꧁☬⋆ᴺᴼ ᴼᴺᴱ'ˢ ᴾᴼᵛ⋆☬꧂

"In trouble?" said the aged spider and Harry thought he heard concern beneath the clicking pincers. "But why has he sent you?"

Harry thought of getting to his feet but decided against it; he didn't think his legs would support him. So he spoke from the ground as calmly as he could.

"They think, up at the school, that Hagrid's been setting a - a - something on students. They've taken him to Azkaban."

Aragog clicked his pincers furiously, and all around the hollow, the sound was echoed by the crowd of spiders; it was like applause, except applause didn't usually make Harry feel sick with fear.

"But that was years ago," said Aragog fretfully. "Years and years ago. I remember it well. That's why they made him leave the school. They believed that I was the monster that dwells in what they call the Chamber of Secrets. They thought that Hagrid had opened the Chamber and set me free."

"And you... you didn't come from the Chamber of Secrets?" said Harry, who could feel cold sweat on his forehead.

"I!" said Aragog, clicking angrily. "I was not born in the castle. I come from a distant land. A traveller gave me to Hagrid when I was an egg. Hagrid was only a boy, but he cared for me, hidden in a cupboard in the castle, feeding me on scraps from the table. Hagrid is my good friend and a good man, but then a girl found me too."

'A girl?' Ron and Harry thought as they looked at each other.

"Is it perhaps the girl with Tom Riddle? Y/N? The girl with white hair and red eyes." Harry asked.

Ron looked at him as if he had gone mental over thinking that he saw Y/N from the past, from fifty years ago.

"Yes, her too. She's very kind, she would feed me from time to time but then when I saw her once again, but in this century, I was shocked seeing the dead girl come back to life. She still looks the same, but the hair and eyes were different."

'She died?'

"However, when I was discovered and blamed for the death of a girl, he and Y/N protected me. I have lived here in the forest ever since, where Hagrid still visits me. He even found me a wife, Mosag, and you see how our family has grown, all through Hagrid's goodness..."

Harry summoned what remained of his courage.

"So you never - never attacked anyone?"

"Never," croaked the old spider. "It would have been my instinct, but out of respect for Hagrid and Y/N, I never harmed a human. The body of the girl who was killed was discovered in a bathroom. I never saw any part of the castle but the cupboard in which I grew up. Our kind like the dark and the quiet..."

"But then... Do you know what did kill that girl?" said Harry. "Because whatever it is, it's back and attacking people again--"

His words were drowned by a loud outbreak of clicking and the rustling of many long legs shifting angrily; large black shapes shifted all around him.

"The thing that lives in the castle," said Aragog, "is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others. Well, do I remember how I pleaded with Hagrid to let me go when I sensed the beast moving about the school?"

"Does this Y/N perhaps know the animal?" Asked Ron.

"Yes, she does. But your Y/N now, I am not sure if she knows it."

Ron looked around, noticing more spiders are coming towards them, but Harry was too busy to notice that because he is speaking to a talking spider. "Harry..." Ron whispers

"What do you mean? Are you saying that the Y/N with white hair knows about the attack from before?"

"Harry..." Ron whisper once again as he tugged on Harry's sweater.

"What."

Ron let out a horrid whining noise as he pointed at the upwards, Harry looked up and finally noticed that they are getting surrounded.

Harry didn't want to press the subject, not with the spiders pressing closer on all sides. Aragog seemed to be tired of talking. He was backing slowly into his domed web, but his fellow spiders continued to inch slowly toward Harry and Ron.

"We'll just go, then," Harry called desperately to Aragog, hearing leaves rustling behind him.

"Go?" said Aragog slowly. "I think not..."

"But - but--"

"My sons and daughters do not harm Hagrid, on my command. But I cannot deny them fresh meat when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, a friend of Hagrid."

Harry spun around. Feet away, towering above him, was a solid wall of spiders, clicking, their many eyes gleaming in their ugly blackheads.

