I confess I have lost my thread a little with this story; I know where I'm going but the journey is a little squiggled at the minute so forgive me if it's noticeable.

-YDHP-

"Merlins pants, it's bloody freezing!"

"For the love of all that is evil Fred, use a warming charm."

"I'm George!"

"That joke doesn't work on me."

Harry hid laughter behind his hand as Vlad and the twins bantered, walking down to visit Hagrid - they would be seperating soon for Christmas.

Vlad was staying. Vlad and Ingrid. Harry was to go home with Draco to Malfoy Manor. Neither were happy about it, but there were a multitude of reasons for the split and only one against. Vlad and Ingrid's magical vampiric apparition would be visiting since Hogwarts was nearly empty. Harry and Draco desperately wanted to see Raven. It was a smart move not to have Vlad and Harry always absent together.

It wasn't as though they would not see each other - they had portkeys, and Vlad and Ingrid were allowed to visit Hogsmeade during the holidays so there were ways to see each other. And Vlad would suffer the separation more than Harry - for Harry it was emotional. For Vlad it was biological, ingrained within his soul to need Harry.

Ingrid might even be happy for the lacking in a constant reminder her own mate was gay and had a lover and a daughter, Harry mused. He couldn't imagine seeing Vlad with someone else that way; remembering Viktor Krum wasn't easy and that hadn't even been real. He knew Vlad was still friends with the Bulgarian Quidditch celebrity, but Harry couldn't begrudge that. It must be nice for Krum to have a real friend who didn't give a toss for the sport.

Hagrid was outside, broad back visible as he tended his chicken coop. Harry stayed a measured distance away, scales prickling at the sound of a rooster crowing. Vlad kept an eye on him, as always, making sure Harry wasn't about to keel over or transform.

"Hey, Hagrid! Stop playing with your feathered friends would ya before I freeze off my-"

"Ello kids! C'mon in!"

Hagrid ushered them in, Weasley twins groaning as the riaring fires heat bathed their chilled, freckled skin. Ginny was a little hardier, though Harry caught her rubbing her hands together over the flames when she went to hang her snow-damp cloak there to dry. Hagrid had a kettle boiling in no time, happy as could be to have nearly a dozen teenagers slung around his hut drinking from massive mugs.

"So, have you been inspected yet?"

"No' yet, but tha' may be why I'm bein' replaced after the 'olidays."

"What? Why?"

"Unicorns are on the tests. They don' like men."

Vlad frowned.

"Can you let me know which classes they'll be in? I can't go. Even keeping my distance... it's too dangerous."

"Aye, I 'ave the schedule somewhere."

Vlad nodded his thanks and sipped his tea, hand twitching to rub his chest and trying to keep it looking like an absent itching. Riddle was growing more demanding of his followers presence, and according to Vlad he was in a progressively worse mood. More than likely because he was bound by an Unbreakable Vow to wait until Vlad was sixteen to do any of his diabolical plans for world domination, else risk losing his magic and his (current) life.

"So, which of you are staying again?"

Blaise was so quiet Harry almost forgot he was there, despite the stand-out quality of his silver scarf and gloves combined with an emerald jumper under his black coat. Granted, Harry had a similar shaded t-shirt on beneath his Weasley jumper. As Ginny's boyfriend, Blaise was almost guaranteed to have his own cosy woollen surprise on Christmas morning. Assuming they didn't all come to Malfoy Manor for Christmas again anyway. Harry didn't know the plan but they all had portkeys.

"Vlad. Ingrid. I think he's the only one in our dorm staying... that must be odd."

"Think of all the studying for OWLs I'll get done."

"Think of all the Aurors off for Christmas. You can roam the halls like a mysterious wraith."

Blaise gestured broadly, chuckling lowly to himself.

"I could camp outside Umbridge's office and play pranks every time she leaves the room."

Harry got an idea of what to do before he left for the holidays, suppressing a mischievous grin behind his mug.

"I'm sure you'll pass the time."

"While we work on new ways to drive the scary pink woman mad over the holidays."

