In the morning, Harry and Hermione left the wooded stream on the mountainside. The fight was not going to disrupt their routine of daily movement. Hermione lingered, fidgeting and puttering around much longer than usual before they finally apparated to a new location. It turned out to be a beautiful, heather-covered hillside.

They spent most of the day pondering the whereabouts of the real Sword of Gryffindor, putting up protective enchantments and wondering about the future. They took turns standing guard. As time passed they got more and more frustrated.

Ron had finally moved into a fitful sleep. If the problems that brought him here were not enough, he was sleeping in a trash heap huddled under a worn-out blanket and there were snatchers looking for him.

Despite the situation, Ron managed to sleep until morning. He was eventually awakened by someone tossing some stuff onto the backside of the heap. He waited until they had disappeared back into the building, then he crawled out wondering where to go from there.

He wished he could just apparate back to Harry and Hermione, to The Burrow, or to Hogwarts. He did not know the procedure to get into Number 12 Grimmauld and was pretty certain it was not a good idea to go there or to Shell Cottage. He did not want to chance his family learning his movements and location. This would make everyone vulnerable to Voldemort and his mind tricks.

Ron moved down the alley to the main street with great caution. He did not want to bump into the snatchers. He was also hungry. The idea of a nice breakfast at the inn before figuring out where to go would be just the thing.

Just as he was about to slip down the street so he could look through the window into the inn, the door of the inn opened. The three snatchers stepped out. Ron ducked back into the alley so he could peer around the corner of the building and watch them.

The snatchers talked a bit while looking around. They must have been planning how to search for him in the daylight. Suddenly, they clasped hands and apparated away. A sense of relief filled him.

Ron reemerged and headed to the inn. He felt confident it was now safe for him to get some food. Planning on a full stomach would be a much-preferred situation to being lost and hungry. Still, he felt exposed, incomplete in the way he did after he stopped Harry from taking off on his own from The Burrow following the disastrous leaving the Dursley's with the notion they would not last two days without Hermione.

He stopped and peered in through the window as he reached the inn. It looked peaceful. There were just a few people inside. They seemed to be enjoying a quiet breakfast. He walked to the door and went inside.

A few moments later he was enjoying a large bowl of porridge accompanied with some sausages, orange juice and a steaming cup of dark, full-bodied coffee that required an excessive amount of milk and sugar for him to get it down. It was a far cry from the breakfast feasts at Hogwarts he had been missing since leaving there but welcomed all the same.

He clutched the pouch Hermione had insisted they all carry as he paid with more muggle money. He bumped it off his chin almost like he wanted to kiss it before putting it away. As he put it back into his pocket he was momentarily swept with a strong wave of emotion. He missed her more than he could understand. He missed Harry, as well. However, this was different. Hermione and him were not going together. They were not even dating. But this sudden severance from her gave him unexpected, unexplainable fits of separation anxiety.

Hermione was drying her tears when Harry came back into the tent to warm up a bit. She quickly poured him a hot cup of tea and handed it to him like she was fine. But Harry could tell by the redness of her eyes that everything was not well.

Hermione would never admit it but she was actually ashamed of her tears. Tears were a sign of weakness and vulnerability that did not fit in her view of being a strong, mature person. She had not really cried since her meltdown early on in her first year which led to her almost getting Harry, Ron and herself killed by the troll in the girl's bathroom. It is true she had cried at the bottom of the stairs and when Buckbeak was executed, but they were minimal in comparison. Now she spent most of her time doing it, although she did her best to hide that fact. Unfortunately, her brain refused to consult with her heart over the true meaning and value of them. Otherwise, she might have viewed them differently.

She had spent too much time around books and boys, and not enough time around her peers to get in touch with her feminine side. Her emotional outbursts tend to be of the more masculine kind, such as punching Malfoy, swatting Harry or Ron on occasion, or being over-competitive in academics to the point of being upset at Harry bettering her in Slughorn's Potions class. This added fodder to the cutting thoughts about her by the other girls. She needed to take time to explore how tears can be sad and glad, angry and joyous, caused by pain and pleasure, bemoaners of failure and celebrants of success. Instead, she tried to hide them and be the stoic.

"Are you okay?" asked Harry.

Yes—yes I am fine," she said in a less than convincing voice. "I was just reading. You need some sleep. Give me the locket and I'll go outside for a while. You get some rest."

"I'm sorry about the other night," he said, knowing she knew the night he was referencing. "I shouldn't have acted the way I did. R—uh, uh—he was just…"

"…It's okay," she said, interrupting him. "We'll be fine without—uh—HIM. We just need to move on.

"No, it is not okay," reiterated Harry. "He's was my best friend…at least I thought so. And I know…well, uh, I know how you feel about him. I let that bloody locket get between us and now he's gone. I can't…"

"Give me the locket, Harry," insisted Hermione with a stern look. "You've had it on long enough. Give it to me…Now!"

Harry winced a bit and stepped back as he pulled the locket's chain over his head. The empathetic part of Hermione's spiritual heart was running on high.

