Title: The Boys Who Lived
Author: Shara Lunison
Beta: Batsutousai
Rating for this Chapter: T
Pairings: Harry/Henry (OMC), several others—none of them canon XD
Warnings: SLASH, eventual twincest, slightly manipulative!Dumbledore, grey Harry/Henry, OoC-ness, others as I think of them.
Summary: The Potter twins are attacked by Voldemort and somehow defeat him. Now the Dark Lord has returned and they have to choose between light and dark. SLASH, Twincest, rated M for later chapters.
Disclaim Her: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
A/N: YOU ALL ROCK! We made it to 100!!! Here's the chapter that I promised. This is also the point where this fic stops being canon (to an extent). I'm taking votes right now on whether I should mention that Sirius Black exists next year or just do what I want to do (which is twincest fluff, Voldie and Dumbles fighting, and general wizarding world mayhem—all of which will happen anyway).
Chapter Eighteen: Into the Chamber
A large group of aurors wearing red battle robes came into the common room next to fetch the second years. Harry, Henry, and Ron all lined up with the rest of their year mates and crawled through the portrait hole one at a time. The aurors surrounded them completely and marched them cautiously out of the castle. Two of them formed a kind of advance guard, using large hand mirrors to check corners and corridors before letting the group cross through them.
Once they had exited through the front doors of the castle, the aurors hurried them forward much more quickly. All the way down the path to Hogsmeade station, where they met the train full of first years. Anyone who had been petrified had apparently been moved to a newly constructed enclosure near Hagrid's hut and the greenhouses. They really weren't taking any chances.
The group of aurors left them at the train, and they were ushered inside by a couple of ministry officials who were guarding the only open door they had allowed near the front of the train. Inside, every car had at least two more officials guarding each exit and entrance. The three boys picked a compartment close to the open door, the better to hear any news that might come in and also so that the twins could leave before the train left.
"This is really serious," Ron whispered, a white pallor coming over his face as they watched another group being brought down from the castle.
Henry said nothing, having returned to his hunched and miserable appearance.
"I'm glad to see that McGonagall isn't taking any chances," Harry said. "I'm not sure Dumbledore would have done all this to get the students out safely."
Ron nodded slightly, reminded that if the school had been closed when they first found out what was attacking the students, his sister would not be in the hospital wing for most of her first year.
A sudden hiss from Henry caught their attention. He looked at Harry with wide eyes, one hand clutching at the scar on his cheek.
"He's happy," Henry said incredulously. "Really, deliriously, happy."
"He's here?" Harry asked in alarm. Henry nodded. "But that means…"
"If the snake hasn't already gotten to Colin, You-Know-Who soon will," Ron said in alarm.
Harry stood and quickly looked out the window at the approaching group of students. "Look, McGonagall is with this group. We have to warn her and everyone else!"
They opened the door to the compartment, and a woman wearing ministry robes quickly came to block the exit, frowning at them. "What's wrong? Need the loo?"
Ron, in the lead, thought quickly. She was only one of two aurors on this car. "Yes please! Can you take me? I don't feel safe going alone. Not with invisible monsters roaming around the castle."
Her mouth pinched in annoyance. "Basilisks aren't invisible. Come on then. You two stay here," she told the twins.
They let her lead Ron away and held the door open so that it wouldn't close just yet. "Remind me to tell him that he's bloody brilliant," Henry told his brother. Harry just grinned and pulled out the invisibility cloak, throwing it over the both of them. They left the compartment, slowly letting the door close so that it looked like it was just a bit sticky rather than having been held open. The three steps leading off of the train were empty, the officials outside standing to either side of them. They carefully crept down them, careful to not make a noise. Outside, they saw that the teachers and what looked like a group of third year Hufflepuffs were almost at the station.
"Come on, let's get to the other edge of the platform. We can stop McGonagall when she's leaving to get another group," Henry said.
They stood next to the platform steps and waited for the students to pass them, then went down to wait on the grass below.
Moments later, however, the head of house's voice drifted down to them, "I need to speak with Harry and Henry Potter. Can you find them?"
"Blast!" Harry cried. They dashed back up the steps and pulled off the cloak.
"Over here, Professor!" Harry called.
She looked over. "Oh!" The group of teachers came to gather around them.
Snape sneered at them, "Minerva says that you know where the Chamber of Secrets is?"
