Hermione didn't show up for breakfast on Sunday.
If you knew Hermione, that was a bit like the sun not bothering to rise. Half the Gryffindor table kept glancing at the doors.
Neville asked me if she was ill. Fred asked if I'd finally scared her off, and George asked if he could have her seat, since it was "going spare now".
"She's probably in the library," I said, and stole the last sausage off Fred's plate as payment for the comment.
I was right, as it turned out. I was on my second plate of eggs when she came marching into the Great Hall with her hair even bushier than usual and a book under her arm that looked thick enough to stop a Bludger.
A couple of months ago, she would have sat down next to me with a polite gap between us.
Now she squeezed in so close our shoulders bumped, and took a piece of toast off my plate before she'd even said hello.
Then she dropped the book on the table hard enough to rattle the plates and leaned in.
"She's an Animagus," she whispered.
"Morning to you too," I said. "That was my toast."
"It's our toast now." She flipped the book open. It was a list of every registered Animagus this century.
There were only seven names on it. McGonagall was one of them. Rita Skeeter wasn't.
"Did you sleep at all?"
"A bit." She waved a hand like sleep was a minor detail. "Listen. She knew what Hagrid said to Madame Maxime at the ball, and they were alone in the garden. She always knows things nobody should be able to hear. And yesterday you said the word beetle and she nearly passed out."
She tapped the page. "She turns into a beetle. And she's never registered, because then everyone would know how she gets her stories."
I gave her a little round of applause.
"Less than a day," I said. "Not bad."
She stared at me. "You knew."
"Pretty much."
"Since when?"
"The wand weighing. I told her I didn't like bugs near me and she went white as a sheet."
"And you didn't think that was worth mentioning?"
"I wanted to see how long it'd take you."
She swatted my arm with the book. Gryffindor's body magic could apparently stand up to curses and dragon fire, but nobody had ever tested it against an annoyed Hermione Granger with eight hundred pages of Ministry records.
"Oi!" Fred called from across the table. "Lovers' tiffs at the end of the table, please. Some of us are trying to eat."
Hermione went bright red. I waved at him with my fork.
Then she got serious again and dropped her voice. "We have to report her. It's illegal. She could go to Azkaban."
"We could," I said. "Or we could just... not."
"Harry."
"Hear me out. Right now she knows that we know. As long as that stays true, she's not going to write anything about you, me, Hagrid, or anyone else we like. If we report her, she's probably looking at Azkaban. But this is the Ministry. On the off chance she wriggles out of it, she comes back angry and with nothing to lose." I shrugged. "I'd rather keep her on a leash."
Hermione chewed on that for a while, along with the rest of my toast.
"That's a very Slytherin thing to say," she said finally.
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment." She shut the book. "Fine. For now. But if she writes one more horrible thing about Hagrid..."
"Then you can catch her in a jar yourself."
She didn't laugh. She looked like she was seriously thinking about it, which honestly was scarier. I made a mental note never to get on her bad side. Then I remembered I was dating her, which meant I'd basically signed up for it.
______________________________________________
Hagrid was back on Monday, as promised.
We walked down to Hagrid's with Hermione's gloved hand in mine.
That got us a look from Lavender and a very loud "Awww!" from Parvati, and Hermione looked like she wanted to dig a hole in the snow and live in it.
"You could let go," I offered.
"Absolutely not," she said, and held on tighter.
Hagrid was standing outside his cabin, looking about as nervous as I'd ever seen him. He'd tried to comb his beard.
I could tell because half of it was neat and the other half had clearly won the fight.
The second the Gryffindors saw him, they started cheering. Seamus and Dean whooped, and Neville waved so hard he slipped on a patch of ice and nearly took Lavender down with him.
Hagrid went pink and grinned like an idiot. It was nice to see.
The Slytherins were less excited, obviously.
"Oh look," Malfoy said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "It's come out of its cave."
A couple of them laughed. Hagrid's grin slipped a bit.
"Careful, Malfoy," I said. "Hagrid's the one handing out skrewts today. Be a shame if you got the one that likes chewing on blond hair."
