In Perpetuum

Chapter 38

Chapter 38: Iustus magis

In the wake of her epic fight with Sirius, Hermione was still simmering.

It had been three weeks, and still, the smallest thing would set her off. It was not in a crying or moping kind of way either. She would get angry, and she would look like she wanted to throw the offending person into the next century.

The situation with Sirius had done absolutely nothing to improve her relationship with James, and Ma’s letter writing had reached new frantic levels as a result.

So it was with a heavy heart that Hermione continued to move through the motions of everyday life. She would get up, have breakfast in the Great Hall, go to class, do her homework and go to bed.

Her friends (or rather, what was left of them) were starting to get very worried. She hardly spoke to them, and the only Marauder that she spoke to now was Remus. She would often sit in the library with him, whilst they did their homework, in silence.

Once a week, Hermione would visit Dumbledore’s office and they would discuss the possible location of the final horcrux. All that Hermione knew was that it was Slytherin’s locket and that it was in a seaside cave. She knew that Tom Riddle had visited that place as a child with the other children of the orphanage.

Dumbledore had since been in contact with the orphanage to no avail. The muggle woman who had been in charge at the time, Mrs Cole, had passed away. There was no way of telling exactly where the children had visited, or even where it was once they did find the beach.

HPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHP

The summer holidays had begun and Hermione was more alone than ever. With the summer holidays came Sirius spending almost every waking moment, and sometimes almost every sleeping moment at the Manor.

They tried their best to avoid one another, but sometimes this avoidance caused more tension that what they had hoped to avoid. When the three teenagers were together (mostly it was because Ma insisted that the family eat their meals together), they would sit in solemn silence, to the great consternation of Ma and Pops.

Despite the fact that it was the holidays, Hermione would Floo over to Hogwarts castle for her weekly meeting with Dumbledore. After all, Voldemort was not resting, so why should she?

It came as a bit of a shock to Hermione when one day in mid-June, Dumbledore told her that he had managed to locate the final horcrux.

Apparently, he had tracked down a boy who had been in the orphanage with Tom Riddle. Dumbledore had, with some difficulty, managed to extract a memory of that day, which now resided in a glass phial.

Hermione’s hands trembled in excitement as she watched Dumbledore pour the silvery liquid into his Pensieve. At Dumbledore’s invitation, she plunged her head into said Pensieve and watched the scene play out.

A young Tom Riddle did not frolic at the edge of the water as the other children did. He stayed in the shadows of the cliff face where the waves broke most dangerously. One wrong move and he could have slipped into the churning water and been repeatedly beaten across the sharp edges of the rocks. Yet Tom Riddle seemed to move with ease and a gracefulness that the other children did not posses.

Hermione took note of the landscape and committed it to memory. This was where they would be travelling, this was where the horcrux was.

With steely determination she took hold of Dumbledore’s arm and, together, they travelled into the crushing darkness.

HPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHP

They landed near the mouth of the cave. The landscape had changed very little in the intervening years between Tom Riddle and Hermione Potter. The rocks appeared to have receded a little more into a more weather-beaten state, but apart from that it was exactly as it had been in the Pensieve.