"I've interacted with a Horcrux before," he had started. "Whenever I see another one, I'll know it straight out. What I want to know is how you, without seeing it, found the one in Hogwarts."

"During the fight to protect the Lovegood residence from its attackers, we managed to fell the leader early on. I neglected to mention that, because I couldn't help but think she knew something... something that I couldn't afford to tell you."

"I don't remember seeing any witches among the dead."

"It's true that even in the magical world, criminals are more likely to be male," Hermione started. She was doing that thing again where she was explaining something neutrally. "Aggression, risk attitudes, and the fact that fewer people care about you are a dangerous combination. No one was surprised that they didn't see a witch there; if anything, they would have been surprised if they did see her. Ron brought her down thinking that she might have been the leader, because she was hanging around in the back. He couldn't warp her out of there, so he just dragged her off and I went out to invade her resting mind while everyone else was cleaning up."

"I'm not blaming you for any of that," he said. "I know that my Occlumency wasn't up to your standards. I've heard you've gotten much stronger, so if you want to give it another go, we can-"

Almost immediately, he was floored by the pressure of Legilimency. He had been pretty sure that proximity made a difference, and he was seeing it in action. It was hard to so much as keep control over the situation; she was getting about as far as Snape by reading his surface thoughts and then counteracting his defenses right as he was about to throw her for a loop.

They were standing in a muggle schoolyard, a place he knew she had never been, but where she did not seem too out of place. He fought back as much as he could, recognizing the pattern of attack and countering. It had been stated in one of the books that the end of Occlumency was Legilimency, even though they were theoretically different; the end of learning defense was offense from a strategic perspective. Hermione did not get further into his mind before the scene disappeared around them.

"I thought I might as well, since I had better show you this."

They were in Hogwarts, following around a young girl, and he knew it was the secondhand memory that she must have shown Ron as well. What was so shameful about keeping it secret? It worked out in the end and he got better at defending his mind- so what could be the harm?

"What's she got there?" he asked, pointing.

"It's an answer key for the written section of the O.W.L's of 1950."

"She looks like a first year, so there's no way she wants it for herself... this has to be part of something."

"Most likely, she joined something like a gang, and the older students wanted it for her, or she did it all on her own and wanted to sell it. I only got so far into the memory before she died on me. It seems like this is basically how her life of crime started."

"How'd she get a hold of it?" he asked, frowning. It was hard to tell what part of the year it was; they were on the seventh floor, which was usually above most of the decorations, in any era. "Isn't it a Ministry test?"

"It is, which makes the possession of its answers a regulatory offense, not just a violation of school rules. It could be that there was a Hogwarts professor who had a hand in making it, but I didn't actually look into the time period. I have a hard time imagining she was connected to a government official who lost track of it."

"That, or it's a fraud," Harry said as they followed her. She was waiting for the corridor to clear; he could tell because she was acting like she was looking for something on the ground, but kept casting glances in different directions. "It's a lot easier to make a fake answer key as long as she knows how many multiple choice questions there are on the test. With all the anti-cheat mechanisms that they had set up when we were taking the test, it's hard to believe they had a single sheet of answers in the first place."

"That could be it, but if it's not real, she would need to convince her customers that it is, and I don't think that they would have taken her innocent child act as well as adults might have." The crowds cleared and the doors to the Room of Requirement opened. She walked over to a section of a room that was stuffed with random odds and ends and took a wand out of her robes, tossing it onto a pile.

"She stole a wand?"

"She could be waiting to see if a reward gets posted for its return. It's possible that she stole it out of a girls' shower room, and if she got caught with it before dropping it off here, she could claim that she picked it up thinking it was hers. If she shows up with it after a reward gets posted and says she found it in a corridor, there won't be any proof she was the one who stole it." Hermione shrugged. "That, or she could be intending to plant it on an enemy or rival to get rid of her. There's not much of an appeals process if it comes out that you stole a wand from another student; you could get expelled."

They turned at a sound coming from the middle of the room, but the girl nearly jumped out of her skin. This was her memory, after all, and she was the one at risk of getting caught. She flattened herself against the floor so as not to be visible to anyone in the room. Out of a cabinet near the middle of the room climbed a young Voldemort. Immediately upon seeing him, he looked only a touch older than he did in the diary and would have in pictures- it was probably right after leaving Hogwarts, but it seemed he had left himself with a secret way back in, just in case anyone ever narrowed down the time of when he made the Horcrux that he was carrying. There was no need to ask Hermione if that was what she asked Ron to retrieve; he could see why anyone would think there was something off about it. The dark wizard summoned a bust of an old wizard and set it on top of the cabinet, and then put the silver crown on top of that. He looked around back and forth a moment before getting in the cabinet again.