"Be ready for some fireworks soon after we return."

Hermione glared at the twins.

"Hey! We promised no exam times."

"The rest of the year is fair game."

She rolled her eyes in exasperation, and they all turned in confusion to the front door as it knocked. They weren't expecting any late joiners. Fang grumbled in the doors direction as Vlad, closest to the door, opened it.

"Uh, I have a note to pass on, is Harry Potter here?"

"Yep."

The shaking first year Hufflepuff stumbled in soaked with snow and held out damp-spotted parchment to Harry, then rushed out as quick as he came in. Vlad closed the door, bemused.

"What's that?"

Naturally, everyone was curious. Harry thought quick.

"It's from Dumbledore. He's teaching me Occlumency. This is my next lesson time."

"How did he know where you were?"

Harry shrugged.

"It's Dumbledore?"

Fred hummed.

"Fair."

They left a while later, bellies bloated with tea and pleasantly warmed cloaks already attracting snow as they trekked through the thick white. Students were engaging in snowball fights, Aurors dodging them with wands out and annoyed looks on their sour, cold faces. Harry caught Vlad eyeing one of them closely, perhaps having had altercations with him or even saw him at a Death Eater meeting.

From what Vlad had worked out and told Harry, not every Death Eater was Marked. Most were, but like Vlad some couldn't have a big brand stamped on their forearm. Particularly if they weren't survivors of the first time round, like Lucius Malfoy or Bellatrix Lestrange, who had a reason to bear the Mark. Those too young for that couldn't claim such a cause.

"So, Hogsmeade tomorrow everyone?"

Everyone agreed, Vlad adding to his.

"Yep. Remember as older students we are unofficial chaperones to the younger ones. Especially if the rumours are true."

"What rumours?"

Blaise quizzed, Ginny's pale hand curled around his dark one.

"Aurors stop-and-question-ing random people. I think there was even talk of bringing back the Dementor searches. Odd, isn't it? One escaped man imprisoned without a trial and the Wizarding World heaved with security. Voldemort comes back and all we have is people bored out of their minds wishing they could hex students. Everything else is all talk."

Vlad was bitter, resentful about the War. He had obviously hoped to avoid such messy politics between good and bad - murder was a common tactic for vampires so the war itself wasn't as shattering to him as everyone else - until it was his job. Instead, a motley group of kids and adults in hiding were the bulk of the resistance against Riddle.

Harry managed to nudge Vlad's hand with his, watching a visible leeching away of tension from his boyfriend. He never got bored of having such a potent effect on one person.

"My mother said there was a group of fighters last time. Secret resistance of the good side. I think she called it the Order."

"Order of the Phoenix" Draco supplemented "my father used to complain about them. It disbanded after Harry's baby victory. Unsurprising. If we had a photo of the original line-up and drew a red line on every one dead, the picture would be more red than anything else. I mean I'm sure Dumbledore is up to something, but... who knows?"

Well, Harry did. Not that he felt the late night Pensieve sessions showing Harry the past of Tom Riddle truly counted as helping the light side, but Dumbledore was dying. There was only so much he could do. For all Harry knew, the curse tearing him apart slowly could be sapping his magic and meaning he could only use his mind now.

He headed to the office that evening. Vlad was already there, going through his own pile of delicate glass vials and seperating them by a system Harry didn't understand.

"I wondered where you got to."

Vlad offered him a smile.

"Yeah, the Aurors change shift at quarter to so I can avoid them by coming earlier."

"Evening headmaster."

Harry remembered to greet the man behind the desk, who stood with surprising speed and circled the table to reach for the cabinet.

"I have two important memories to show you tonight Harry, one my own and the other belonging to a house elf."

Well, that was a change from the norm. It was still niggling though so he had to ask.

"What are you doing Vlad?"

"Sorting the altered and defective memories from the clean ones. See here?"

Vlad tipped the vial just so, and Harry saw the memory inside flow and curl like wet smoke. The other one, when viewed at exactly the right angle with light behind it appeared sluggish and thick. Gloopy memory.

"Weird."

