I spent most of Saturday making the fake cup.
The Room gave me a plain gold goblet when I asked for one, and the rest was Transfiguration and a lot of fiddly charm work.
It needed the two little handles and the badger on the side, and it had to weigh exactly the same as the real one, in case a goblin ever picked it up.
I also made sure the Transfiguration would hold. A copy that turned back into an ordinary goblet in a month would have been worse than no copy at all.
Hermione watched me for the last hour of it.
"How do you know it'll pass?" she asked, turning it over in her hands. "The goblins must know what's in their vaults."
"They know what's in there," I replied. "But I don't think they're going to count Bellatrix Lestrange's cups while she's in Azkaban. Nobody's been in that vault for fourteen years except maybe a goblin with a lamp."
She didn't look completely convinced, but she put it down and went back to her Arithmancy.
At dinner, Hermione pushed her food round her plate and didn't eat any of it.
"You should eat something," I told her.
"I'm not hungry."
"Nobody fights evil properly on an empty stomach," I reminded her. "Someone very clever said that to me once."
She narrowed her eyes at me, but she ate half a jacket potato, which I decided to count as a win.
Further down the table, Fred and George were bent over a letter, and George muttered something about "he can't keep ignoring our owls."
That would be Bagman, who'd paid them in leprechaun gold at the World Cup. I was planning to win the tournament anyway, and I didn't need the thousand Galleons, so the twins could have it.
We met in the common room at midnight.
The last people had gone up to bed around eleven, and I'd waited until Ron started snoring before I got up, because Ron asleep was a lot easier to explain than Ron awake.
Hermione was already sitting in the armchair by the fire when I came down, fully dressed, with her wand in her hand and her hair tied back so it wouldn't get in the way.
"You look like you're about to sit an exam," I said.
"I'd rather be sitting an exam." She stood up. "Go through it again."
So I did, quietly, while the fire burned down. We'd go straight from the common room, under the Cloak, with the cart knot wrapped round both of us this time instead of just me.
I'd take us to the cup's thread instead of a place, so we'd land right next to it.
Then nobody touched anything until I'd checked the vault, and if there were curses on everything, I'd take them off first. After that I'd swap the cups and bring us home.
"And the Infinity?" she asked.
"Off until I've had a look at the vault's magic. I don't want to find out down there that it does something funny to their wards."
She nodded. She'd heard it about six times already.
"You've never Apparated to a thread before," she said.
"I practised yesterday," I said. "I put a bit of my own magic on your Arithmancy book in the library and went straight to it, and then I did the same with the Easter egg Ron's been hiding under his bed. A thread's just a stronger version of that."
"He's still got some of it left?"
"About half. He's rationing it."
Hermione shook her head at that, and then she held out her hand. Her fingers were cold, and when I took them she held on hard.
"If anything feels wrong down there," she said, "anything at all, we come straight back. You don't stay to finish it."
"I promise," I said. "First sign of anything wrong, we're back on this rug."
She nodded, and I pulled the Cloak over both our heads.
One moment we were standing on the rug in Gryffindor Tower, and the next we were in the dark, on cold stone, a very long way under London.
The noticing ward brushed over us, found the cart knot and lost interest. I didn't relax yet, though, because something was breathing on the other side of the wall.
It was a big, slow sound, like an enormous pair of bellows. Something heavy shifted, and I heard chains drag across stone.
Hermione's fingers dug into my hand. "Is that the dragon?"
"Yeah," I whispered. "It's outside the vault, not in it. It can't get to us."
"Lumos." I kept the light at the tip of my wand down to a dim glow. We were inside the Lestrange vault. It was bigger than it had looked in the films, and every inch of it was full.
Gold was piled up against the walls, and every shelf was crammed with jewelled goblets and things I didn't want to look at too closely.
The Lestranges had clearly never thrown anything away in their lives. I only wanted one cup, which was also the only thing in here Bellatrix would actually have cared about losing.
The thread pulled upwards. The cup was on a high shelf near the back, and next to all the jewels around it, it looked almost plain.
"Don't move," I told Hermione.
"I'm staying three feet back," she whispered. "I said I would."
I let my senses go out over the vault, the same way I had in the lobby. The goblin magic was all over the walls and the door, and I left that alone.
Under that, sitting on every single object in the room, were the Gemino and Flagrante Curses.
So somebody had already put them on. They were wizard curses, though, which meant I could follow their shape.
I started at the door end of the vault and worked my way towards the back. It wasn't quick.
There were a lot of things in that vault, and each curse had been laid over all of them at once, like a sheet thrown over furniture, so I had to lift it off carefully instead of tearing it.
