Yo! Gonna be honest, I'm freaking loving this fic. I've reread it twice over the last month. It's really grown on me. Yeah, I read my own stuff. I wouldn't write it if I wasn't going to read it, lol. Anyway, thank you to all readers so far!

Severus entered the Room of Requirement at ten at night two days later. The very existence of the room surprised him, but he was more focused on the ones in the room.

Draco had led him here, but Potter, Weasley, and Granger were already seated in comfortable-looking red armchairs. Two more appeared when Severus and Draco entered, these green, all five seats set in a circle around a dark wooden table.

"I can't believe this," Weasley muttered, and Granger swatted at his arm.

"Play nice, Ron," she hissed.

Weasley rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I know."

"Have a seat," said Potter amiably.

Severus and Draco both sat, and after a bit of an awkward pause which Severus suspected was due to his presence, Potter herself spoke first.

"So, like I said earlier, Snape now knows about the Horcruxes, and we've decided we should start with trying to find the one we're guessing is hidden here in the castle. If we can find and destroy that one without Dumbledore finding out, we can try to get the one Kreacher stole next."

"Any idea where to start?" asked Weasley, leaning back in his seat as he shot Severus a cautious glance.

Potter sighed. "Nope."

"What about the Chamber of Secrets?" said Draco. "The Dark Lord's likely spent plenty of time in there. Isn't it possible he left it there somewhere?"

"I did check the Chamber already," said Potter, "or whatever bits of the Chamber I could get to, but my scar never reacted. I'm thinking there might be hidden rooms or something down there, but I don't know the right spells to reveal them, and Parseltongue didn't help either."

"Well, Professor Snape could help with that, right?" said Granger. She looked at him. "I expect you know more advanced revealing spells than us, and maybe even dark-aligned ones? According to Violet, as a student, Riddle was already very familiar with dark magic."

Severus nodded slowly, already thinking. "It will be difficult to say anything until I examine the place myself, but it would be unsurprising if dark magic is involved." Though he said that, he still wasn't entirely sure about his presence in the room. His inclusion here was strange.

Why exactly was he here? Why did they (to varying degrees) trust him? Draco was one thing, of course, but there was no reason for Potter, Weasley, and Granger to trust him. He'd done nothing to endear himself to them and was well aware of it.

"If you're going to go into the Chamber of Secrets anyway," said Draco, "can you destroy the Horcrux there too if you find it?"

Potter nodded. "Yeah, the basilisk's body is still there."

"Why not just do it now?" said Weasley. "Going to the Chamber, I mean. We're already gathered here. You and Snape can just head on over, check things out, and come back when you're done and let us know what happened."

Potter scratched her chin. "I don't mind either way. Are you busy now, Professor?"

He was, but he supposed his potions didn't matter much right now. He certainly wasn't about to let Potter go down there alone. "No," he replied.

"Perfect." Potter got to her feet, and Severus followed suit. "We'll be back in a bit, then," said Potter, leading the way out of the room.

"Be careful!" Granger called.

"I'll be as careful as I always am," said Potter reassuringly from over her shoulder.

"You're never careful!"

Potter laughed, and Severus followed her out of the room in silence, once again wondering what he had done to warrant some measure of trust from Potter and her friends. They were even bantering around him without a care!

He didn't understand any of this.

Severus was rather surprised when Potter took him into the girl's bathroom on the first floor instead of leading him to the Chamber of Secrets. This was a little disturbing. The ghost crying in one of the stalls only made it worse.

"Why in the world are we in here, Potter?" he questioned.

"Because Slytherin was either a creep who put the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets in the girl's loo, or the girl's loo just so happened to be built over the entrance," said Potter rather casually.

Severus had questions, quite a few of them, in fact, but he said nothing. The main thing he was wondering right now was, why hadn't Dumbledore ever told him this bathroom hid the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets? Surely Potter had told him after what happened in her second year.

But why was he surprised? This was just another thing to add to the already very long list of important information Dumbledore had never deigned to tell him.

Quiet and curious, he watched as Potter approached one of the sinks and hissed out a word that was said so quickly he didn't even have time to flinch. To his surprise, the sinks began to move and soon revealed a rather large hole in the floor. Had that really been hidden beneath the sinks for the past thousand years?

"This is a pipe," said Potter, "and it's connected to a bunch of other pipes throughout the castle. It's how the basilisk got around. That's why no one ever saw it when all the Muggleborns were getting attacked." She sat at the pipe's entrance, legs dangling inside. "C'mon."