Even as he reached for his wand, Harry knew it was no good, there were too many of them, but as he tried to stand, ready to die fighting, a loud, long note sounded, and a blaze of light flamed through the hollow.

Mr. Weasley's car was thundering down the slope, headlights glaring, its horn screeching, knocking spiders aside; several were thrown onto their backs, their endless legs waving in the air. The car screeched to a halt in front of Harry and Ron, and the doors flew open.

"Get Fang!" Harry yelled, diving into the front seat; Ron seized the boarhound around the middle and threw him, yelping, into the back of the car - the doors slammed shut - Ron didn't touch the accelerator, but the car didn't need him; the engine roared, and they were off, hitting more spiders. They sped up the slope, out of the hollow, and they were soon crashing through the forest, branches whipping the windows as the car wound its way cleverly through the widest gaps, following a path it obviously knew.

Harry looked sideways at Ron. His mouth was still open in the silent scream, but his eyes weren't popping anymore.

"Are you okay?"

Ron stared straight ahead, unable to speak.

They smashed their way through the undergrowth, Fang howling loudly in the back seat, and Harry saw the side mirror snap off as they squeezed past a large oak. After ten noisy, rocky minutes, the trees thinned, and Harry could again see patches of sky.

The car stopped so suddenly that they were nearly thrown into the windshield. They had reached the edge of the forest. Fang flung himself at the window in his anxiety to get out, and when Harry opened the door, he shot off through the trees to Hagrid's house, tail between his legs. Harry got out too, and after a minute or so, Ron seemed to regain the feeling in his limbs and followed, still stiff-necked and staring. Harry gave the car a grateful pat as it reversed back into the forest and disappeared from view.

Harry went back into Hagrid's cabin to get the Invisibility Cloak. Fang was trembling under a blanket in his basket. When Harry got outside again, he found Ron being violent sick in the pumpkin patch.

"Follow the spiders," said Ron weakly, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "Why can't it follow the butterflies? I'll never forgive Hagrid. We're lucky to be alive."

"I bet he thought Aragog wouldn't hurt friends of his," said Harry.

"That's exactly Hagrid's problem!" said Ron, thumping the wall of the cabin. "He always thinks monsters aren't as bad as they're made out, and look where it's got him! A cell in Azkaban!" He was shivering uncontrollably now. "What was the point of sending us in there? What have we found out, I'd like to know?"

"That Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets," said Harry, throwing the cloak over Ron and prodding him in the arm to make him walk. "He was innocent."

Ron gave a loud snort. Evidently, hatching Aragog in a cupboard wasn't his idea of being innocent.

As the castle loomed nearer, Harry twitched the cloak to make sure their feet were hidden, then pushed the creaking front doors ajar. They walked carefully back across the entrance hall and up the marble staircase, holding their breath as they passed corridors where watchful sentries were walking. At last, they reached the safety of the Gryffindor common room, where the fire had burned itself into glowing ash. They took off the cloak and climbed the winding stair to their dormitory.

Ron fell onto his bed without bothering to get undressed. Harry, however, didn't feel very sleepy. He sat on the edge of his fourposter, thinking hard about everything Aragog had said.

The creature that was lurking somewhere in the castle, he thought, sounded like a sort of monster Voldemort -even other monsters didn't want to name it. But he and Ron were no closer to finding out what it was or how it petrified its victims. Even Hagrid had never known what was in the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry swung his legs up onto his bed and leaned back against his pillows, watching the moon glinting at him through the tower window.

He couldn't see what else they could do. They had hit dead ends everywhere. Riddle had caught the wrong person, the Heir of Slytherin had got off, and no one could tell whether it was the same person, or a different one, who had opened the Chamber this time. There was nobody else to ask. Harry lay down, still thinking about what Aragog had said.

He was becoming drowsy when what seemed like their very last hope occurred to him, and he suddenly sat bolt upright.

