They dropped through the entrance one by one, the tunnel carrying them down into the dark, and landed in a passage that smelled of old water and something else — stone, deep earth, the particular cold of spaces that have been sealed for a very long time.
Kevin noted Dumbledore's absence. He knew the old man was there. Invisible, moving in parallel, waiting to see how things played out. It was, he had concluded, Dumbledore's standard operating method — create the conditions, place the right people, and watch to see what they chose to do with them.
He fell in beside Harry and they walked.
The shed snakeskin was enormous — the kind of enormous that made you recalibrate your scale of what enormous meant. Ron took a step back from it. Hermione pressed close to Kevin's arm.
The iron door, when they reached it, opened for Harry's Parseltongue with the compliance of something that had been waiting.
Ginny was at the far end of the Chamber with the still quality of a person being used as a vessel. Not herself in any of the ways that matter — eyes flat, posture wrong, the particular blankness of someone whose agency has been temporarily vacated.
Don't, Kevin thought, watching Ron step forward. She's in there, but she's not driving.
Tom Riddle stepped from the shadows with the ease of someone who had been waiting and found the wait worthwhile.
Tall. Dark-haired. The kind of face that would have been easy to trust, once, before you knew what it was built on. He looked at the group with the particular attention of someone assessing pieces on a board.
"Which of you is Harry Potter?"
Kevin answered first.
"Invisible Blade."
No announcement. No posturing. The spell came off his wand and crossed the distance before Tom had finished his first word, and Tom's Shield Charm snapped up and held it — but it cost him his composure for exactly two seconds, which was the information Kevin needed.
He's quick. He's very quick. And he's running on stored memory, not a full body — which means he's drawing from the diary, which means that's what ends this.
Tom regathered himself with the speed of someone who has decided that surprise has passed and that the situation is now manageable.
"You're the one who defeated my current self," he said. "Interesting."
"Less interesting than you think," Kevin said. "Harry — get Ginny."
Tom flicked his wand at Harry.
Kevin got in the way, deflected the curse off his bracers, and drove his crowbar in a lateral arc at Tom's head. Tom apparated two metres sideways — wandlessly, which Kevin noted — and gestured at the far end of the Chamber where the massive carved serpent gaped.
Kevin threw everything he had at interrupting the call. Cutting hex, explosive curse, a blasting charm that cracked the nearest pillar — Tom took the hits and kept the Parseltongue going, absorbing the force with the specific resilience of something that isn't entirely present in a physical sense.
The basilisk's snout appeared in the opening.
"Eyes closed. All of you — eyes closed and keep them closed."
Kevin drove Final Flash at full compression directly into the emerging head.
The light lasted one second. The basilisk's scream lasted three.
Kevin vaulted onto its head before it could reorient, both crowbars in hand, the Hardening Charm running through both. The skull of a basilisk was old and dense and extraordinarily hard. He hit it anyway.
The fight was not elegant. The basilisk thrashed and he held on and hit, and it thrashed harder and slammed itself against pillars trying to dislodge him, and the stone of the Chamber cracked around its body, and Kevin hit and hit and hit with the single-minded commitment of someone who has decided that this is ending today.
Tom, below, was managing Harry and Ron and Hermione simultaneously — all three at distance, none close enough to land anything, the diary sitting on the stone floor near Ginny's feet with the specific untouchability of the one thing that mattered.
Kevin saw the diary. Tom saw Kevin see it.
Avada Kedavra.
Green light.
Kevin was mid-air off the basilisk's head, no footing, the curse tracking him in the half-second before he hit the ground.
He threw the crowbar.
The metal met the curse and the curse tore through it and continued and Dumbledore's shield arrived from three metres away and deflected it into the ceiling, which came down in a significant amount.
Silence for two seconds.
Tom turned, slowly, and found Dumbledore.
"Professor," Tom said, with a quality that was not fear but was its cousin. "You're here."
"I am," Dumbledore said pleasantly. "Hello, Tom."
Kevin hit the floor, recovered, and moved.
He'd slid his crowbar under Ginny's foot in the distraction of the ceiling and now he grabbed it back, wrapped both hands on it, and crossed the Chamber in four steps and drove the point of the iron down through the diary's cover.
It screamed.
Real blood — not ink, something deeper — spread across the stone.
Tom screamed with it. The tall, composed form fractured, light bleeding through the cracks, and he turned to look at Kevin with an expression that had shed every layer and arrived at something very old and very afraid and very angry.
"You —" he said.
"Yes," Kevin said, and drove the crowbar through the cover again, all the way down, and held it.
The light went out.
The diary smoked. The blood stopped spreading. Tom Riddle's memory, fifty years old and seventy years from completion, dissolved into the stone floor of the Chamber his ancestor had hidden and nobody had found for a thousand years.
Ginny gasped. Her eyes changed — flooded with herself again, blinking in the cold light, hands shaking.
"Ron — " she started, and Ron was already there.
Kevin sat on the floor for a while.
Hermione arrived first, as she always did. She produced a Recovery Potion and held it until he took it. Her hands had a faint tremor she was suppressing. He noticed and didn't mention it.
"That was the last time you're doing anything like that without telling me first," she said.
"That's probably not going to be possible," he said.
"Then it's the last time you do it without planning to tell me first."
He thought about this. "That's a reasonable amendment."
She sat beside him. Close enough that their shoulders touched. The bracelet glowed faintly between them — warm light in a cold place.
Above them, Dumbledore was speaking to Ginny in the quiet, unhurried tone of someone who knows that the first thing a person needs after something terrible has happened is to be treated as though they are still entirely themselves.
Kevin watched it and thought about what that took.
[Ding! Detected: Chamber of Secrets incident concluded significantly ahead of schedule.][Chamber of Secrets Incident Ended. Reward: All Attributes +5.][Ahead of Schedule Bonus: All Talents +2.][Ding! Detected: host has secured initial approval of key figure Dumbledore.][Reward: Spellcasting Talent +10, Magic Power +10.]