She was being very casual with him, he realized suddenly. He'd never tolerated that from a student before, so why did her disrespect not irritate him? He frowned, but there was no time to inspect these thoughts. Potter slid down the pipe, and he had no choice but to follow suit.

The trip down the pipe was unpleasant. It was a long way down, long, dark, and foul-smelling. They went deeper and deeper, heading further and further underground, well below the dungeons and certainly far below the lake.

"Be careful when you land, Professor!" Potter called out suddenly. "It's a bit of a fall!"

And that was all the warning he received before the pipe came to a sudden end and he shot out of it, hitting the cold, stone floor harshly. He took a moment to catch his breath, but Potter was already on her feet, brushing herself off. He stood and reached for his wand, but Potter was again ahead of him, already lighting hers with a murmured lumos. He did the same and looked around.

The space they were in was larger than he'd been expecting, though if he considered it had to be spacious enough for a basilisk to move through, it made far more sense. The walls and floor were made of dark stone and were covered in a layer of slime. In a corner was a pile of rodent bones, and the path ahead, if it could truly even be called that, looked like a wall of crumbled stone with a hole just barely large enough for them to get through.

"A cave-in?"

"Hmm? Yeah," said Potter, aiming her wand light at it. "Lockhart tried to obliviate me and Ron, but he used Ron's broken wand for it and the spell hit the ceiling before bouncing back and hitting Lockhart. I guess some of the stone up there was loose, because the whole thing collapsed. No one got hurt, luckily, but Ron and Lockhart were stuck on this side while I was on the other side. I went on, and he tried to make a gap for me and Ginny to get back through."

Potter turned to him. "Oh, but don't worry. We came back a bit ago, this time with Hermione, and we were able to use a couple of spells to reinforce the wall, so it shouldn't collapse on us or anything." She looked at the wall and cocked her head. "Probably."

Severus decided it was better not to trust that and waved his wand in front of the wall, casting a quiet spell. Potter only huffed as he did this. Satisfied the wall was sturdy enough, he inclined his head and took a step back, allowing the girl to take the lead. He didn't want to admit it, but she knew more about this place than him. It was better this way. It would be quicker as well.

Whether she realized what he was thinking or not, Potter did indeed take the lead, and Severus followed her without a word. They made their way down the corridor, still surrounded by dark stone, until they came across a second door, though Severus had no time to get a good look at it before Potter hissed out another word and the door opened.

Potter walked in silence after that, and Severus did the same. Around them, the stones began to smooth and darken. And then they were in a chamber, and there was the basilisk, huge and dead, curled in the centre of the room. Behind it was a statue of Salazar Slytherin, but Severus' eyes were on the snake.

"I killed it with Gryffindor's sword," said Potter, no doubt noticing where his attention lay. "Stabbed it through the roof of the mouth. Got a fang in my forearm for my trouble, too. Oh, but Fawkes cried on the wound, so that's how I lived," she added before he could even think to speak.

Severus frowned. That explained why his soulmark had pained him so horribly when Potter had gone off to rescue Ginny Weasley all those years ago. He turned but saw Potter standing in front of the statue of Salazar Slytherin.

Potter spoke in Parseltongue again, and this time the phrase she said was long enough to get a flinch out of him. The statue's mouth opened, revealing a dark chasm within. She glanced back at him from over her shoulder.

"There's a corridor in here, but it leads to a dead end," she explained. "We thought there might be something hidden here, but we couldn't figure out how to reveal anything."

Severus nodded and, leaving the dead basilisk behind, approached the girl who once again led the way forward. He followed her wordlessly, looking around curiously, but as she'd said, the path led to a dead end, the stone wall ahead smooth and cool to the touch.

He tossed out a few simple spells first, ones Potter and her friends would have attempted, but of course, they revealed nothing. He tried other spells then, more advanced ones that became darker with every new spell he attempted.

Finally, they heard the sound of stone against stone, and the wall began to slide down, grinding loudly as it revealed the corridor that had been hidden behind it. Severus lit his wand again.

"You did it!" Potter exclaimed. She sounded delighted, but she didn't seem to pay that any mind and aimed her lit wand down the newly revealed corridor, squinting in the gloom.

Severus frowned. It was strange to hear her speak this way to him. He was used to anger and disdain from the Gryffindors, not…this. Now that he thought about it, had Potter ever regarded or spoken to him in anger or disdain? She'd been upset, yes, frightened, yes, intimidated, yes, but she'd never reacted poorly to him, even when he'd given her more than one reason to.

Why was that?

They stepped into the corridor, Severus taking the lead this time, as the place was just as unfamiliar to Potter now as it was to him. He led the way down the dark corridor, Potter following a few steps behind him, both of them using their wands to light the way.

