The Battle of Hogwarts, Part 3
Hermione and Harry slipped into the back of the Great Hall as Professor McGonagall explained that Professor Snape had left and the Carrows were "incapacitated." The cheer that went up around them was deafening, and Hermione wondered just how terribly students had been treated thus far this term. She listened patiently as their former professor calmly informed the assembled crowd that students who were of age and wished to stay could stay and fight but that younger students would be evacuated to Hogsmeade. Murmurs of fear drifted through the crowd. Amongst the Gryffindors, she also sensed righteous anger and a desire to fight.
Hermione searched the room, looking for Draco Malfoy's telltale head of pale blond hair. Would he be here? Or was he already with Lucius? Lucius had not offered any information about his son's whereabouts, and she had not thought to ask him. Was she still bound to the promise she'd made her lover to protect his son? Not to mention that tiny little issue of Harry thinking Draco was her informant and lover. Wherever the younger Malfoy was, she needed to get to him before Harry could and make sure the prat kept his mouth shut. Unfortunately she wasn't sure how to best accomplish that, given what happened during their last encounter the night Dumbledore died. Plus there was also that whole issue of 'defeating Voldemort' that had to take precedence over everything else.
"Everyone is surprisingly calm," Harry observed quietly beside her as the faculty began to sort the student body, sending those who wished to stay off to one side to await instructions from members of the Order. Students were being sorted by year and a group of first years was already headed for the stairs that would take them to the Room of Requirement, the secret tunnel and hopefully safety in Hogsmeade. She hoped that someone had worked out where to safely hide those children until whatever happened tonight was over.
"Too calm?" she responded, following his gaze to where Remus, Tonks, and a wizard Harry did not recognize were talking to Professors Sinistra and Slughorn.
"I don't know." He looked around the room and then suddenly winced, squeezing his eyes shut as his hand instinctively went to the scar on his forehead.
"Harry?" She reached for him quickly, ignoring the whispers of, "Is that Harry Potter?" that surrounded them.
"I think… he's…" Harry mumbled before
"I saw him. He's coming here," he whispered as he rubbed his head. "He… he was in a cave, and he saw that the necklace was gone, and he's furious."
"He knows that we know about the horcruxes then."
"Yes. We don't have a lot of time," he whispered to her.
He pulled back from her and Hermione was about to suggest that they slip out of the Great Hall to look for the diadem, but she was cut off before she could speak. Another loud disembodied voice echoed around them, only this time it was not the stern by familiar tones of their former professor. This time it was a sinister, hissing voice that slithered past the wards, through the windows, and in through the tiny cracks and crevices of the castle.
"I know that you are preparing to fight. Your efforts are futile. You cannot fight me. I do not want to kill you. I have great respect for the teachers of Hogwarts. I do not want to spill magical blood. Give me Harry Potter, and they shall not be harmed. Give me Harry Potter, and I shall leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter and you will be rewarded. You have until midnight."*
Hermione immediately grabbed hold of Harry's arm, as if she instinctively thought she could hold her to him and somehow keep him safe from fate and a prophecy she did not want to believe. Around her, she heard shrieks of fear and saw a younger student crying as he clung to the arm of an older girl who looked to be his sister.
As Voldemort's voice faded away, the Great Hall descended into an eerie silence. Students looked around the room at each other, as if puzzled that no one had taken charge to usher them to wherever they needed to be.
"Well? Give Him what He wants!" Pansy Parkinson's voice echoed off the stone walls. "Give Him Harry Potter!"
She was supported by a cadre of students behind her, all in Slytherin robes. Hermione's eyes roved frantically over the group in green-edged robes, looking for Draco, but she did not see him there.
"You heard Him! He'll leave us all be if we give him Potter!" Parkinson repeated.
Hermione and Harry were immediately surrounded by a group of Gryffindor students, wands drawn. Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff soon followed, and Hermione's heart thrummed in breathless relief to see so many of her former classmates willing to fight for Harry.
"No one is fighting anyone tonight, at least not each other." Minerva said firmly as she stepped down from the dais and strode toward Parkinson. "Slytherin house will be evacuated to Hogsmeade. No one is handing over Harry Potter. Mr. Filch, Professor Sinistra, please escort Slytherin House from the castle."
As the grumbling Slytherins began to leave the Great Hall, Minerva addressed Harry and the remainder of the students.
"Mr. Potter and Miss Granger have a very specific task they MUST complete before You-Know-Who attacks. If they ask for your assistance, please do whatever it is they require. Now, we must buy them time. Let us begin," she said to the students. Hermione caught her former professor's eye again for a brief moment, and Minerva gave her a hint of a nervous smile before nodding toward the doors as if to say, "Go on. What are you waiting for?"