"Yep. Go stick your face in that so we can be done for the night."

Harry headed across to the pensieve, watching Dumbledore tip the first memory into the swirling smoke.

"Is this your memory sir?"

"No, this is the memory of a house elf named Hokey, of Tom Riddle and a woman named Hepzibah Smith."

Nonplussed, Harry joined his headteacher in the memory. The room they landed in was utterly awful, looking like Umbridge's paradise as Harry took in the pink swathes of fabric everywhere. One of the masses of pink was moving, a violently bright affair on an enormous woman. She was applying make-up to her fleshy face, giggling to herself girlishly. The make-up itself was expertly applied, but it wasn't really masking the size of the woman.

With all the frilly layers, Harry felt a bit like she resembled a melting tier cake. She covered simpering lips in rouge, then leaned into the mirror on her vanity to check for lipstick on her teeth.

"How do I look Hokey?"

"Mistress looks beautiful!"

Hokey must have lying in her contract, Harry decided. Hokey was a scrap of an elf, but she seemed happy and unbeaten. She didn't cower or squeak in fear. The door knocked and Harry turned toward it automatically, then heard the woman immediately start giggling as she flapped her hands.

"Answer it Hokey, answer it! It's him!"

Harry watched on as Hepzibah grew flustered and headed out, barely able to navigate her enormous body between suits of armour and piles of shiny objects and aged artifacts all over every surface. The front door swung open and she wobbled with excitement, practically falling over for the man framed by the doorway. His hair was longer than it had been at Hogwarts, and his cheeks were hollow, almost sunken.

But when he compared the perhaps eighteen or nineteen year old to present day Tom Riddle, Harry supposed he looked surprisingly handsome. Of course, he already had at least two horcruxes under his belt by then.

"Tom!"

"Mrs Smith!"

"It's Miss Tom, you know I'm not married."

"I'm just amazed nobody has noticed what a catch you are."

His charm was effortless but the sentiment was hollow; Tom wasn't there to flirt.

"I'm here on behalf of Mr Borgin as you well know. He's doubled the offer."

"Oh, he won't be happy until he takes that thing from my cold, dead hands! Hokey, bring us some tea?"

The elf shuddered under a groaning tray as she navigated the stacks of collectibles. Harry knew Hepzibah was carrying a torch for young Tom Riddle, which was probably how he got away with his requests.

"May I see it?"

"Oh, careful Tom. I'll think you're only here for my priceless artifacts!"

Well, he was. Harry knew Riddle didn't really look at women. Well, apart from Harry's own grandmother. And, according to Vlad, Bellatrix Lestrange. Neither woman resembled the melting pink creature before him now. Still, Riddle played on her crush ruthlessly.

"It's one of a kind. That's why Borgin wants it so much."

She simpered as she offered Tom tea, which he took but didn't drink. Perhaps Tom had learned from his fathers mistake and worried she would potion him into her bed. Hokey came back a minute later holding an ornate box, inlaid with gold filigree and sparkling gems. It opened to reveal a rather nondescript yellow-gold cup. Harry fancied it looked like a kids spelling bee trophy, small and unimpressive as it laid in plush velvet lining.

When he squinted though, he saw the emblem, a badger engraved and laid with tiny but perfectly shaped jewels.

"Helga Hufflepuff's cup."

"Said to possess all manner of powers. Though nobody is quite sure what. Even my family don't see this young Tom, I hope you feel privileged! And tell your boss I could never part with it.

The hunger in Riddle's face gave Harry a clue as to why he was seeing this memory. Then another box replaced the Hufflepuff cup, and he knew immediately it was fake. The real one was at Malfoy Manor.

"Slytherins locket, one of my other secret objects of course. For your eyes only, though I paid an extortionate amount of gold for this from your boss. Said he bought it from some ragged street urchin with no clue of it's true value."

Riddle seemed aware it was a fake, though Harry knew Riddle wouldn't encounter the true one for a few years yet. And that 'ragged street urchin' was, in fact, his mother and a direct descendent of Salazar Slytherin himself. Harry wondered how the locket passed stringent checks, but it was starting to hurt his head imagining the twists and turns of Slytherins line.

