This summer, Harry had grown closer to his relatives and his cousin, and after Dudley was sorted into the same House, they began spending all their free time together, including Hermione Granger as Harry's fiancée and their resident brains all in one. But even in his worst nightmares, the boy had never dreamed of entrusting his most intimate secret to anyone. No one among the living, half-living, undead, dead, or those who had not passed through the veil into the afterlife must ever learn that he was not entirely Harry Potter.
It was not that he was ashamed of being Thomas Riddle, but the reputation of his former "Ego" did the boy no credit, and he wanted to forget about it. But it kept haunting him.
Just as Voldemort's old snake, Nagini, had recently haunted him after she was found not far from Hagrid's hut. Sensing the approach of Potter, who was out walking with his fiancée, Nagini desperately rushed forward, crying out in the language of snakes:
"Massster, massster! You have risssen from the deaaad-sss..."
From the outside, it looked like an attack on the Boy-Who-Lived, and Hermione, frightened for him, rushed forward with her wand at the ready, shielding him with her slender body. But Potter easily pushed her aside and, ignoring her stunned and disbelieving expression, touched the snake crawling toward them, having recognized her at first glance.
Nagini first ran her forked tongue over the skin of the boy's hand, hissing at last:
"You sssmell different, massster, but it isss ssstill you-sss!" and wrapped her thick, long body around his thin one, thin not because Potter was still underfed, but because he had grown a good fifteen centimeters that summer.
Her eyes came level with Harry's emerald ones, and he remembered his final Horcrux, the one he had accidentally left inside his familiar.
"Bite me, Nagiiini-ssss, bite me betweeen the eyessss," he hissed to the snake, and obeying the command, she pricked the boy in the middle between his thick eyebrows, not far from the reddening scar.
The venom poured into his flesh, and he immediately stopped feeling it.
From somewhere far away, Hermione's screams reached his fading consciousness—"Harry, Harry, wake up, don't die..."—but they had no meaning in the dimension where his next Horcrux was moving toward him. Without saying anything, it immediately touched the already growing magical core and merged with it, giving the nearly whole soul its share of power and several very interesting memories.
As soon as the first-years appeared in the Gryffindor common room, Harry identified that enchanted soul—Giacomina, no, no, Ginevra Weasley, he thought. She smelled of his Horcrux; he sensed his own malicious little aura surrounding her, but he had no desire to associate with either her or her brothers.
Ron kept trying to befriend Harry and initially made filthy remarks about his brother Dudley, hoping that his caustic comments would remind his dark-haired classmate of his difficult life among the Muggles on Privet Drive and thereby drive a wedge between the cousins. Refusing to believe the girls' claims that Hermione and Harry Potter had become engaged over the summer, Ron was not particularly polite toward the curly-haired brunette either, until after his second insulting remark, he was told to get lost... Since then, Ronald Weasley had spent his days portraying an icon of doubt, disbelief, and accusation.
None of his brothers helped the youngest one climb out of the swamp into which he had drowned himself with his large, verbally incontinent mouth.
Percy had his head in the clouds, basking in the rays of his golden prefect badge, and no brothers—mere ants beneath the feet of the Great and Unattainable Gryffindor Prefect—interested him. Nor was he interested in Ginny, the little sister who sought his attention every morning so she could cry and complain about wicked fate, which had taken "HER Harry" away from her and placed him in the hands of a Mudblood.
Percy stepped on his sister's foot, hinting that she should speak more quietly so that no one from the red House would hear that a family devoted to the Light knew "those words," and she fell resentfully silent.
Ginny ran to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom to complain to her, having found a kindred spirit who was just as wronged, and to communicate with the diary of a boy named Tom.
In Tom, wherever he lived and whoever he was, Ginny found a friend. She wrote in the notebook she had found among her secondhand textbooks about everything—everything that oppressed her, everything that hurt inside her little heart. She wrote about her dreams of taking the place of the horrible, bushy-haired Mudblood Granger-Major, who had beaten Ginny to it and bewitched Harry Potter with some extremely powerful love potion, since he had committed such an abomination—becoming engaged to the swotty buck-toothed know-it-all.
Tom answered her at once, persuading the red-headed girl not to grieve but to follow his instructions on how to unleash the terror of the dungeons upon the school, the dreadful beast of Salazar Slytherin, which would kill all the Mudbloods, and then Harry Potter would belong to her, Ginny.
And this morning, Hermione disappeared.
Hermione was a different matter entirely, something of a completely different order. She was his fiancée, and if anything happened to her, if so much as a hair fell from her head, her kidnappers would regret it.
The evening of the previous day.
"Sit down, my girl. Some tea?"
The old headmaster's azure eyes shimmered toward the girl with a mass of chestnut curls on her head, who was stunned by the group attack of all the Weasley boys.
Hermione-damn-Potter's-fiancée had finally been caught. For two months, she had moved around the castle permanently glued either to her fiancé or to his cousin, or surrounded by a crowd of students. At last, Potter and his cousin had been successfully put to sleep after escaping the supervision of the greatest wizard since Merlin—Albus Dumbledore—and the petrified fiancée had been brought to his office. Once the headmaster had finished dealing with the bushy-haired upstart, he would throw her to the Weasley boys for their amusement.
After drinking a cup filled with Dreamless Sleep Potion mixed with a Subjugation Potion, Hermione passed out, falling to the floor at the base of the headmaster's large desk, and he immediately sprang up and launched into a flurry of activity. He moved the limp girl's body back onto the chair and bound her to it with the black ropes of Incarcerous. From a drawer in his desk, he took out an enchanted mirror that reflected the most terrible fears of the person looking into it and fixed it with a spell directly in front of the girl's eyes.
Then, with a wave of his wand, he woke her and began waiting for her reaction to what she saw in the mirror.
The fog in her head slowly cleared, and Hermione's brown eyes opened. In front of her, she saw herself—equally stunned, with her eyes fixed straight ahead. But, dear God, how repulsively hideous she had become! The disgusting face was covered with pimples the size of craters on the Moon. The lips of her mouth were lifted by enormous, long, crooked, yellowish teeth. The teeth were so disproportionately huge that the nostrils of her nose pointed directly forward like two dark holes in the middle of her face. Her nose had swollen like a potato, and her eyes—ooohhh... Streams of tears flowed from her eyes, and the girl jerked backward so she would not have to look at herself.
Then, in the mirror, she saw what was happening behind her back.
There, her fiancé was embracing little Ginny Weasley and kissing her with complete abandon. In his arms, she looked like a porcelain figurine—so delicate and pale, with fiery red hair that drew the eye and stood in vivid contrast to Hermione's limp tangles of indeterminate dirty color.
Hermione moaned from the wild despair that had seized her consciousness and was imperceptibly creeping toward her broken heart. Waves of despair mingled with fits of longing to die right now—at this very moment, here—on the spot.
Suddenly, unbearable pain tore through her, and she felt herself flying into the unknown and falling into an abyss of darkness at the same time.
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