"Yes, but things have gotten worse," Henry said. "The Dark Lord is here."
"What?" McGonagall gasped.
"My scar started twinging like it did at the end of last year when Quirrell attacked us. And I could tell that he was really, really, happy about something," Henry explained.
Snape had gone still, a strange glint in his eyes. "Minerva," he said slowly. "You and the other teachers continue to evacuate the students. I will escort Messirs Potter to the location of the Chamber and try to see if Mr. Creevey can be rescued safely. If the Dark Lord is here, the boy's time may be quickly running out."
"I cannot condone this, Severus. Taking two second years to possibly face the basilisk and the dark lord—again, I might add—is extremely foolhardy, especially for you."
"You must realize that they are the only ones who can even open the Chamber, Minerva," he argued. "And I am the best choice if the Dark Lord is involved. These boys will be in no undue danger."
Her lips pinched tightly.
"Please, Professor," Henry said, "Let us try to save Colin? We've known where the Chamber was since last night. If we had told you then…"
Her eyes softened. "I doubt I would have been able to gather the necessary forces in time," she admitted. Sighing, she pierced Snape with her worst glare. "Take care of them. If anything happens to them, I'm holding you responsible."
Snape bowed slightly and then turned to the twins, motioning for them to lead the way.
The other professors followed them to the entrance hall before they parted ways. Harry and Henry led the potions professor unerringly to the girl's bathroom on the second floor.
"A girl's bathroom?" Snape sneered. He paused when he stepped inside and then did something they had never heard before. He laughed.
"What's so funny, Professor?" Harry asked, somewhat rudely. They were on a rescue mission, after all.
Snape snickered a few more times before calming down. "I was just imagining the Dark Lord coming in here as a student to get to the Chamber."
The twins couldn't help but smile and walked towards the round sink opposite the door. "The blueprints of the castle revealed a large pipe here that these sinks drain into," Harry said.
They examined the sinks carefully, looking for any sign of a mechanism to open them. They turned every tap, and peered down every drain. Finally, Harry spotted it—a small carved snake on one of the faucets. "Open," he hissed to it.
A great rumbling shook the room and the sinks sunk down into the floor, revealing a large pipe in their place.
"Lumos," Harry whispered, shining his wand light down into the hole. There didn't seem to be a bottom to it. "Nothing for it," he said. And with a shrug, he jumped down the hole.
Snape let out a strangled cry, his hand reaching out to stop the younger twin a second too late. He looked at Henry incredulously, but the boy just grimaced, hand rubbing his heart.
"Must be a very deep hole," Henry muttered. "He's not hurt Professor—in fact, he seemed to be having fun." And then he jumped, too.
"Gryffindors!" Snape snarled to the empty room. "Henry Potter, you have clearly been spending too much time in Gryffindor tower!" he yelled down the pipe. Then, with a reluctant sigh and a muttered anti-grime spell cast over his robes, he jumped.
The pipe twisted and turned all the way to the bottom, where he shot out with a lurch and landed on a pile of what felt suspiciously like bones.
"Welcome, Professor!" Harry said cheerfully.
The trio began picking their way through the veritable field of bones, and froze as they entered a new section of the chamber. A giant snakeskin was literally filling every portion of the room.
"Whoa," Henry said.
"Indeed," Snape returned.
"Onward!" Harry cried, having the time of his life.
They kept going and came upon an ornate circular seal with numerous carved snakes and other designs set into the wall.
"Open," Harry said, again. The seal rolled to one side and they entered a much more refined, Slytherin, chamber. This one was covered in uniform gray stones, exactly like the rest of the castle. A long walkway stretched before them, snake carvings and statues lining it on either side. At the end of the long stretch, they saw two figures standing before a statue of the founder, a pale blond-haired child stretched out on the ground between them.
"Colin," Henry breathed. Before Snape could stop them, both boys were running forward to rescue the boy.
The two standing figures looked over at them as they approached. The older one's eyes lit up as he spied Snape following more cautiously behind the twins.
"S-s-severus-s-s," he hissed slowly.
Snape approached a little further and then fell to his knees before the man. "My lord…"
"It has been a long time, Severus," the other figure murmured. Snape looked up in surprise, a slight blush suffusing his cheeks. The younger man—no older than twenty-five—grinned.