"Pop these away now Hokey, the usual charms. And I've got some things for Borgin to buy, some troublesome fabrics and that cursed armour. Twelve bodies to it's name!"

They haggled back and forth for a while, then Riddle stood and said he would be back in two days with the gold and to collect the things. Hepzibah fluttered and waved all the way to his leaving, teetering forward in the painfully obvious hopes of a kiss. Riddle cringed where she couldn't see, leaning to the air just aside her cheek but she giggled hysterically all the same. Clearly, keeping on that woman's good side was a massive priority.

The memory faded around them, leaving Harry a little dizzy as the world stopped existing in shades of pink. Dumbledore was looking thoughtful too, though presumably he had seen it before.

"Sir?"

"Hepzibah Smith was found dead three days later, and her elf was found to remember accidentally poisoning her cocoa."

"Why would she do that?"

Harry asked, but he already knew the answer.

"She didn't. Voldemort was the murderer, and the thief of those priceless artifacts. He implanted the false memory of the murder in Hokey's mind."

Vlad chimed in then.

"And nobody looked further because she was just an old elf."

He looked annoyed about something.

"Indeed."

"And you hunted her down, took the real memory but didn't get her released?"

"Yes."

Vlad stood up with a sigh, stretching a crick out of his back.

"If you truly want to measure a man's character, look at how he treats his inferiors not his equals. How many people and creatures have you used and ignored in your quest for 'greater good'?"

Harry watched Dumbledore look very uncomfortable.

"Too many. Far, far too many. I do not have the time to make up for all my mistakes."

Vlad clearly felt Dumbledore had gotten away with too much, and there wasn't much time for him to be called out on past mistakes now. The blackened cursed skin of his hand looked ever more dark and deadly.

"Anyway, you have another memory to watch. I'm done with these by the way."

In the time Harry had been in the Pensieve, Vlad had organised the memories assigned to him and each careful pile had a parchment beneath with Vlad's ever-more elegant script with information on. Harry had no idea what it meant, but Dumbledore was pouring his own memory into the bowl and he moved to join him in it, because Vlad wouldn't leave until Harry did.

"This was the last time I saw Tom Riddle before he became exclusively known as Lord Voldemort."

Except to Vlad, who wound up the psychopath regularly by refusing to beatify him with such titles. Harry leant forward, slightly confused at the setting not changing but the people present shifted. Dumbledore and Riddle sat opposite sides of the Headmasters desk. Riddle was bald, but aside from his pale pallor and flatter nose he didn't look as... reptilian as he did now.

"I'm afraid I can't offer you the position Tom."

"I have politely requested you not call me that."

Harry saw a less-than-polite expression on Riddle's face, but Dumbledore kept his composure.

"You must forgive an old man, but you will always be Tom, the little boy in the orphanage to me."

"I have spent my years travelling, learning, pushing the boundaries of magic further than many thought possible. Allow me to pass on this knowledge to young, moulding minds."

Dumbledore shook his head, placing his chin on steepled fingers.

"Unfortunately, I feel you are still woefully ignorant in some branches of magic. You deny the power of love, for example."

Riddle's head tipped and he hissed lightly - not a word, to Harry's understanding - in a distinctly snake-like manner of irritation.

"Love has no place in magic."

"And this is where we differ. You had to know I could never give you access to malleable minds Tom, not with your... practices."

At this point, Harry reckoned Dumbledore knew about the Horcruxes. It annoyed him; he could have spent the last fifteen years tracking them down to prevent Riddle returning and again. Why wait until now?

"You'll regret this."

Riddle swept from the room, and the memory dissolved again. They pulled out of the Pensieve, and Harry was admittedly confused.

"Ever since that day, I have not been able to keep a Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher in the position for more than a year."

Harry thought on it.

"Can you curse a job post?"

"It seems so. However, I suspect that the open job post was not his only reason for returning to Hogwarts."

"You're going to have to be more specific."