Malfoy's hand went to his hair before he could stop it. Seamus snorted so loudly that half the class turned around, and Malfoy spent the rest of the lesson standing as far away from the crates as Hagrid would let him.
The lesson was very Hagrid. There were only a few skrewts left, each one bigger than a Great Dane, and Hagrid had decided the way to stop them killing each other was to work out what they liked eating.
So we spent an hour holding out buckets of increasingly disgusting things while the skrewts sniffed at them and occasionally exploded.
Halfway through, Hermione's skrewt took one sniff of what Hagrid swore was dragon liver, and its back end went off with a bang.
It shot forward, slammed into her bucket, and sent the whole lot sailing across the pumpkin patch. Most of it landed on Malfoy.
So much for keeping his distance.
'Task failed successfully,' I thought, as Malfoy shrieked and tried to wipe liver off his robes.
Hermione put a hand over her mouth. "Oh no," she said, in a voice that didn't sound sorry at all.
When the bell went, Hagrid caught my shoulder before I could leave and waited until the others had started back up to the castle.
Hermione waited a few steps away, pretending very hard to be interested in a pumpkin.
"So," Hagrid said, nodding at her. "Yeh an' Hermione, eh?"
"Yeah," I said. "Me and Hermione."
His whole face lit up. "Took yeh long enough. Mind, yer dad was worse. Yer mum wouldn't give him the time o' day fer years."
I didn't really know what to say to that, so I just grinned.
He gave my shoulder a squeeze that nearly put me in the snow. "Look after her, Harry."
"I will."
"An' thanks," he added, a lot more quietly. "Fer Saturday. Both o' yeh."
I said, "Anytime," and left it at that, because if I'd said anything more he'd have started crying again, and my ribs had only just recovered.
Hermione grabbed my hand again on the way back up to the castle and complained the whole way that her robes smelled like dragon liver. They did, a bit. I didn't tell her that.
_______________________________________
That night, once the common room had cleared out, Hermione and I went up to the seventh floor.
She had her arm looped through mine the whole way, which made sneaking a lot less sneaky, but I wasn't about to complain.
"You know," she said, "most boys take their girlfriends to Madam Puddifoot's."
"Have you seen Madam Puddifoot's? It looks like a Valentine's card threw up."
She laughed and bumped her shoulder into mine. Then she stopped in front of the blank wall and gave me a look.
"So. Saturday. 'That's convenient.' You said you'd tell me later."
"Yep. This is later."
"Finally."
I checked the map. Corridor empty. Filch on the ground floor, apparently having an argument with Peeves. Perfect.
I started pacing, but this time I wasn't asking for our usual room.
I need the place where people hide things.
The door that showed up on the third pass wasn't our door. It was older and heavier, with a black iron handle so cold it actually hurt to grab.
I pushed it open, and Hermione's jaw dropped.
The Room of Hidden Things was huge. It was basically a city made of junk, piled so high in places that I couldn't see where it ended.
Broken furniture, old cauldrons, trunks, books, bottles, rusty swords, robes that had probably been fashionable when Dumbledore was a baby. Little paths ran between the piles like streets.
"What is this?" Hermione said.
"Same room, different version. It's where everyone hides stuff they don't want found. People have been dumping things in here for centuries."
"There must be thousands of..."
"Probably. And some of it's definitely cursed, so don't touch anything."
She pulled her hands in to her chest so fast it was almost funny, and after that she stayed glued to my side.
Honestly, this place was every fanfic MC's dream. Piles of unclaimed magical stuff, no owners, nobody watching. Free real estate.
Half the stories I'd read would have had the main character walking out of here with a legendary sword, three cursed rings and a pet. I was here for one tiara. Very restrained of me.
I didn't need the map in here. I could feel the thread pulling at me, cold and greasy, like following a bad smell.
Left past a wardrobe with no doors, then turned right at a heap of broken broomsticks and went past a cupboard that looked like someone had spilled acid all over it.
