He thought about the Chamber for three days before deciding.
The logic was straightforward: if Voldemort had hidden the locket in a cave in the sea, and a diadem in a room full of junk — the Chamber of Secrets was exactly the kind of place he would consider safe. He had opened it once as a student. He believed he was the only one who could. From Voldemort's perspective, anything left there was unreachable.
From Ron's perspective, it was not unreachable. He had been in the Chamber. He knew the way. And he had a basilisk fang in his trunk and a knife now imbued with the means to destroy whatever he might find.
The question was whether Voldemort had left anything there, and whether going would compromise anything else.
He decided the going was worth it. And he needed Parseltongue.
He found Harry on Wednesday evening in the common room, working on Defence notes with the focused attention Harry brought to things he had decided to take seriously.
'Can I ask you something unusual?' Ron said.
Harry looked up. 'How unusual?'
'Parseltongue,' Ron said. 'I've been reading about rare magical abilities and Parseltongue is the most documented one with a living practitioner.' He sat down across from Harry. 'I want to understand how it works — whether it can be learned or whether it's purely inherited. And if it can be approximated, what the sounds are. Common words, phrases. Enough to understand if I ever heard it.'
Harry looked at him with the expression he used when he was deciding how much of what he was thinking to say. He had developed this expression over the autumn; it was one of the ones that had not existed in the previous version of Harry.
'You're not going to tell me why,' Harry said.
'It's academic,' Ron said. 'Mostly.'
Harry looked at him for a moment longer. Then he said, in Parseltongue, something that had the quality of a greeting.
Ron listened with the full attention of someone who was not simply hearing a sound but trying to map it to a structure. The language was sibilant in the way described in the texts, but the pattern of it was more complex than simple hissing — there were distinctions of pitch and duration and something that functioned like stress, all of which carried meaning.
'What was that?' Ron said.
'Hello,' Harry said. 'Roughly. It doesn't translate exactly.'
They spent an hour on it. Harry produced common words and phrases — door, open, come, go, stop, wait — and Ron listened to each one multiple times with the focused attention of someone building an internal dictionary. He could not speak it; his mouth did not produce the sounds naturally the way Harry's did. But he could hear it, and distinguish it, and understand it if he encountered it.
At the end of the hour, Harry looked at him.
'If you ever need me to say something specific,' Harry said, 'you can ask.'
'I know,' Ron said. 'Thank you.'
Harry went back to his Defence notes. Ron wrote up his own notes on Parseltongue phonology with the systematic thoroughness of someone who had found the subject more interesting than he had expected, and thought about the Chamber, and thought about what might or might not be waiting in it, and decided he would go on Saturday.
He spent Thursday preparing.
Not physically — the preparation for the Chamber was straightforward, the same kit he had assembled in January: wand, knife, light source, the Invisibility Cloak for the journey through the castle in the early hours. The preparation that took time was the intellectual kind: working through what he expected to find, what he would do if he found it, what he would do if he found something he had not expected.
He did not expect a Horcrux in the Chamber. He thought it was possible — Voldemort had used the space, had trusted it, had believed it inaccessible — but the probability felt low. The diary had been designed to be used, to be deployed against a target, which was why it had ended up in Ginny's cauldron. The locket had been hidden in a cave specifically protected. The diadem had been hidden in the room at Hogwarts specifically because Voldemort had believed the hiding place was his alone. The Chamber was not the same kind of hiding place — it was a working space, a place Voldemort had used for his school-year occupations, not somewhere he had chosen specifically as a repository.
But possibly. And the possibly was worth a Saturday morning.
He also thought about the Parseltongue.
Harry had been generous with it — more generous than Ron had strictly asked for, producing not just the words Ron had requested but the broader phonological range, the distinctions of register, the specific sounds that marked questions versus statements versus imperatives. Ron had the impression Harry had been carrying the language in isolation for a long time and had found something unexpectedly relieving about being asked to explain it.
He had not asked why Harry was generous with it. He thought he understood.
Parseltongue was associated, in the wizarding world, with dark magic and Slytherin and the kind of ability that people looked at sideways. Harry knew this. Harry had been dealing with the sideways looks since the dueling club incident in his second year. Responding to a request to teach it — to treat it as a learnable skill rather than an inherited darkness — was something Harry would have felt differently about than most interactions involving the ability.
He had, he suspected, given Harry something by asking. Not by design. Just by treating the thing as what it was: a language, a communication system, something that could be studied and understood and used.
He made a note in the Parseltongue section of his research notebook: the Hogwarts plumbing system responds to spoken Parseltongue commands. The Chamber entrance is in the second-floor girls' bathroom, behind the sinks. The entrance phrase — open — produces a specific muscular response in the speaker that he had noticed when Harry demonstrated it and which he could not replicate but which he could now reliably identify if he heard it.
He also noted: the Chamber itself may contain additional Parseltongue-sealed spaces. He had seen what appeared to be door-shaped indentations in the walls during the June visit and had not had time to investigate them. He would look on Saturday.
Thursday evening, after dinner, he told Harry he was planning to visit the Chamber.
Not in detail. He framed it as following up on something he had noticed in June — which was accurate — and said he wanted to make sure the space was properly sealed before anyone else found the entrance.
Harry looked at him.
'Do you need me to come?' Harry said.
'No,' Ron said. 'I have the phrase you gave me. I'll be fine.'
'If anything looks wrong —'
'I'll come and find you,' Ron said. 'I promise.'
Harry looked at him for a moment with the expression that was not quite trust and not quite concern but occupied the space between them where a person decided to let someone else do something they had some right to do.
'Alright,' he said.