A/N: Well, I'm back. Is anyone still out there? I'm really sorry about the delay, and I'm afraid I can't make any promises about my subsequent update speed either. BUT. I will get there! Maybe some of you will even still be reading when I do!

Thanks so much to those of you who prodded me along while I was AWOL. It helped a lot.

~oOo~

John Granger – rear gunner on a Mark 1C Vickers Wellington bomber – died several thousand feet above Mannheim, Germany on the seventeenth of December. England had been veiled in cloud but somewhere over Holland it had cleared completely, revealing the moon only two days beyond full. A perfect night for spotting the enemy, he thought, as searchlights and then anti-aircraft fire began to erupt to the left and right. He never even heard the explosion that sent shrapnel tearing through the cramped turret. John, perhaps, was the lucky one: dead before the plane could complete its crippled descent into the unforgiving earth below.

Death gathered all six souls moments later and sent them onward. There was no considering the mothers and fathers or the wives and children left behind; death, to Death, was merely incidental. Perhaps this particular fate was crueller than many, or perhaps it wasn't, but Death didn't ponder it. The men and the circumstances were unique, certainly – but so were all the others. Death had no time for names or faces. He transported John Granger without even realising the significance.

The significance was, of course, completely unknown to the unfortunate soul himself. In fact, even if he had known, he would have struggled immediately to care. That is the nature of dying. People tend to find it overwhelming.

After some time John's panic began to ease, allowing him to notice that he was inhabiting one of the chairs in the corridor outside the Flight Lieutenant's office. For a wild, triumphant second he thought the whole sortie had been a bad dream and that the panelled door would open any minute to admit him. It didn't; in fact, he couldn't even imagine a reason why he would need to be there. He looked around more fully, trying to ignore the fact of his missing body. The corridor was long, stretching perhaps thirty yards in either direction before it became curiously blurred. The pattern on the carpet, too, seemed to squirm when he tried to look at it directly. The silence was eerily absolute.

He had been in the plane. That much was for certain. He remembered the takeoff and then crossing the sea in cloud, the turret growing ever colder. He had seen the shimmer of the Rhine in the moonlight and the shadowy forms of the other bombers to either side. He remembered thinking he would have a good chance to see his targets. He remembered the horribly distinctive sound of the flak guns. Yes… he was definitely dead, yet... here he was.

Slowly, and apparently of its own accord, the office door opened, throwing a slice of gentle sunlight into the corridor. He knew with absolute certainty that there were no windows in the Flight Lieutenant's office, but he refused to be afraid. He left the chair – hesitated just barely – and crossed the threshold.

The room he found himself in was, to all intents and purposes... a classroom? Rows of chairs faced a blackboard, on which the word WELCOME was written in bold lettering. Beneath the rather surprising heading, the words please take a seat were added as an afterthought. He sat down in bewildered acquiescence, which was when he noticed his body was back. He jabbed himself sharply in shock and stifled an expletive when it did, indeed, hurt.

The door, having shut behind him, opened again to admit Charlie, the Wellington's navigator. He was wearing his flight suit and a shell-shocked expression. They stared at each other mutely as the door opened again and again to admit more frightened people; their fellow crew, but other men and women too, both old and young. After a while a distant bell sounded and the door simply vanished. At the opposite end of the room, next to the blackboard, an archway appeared in the solid wall. Through the archway entered a woman.

The woman in question, whose black hair fell loose well past her shoulders, was of indeterminate age but great elegance. She wore a deep blue embroidered robe quite unlike anything he'd ever seen anyone wearing before. When she spoke it was with a bored sort of authority, her accent slightly strange although he couldn't have said exactly why.

"Welcome to the other side," she said, glancing briefly around the group of perhaps two dozen faces. Though she was not particularly tall, her presence had a command which he felt was not entirely due to the discomforting nature of the situation. "Do sit. I've got several things I'm supposed to run through before I let you in. Current policy, you see. To ensure a smooth transition." The people who were not yet seated sat down as if compelled by an unseen force, which perhaps they were. The woman sighed.

