Happier with you- Charlie Weasley

DH 10

Early next morning, before the other three were awake, Harry left the tent to search the woods around them for the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient looking tree he could find. There in its shadow he buried Mad-Eye Moody's eye and marked the spot by gouging a small cross in the bark with his wand. Then he returned to the tent to wait for the others to wake, and discuss what they were going to do next. Harry, Rory and Hermione felt that it was best not to stay anywhere too long, and Ron agreed, with the sole proviso that their next move took them within reach of a bacon sandwich. Hermione removed the enchantments she had placed around the clearing, while Harry and Ron obliterated all the marks and impressions on the ground that might show that they had camped there whilst Rory leaned against a tree trying not to put much weight on her leg. She wasn't able to heal herself or Ron with how weak she was and Hermione wasn't willing to try encase something went wrong . Then they Disapparated to the outskirts of a small market town. Once they had pitched the tent in the shelter of a small copse of trees and surrounded it with freshly cast defensive enchantments, Harry ventured out under the Invisibility Cloak to find sustenance. This, however, did not go as planned. He had barely entered the town when an unnatural chill, a descending mist, and a sudden darkening of the skies made him freeze where he stood.

"But you can make a brilliant Patronus!" protested Ron, when Harry arrived back at the tent empty-handed, out of breath, and mouthing the single word, dementors.

"I couldn't make one," he panted, clutching his side. "Wouldn't come."

"So we still haven't got any food."

"Shut up, Ron," snapped Hermione. "Harry, what happened? Why do you think you couldn't make your Patronus? You managed perfectly yesterday "

"I don't know." He sat low in one of Perkins's old armchairs. Ron kicked a chair leg.

"What?" he snarled at Hermione. "I'm starving! All I've had since I bled half to death is a couple of toadstools!"

"You go and fight your way through the dementors, then and I don't see Rory moaning and the same thing happened to her" Harry said.

"I would, but my arm's in a sling, in case you hadn't noticed!"

"That's convenient."

"And what's that supposed to?"

"Of course!" cried Hermione, clapping a hand to her forehead and startling both of them into silence. "Harry, give me the locket! Come on," she said impatiently, clicking her fingers at him, when he did not react, "the Horcrux, Harry, you're still wearing it!" She held out her hands, and Harry lifted the golden chain over his head. "Better?" asked Hermione.

"Yeah, loads better!"

"Harry," she said, crouching down in front of him and using the kind of voice he associated with visiting the very sick, "you don't think you've been possessed, do you?"

"What? No!" he said defensively. "I remember everything we've done while I've been wearing it. I wouldn't know what I'd done if I'd been possessed, would I? Ginny told me there were times when she couldn't remember anything."

"Hmm," Hermione said, looking down at the heavy gold locket. "Well, maybe we ought not to wear it. We can just keep it at the tent."

"We are not leaving that Horcrux lying around," Harry stated firmly. "If we lose it, if it gets stolen"

"Oh, all right, all right," Hermione said, and she placed it around her own neck and tucked it out of sight down the front of her shirt. "But we'll take turns wearing it, so nobody keeps it on for too long."

"Great," Ron said irritably, "and now we've sorted that out, can we please get some food?"

"Fine, but we'll go somewhere else to find it," Hermione said with half a glance at Harry. "There's no point staying where we know dementors are swooping around." In the end they settled down for the night in a far flung field belonging to a lonely farm. Rory, Harry and Hermione spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they had already got, their conversations becoming increasingly repetitive as they had no new information. As Dumbledore had told Harry that he believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they kept teching, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they knew that Voldemort had lived or visited. The orphanage where he had been born and raised, Hogwarts, where he had been educated, Borgin and Burkes, where he had worked after completing school, then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile. These formed the basis of their speculations.