"Was he intending to return here?" Harry asked, realizing he had been holding his breath.

"I don't know. He could have been intending to set up some place of greater honor, or he could have been intending to put more magical protections on it. He never got a chance, though."

The girl got out of her hiding place and practically threw herself over the pile of rubbish between her and the cabinet. She quickly looked it up and down before locking it and casting a reductor curse on it, but nothing happened, possibly because she had the wand movement wrong. He was more puzzled than anything else.

"He didn't see her. Was she just trying to get rid of any chance he would find the evidence?"

"I don't know," Hermione said. "It seemed like a fear reaction rather than anything strictly rational. I have no idea what that cabinet is. I can only imagine that it's dark magic if it can somehow get through the castle's defenses. I would think that the secret passages that you used in third year were not counted by the protective charms. That seems like an oversight to me, but the founders might have had disagreements about how the school should be defended."

"Really?" he asked. The girl was just standing there, panicked. "You didn't tell us about that before."

"In those days I was just reading facts from books and memorizing them. This is something of an extrapolation, but basically Helga Hufflepuff did a large part of the construction, and she openly stated that Rowena Ravenclaw was overconfident on some of the spell-forms that were supposed to be protecting the children. She would have been responsible for the construction of the secret passages, and she had a reason to go behind the backs of the others so that future generations would have a way to evacuate in an emergency."

"That gives the enemy another way in, though."

"That was apparently what Godric Gryffindor said when she brought it up in an early discussion over the design. This is just what I think, but she might not have seen it as terribly likely that anyone who had learned at Hogwarts would come back to destroy it, and a secret passage is narrow enough to be turned into a death trap if need be." She shrugged. "As far as I know, the castle has never been properly attacked, so you could say that it's a moot point."

The girl in the memory seemed to get an idea and started pushing the cabinet out into the hallway, opening the door as soon as she got to it. It was a challenge for a first year witch who seemed to have prioritized learning spells that would help her get rid of evidence, but it was possible that she thought it was Voldemort's only way into the room. She looked around a few times before pushing it into an empty classroom before hitting it with some water that at least had a chance of getting her fingerprints off.

"Wait a minute..." Harry started. "That's the Vanishing Cabinet." He suddenly remembered

"Wait, really?" Hermione asked. "Wasn't that on the first floor?"

"Yeah, it was, I thought it looked familiar... there was one time that Peeves dropped it in a classroom to get me out of trouble with Filch... I think Nick was the one who put him up to it."

"It seems like no one knows its true value, then," she said after a moment. "Fred and George seemed to know what it was when they apparently shoved Montague inside of it, but it had to have been malfunctioning by then, because it would have been trivial for him to return to school if he came out on the other end... wherever that is."

"Well, you can thank Peeves for that, I guess. It's hard to think of a magical artefact getting badly damaged from a simple drop, but it's possible that it's got some delicate magical mechanism and no one realized when it was moved down to the first floor." He frowned. "It was probably Filch that did that; he wouldn't have known what it was or how to put it back right again. If he identified surface-level damage to it, he would have asked someone to cast a simple repair charm as a punishment, and that would have been the most he thought about it."

"I can't help but think that it might be useful to us if we could get it working again, and if we knew where this other end was- it would have been even better if we could have done that for Ron's trip to Hogwarts, because it would have been trivial to get in and out, but at this point, I think the ship might have sailed." She frowned a bit. "Well, at least we know how it happened."

"Where is it now?"

"I don't know. After Montague was nearly lost forever, I would think that someone would have done something with it, but I can't imagine what. Either way, it would be out of reach for students. I think at some point during the last few days of school, I overheard that Professor Trelawney wanted to take a look at it." She rolled her eyes. "Apparently, she thought it was prophetic."

"That's not that surprising. She might have thought it would be easy to fix up, but I don't remember hearing anything about it after that." He frowned. "What teacher would normally handle something like that?"

"I'm not sure. The teachers were all invested in the school and would help with various problems that came up beyond the normal scope of their duties just because they were experts on hand and occasionally just because they were interested, like when Professor Snape brewed Mandrake potions for us in our second year- technically, he could have said that he was not being paid to mass-produce esoteric remedies, but he had the capacity; he simply tasked a handful of upper years to taking care of the grunt work."

"I'm surprised you looked into it."

The vision faded around them. Technically, it was Hermione's memory of a memory that she had seen, but it certainly felt like he had just moved through time again. The forest around them seemed a lot less like home than Hogwarts, even though that was where he had been living the last few days. Had it really been so nice just to reminisce, even over pointless memories like Peeves breaking something or Snape brewing potions?