It got colder the closer we got. Hermione noticed too. She kept rubbing her arms and didn't say anything.
Then I spotted the bust. Some ugly old warlock with a chipped nose, sitting on top of a pile of crates.
Right next to it, half under an old cloak and a squashed birdcage, something glinted.
I floated the junk out of the way with a quick Levitation Charm, and there it was.
A thin silver diadem, so tarnished it was nearly black, with a blue stone in the middle and tiny writing around the edge.
Hermione bent down to read it. "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure." Then she actually squeaked.
"Harry, that's Ravenclaw's. That's Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem. It's in Hogwarts: A History. It's been lost for nearly a thousand years, and it's under a birdcage?"
She reached for it.
I grabbed her wrist. "Don't."
She looked at me, surprised. Then she looked at the diadem again, properly this time, and I watched her work out that the cold was coming from it.
"What's wrong with it?"
'Okay,' I thought. 'Here we go.'
"Have you ever heard of a Horcrux?"
She shook her head. Of course she hadn't. Dumbledore had cleared every book about them out of the library years ago.
So I explained. Murder splits the soul. A dark wizard can take the broken piece and lock it inside an object, and as long as that object exists, he can't properly die.
His body can be destroyed, and he'll still be hanging around.
Hermione had gone pale. "That's horrible."
"That's Voldemort. And he didn't stop at one."
"How many is 'not one'?"
"He wanted his soul in seven pieces. Seven's supposed to be the most powerful magical number."
"Seven?" She looked like she might be sick. "That's... Harry, that's not even a person anymore."
"Yeah. That's sort of the point."
She looked down at the diadem like it was a snake.
"That's how he survived," she said slowly. "When the curse bounced off you."
"Yep."
Then, because she's Hermione, she was already three steps ahead.
"Wait. If it can be inside any object..." Her eyes went wide. "The diary. Ginny's diary, in second year. The one that was talking to her. That was one, wasn't it?"
"That was one," I said. "I stabbed it with a basilisk fang without even knowing what it was. So that's one gone."
"Basilisk venom destroys them?"
"Basilisk venom, Fiendfyre, and a couple of other things nobody sane wants to go near." I tapped my wand against my palm. "And this, now."
She was quiet for a second, putting it together. Then she asked the question I'd been waiting for.
"How do you know all this? How did you know it was even here?"
I'd already decided I wasn't going to lie to her.
"Because there was one in me."
Hermione just stared at me.
"The night he tried to kill me, a bit of his soul broke off and stuck to me." I tapped my scar.
"Right here. That's why I could speak Parseltongue in the first place, and why my scar hurt whenever he was around. I can still speak it, before you ask. That's thanks to a book of Slytherin's I found in the Room, though, not him."
"Was," she said. "You said was."
"I got rid of it a few weeks ago. In the Room. It's gone." I tried to make it sound like it wasn't a big deal, which didn't work at all.
"When I destroyed it, my magic sort of tagged the rest of his soul. Now I can feel where the other pieces are."
She didn't say anything.
Then she threw her arms around me and hugged me so hard it nearly knocked the breath out of me. A second later, she pulled back and glared at me.
"You had a piece of Voldemort inside you," she hissed, "and you got it out by yourself, and you didn't tell me?"
"I'm telling you now."
"Harry!"
"I know. I know, I'm sorry." I took her hand. "I didn't want you worrying about something you couldn't fix. But I'm not hiding this stuff from you anymore."
She was blinking a lot. She didn't let go of my hand, though.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"Your idiot, though."
"That," she said, "is the worst line I've ever heard." But she was squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt.
Eventually she let go and took a step back. "Go on, then. Get rid of that thing."
I raised my wand and called up the orb. It came easily now, a ball of white light humming in the air in front of me, bright enough that Hermione had to squint.
I aimed it at the diadem and pulled.
The diadem twitched. Then it lifted off the floor by itself, shaking like something was trapped inside it. Which, to be fair, something was.
Then it started screaming.
A thin, horrible scream, like someone had yanked a whole bed of Mandrakes out of the ground at once.
