thanks." And then, after an odd sort of pause, "I'll just go, then."

Though she was a terrible liar, there was definitely something about her which he didn't trust. Sometimes he could swear he was being followed right before she would show up out of nowhere, and he hadn't forgotten the times last year when he would try to follow her only for her to seemingly vanish. If he let her go now, he knew he wouldn't be able to shake the feeling of being watched.

"Let's go to the library." It was basically an order – the kind of tone which nobody had ever dared talk back to. Though he didn't recall speaking to her that way before, she seemed unsurprised and even unfazed. They were staring at each other again.

"I don't need you to tell me what to do, Tom Riddle." He didn't like people who didn't do what he wanted them to. But Hermione had somehow exempted herself from that rule by seeing through his teacher-pleasing charm, and evidently there was no going back. If half drowning her in the lake hadn't made her more compliant, he didn't know what would. And he couldn't exactly risk any more misdemeanours; Dumbledore and the governors were desperate to have him expelled.

"As it happens," she continued, rendering his potential reaction moot, "I was going there anyway. So alright." She began to walk away rather abruptly, and he was forced to take a few running steps to catch up so as not to feel as though he were trailing along behind.

"You knew what was down that corridor," he said, eventually, wondering if a sudden pronouncement would shock her into telling the truth. She looked at him evenly, one eyebrow slightly raised, and he realised there would be no such luck.

"You weren't looking at a spider," she said. He gave no reaction, wondering how she knew or if it were merely a lucky guess. "Are you going to try and drown me again?" Her eyes were bright with mischief and he couldn't stop the laugh from escaping. Did most people find this kind of thing funny? She was so… strange. They kept walking in a silence that might have been described as companionable, which he couldn't recall thinking about anyone except perhaps Elizabeth. By the time they reached the library he had almost forgotten about the Chamber of Secrets.

~oOo~

Tom was looking for the Chamber of Secrets. That was the only possible explanation for today's behaviour. Had he already found it? No, she thought. He would not have been lingering in the corridor like that if he had. She was sure – sure, as she had been since thinking about it in the hospital wing last year – that there must be another way in. It simply wasn't credible that generations of heirs-of-Slytherin would constantly slide down a grimy pipe. Besides, that plumbing was quite modern. There must be an original entrance.

Where would you hide such a thing? The Slytherin common room? Well, that would give easy access to the right person, but surely it was too busy and too easily discovered. If it was up to her, she thought, she would hide it on the seventh floor. Nobody would think to look for a dungeon entrance so high up – but no, she had to think like a Slytherin. They tended to be good at subtlety but not so good at deductive reasoning… and rather prone to grandiose acts. A Slytherin would only want to put the entrance on Slytherin territory – the dungeon, then. Besides, most of the upper floors of the castle were not built until the middle ages (thank you again, Hogwarts: A History).

Tom evidently thought the entrance would be in the dungeons, or at least that it was a sensible place to look. How lucky for her that he had been in the corridor leading to the kitchens just as she was going for lunch; the missed meal was a small price to pay for the knowledge that the heir of Slytherin had realised he had a fifty-foot basilisk at his disposal.

Would Tom set the basilisk on her? Academically, it was an interesting thought. His views on the subject were opaque to her; although he was one of barely a dozen second-years who had never remarked on her muggle heritage, she couldn't allow herself to imagine he truly had no prejudice. The one thing she felt sure about was that Tom would do anything to avoid being expelled, and it seemed to her that he realised killing other students wasn't going to go down well.

Whether or not Tom would let the snake out, there seemed little chance that she would find the entrance – and somehow seal it from him – in the week that remained in term time. She could only hope that Tom wouldn't find it either. Then, at least, she would have the summer to plan. She remembered that she had intended to replicate the Marauder's Map, but the drive to become an Animagus had pushed it out of her mind. With the map, it would be easy at least to follow Tom into the Chamber if he found it.

More than once it occurred to her to try and open the entrance in the girls' bathroom. Perhaps she remembered what Ron had said, and if she had enough time and gave it enough tries – No. It would be suicide, though ironically that part wasn't really a problem for her. But it was a last resort. She had no idea how to kill the creature, much less without looking at it. There was no choice for now but to keep an eye on Tom; a task thankfully made easier by his after-dinner curfew. For the first time in several months she was once again certain that summer could not come soon enough.

~oOo~