He ran the way the eidetic memory told him this tunnel ran — long, straight, the snake carvings on the walls sliding past in his peripheral vision, the greenish light of the Chamber growing ahead of him, and under it, faint but unmistakable, the sounds of the fight.
The basilisk's death, when it came, was not quiet.
He heard the sword connect. He heard the sound a basilisk makes when something nine hundred years old and sixty feet long finally stops moving — it was, frankly, more noise than he had prepared himself for, a kind of enormous exhausted shudder that seemed to come up through the stone floor — and he was through the great carved doors and into the Chamber itself in the moment that followed.
The scene assembled itself in his mind with the precision his new memory allowed. Harry, twelve years old, impossibly brave, kneeling in the dark water with the fang in his arm and his face already going the wrong color. Ginny, crumpled near the statue's base, still unconscious but alive — he could see her chest moving from here. The diary, black and water-logged, lying where Tom Riddle had dropped it. The basilisk, fully and irreversibly dead.
Tom Riddle.
Tom Riddle, who was still present, still substantial, still the shimmery not-quite-there apparition of a sixteen-year-old boy who had been feeding on Ginny's life force for most of a year. He was currently looking at the basilisk with the expression of someone watching their best plan disintegrate, which meant his attention was, for this one specific moment, slightly elsewhere.
He crossed the Chamber in the time that calculation allowed him, reached Ginny, and pulled her away from the statue.
Not dramatically. Not heroically. He just moved her, quickly and carefully, to a position nearer to Harry and farther from anything that might fall, and crouched beside her to confirm what he'd already observed — pulse steady, breathing regular, color coming back to her face with the basilisk's death breaking whatever hold the diary had maintained.
She was going to be fine.
He straightened.
Tom Riddle had noticed him.
Which was, he had anticipated, going to be a problem.
"Ronald Weasley," Riddle said, with the particular brand of contempt that came naturally to someone who had spent seventy years as the most talented student at a school where talent was the primary currency. He said the name the way you'd say inconvenience. "You're alive. That's unexpected."
"People keep saying that," he said pleasantly. "Starting to take it personally."
Riddle's eyes — dark, sharp, present in a way that a projection of memory shouldn't quite be able to manage — moved from him to Harry, who was not moving well, and then to the diary lying in the dark water between them.
Riddle raised his — Harry's — wand.
The spells came in quick succession, and they were not casual. Riddle was not the kind of person who did anything casually. He was precise and he was powerful and the constructs he was throwing were fifty years more sophisticated than anything a second-year should have been facing.
They missed.
He moved — Ron's body, it turned out, was built for Quidditch and had the spatial instincts to prove it — and kept moving, not elegantly but effectively, the way that someone who is not trying to look impressive moves when they are trying to not get hit, which is an entirely different and considerably more practical skill set.
He needed the sword.
Harry had dropped it when the fang went in. It was lying in the shallow water beside the basilisk's enormous head, the rubies still glinting in the greenish Chamber light, and he registered its position with the peripheral calculation of someone who had now spent approximately three minutes thinking about nothing except immediate survival.
Riddle fired again.
He was already moving, and the spell hit the stone where he'd been standing and left a scorch mark that he did not stop to examine. He covered the distance to the sword in five strides, closed his hand around the hilt — cold, heavy, real in the way that only very old things are real — and came up swinging in a direction that was not at Tom Riddle but at the diary.
He stabbed it.
The basilisk fang he could have used had been in Harry's arm. The sword had been here. The sword was made from the kind of material that destroyed Horcruxes. The sword would do.
The ink that came out was black and wrong in every way that ink shouldn't be — thick, too thick, not quite liquid, and it came out screaming. Tom Riddle's scream, the ghost-echo of a sixteen-year-old boy's fury and pain and the specific outrage of something that had been sure of itself for fifty years, split the silence of the Chamber and bounced off the stone walls and then stopped, the way all things stop, cleanly and completely.
The diary lay destroyed. The Chamber was quiet.
He stood there for a moment with the sword dripping dark ink into the shallow water and his heart doing something rhythmically excessive in his chest and thought, with considerable feeling, alright, we're off to a reasonable start.
Then he crossed to Harry.
Harry was — bad. Not unsalvageable bad, not with Fawkes already there, the great crimson bird having descended with the quiet certainty of something that knew exactly why it had come. But the basilisk venom was working and Harry's face was too pale and his breath was too shallow and the arm with the fang wound was shaking.
Fawkes cried.
He had read this. He had known this was going to happen. Knowing it didn't make watching it less remarkable — the tears fell on the wound and the poison retreated from Harry's system the way darkness retreats from an open window, simply and entirely, and Harry breathed in properly and some color came back to his face, and it was — it was a genuinely extraordinary thing, and he filed that feeling away with everything else because he suspected he was going to have a great many extraordinary things to process before this year was done.