Before she could say anything in response, Harry grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the doors.
~oOo~
Where should they start the search for the diadem, Hermione wondered as they walked. Splitting up would allow them to cover more ground, but working together meant that she'd be with Harry to help and protect him if need be. The dungeons seemed like a logical place to start, she thought. Riddle had been a Slytherin, and he would have had ample time to explore the Slytherin dungeons as a student. Perhaps he could have stashed the diadem there. If so, then perhaps Lucius could somehow help her gain entry? She wondered briefly if they should go back and try to find Professor Slughorn or a younger Slytherin who could be induced to give them the password to the dorms. She was not, she thought grimly, opposed to using the imperius curse, if need be.
"If you were Tom Riddle, where would you hide a priceless bit of jewelry?" Harry asked her as they left the Great Hall.
"I really don't know. I mean, he probably spent the most time at Hogwarts in the Slytherin dormitories, so perhaps he could have hidden it there," she reasoned.
"Maybe."
"Where do you want to start?" she asked as they paused in front of the main staircase.
"He wouldn't hide it in the dorms," Harry said abruptly.
"Okay. Why not?"
"Too easy to find."
"Only if you're a Slytherin. It's not like students from the other houses spend a lot of time there," she reasoned.
Harry snorted under his breath. "I'm sure you've forgotten this since you were a half-cat at the time, but it's not THAT hard to get into the Slytherin dorms. Ron and I managed in second year."
"I don't know. You said you thought Riddle thought of Hogwarts was his home, the birthplace of his Vol- um, Dark Lord persona," she reminded him. "Slytherin was literally his home. Why not there?"
"Well for that matter, why not the Chamber of Secrets?" he shot back. "That's his ancestor, after all. There's no telling how much time he spent down there as a student, and we know it's a secure place. It's not that far from the Slytherin dorms either. Let's go." He turned abruptly and headed toward Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.
Hermione rushed to catch up to him and grabbed onto the sleeve of his robes.
"No, wait!"
"What?"
She realised then they were partially blocking access to the stairs and moved out of the way so younger students could evacuate, moving Harry toward an empty classroom.
"The diadem was hidden in a tree in Albania. He didn't find it until after he graduated. That means he could not have been a student when he hid it here. And if he wasn't a student…" her voice trailed off.
"It seems unlikely he would have known the current password to get into the dorms," Harry finished. "I guess we can cross the dorm off our list."
"Do we have any idea when he came back here?" she asked.
"He applied to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. Dumbledore wouldn't hire him."
"Tom Riddle teaching DADA is utterly ludicrous," she mumbled, thinking about how absurd it would have been to have one of the darkest wizards of all times teaching defense against the dark arts.
"Yeah. That's the only time we KNOW for certain he was in the castle after he graduated."
"So his path through the castle would have taken him from the front gates to Dumbledore's office and then back out past the wards again," she said.
"In theory. I mean, we have no idea how long he could have been in the castle. He could have had time to go down to the Chamber of Secrets."
"Bloody unbelievable," she whispered under her breath.
"What?"
"By the time he came back to ask for that job, he already had multiple horcruxes, right?" she prompted.
"Yeah. He made the diary and the ring whilst still a student."
"If that's when he hid the diadem here, then he had it on him. He literally walked into a meeting with Albus Dumbledore, defeater of Grindelwald, and asked for a job while toting around a piece of his soul in one of the darkest objects known to the wizarding world."
Harry stared at her for a moment, opened his mouth and then closed it again.
"That...that's pretty fucking ballsy," he finally said.
"Or insane."
"He surely knew Dumbledore would never hire him."
Harry squinted at her for a moment, and she had the distinct feeling he was looking right through her.
"I think asking for a job was just a pretense. It was a reason to get him into the castle to hide the horcrux. I bet he got some sick sense of satisfaction knowing it was under Dumbledore's nose all these years," he said.
She stared at him, as it all clicked together in her head. It was yet another brilliant observation of Harry's, although the insight he seemed to repeatedly have about Voldemort scared her.
"You could be right," she right acknowledged. "If that's the case, if He was just here to hide the horcrux, He wouldn't have taken the chance to just hide it anywhere though. He could not have stayed here long after Dumbledore dismissed him, not without being caught, so He surely had a place in mind when He arrived. It would have been a good place, a very good place, where He thought it could stay for ages without ever being found."
