A/N: Thank you all so much for your reviews, favorites and follows! I am so glad you are enjoying this new horcrux hunt with Theo involved. His presense is definitely going to cause some changes to canon, if you hadn't already guessed. You can follow me on tumblr (nauticalparamour) where I post sneak peeks, story updates and answer questions. Please let me know what you thought of chapter twenty-seven and be on the lookout for chapter twenty-eight in a few days!
Everything seemed so much more serious now that they were camping out in the wilderness with no direction. As if it hadn't been clear enough before, the knowledge that they had no plan to speak of was only made more obvious every day that they spent wandering around the forest, hiding in the expandable tent at night.
Harry, at least, had been sufficiently kowtowed by Theo's rebuke of his tendency to put those closest to him in grave danger. He spent most of his days looking at Ron's arm in a sling with an incredibly guilty look, and his evenings trying to blast the locket apart into smithereens, with no luck.
"You won't be able to destroy that with a simple diffindo," Theo said with a snort, leaning back into the couch with his arm slung around Hermione's shoulders as she read the book Dumbledore gave her, furiously translating the runes. He was happy to help her whenever she got stuck, but she was generally much better with runes than he was. "You heard the house elf...even he wasn't able to destroy it."
Harry snorted in derision. "I suppose that you would be the expert in dark magic, Nott," he said, more annoyed with his own ineptitude than Theo's presence.
Theo was not one to back down from a verbal challenge, especially after spending so many days in tight quarters with the boys. "Yes, my father never held back any knowledge from me, including numerous types of dark magic, the sort of thing that they don't teach in Hogwarts," he said, rolling his eyes. He wasn't going to apologize when he hadn't done anything wrong. "But I never had a primer in horcruxes."
The messy-haired boy crossed his arms over his chest, playing with the locket that currently was resting around his neck. "Still, you must have some idea of how to destroy it," he countered, knowing that he would take pretty much any idea at this point.
"Well, fiendfyre seems like the most obvious choice," he drawled, his fingers playing with Hermione's hair. "You wouldn't happen to have any basilisk venom hiding in your little bag, would you, Hermione?"
She snorted at that, showing that she was very much paying attention to the discussion between her boyfriend and best friend. "Plumb out, I'm afraid," she said, before giving a secret smile to Harry. Theo had extracted the story of the polyjuice out of her one evening while they were sharing one of the bunk beds together, laughing about how they thought that Malfoy was the heir of Slytherin, but she hadn't gone into detail about what Harry experienced in the Chamber of Secrets. "I don't think we should do around using fiendfyre, either, except as a last resort. It could get wildly out of control."
"It feels like a last resort," Harry said glumly, the time with the locket around his neck affecting him in particular out of the four of them.
Hermione shut her book sharply, before setting it to the side. "We can talk about it more later," she announced, before giving Theo's hand a squeeze. "We have to tell you something first."
Harry's green eyes roved between Theo and Hermione wildly. "Hermione, please, tell me you aren't pregnant," he nearly begged.
"What?" she squawked, clearly caught off-guard by the question. "Wha-Harry, no. I am not pregnant. We haven't - we aren't - we haven't," she sputtered, embarrassed and unsure of what to say back to him.
"Could have fooled me," Harry countered, one eyebrow raised in surprise.
Hermione cleared her throat. "No, I am not pregnant. We need to talk about the full moon," she said, significantly, effectively destroying some of the light-heartedness in the room. "It's tonight, and...well, we don't have any wolfsbane."
For Theo, at least, his next transformation had been creeping towards him with terrifying pace, until before he knew it, the night of the full moon was upon him. He vaguely remembered his first changes, before he'd returned to Hogwarts and had wolfsbane at ready access, and it was tinged with fear and pain. He hoped that things would be easier now that he had been changed for over a year and had more than a dozen transformations under his belt.
Harry looked stricken, then, perhaps reminded for the first time in a long time what it meant to be a werewolf. "What are we...what are we going to do?" he asked, looking at Theo suspiciously, not hiding his line of thinking that Theo should just handle things on his own.
"Theo and I are going to have to leave the wards tonight," Hermione said firmly. "You can let us back in tomorrow morning."
Immediately, both Theo and Harry began to protest her pronouncement, though likely for different reasons.
"Hermione, you can't go out there with him, especially not without wolfsbane," Harry sputtered, sounding genuinely concerned for his friend and what it would mean if he didn't have her in his life. "It's too dangerous."
"I can't let you do this, Hermione," Theo said quietly, even though his body was singing for her to be near him during such a vulnerable time.
Hermione shook her head. "I knew that you guys were going to be against this, but I can't leave Theo to fend for himself. While he's transformed, he could go anywhere and we might not be able to reunite with him in the morning," she explained, biting at her lower lip. She cupped Theo's cheek gently, nails scratching at the days old beard that he wore. "And, you, Theo...I know you won't hurt me when you're transformed. I am your mate, and your wolf knows it too. He wouldn't allow harm to come to me, especially not from yourself."