"I don't have a clue where it is now," she said without his having to ask. "I would guess that if Fred and George could identify it, they probably knew from their father, and several others at the Ministry would be able to identify it. I would not be surprised if it were destroyed."

"I mean, we could go through Ron's memories to see if he saw it, but I don't think he was really looking for it. It'd be weird if it ended up back in the Room of Requirement, but maybe there was a reason it was in there in the first place. It looked like that version of the room was full of junk."

"It was probably just that," his old friend said, shrugging. "Perhaps it never worked properly, or it hadn't in a long time, and that was just where someone decided to leave it. Either way, I'm glad that we were at least able to answer the central question." She looked down.

"I'm sorry to drag you away from other things just for that," he said, remembering she was knackered.

"No, it's no worse than... Harry, the argument that Ron and I had was fake, for the most part. We were always going to send him to get the Horcrux; we just needed a way of convincing you not to go yourself."

"You had a reason." He thought another moment. "You've told me everything since then, right?"

"Are you saying you can trust us again after that?"

"Yeah. I trusted you the whole way through, Hermione. I don't know if you see it that way, but I don't... hang onto conflicts. There was a lot that caught up to me this past year, but you and Ron have always been good friends with me. No matter what happened, you were always there."

"What about the time in fourth year when he didn't believe you about the Goblet of Fire?"

"That was two years ago; I don't even think about it now. Does he still think about that? The fact that Ron threw a fit and didn't speak to me for a bit was proof that he had- Merlin, I don't like putting it like this, but he had genuine feelings and he felt really hurt when he thought I was lying to him. He didn't handle it well, but he's not a fake sycophant like Colin Creevey." He shook his head. "I shouldn't say that. He never pretended to be a friend or anything."

"I told him that the reason I believed you had more to do with my trust in Professor Dumbledore's ability to restrict entry to minors. It didn't seem terribly likely that an older student would enter you because you asked, but there are some who would have done it for a chance to get rid of you. I never said anything, but that was really what I thought it was."

"I don't blame you for that. I didn't even know. Don't tell me something just to see if I would blame you for it."

He went back to see the others without any explanation. It would probably not be a good idea for him to touch the locket, and it would be safely stashed away where they could get it again as soon as possible, but he wanted to take a look at it, if only from a distance. Sure enough, the moment he saw it, he knew something was off, and he knew that he had seen it before.

"We all tried to get it open," he revealed to Neville, who was on watch or something. "Even now I don't know how you would do it."

"Didn't you just destroy the diary with basilisk venom?"

"I don't exactly have a basilisk around. Maybe that would work, though; maybe there's no need to get it open if the venom could get through the silver. Are there any plants that break down magical protections?"

"There's a few, but I would have to actually make a potion that would be effective enough to get through pretty much anything. If I don't know what kind of protections there are, basically I have to add a few more ingredients every time, and you can't just keep adding them; there's stabilizing agents-"

"Get to work on it. We'll get you what you need if you can't find it."

"I'm rubbish at Potions-"

"You know the materials, though, and you know how to get them. We'll get someone who's good at this to help you with it."

"I've been thinking about what you said about vanishing a skeleton." He shook his head. "I don't know why I just understated it right there; I've been practicing it. It worked, but I had to vanish one bone at a time."

"Did anything happen like that before? I've never heard of that."

"Well, my old uncle Archie used to work with animals and I suddenly remembered that he said he never used to get rid of the skeletons; he thought it was all more trouble than it was worth and he left them out for the creatures. Never saw a thing; he just levitated the remains over to the tree line and the next morning, they were gone."

Harry could easily see how a younger Neville might have developed a paralyzing fear of the forest, but it had him thinking. Animals had a lot of similarities to humans, and they had souls, if he remembered from his Care of Magical Creatures book, and the implication of the story was that the adult wizard who worked with them would have known how to vanish corpses if it were possible, but found it easier to get rid of them by letting magical creatures take care of it. Was it really as simple as just blasting them to bits first? Why?

"The last time we spoke about this, I brought up an Inferius."

"I'm almost certain you couldn't vanish them."

"What about once you kill it, or get it close enough to being dead again?"

"I haven't tried that. I would think that nothing would have changed, though. I'm pretty sure you could use the same spell and raise it up again, though you'd have to ask someone who knew dark stuff better than I do."

"Even among those we have, I don't think there's anyone who's messed around with Inferi," he said, thinking about it. He had an unshakeable feeling that there was something to his apparently pointless speculation and was grateful that Neville, who seemed to be totally oblivious, had the patience of a saint and was just going along with it. He had just answered with casual interest and patience since before he would have guessed anything about Horcruces. "Thanks for entertaining all my questions," he said after a moment of thought.

"Not a problem. If you ask me how Gran had all those books that you needed back home, I've got no idea, mate."