"Ron," he hissed through the dark, "Ron--"

Ron woke with a yelp like Fang's, stared wildly around, and saw Harry.

"Ron - that girl who died. Aragog said she was found in a bathroom," said Harry, ignoring Neville's snuffling snores from the corner. "What if she never left the bathroom? What if she's still there?"

Ron rubbed his eyes, frowning through the moonlight. And then he understood, too.

"You don't think - not Moaning Myrtle?"

➱➱➱➱

"All those times we were in that bathroom, and she was just three toilets away," said Ron bitterly at breakfast the next day, "and we could've asked her, and now..."

"Should we perhaps... maybe ask Y/N about it too? Remember what the spider said? He knows Y/N." Ron said as he copies some notes from Harry's paper.

"Ron, it was the other Y/N. The Y/N he knows was the other one from fifty years ago and that girl has Y/N white hair and red eyes however her face is the exact the same as our Y/N right now." Harry whispered.

"Why are you two talking about me." Both Gryffindor turned to their side, forgetting that Y/N is sitting on their right. Sitting next to Easton.

"Huh? Nothing" said Harry worried.

"No talking in the class." Professor McGonagall spoke.

It had been hard enough trying to look for spiders. Escaping their teachers long enough to sneak into a girls bathroom, the girl's bathroom, moreover, right next to the scene of the first attack, was going to be almost impossible.

But something happened in their first lesson, Transfiguration, that drove the Chamber of Secrets out of their minds for the first time in weeks. Ten minutes into the class, Professor McGonagall told them that their exams would start on the first of June, one week from today.

"Exams?" howled Seamus Finnigan. "We're still getting exams?"

There was a loud bang behind Harry as Neville Longbottom's wand slipped, vanishing one of the legs on his desk. Professor McGonagall restored it with a wave of her own wand and turned, frowning, to Seamus.

"The whole point of keeping the school open at this time is for you to receive your education," she said sternly. "The exams will therefore take place as usual, and I trust you are all studying hard."

Studying hard! It had never occurred to Harry that there would be exams with the castle in this state. There was a great deal of mutinous muttering around the room, which made Professor McGonagall scowl even more darkly.

"Professor Dumbledore's instructions were to keep the school running as normally as possible, she said. "And that, I need hardly point out, means finding out how much you have learned this year."

Harry looked down at the pair of white rabbits he was supposed to be turning into slippers. What had he learned so far this year? He couldn't seem to think of anything that would be useful in an exam.

Ron looked as though he'd just been told he had to go and live in the Forbidden Forest.

"Can you imagine me taking exams with this?" he asked Harry, holding up his wand, which had just started whistling loudly.

Three days before their first exam, Professor McGonagall made another announcement at breakfast.

"I have good news," she said, and the Great Hall, instead of falling silent, erupted.

"Dumbledore's coming back!" several people yelled joyfully.

"You've caught the Heir of Slytherin!" squealed a girl at the Ravenclaw table.

"Quidditch matches are back on!" roared Wood excitedly.

"These people really think they have caught the heir, what a dimwitted you all are." Y/N scoff loud enough for everyone to hear; she stood up and about to leave the great hall.

"Not so fast, Y/N Dumbledore. Go back to your seat, and what do you mean? "These people really think they have caught the heir. What a dimwitted you all are." huh? Are you trying to imply that we caught the wrong person?" Lockheart took his wand out and made Y/N freeze and face them.

But Y/N broke free from the spell, "You're an actual twit, thinking that would work on me." Y/N slowly walks towards the professor as he backs away.

Y/N looked at him smugly, then turned into a serious face "piss off, fraud."

"Y/N, that is not a way to talk-"

"Shut your mouth, well everyone, good luck on surviving the school year." Y/N turned towards everyone and smiled, and apparated to her room.

"Those idiots." Y/N snorted.

Y/N walked towards Kayden's old bed and sat down; she strokes the leather of the blanket Kayden has. "If you were here... you would have gotten it all finish soon and get the heir lock up... I miss you."