The twins ignored them and knelt next to Colin's still form. "Colin!" Harry said, shaking him.
"He won't wake," the young man told them. Harry looked up at him for the first time. He looked eerily similar to he and his brother. Tall, with black hair and grey-green eyes. He was wearing black robes in an older style and appeared to be quite poised and aristocratic. Harry's eyes fell on a familiar black book lying on the floor.
"You-you're Tom Riddle!" he accused. Memories suddenly came back with a rush. He remembered a conversation that he and Henry had had with Snape earlier in the year, when the diary first went missing. Harry turned to glare at Snape as he remembered being obliviated but found that he had more questions than hatred for the man.
Henry was remembering too and looked in alarm between Colin and the diary and the very real Tom standing in front of them. He stood. "You drained his life away, using your diary, to bring yourself back to life. So, it really was a horcrux…"
The older man cried out in rage, a wand suddenly appearing in his hand to be trained on Henry, "How!?" he screeched in a high, cold voice.
"My lord!" Snape was suddenly on his feet, grasping the Dark Lord's wrist behind the wand. "I am afraid that I am duty bound to protect them as long as they are under my care," he whispered.
The wand slowly lowered, but the eyes that had flashed red in rage stayed trained on Henry with a menacing leer.
"Perhaps we should conclude our business before dealing with our guests?" Tom Riddle suggested drily.
Voldemort sneered at his younger self, and said, "I do not agree with this joining you are asking me for. I worked too hard to get to this point!"
Riddle sighed, "You are only one sixty-fourth the man you once were, and you claim that you are better this way? Together we would be more than half of a full person. And I believe," he glanced at Snape, "closer in age to our…pet."
Harry's mind quickly put together the pieces by combining Snape's story of love after their mother with the conversation now taking place. But he really didn't want to go there right now. Kneeling, he felt at Colin's neck for a pulse. The boy's skin was clammy and cold, his eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling above them. Gently, Harry closed the lids with his fingers and turned to confront the man responsible.
"You…you bastard!" he snarled at Tom Riddle.
Henry glanced quickly at Colin's still form, and then away. "How could you?" he whispered.
"Come, come, Henry, my friend. Surely you cannot fault me for wishing to live once more? He was only a mudblood, after all."
Henry whipped out his wand, "Confringo!" Tom stepped calmly to one side and the reddish-purple curse flew past him to smash a sizable hole in the wall. Harry followed suit with an expelliarmus which Tom didn't bother to dodge, but as he wasn't holding a wand it did nothing.
"Severus, may I ask that you bind these children until we finish our discussion?" Tom asked the potions master.
Snape reluctantly brandished his wand at the twins and cast incarcerous on them. Neatly trussed and tied, they sat heavily on the damp floor beside Colin's body.
Before the two dark lords could continue arguing, Snape turned to Voldemort and said, "My lord, please reconsider. Dividing your soul so many times caused you to lose your sanity piece by piece, and your ideals with it. Please…"
Voldemort frowned dangerously, considering his younger self. "We will create more horcruxes if you are wrong?" he asked.
Tom nodded.
With a sigh, the Dark Lord nodded. He closed the eyes of his borrowed body and as they watched, a dark formless shape began to exude almost from the man's skin. A moment later the body he had been using fell to the floor, dead, and the dark shape of his soul floated across the room to join with the younger Tom Riddle. Tom stiffened as it struck him, clenching his teeth for a few moments before a long and agonizing scream was torn from his lips. His skin bubbled and reshaped over muscles and bones, the scream continuing as the pieces of his soul combined once more. The twins and Snape watched on in horrified fascination as he grew older and taller until at last, a new Tom stood in his place. Harry estimated him to be around thirty-five years old.
Tom sighed in relief as he flexed his new arms, hands, and fingers. "Finally, I feel almost like a real person again."
"My lord!" Snape gasped, falling to his knees again. "I am so glad to see you returned to yourself once more."
"Stand up, Severus. The rules of the past no longer apply. I will have to rebuild everything from scratch, including my followers."
Henry glared malevolently at the Dark Lord and Snape, but could not help wondering if this Tom was not the same as the evil Lord Voldemort. Beside him, Harry shifted slightly, straining against his bonds to reach his wand.
Tom turned to them. "I will let you go and leave here peacefully without harming another student, but you must come to me at some point this summer. Both of you."