"My name is Rowena, and I shall be your mentor for your first day. You'll soon get used to everything, but I understand that it's very daunting at the moment." There was a slight softening of her regal expression, which was perhaps intended to be soothing. "All of you here were British, and you died between –" she glanced at a clock that had appeared in the middle of the blackboard – "ten past one and twenty past one, on the morning of the seventeenth of December." An outbreak of sobs and gasps accompanied the word 'died', but Rowena resolutely ignored them.

"This is a moment of great sadness for you, of course, but please be assured that every soul must pass this way in time. There are always reunions here." From somewhere inside her robe she produced a scroll of heavy paper and a long feather. "What I'm going to do first is take your names. It will be much friendlier once we know what to call each other." John wasn't feeling very sociable, and judging by the sobs still rippling through the room, neither was anybody else. When it was his turn to answer, it was hard to find a voice. The silence afterwards caused him to believe that he had gone unheard.

"John –" he began to repeat.

"Yes, I heard," snapped Rowena. He blinked in confusion and the silence continued. To his left, Charlie cleared his throat, but the woman cut him off too.

"Do you have a niece?"

He was completely lost. Why did she care? Why hadn't she singled anyone else out? Eventually he managed to say, "Yes… one," in a small voice.

"Your brother's child?"

"Y-yes."

"Does he live?" Rowena leaned forward slightly, as if the answer was important. He couldn't imagine why.

"No… he got tuberculosis. Before the war." This seemed to be the right answer: Rowena's expression suddenly became animated and all eyes in the room were wearily turned in his direction. He shifted uncomfortably. "Why?" he dared to add. She either did not hear, or chose to ignore it.

"You took the girl in," she continued excitedly. He frowned.

"Margaret? No… She went to her mother's sister, even before Arthur was ill. He couldn't care for her, and I didn't marry. Why would he have sent her to me?" Nothing was any clearer. "Has something happened to her?" Rowena shook her head impatiently, which didn't give him much confidence.

"You've no other nieces… no other brothers?"

"No – please – why does it matter?" The weight of all the gazes falling on him was getting heavier. The woman looked uneasy and glanced towards the archway she had entered through.

"The rest of you will wait here," she said, gesturing unnecessarily around the room before pinning him directly with a sharp stare. "You. Follow me."

~oOo~

Tom had been looking forward to the holidays, and though there were more students remaining at Hogwarts than there had been in previous years, the library was still virtually always empty. There was also a drastic reduction in teacher supervision – Slughorn had even turned a blind eye to his personal curfew. As such, he was left undisturbed in his quest to solve the mystery of the Boudica card. How? When? Why? … Who?

The library contained very few references to the language of Parseltongue, and almost always in connection to Salazar Slytherin or his descendants. It was a startlingly rare ability. He had never heard or witnessed another person speaking to a snake; never heard a snake say that it had spoken with a human other than himself. And yet in this very castle not six months ago there had been somebody else with the gift.

Tom entertained the thought that there was another way into the Chamber which did not require the presence of a Parselmouth, but he couldn't believe it. It had been protected in this fashion very deliberately, across two separate entrances, and the rest of the school believed its entire existence to be mythical. The idea that an unconnected person had found their way inside only to leave a chocolate frog card was incredulous. No: the answer to the question of how, as far as he could tell, involved a Parselmouth who had always known of the Chamber, and always kept it secret. Just as he himself was now keeping it secret.

The when was something he could be roughly more certain about, owing to a very fortunate change in chocolate frog design that he had traced back to approximately May. Given that he had noticed the snake stone on his first visit to the Chamber in September, he was left to conclude that the visitor had entered sometime over the summer. Presumably the castle had been almost empty, but he didn't dare ask the portraits. They probably wouldn't remember anyway.