"I think perhaps that he followed in Salazar Slytherins footsteps and hid something within the walls of Hogwarts. He certainly believed he had plumbed every mystery of this school."

When Harry turned around to Vlad, the vampire was slowly going through the books on Dumbledore's shelves without permission. Fawkes was perched on his shoulder, waving lazily from side to side as Vlad moved.

"Are you enjoying my personal library Vladimir?"

"Just comparing it to other libraries I've seen. It's a bit limited but then I suspect you have a personal Restricted Section."

He raised a hand to scratch Fawkes' chest feathers and the phoenix trilled happily, rubbing his plumed head against Vlad's like an affectionate cat.

"Indeed. Any questions Harry?"

"None I expect answers to. Is that all for tonight? Only it's Hogsmeade tomorrow and I'd like to get an early night."

Harry was released and Vlad followed after saying a fond farewell to his kin, Fawkes soaring across to his perch and waving one wing in Vlad's direction before tucking his head under it for a nap.

"What are you thinking?"

He quizzed after telling Vlad about the memories that night, watching his boyfriend doodle the rough shape of the cup below a locket, ring and diary.

"That he used Hepzibah's death to make the cup a fourth horcrux. If we assume Nagini" Vlad added a snake to the drawings, circling coils with his quill "is another, that's five. Depending on whether we assume he counts seven to include the sliver left inside him, that's six. Meaning we have one more horcrux to account for. If he made seven horcruxes, that would make eight... but I think seven is a more likely total. Each death would have been important."

"Rose. His father. Perhaps someone at Hogwarts for the diary... how was Hepzibah Smith important?"

Vlad shook his head.

"She wasn't, not really. But she had things he wanted. And it was the last thing he did before fleeing to Albania for years to hone his insanity."

"What's so special about a fake locket and a cup nobody knew how to make use of?"

Digging through his backpack, Vlad came out with a couple of thick dusty tomes.

"History. Riddle was a half blood with a deep shame for it. He had no ties to magical heritage that he knew of until the Gaunts. Even then, there was nothing remarkable to be gained; Morfin was a barely human maniac with nothing but hatred and loathing. Riddle craved proof he was important, powerful. Slytherin locket. Hufflepuff cup... I suspect we're looking for another founder object. Hence... these books on the founders."

Harry nodded, biting into a biscuit as he leant away from the books.

"I lean toward Ravenclaw. Someone obsessed with his Slytherin heritage isn't likely to use Gryffindor heirlooms."

Vlad smiled.

"Good thinking. I'll start with Ravenclaw... maybe I'll ask Luna tomorrow."

"Why tomorrow?"

"She's going to Hogsmeade with Ginny."

"Of course you know that."

"They arranged it at your Defence club. Once you get past the rainbows and unicorns floating around her head, Luna is smart and funny. I mean, she is a Ravenclaw."

Harry smiled at his boyfriend, then continued eating. His scales seemed to be a little itchy, making Harry wonder if he was due another growth spurt with lots of baths to soak off the layered skin. He hoped not; he was already noticeably bulkier than most of the boys in his year and Harry wasn't sure he could physically eat any more than he already did to sustain the growth.

Though he wouldn't struggle trying over Christmas with the Malfoy elves.

"Wizard!"

Lily woke when Vlad shifted the book next to where she was sleeping, one scaly eye opening to glare at the vampire before she slithered toward Harry. He offered her a little leftover sausage, which she eagerly took with an affectionate lick to Harry's fingers, then below his ear before she coiled loosely around his neck.

"I'm being eyeballed here."

"I think she's warning you off my neck."

"Samael said you couldn't be turned. You're immortal, I can't make you undead after the fact."

Harry stroked his familiars head.

"I think Lily is just making sure."

-YDHP-

More borrowing from the queen JK. All intellectual property of hers and so on. Twenty one chapters and we're only just getting close to Christmas. It'll start speeding up soon, this story has places to go!

I'm sad we didn't get the Hepzibah and job interview scenes in the movie. It would have made the horcrux stories far more exciting.