They walked in silence, checking the stone walls as they passed, but found nothing until they reached the end of the corridor. It was another dead end. With Potter watching closely from under his arm, Severus repeated the spell he'd used previously, and another door appeared. This door, however, remained locked.

Potter hissed something then and, not having expected it, Severus flinched. He noticed her look at him but he ignored her and was relieved when the door swung open.

"What did you say?" he asked, unable to stop his curiosity.

Potter shrugged. "I just asked it to open. Riddle wasn't very creative with his passwords. Or maybe it was Slytherin who wasn't creative. I'm not sure who assigned the passwords." She gestured at the doorway. "Should we go in?"

Severus again led the way, Potter following a step or two behind him, and they found themselves in a study. Salazar Slytherin's personal study, by the looks of it. Severus felt a jolt in his gut. Was he really standing here right now? In a place he'd only dreamed could exist?

The room was quite large, the floor and walls made of the same smooth, dark stone as most of the chamber. The back and side walls had numerous windows displaying the current scene outside. Severus assumed they were charmed the same way the ceiling in the Great Hall was. Torches lined the walls between the windows and since it was dark outside, Severus lit these, giving them a better look at the room.

Right of the door was a large hearth, before it a sofa, two armchairs, and a table. Left of the door were two dozen bookshelves that nearly touched the ceiling, every shelf lined with books and scrolls. In the centre of the room, directly in front of the door and standing before the largest window was a desk of polished mahogany.

As Potter wandered off to the closest bookshelf, Severus approached the desk. It was messy, parchments rolled and unrolled strewn across it. There were three inkwells, one closed, the second open and dry, and the third on its side where it had left a pool of now-dry ink on one of the sheets of parchment and the desk below it. There were five quills as well, three of them with broken nibs.

Frowning, Severus picked up the closest sheet of parchment. The handwriting was unfamiliar and the script in a language he didn't understand. He looked at it carefully, trying to place the strange characters, but he couldn't recognize them. But there were numbers, he noted, measurements of some kind. Were these instructions for a potion?

He glanced at Potter and saw her going through a book. She'd put her wand away. Even as he watched, she replaced the book and pulled another one off the shelf seemingly at random. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she flipped through pages.

There was so much he had to ask her. So much they needed to discuss. How had she learned she was a Horcrux? How had she and her friends concluded what the other Horcruxes were? When had she and Draco become friends? When had they allowed Draco into their friend group? How long had she been suffering with her relatives? Had she told her friends about it or had they found out on their own? Had she ever told Dumbledore? What about Black and Lupin? Did they know?

Severus frowned and turned his attention back to the desk before Potter could notice him staring. He took up another sheet of parchment, deciding it was time to refocus. This parchment too featured the unfamiliar language, and so did the rest of the parchments on the desk.

As Potter moved to another bookshelf, Severus checked the desk itself for clues, but there were no drawers, let alone hidden compartments. Frustrated, Severus turned his attention to the bookshelves and, picking one Potter hadn't checked yet, approached that instead, hoping for better luck.

"Looks like the shelves are organized by subject," said Potter when she saw him, "and then alphabetically going by the author's name. There are books in a bunch of different languages too. I wonder who brought them all here?"

Severus examined the books on the shelf before him and quickly realized they were all related to history. Further examination confirmed Potter's words. There were books in English, of course, but he also saw numerous books in other languages, some of which he could vaguely recognize, and others which were entirely unfamiliar to him.

How many people had been down here? Slytherin couldn't possibly have collected all of these. Many of them had been published long after his death. Had the Dark Lord brought them all here?

As Potter had said, every bookshelf held books on a different topic. The one before him was history, but other shelves had books on charms, transfiguration, herbology, and astronomy, and there was another shelf filled with books on mythology and legends. There were hundreds of books, and that wasn't even to mention the countless scrolls lining other shelves.

"Hey, Snape, I found the potions shelf," said Potter suddenly.

Severus turned and saw her jerk her thumb at the bookshelf next to her. He walked over, but when he saw her face, he frowned. "Why are you grinning?"

Potter blinked and her expression turned innocent. "No reason," she said, turning her attention to a different bookshelf and leaving him alone.

Severus' eyes narrowed, but when she said nothing more, he looked at the books on the shelf instead. He found many books he was very familiar with, some he knew of but hadn't managed to get his hands on, and there were dozens of books he'd never heard of before in his life and was eager to go through.

He skimmed through a few of them and again found a few in the same strange language as the parchments on the desk. Quite a few of the books in here had been written in that tongue. He wondered what it was.