The why followed naturally from the when, because he just knew that he had heard the voice of the basilisk last year. It had started him on the course of discovering the Chamber, and yet in more than three months he had seen no sign of it down there. No movement, no noise, no skin. Nothing. He had to assume that the snake was now in the little urn, because the coincidence was too great. And what was the alternative? That it really was Boudica, brought to this random location almost two thousand years after death? Surely not. But why would somebody kill the basilisk – or rather, why then? Perhaps it was already dead, and they simply buried it. Perhaps that wasn't the part of the mystery that really mattered. It wasn't the part that bothered him, at least.

Someone had entered the Chamber during the summer, cremated the basilisk and interred it in the wall along with an apparently unrelated piece of memorabilia. But who? He was no closer to answering that question at Christmas than he had been at Halloween, but he did have the beginnings of a plan. That was why – at five o'clock on Christmas eve, as they passed through the hidden archway in the dungeon corridor – he found himself saying,

"I need your help with something." She stopped so abruptly on the staircase that he crashed right into her, the collision sending them both staggering into the wall.

"Pardon?" He was still half leaning on her and jumped backwards quickly, brushing himself off and sweeping past her by way of regaining some dignity.

"You heard."

They were standing in the main chamber before she spoke again.

"So, what's the problem? Stuck on your Charms essay?" He narrowed his eyes and tried to ignore the way her smile brightened her face. She had been in a mysteriously good mood recently, now he came to think about it.

"Hardly." Now the moment had come, it was difficult to find the right words. "I need you to show me how to disappear. I know you do it. It's the only explanation. I know all the passages through the castle and yet you still hide from me." She considered him calmly for some time. He stared back, feeling oddly exposed.

"Are you saying that I'm better than you at something?"

"No! Well. Are you saying you do know how to disappear?" She grimaced slightly, evidently thinking that she should have lied rather than teased.

"It is the only explanation, really, isn't it? Remarkable nobody else has noticed. Still, most people don't notice anything." He smirked.

"Show me, then."

"What's in it for me?"

"I can hurt you, if you don't."

"Seriously? You still think you can scare me? I thought you were clever." He sent a quick hex her way but she blocked it as she always did, laughing. "You're so predictable! It's almost like you don't even want to hurt me." The silence lengthened as he cast around in alarm for something – anything – to say.

"I can show you how to hurt other people, then." Perhaps her smile was a little sad, but he didn't ponder it.

"I'm perfectly capable, thanks. I just don't want to." She coughed, and in a smaller voice added, "Very often."

"Well... what do you want?"

"I –" There was a pause which became so tedious that he began to strongly regret starting the conversation. Surely there must have been another way, something that didn't involve asking her?

"I want you to tell me exactly why you want to know." He grimaced, because he had thought it might come to this.

"Why wouldn't I want to know?"

"Oh, quite… only, you wouldn't ask me for help unless it was really important. You wouldn't do it just in general. You'd try and figure it out for yourself." Though they spent hours together every day, and though in the privacy of his own mind he might even call her a friend, this situation felt like it were on another level again.

"That card," he said, eventually, gesturing to the hole in the wall. "I want to know who put it there."

"You've got an idea?"

"I want to find –" he hesitated for the final time, hating giving away the information and not really knowing why he was – "Marvolo. Marvolo Gaunt."

"The man you're named for?"

"My mother's father. Another Parselmouth, maybe." Hermione slowly nodded her understanding.

"That makes sense. Where is he?"

He removed his bag from his shoulder and withdrew a thick book. A Directory of Wizarding Families – the very first library book he had ever looked at, two and a half years ago. It fell open to a well-thumbed page.

"Marvolo Gaunt of Little Hangleton, Cornwall. That's all it says."

"Hmm. Well, that's probably enough to go on, but how on earth are you going to get to Cornwall?"

"On the train."

"What?"

"On the train. I'll sneak out while I'm invisible. I'll walk to the nearest station. Then I'll get the train."

"Hang on – hang on. You mean, the nearest station to here?"

"Yes, obviously. I can't leave the orphanage over the summer, they'll notice almost immediately and send Dumbledore."

"You can't be serious. This is complete madness! Do you have any idea how long it's going to take you to get to Cornwall? It's got to be at least a day each way!" He considered this for a moment.