Black smoke poured out of the blue stone and twisted into a face for a second. Not the snake face I knew from the books.
A young man's face, handsome and pale, with dark eyes and his mouth wide open. Tom Riddle, back when he'd made this thing.
Hermione grabbed my sleeve.
The face went for me and got nowhere near. The orb sucked it in like a drain, tearing the smoke apart, and the scream went higher and higher and then just got cut off.
The orb flashed and went out.
The diadem fell back onto the floor with a little clink, like any other bit of metal.
In my head, one of the cold threads snapped and was gone. The others didn't even twitch.
Somewhere far away, Voldemort had just lost another piece of himself, and he had no idea.
'Three down,' I thought. It was like the world's most messed-up game of Pokémon. Gotta catch 'em all.
It was very quiet after that.
"Is it gone?" Hermione asked. Her voice was a bit wobbly.
"It's gone."
I picked up the diadem. It just felt normal now. Even the blue stone looked a bit brighter.
"That thing was screaming," Hermione said.
"Not anymore."
She laughed, kind of shakily, and covered her face with her hands for a second. "I can't believe you just did that. I can't believe any of this. Most couples' big night out is Hogsmeade, and ours is exorcising a cursed tiara in a magic junkyard."
"Romantic, though."
"Harry." She said, exasperated.
I turned the diadem over in my hands. With the Horcrux gone, it actually looked pretty.
It was supposed to make whoever wore it wiser. Sharper. That was the whole point of it, back when Ravenclaw had it made.
For me, it would be pointless. The Essence of the Archmage had already done a number on my brain. Putting the diadem on me would be like strapping a torch to the sun.
For Hermione, though...
I grinned, held it up, and set it carefully on her head before she could stop me.
"There," I said. "Every princess needs a tiara."
She stared at me. "That was terrible"
"I've been saving that one."
Then she seemed to realise what was actually sitting on her head, and she went rigid. "Harry, take it off. Take it off right now. I can't wear this. It's a founder's relic. It's priceless! It should be in a museum, or given back to Ravenclaw, or..."
"Or what? Given to Dumbledore?" I said. "He'd stick it in a cabinet in his office next to all those little silver things that puff smoke, and nobody would ever see it again."
"That's not the point!"
"It's been lost for nearly a thousand years, Hermione. Nobody's looking for it. Half the people who've heard of it think it's a myth. It was under a birdcage." I shrugged. "It's meant to make whoever's wearing it smarter. It'd be wasted on me. On you, though? The library wouldn't stand a chance."
"You can't just flatter me into accepting a priceless artefact."
"It's working, though, isn't it?"
She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. She'd reached up and was touching the edge of the diadem with one finger, as if it might break.
"Is it safe?" she asked quietly. "Properly safe?"
"I just pulled Voldemort out of it. It's probably the cleanest thing in this whole room."
She was quiet for a bit.
"I'm borrowing it," she said finally. "That's all. Borrowing. And the moment it's the right thing to do, it goes back to Ravenclaw."
"Deal."
"And you are never calling me a princess again."
"No promises."
She tried to glare at me. It's quite hard to look scary with a thousand-year-old tiara sitting crooked on your head.
Then, a bit more quietly, she asked the obvious question.
"How many more?"
"Four more pieces," I said. "Then him."
She took my hand again. It was her "I've made up my mind" grip, and there was no point arguing with that.
"Okay," she said. "Then we'd better get started."
She was standing in the middle of a mountain of junk, still a bit pale, with Ravenclaw's diadem sitting crooked in her hair, and already planning.
I didn't really think about it. I just leaned in and kissed her.
She made a small surprised noise, then kissed me back, her free hand bunching up the front of my robes.
It only lasted a few seconds, but when we pulled apart, some of the colour had come back into her face.
"What was that for?" she asked.
"For not running away screaming."
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. Then she touched the diadem again. "This doesn't mean I'm keeping it, you know."
"You're wearing it."
"...Shut up."
Yeah. That was my girlfriend.