Snape looked between the twins and his master in confusion.
Henry raised an eyebrow at the potions master. So he didn't know that Henry was a horcrux? How interesting. "Why?" he asked.
The Dark Lord pierced him with grey-green eyes. "I think you know why, Henry. You will not be harmed while under my care." He paused. "Much."
He turned away from them and approached Severus, reaching out one long-fingered hand to caress the potions master's face. "I have missed you, S-severus-s-s." The name held a seductive hiss that caused their professor to close his eyes and lean his cheek into the hand.
"And I, you, master."
Tom kissed the other man chastely and turned to walk away towards one wall of the chamber. "I will contact you when the time is right," he promised. "Open," he hissed to the wall. A section of it melted away in a similar fashion to the portal at Diagon Alley. Beyond, they could see a slanted tunnel that presumably led out of the castle.
Snape waited until the Dark Lord had gone and the portal closed behind him before releasing the twins. Harry's wand was trained on the man in an instant, but Henry grabbed his wrist and forced it back down.
"I presume you have questions," Snape said silkily, completely unconcerned at being threatened by a second year. "But perhaps you would like to wait and think about things before you ask them. Let's get Mr. Creevey's body out of here and inform Minerva that the basilisk is nowhere to be found. I doubt anyone will be releasing it again now that the diary is empty of Tom's soul."
"It would be better to tell her we killed it," Henry said. "Otherwise, you might have to reveal the horcruxes to her. I doubt that would end well."
Snape inclined his head slightly. "I will think about it. Come. Levicorpus."
The body the Dark Lord had been inhabiting and Colin's body rose to their feet and hovered there limply above the ground. Snape picked up the diary and placed it in his pocket. The bodies followed them eerily out of the Chamber, bobbing along like specters haunting them from beyond the grave.
When they reached the pipe that led back up, Snape sneered at them. "Perhaps if you asked for stairs this time?"
Henry suppressed a smile, seeing that Harry was still livid with the man. "S-s-stairs?" he tried. There was a grinding noise from above and moments later the plinths where the sinks were mounted had rotated down around the edge to rest at their feet.
"Even better," Snape muttered. He stepped onto one of the plinths, guiding Colin and the other body with his wand onto another. Harry and Henry took two others and waited for something to happen.
When nothing did, Henry sighed and said, "Up?" The plinths began to rotate slowly around the edge at once.
"Indeed," said Snape, probably having grasped the questioning tone of Henry's hissing.
At the top, an empty bathroom greeted them. Snape guided them quickly through the halls and out the front doors. In the time they were in the Chamber, the rest of the students must have been evacuated because all of the professors and a number of aurors and ministry officials were waiting for them.
McGonagall paled when she caught sight of Colin. "Is he…?"
Snape nodded gravely.
The gathered crowd of people gasped or cried out. The professors all frowned sadly and took the boy's body from Snape's spell, gently carrying him down to the enclosure where the other victims of the basilisk waited for the mandrakes to be ready. The aurors took the other body after hearing that the Dark Lord had been possessing the unknown man and the members of the ministry followed, leaving the deputy headmistress to speak to the potions master about what had occurred.
"What of the basilisk?" McGonagall asked a moment later.
Snape shrugged. "We did not see it. There was a brief confrontation with the Dark Lord. He has regained his body once more."
She looked sharply at the twins. "And he didn't hurt you?" There was a note of incredulity and suspicion in her voice.
Henry shook his head, Harry just scowled.
"I believe he got what he came for when he recovered his body," Snape offered. "He agreed to leave without harming any other students."
"How odd," McGonagall muttered. "That sounds like something the Tom Riddle I went to school with would do."
"He appears to be about the same age as me now," Snape said. "He combined with an image of himself at sixteen—though I will admit, he looked older—that he used Mr. Creevey's life force to create."
"How?"
"I believe that Albus would not want me to share that information. I don't think he knows I know, either," Snape said mildly.
"Very well," she frowned. Turning to the twins, she said, "Your things have been taken to the Hog's Head. Be careful going to Hogsmeade, but you can go about where you please. Just not into the castle."
They nodded and walked down the path towards the small village. They had a lot of thinking to do.
-o-0-o-
A/N: I know, they should talk to Sev here, but it was a good place to stop and I feel like the twins need a breather after all that. Forgive me?
~Shara