She could see him clenching his jaw, fighting back whatever argument he wanted to make, knowing that it was going to be a losing battle. Instead, he shut his eyes, letting himself enjoy the feeling of her skin against his. "There is no arguing with you, is there?" he asked, sullenly.
She smirked happily, knowing that she had won this time. "Of course not," she said triumphantly.
"So nothing I say is going to change your mind then?" Harry asked, his shoulders deflated in defeat.
"You are just going to have to trust me, Harry," Hermione said, hoping to smooth things over. "It's not the first time that I've been with him during the full moon," she breezed over, leaving out the fact that he'd been fully dosed with wolfsbane at the time.
Knowing that there wasn't much time left before the sun went down, the three of them joined Ron for a tense dinner, telling him about their plans. The redhead didn't like the idea of letting Hermione go out with a known werewolf, but he felt too helpless to argue. It wasn't as if he could stop Hermione when she had her mind made up, after all, and he was even more useless with his arm still out of commission.
When the time came, Hermione reviewed all of the warding with Harry, wanting to make sure that he would be able to handle everything when she was gone. "So, we will be waiting by that tree," she pointed to a large evergreen just outside of the wards, "tomorrow morning at nine. You'll let us in. Nine precisely, okay?"
Harry fidgeted with his pocket watch, making sure that it was the correct time. "What if you aren't there?" he asked, nervously.
"Only drop the wards for a minute," Hermione told him sternly. "And if we aren't there...well, you will just have to move on. We will...we will have to keep fighting on our own, I suppose." While she was hopeful that nothing would go wrong, Hermione knew that it was possibility they would have to face.
Not waiting any longer, Hermione grabbed Theo's arm and pulled him out of the ward, only to immediately settle down in front of the tree she had pointed out to Harry, pulling out a blanket and the Tales of Beedle the Bard.
Theo dropped next to her, bone weary, and slipped under the blanket as well, happy to enjoy a moment of privacy with her for the first time in months. "I wish you hadn't done this, Hermione," he told her, before sighing. He was too tired to start another argument with her. "You don't need to be responsible for everyone, all the time."
"If there is anyone that I want to take care of, it's you, Theo," she said, honestly. "And I wouldn't have been able to sleep at all tonight if I had known that you were out here all by yourself, without anyone to protect you." She turned her head and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. "I know you are worried about me, but I am worried about you."
She could feel some of the tension leaving his body, and she wondered when the last time was that he had someone who was so open and affectionate with him. They never talked much about his family, but she got the impression that it was never a very happy home. "How is your translating going?" he asked, needing something to neutral to talk about to pass the time until moonrise.
"Fine," she said, a bit annoyed. "I'm not understanding why Dumbledore left this to me...I know there must be some reason, but right now, all it seems like is children's stories." She nibbled at her lower lip, hating how cryptic the former Headmaster had been in his will. Then she remembered the odd symbol she'd found on one of the first pages. Flipping to it eagerly, she showed Theo. "Do you know what this symbol is? I can't find reference to it anywhere."
His blue eyes widened in surprise. "Well, you probably wouldn't. It's a symbol for the Deathly Hallows - the elder wand, resurrection stone and the invisibility cloak," he explained, hearing Hermione's heart hammer in her chest.
"Like in the tale of the three brothers?" she asked, paging through to the story that he was referencing.
"Yes. If you have all three, it is said that you are the master of death," he said with a snort. "But it's just a story, Hermione...nothing real."
"But it could be," she said, turning to face him. "Harry has an invisibility cloak, and if that's real then...doesn't it stand to reason that the other two hallows could be real, too? It sounds like something You-Know-Who would be after, doesn't it? After all, that's what he's trying to do with the horcruxes."
Before the pair could talk about it too much, Theo froze in pain, throwing himself away from her. She watched as the transformation took over his body, his arms clutching his sides as his bone and sinew stretched and changed to accommodate his new lupine body. He was growling when he finally laid eyes on her again.
Hermione felt a bolt of fear run up her spine when he began to advance towards her, but forced herself to keep still. He pressed his nose against her body, sniffing up from her legs all the way to her face. The wolf gave her a contented snuffle then, realizing he knew who she was, his mate, before letting dropping down to lay beside her, his head in her lap. She laughed a bit, glad that her assumption that he wouldn't hurt her had been right. She had been nearly positive, but she knew there was still a chance he could bite her in his werewolf form.
They spent most of the night cuddled next to one another, with Theo darting off once or twice to track down a rabbit to bring back to her as some kind of morbid present, that Hermione rewarded with scratches behind his ears.
When nine AM finally came, Theo and Hermione were waiting for the wards to let them in, exhausted but exhilarated at the same time. The werewolf grinned at the two worried boys who appeared out of nowhere, his arm slung around Hermione's shoulders and two rabbits held in his other hand, proud that it had gone better than expected and ready to shove his usefulness in their faces.