"We can't stay here and debate this. We need to hurry." Harry scrubbed at his face with his hands before adjusting his glasses.
She wrung her hands in frustration and anxiety. The castle was enormous. Given the number of secret passageways in Hogwarts, she could only guess at how many false walls, hidden chambers, and other concealed spots the ancient building held within its stone walls.
"Okay, let's try this again. He's in your head, there's some strange connection with you and the Dark Lord. So try to think like Him. If you had something precious, something dangerous, something that you did not want anyone to ever find, and you had to hide it in Hogwarts, where would you put it?" she asked.
"Oh fuck," Harry breathed out, as his eyes widened and a look of shock crossed his face.
"What? What is it?"
"I know exactly where it is. Bloody fucking hell! Come on, let's go!" he exclaimed as he grabbed her hand and ran from the room, nearly dragging her behind him.
~oOo~
As they raced up the stairs, they passed a window, and Hermione caught the lights from a volley of spells hitting the wards surrounding Hogwarts. At any other time, it might have been a beautiful sight, and she would have marveled at the power of magic. On this night it was terrifying.
"How long do you think the wards will hold?" Harry asked as they climbed.
"They're said to be some of the strongest ever created, but they won't hold forever, especially not under that sort of attack."
She was breathless when they finally reached the seventh floor.
"We were just in the Room of Requirement," she panted as they approached the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy.
"There's another room, a junk room," he said as he paced back and forth in front of the tapestry. "The diadem is there."
"How do you know that?" she demanded, flabbergasted at this sudden revelation.
"The book, the Half-Blood Prince's potions book. You told me to get rid of it. I told the Room I needed a place to hide something," he explained. "And it offered me this."
A door appeared before them across from the tapestry and Harry threw it open with a flourish, revealing a cavernous space practically filled to the brim with, well, everything.
"What is this place?" she asked as she followed him inside.
"The Room of Hidden Things. Over a thousand years, I guess plenty of people had things to hide."
There were suits of armor, rolled up tapestries, stacks of paintings, bits of decor, pieces of furniture piled up like miniature towers. She could only begin to imagine the treasures that were surely stored in this room.
"Oh my god," she murmured as she took in the sight before her.
"Crazy, isn't it? I bet it really chapped Riddle's arse to think he was something special to stumble across the Room of Requirement, only to end up here, with a thousand years of other people's junk."
Hermione nodded, still in awe of just how much STUFF surrounded them. "Harry, how are we possibly going to find the diadem in this mess?"
He grinned, a slightly manic, excitable grin. "Ironically, I know EXACTLY where it is."
She followed him as he wove a path through the mess, explaining how he'd looked for a place to hide the potions book, following Hermione's injury with the sectumsempra curse. He glanced sheepishly at her as he admitted that he'd placed the book carefully so that he could come back for it if he found that he couldn't pass potions without it.
Before she could admonish him for even thinking about coming back for that damned book, a loud crash sounded nearby, and Hermione startled. Hermione startled. Bits of dust fell from somewhere above them, and the floor seemed to shudder under her feet.
"I don't know how much longer the wards will hold," she warned as she looked frantically to and fro, as if Death Eaters could appear at any moment.
Harry stopped and looked down multiple paths in the junk and quickly tried to accio the diadem. Not surprisingly, it did not work. They'd not been able to use accio to retrieve any of the other horcruxes.
"Okay, let's split up then," he offered. "When I was last in here, I saw the diadem. Look for a stone bust of an old man. There was a wig on top of the bust, and I put the tiara on top of that. The whole thing is standing on a cupboard. We must be close."
"Got it." She gave him a curt nod and took off down the path to her left, as Harry went the opposite direction. She loathed the idea of splitting up, but they were running out of time.
Find the diadem, she told herself. Find it, and destroy it, and then… And then what? Her fingernails dug into her palm as she frantically scanned piles of junk looking for a cupboard with a stone bust atop it.
She was so focused on her search, so intensely seeking the accursed diadem that she did not see him until it was too late.
"Expelliarmus!"
Her vine wand slipped through her fingers, and she gasped as she whirled around, only to come face-to-face with the one person she'd sought out earlier: Draco Malfoy.
~oOo~
* Voldemort's quote is taken from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."
I'm honored to share that "An Innocent Obsession," was voted Runner Up for Favorite Canon Story in the Beyond the Book Fanfiction Nook awards on Facebook. Thank you to everyone who participated in that contest. It's always thrilling to have your writing recognized and appreciated by others.
Thank you to everyone who continues to read and share your thoughts with me. I am so thankful for all of you! For my American readers, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving today!
-Elle