Severus didn't know how long he spent going through the potions books. It was only when he felt hunger gnawing at his stomach that he stopped to check the time. It'd gotten quite late. Much later than he'd been expecting. He sighed mournfully and replaced the book he was holding.

Potter, he noted, was at the desk now, going over some of the parchments. But as he watched her, he realized she was looking at them for much longer than she should have been, considering the writing was in a foreign language.

"What are you looking at?" he asked as he approached.

"Huh? Oh, antidote to common poisons," said Potter. "But...it looks a bit different from what I remember."

Severus hadn't seen that one. Had he missed it? "Why do you say it is different?" But when Potter answered, Severus flinched and stiffened. "Potter!"

"What?"

"You're speaking in Parseltongue."

Potter blinked. "Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't realize." She looked up at him. "Does it really bother you that much?"

He didn't answer. Hearing Parseltongue made him feel two things, and both were things he didn't want to be feeling around Potter. Fear was one of them, and the other, well, no, he didn't even want to acknowledge what the other feeling was.

Perhaps realizing he was reluctant to answer, Potter showed him the parchment she had in hand. "It's because this is written in Parselscript," she said.

"Parsel...script?" he repeated, surprised. That wasn't a term he'd heard of before.

"Yeah. Well, that's what Riddle called it, at least," said Potter. "I found a journal or something I think was his. It didn't have his name anywhere, but I recognized his handwriting. Anyway, he mentioned there being a written version of Parseltongue and he called it Parselscript. All of these are written in it," she said, gesturing at the parchment-strewn desk. "Some of those books are too," she added, nodding at the shelves on the other side of the room.

"...Did the Dark Lord write these as well?" asked Severus, indicating the parchments.

Potter shook her head. "The handwriting's different, so I don't think so." She looked up at him. "Do you want me to try to translate some of this stuff?"

"Would that be possible?" he asked, trying to mask his eagerness. Having free access to the Dark Lord's old notes and journals, and possibly even Salazar Slytherin's writings wasn't something to scoff at.

"I may as well give it a shot," said Potter with a shrug. She glanced around. "My scar hasn't reacted to anything down here yet, but that doesn't mean much. There might be more hidden rooms around. Who knows how big this place gets? And going through Riddle's old stuff might even give us a clue."

"Do what you can, then," said Severus. "Gather whatever you think may be relevant now, and I will keep them in my quarters. They'll be safer there."

Potter frowned but nodded and hurried off into the bookshelves again. "If we're keeping the stuff with you, we'll have to come up with a reason for me to head into the dungeons every now and again," she said from behind one of the shelves. "Unless you just want me sneaking down there at night."

Severus nearly jumped when he felt a strange throb pass through his soulmark. He rubbed it, frowning. That was odd. Had that happened because of him? Or was it because of Potter? Because of what she'd said? Because of the image his mind had conjured up? He shook his head, pushing those thoughts behind his shields. It was best not to focus on them. Certainly not while Potter was around.

"Remedial potions is the first thing I thought of," said Potter, fortunately unaware of Severus' thoughts, "but that probably won't make the best excuse since I did manage to make it into your NEWT class. I think I've been doing decently enough, right?"

"You failed your potion the other day."

"That was on purpose!" Potter protested. "I needed to get your attention and Hermione said that was the best way to do it."

"Which means Granger is the one who planned it," said Severus. "No doubt because you did not know how to do so safely."

"We-well... Alright, fine, just make me do remedial potions," said Potter with an indignant huff.

And that was all they required to settle things. Potter returned with a few books and scrolls, Severus hid them away, and they backtracked through the Chamber of Secrets. Once they were standing below the pipe, Potter summoned a house elf to help them get out, and in a flash, they were once more in the girl's bathroom on the first floor, the Chamber's entrance sealing itself away behind them.

"Why did you not have the house elf take us down there as well?" asked Severus.

"It's always fun to experience the pipe slide at least once," said Potter, amusement in her eyes. "We won't be doing that again though," she said quickly before Severus could speak. "Anyway, I'll tell the others what we found." And with a quick smile, she was gone.

Severus sighed. His mind was a mess of questions, but there was no time to ask any of them. It seemed he would be spending more time alone with Potter. He wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that, but perhaps he would be able to get some answers soon.

And ignoring another throb that pulsed through his soulmark, Severus returned to the damp darkness of the dungeons alone.

That's it for now. And if you're waiting on updates for pretty much anything else I've been writing, I'm sorry it's taking so long. It's been a really bad year for me both physically and mentally and I haven't been able to get much writing done. I'm trying though, I promise! Looking forward to reviews! Laterz!