"I wish we had a way to destroy it," moaned Harry as he handed over the cursed locket. "None of this would have happened if…"

"…Stop it, Harry. Just stop it."

Okay. Let's just work on finding the other ones. We can try to figure out a way to destroy it as we go."

"Yes, but we don't know the whereabouts of the real Sword of Gryffindor and I don't fancy us fighting a basilisk, either. At least we know the sword in Bellatrix's vault is a fake. There must be other ways," said Hermione in a frustrated tone. "I wish we could go search the library."

"I don't think Snape would be keen on that," said Harry with a rare of late chuckle. "We just need to keep searching."

"Well, lie down for a while. You need some rest. I'm going outside and read," she said as she reached for the tent flap.

Harry gasped as Hermione pulled the portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black that hung in 12 Grimmauld Place out of her bag. It still had the blindfold on it from the first time they had talked to it.

"Why the bloody hell did…"

"…I grabbed it while packing. I thought it might be useful," said Hermione, interrupting Harry. "It's companion portrait is in Dumbledore's—uh—Snape's office."

"Brilliant. But he is a pureblood Black and a Slytherin. Do you think he will help us?"

"I don't know. We can only try and hope, I suppose," she said as she set the portrait on a chair.

It took a lot of coaxing, but Phineas was finally convinced to appear in his portrait, which Hermione had carefully adjusted the blindfolded so as to not give away any details of their location. The conversation was contentious and not particularly helpful. However, it was a building block for many more conversations in the future.

Following the conversation with the portrait, Harry walked over to his bed and sat down as she exited. Once outside, Hermione sat back against a tree and lit her wand for reading. Within moments, she was crying once again. The absence of Ron, her anger at him aside, was consuming her mind and preventing her from reading. She did not understand why.

She imagined this is being what a break up must be like, even though it was not one. They were not even dating, let alone going together. Still, his angry departure and her place stuck between grabbing him and staying with Harry and the quest was tormenting her heart in ways she had never felt in the past. Even the incident at the bottom of the stairs was nothing compared to how she was now feeling. It was like something was going on inside her that she did not fully understand.

Harry lay down and tried to fall asleep. He missed Ginny. Even though their relationship was still in its adolescence, he ached for her embrace and the warm press of her lips on his. Even though he was thoroughly pissed at Ron, he blamed himself for a huge chunk of the situation. "Why did I have to pop off like that? I knew he was wearing that bloody locket. I could have handled this better," he told himself as he finally started to drift off. "How are we going to get him back? Does he even want to come back? Do I want him to come back?"

He dreamt of Dumbledore. He kept asking for advice but only got encouraging words and cryptic answers he could not decipher. Snape hit him repeatedly with a rolled up parchment, McGonagall stared at him over her square glasses, and Peeves taunted and laughed at him.

The morning found Harry and Hermione eating breakfast in the tent. Food being an item that cannot be conjured with magic, they had to rely on the variety of food items Hermione had stuffed into her bag. The best they could do was pulling something from her supply, multiplying and or enlarging it, and then work with it from there. It was not as nice as the one being enjoyed by Ron, but it was quite adequate and sustaining.

"We need to talk about how we are going on from here," said Harry in a half-hearted tone.

"I know," replied Hermione in soft resignation. "We can't just sit here."

"You're free to leave if you want," said Harry, looking her in her red, puffy eyes. "I know how you feel about—uh—him," he said, stumbling a bit at saying his name for the first time since their fight. "You don't have to stay. You can go look for him…"

"…No," she interrupted. "I need to stay. We need to keep searching for the other horcruxes. He will be okay. I've never said this in front of him and don't you dare tell him I said it, but he is pretty clever and skillful when he doesn't have time to overthink himself. He'll get his comeuppance for taking off when we find him. For now, we need to press on."

Harry sat quietly. He was still burning with anger on the inside. His best friend had blown a hole in their relationship that looked of terminal dimensions. This was a hundred times worse than their row over whether or not he had put his name in the Goblet of Fire. He did not want to hear good words about him.

He had never seen this Hermione…the one to compliment Ron and his skills. He was more accustomed to the Hermione that often treated Ron like a naughty schoolboy that she somehow could not stop liking. However, she also expressed anger at him for leaving the way he did. She was upset at the way she had been put on the spot between going with him and staying with Harry and the mission. He wondered what she was really thinking. He wondered about Ginny and how much he missed her.

Inside, Hermione's heart and brain were struggling for control. Her heart wanted to run after Ron. It wanted to find him. It wanted to stand by his side and fight to protect him. Losing him this way was tearing at her more than she could yet understand. Really losing him, never seeing him again, was the trigger causing her increasingly frequent teardrops to fall. But her brain was still running the show.

Her brain was still focusing on the task of finding the horcruxes, finding a way to destroy them and ultimately defeating Voldemort. She was always a thinker, a plotter and planner. Her quick decisions often failed her, such as going to Slughorn's Christmas party with Cormac when she could have gone with Harry, or when she almost got Harry and herself killed by howling at Lupin without an escape plan. This was a place where Ron's quicker, less complicated thinking complimented, even benefited her lengthier, more process-oriented thinking at times.