"The Hogwarts Express gets to London in six hours."

"Well, yes, but it's magical! It doesn't have to stop at any other stations, and you know when it's going to leave. Where are you going to get a muggle rail timetable from? How are you even going to find the nearest station? You'll sneak out – after curfew, I assume – and walk out there in the snow all night and freeze to death. And even if you don't, you'll get expelled. There's got to be a better way." He couldn't recall seeing her like this before. It was too disconcerting to make him angry, so he just stayed silent.

"How did Dumbledore find you?" she asked, eventually, with a pensive expression.

"I don't know, he just appeared, like he does."

"But did he know where you were going?"

"Probably Mrs Cole told him the town," he conceded.

"Then it will be different next time. He won't know where to start, will he? It's a lot harder to find anything when it's further away. Besides, you don't really think he's not going to notice when we're gone from Hogwarts for several days?"

"What did you just say?"

"What? I said… 'I think he's going to notice if we just leave Hogwarts for several days'."

"We?"

"Well, I'm hardly going to let you go by yourself, am I?"

"Let me?!"

"Oh, come on. We'll have a much better chance if we stick together, and we'll have plenty of time to plan. If we're lucky, we might not even get expelled. I'd like a summer holiday in Cornwall. We can go to the beach. What d'you reckon?"

Once again, he was completely stuck for something to say. The word beach was flashing rapidly across his brain, and Hermione was smiling at him with a sense of excitement he couldn't quite understand. The moment was entirely surreal: he wondered if he was imagining it.

"Erm – al-alright."

~oOo~

Pride, satisfaction and, yes, jealousy – these were the feelings he experienced as he watched her arms lengthen and hit the floor, her clothing turn to smooth black skin and her back sprout strong wings.

"I knew you could do it!" She gave a kind of snort, almost certainly by accident, and then looked down at herself. Seeing that this was not very easy, he conjured a mirror to allow her a better view. A thestral! He had thought as much since that day in the summer with Polaris' foal; had taken that hunch and put the image in her mind. Hadn't expected it to work so quickly.

Hermione-the-thestral stamped her front feet, flicked her whip-like tail and furled and unfurled her wings several times, her expression full of excitement.

Now that the last goal of Christmas Eve had been achieved, the exhaustion caught up to him all at once. Long days traipsing over half of Africa following herds of erumpent and tracking sphinxes; fact finding missions into muggle towns, discovering festive traditions; early evenings writing ridiculous Elf-related puns to the tune of carols; late evenings getting considerably more… exercise… than he was recently accustomed to. Not that he was complaining about any of that, especially the last part. And she had appreciated it, hadn't she?

He was keeping busy to avoid thinking about the future – that much he could admit. To avoid thinking about the way she had said the words, I'm nothing to you, or I'll always feel stupid, or worst of all, somehow, you're the only person who knows me. Because thinking about it would draw him again and again to the inevitable conclusion that she could never love him, or see him as an equal – or even as a man – and that her presence in his bed was therefore merely a pleasant consequence of the fact that he had taken her away from everyone she would have voluntarily chosen to be with. Everyone she could truly relate to. Of course she would never fully be able to forgive him for that. Why should she? He wouldn't, if it were the other way around. No wonder she spent so much time with the Riddle boy.

Something solid connected with his upper arm. Snapping back to reality, he saw that it was her beak. He gave it an awkward pat.

"How does it feel?" he asked, in thestral, but she looked blankly back at him. When she tried to say something, all that came out was a sort of whine. He smiled.

"Seems as though I still beat you at speaking thestral, then. Tough luck." She stamped a hoof petulantly and gave him a harder tap on the arm with her beak. It was surprisingly painful.

"I think we ought to change you back now, before you get too tired. It might take some effort."

He helped her to shift, and took her to bed, and let the festive spirit ward off the melancholy that was always threatening to creep in.

Younger Salazar watched the lights extinguish in the courtyard before peeling himself away from the window seat. His patience, such as it had ever been, had well and truly run out.

~oOo~