If I'd torn it, I had a feeling the whole vault would have gone off at once, and I didn't fancy being buried under a mountain of burning gold on our first proper heist.
Every time a layer came loose, the gold underneath gave off a faint red shimmer, like heat coming off a road in summer, and then went dull.
Behind me, Hermione was breathing very carefully through her nose, and on the other side of the wall, the dragon kept up its slow bellows noise. Every so often the chains moved.
"It's chained up," Hermione whispered after a while. "Isn't it."
"Yes." I didn't stop working. "We can't do anything about it tonight without telling the whole of Gringotts we were here."
"I know that," she said. "Someone should, though. Afterwards."
She was right, and the dragon went on my list of things to fix once all this was over. In the books, Harry, Ron and Hermione had flown out of here on its back, which was probably the best day that dragon had had in years.
It took me about twenty minutes to get both curses off everything. When I was done, the magic in the room had gone a lot quieter.
I tested it by touching the nearest gold coin with the tip of my wand. It stayed one coin.
"Done," I said. "You can move now. Just don't touch anything if you don't have to."
"I've been standing on one flagstone for twenty minutes," Hermione whispered. "I wasn't going to start touching things now."
I didn't try summoning it. Goblins had spent centuries making sure nobody could Accio anything out of their vaults, and this wasn't the vault to test that in.
I lifted myself off the floor instead, slowly, until the high shelf was level with my chest, and took the cup down by hand.
As soon as my fingers closed round it, the piece of soul inside woke up. It was a lot like the locket.
It knew straight away what I was, and it pushed against my hand, trying to make me drop it. I didn't.
I took the fake out of my pocket, let it grow back to its proper size and set it down in exactly the spot the real one had been. Then I came back down and checked it twice from below to make sure it looked right.
I knelt, put the real cup on the stone in front of me and pulled the soul orb into being over it with my wand.
The piece in the cup came out screaming, and for a second I saw young Riddle's face in the smoke again, mouth open to say something.
I wasn't letting it talk. The orb closed over it before it got a word out, and I felt its thread go slack and then disappear.
"Six down," I said.
Hermione had both arms wrapped round herself. "It sounded the same as the diadem."
"They're all bits of the same person," I replied.
I left the cup where it was and went over to her. Nothing in the vault could hurt us now, but I still kept my elbows in.
When I put my arm round her, she was shaking a bit, and she leaned her forehead against my collarbone and stayed there while the dragon dragged its chains on the other side of the wall.
"Sorry," she said after a while. "I'm fine. They're just horrible when they scream."
"I don't like it much either," I said.
She stayed where she was until the chains went quiet. Then she stepped back, tucked a loose bit of hair behind her ear and nodded at the floor, so I went and got the cup.
It was just an old gold cup now. I wrapped it in the cloth I'd brought and shrank the bundle down to about the size of a walnut before it went in my pocket.
Before we left, I put both curses back on the vault, exactly the way I'd found them.
If anyone ever did come in here, it would be every bit as nasty as it was supposed to be, and the fake would burn and multiply like everything else.
"Let's go home," I said.
I took her hand. The cart knot was still wrapped round us both. I checked the shelf one last time, and then I took us back to Gryffindor Tower.
The common room was exactly the way we'd left it, with the fire down to embers and a Chocolate Frog wrapper on the floor next to the armchair.
The whole thing had taken less than an hour, and nobody in Gringotts had any idea we'd been there.
Perfect stealth run. Not one alarm.
"We just robbed Gringotts," Hermione said. She sat down on the arm of the chair, still holding her wand. "We actually just robbed Gringotts."
"We recovered some stolen property," I said, dropping into the armchair across from her. "That makes us the good guys."
"We broke into a bank at midnight and left a forgery on the shelf." She finally put her wand away in her pocket, and then she started laughing, with her hand pressed over her mouth so she wouldn't wake the whole tower.
We went to the Room, even though it was nearly one in the morning, because Hermione said she wouldn't be able to sleep until it was on the board.
She drew a tick in the cup's box, under OPERATION HONEY BADGER and her badger, and stood back to look at it.
There was only one box left without a tick now, the snake's, with the arrow pointing at the stick figure with devil horns.
"Six down," she said.
"One to go. Plus him."
She put the chalk down and turned round. She looked tired, and there was chalk dust all down the front of her jumper. I thought she was going to say something about bed.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we talk about Dumbledore. Properly. You promised."
"Yeah," I said.
She kissed me on the cheek. I felt the cup in my pocket to make sure it was still there, and then we went back to the common room together.
*
P@treon : Eternal97