The Art of An Ending

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Room of Hidden Things

Erica wracked her brains over the next week as to how she was going to approach Harry and offer her help in persuading Slughorn to hand over the true memory, but nothing in the nature of a brain-wave occurred and she was reduced to doing what she did increasingly these days when she was at a loss: searching in the Room of Requirement for what a Horcrux was in all the many books it held.

"You won't find anything in here," said Draco firmly, early one Sunday evening.

"Don't start," Erica yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand before returning to rifling through The Darkest Arts with bleary eyes. "At least we're sort of being productive, this way."

"If by productive you mean filling our heads with Dark magic we're never going to use in an attempt to find out what in the name of Merlin a bloody Horcrux is," Pansy huffed, slamming closed Eldest Curses and tossing the ancient tome to the side, not caring when the spine creaked dangerously as she reached forward for the next book in the pile, Middle-Age Monstrosities.

They were sitting in the Room of Requirement surrounded by a growing pile of Dark Arts books in what they had come to refer to as 'the room of hidden things'. Initially it had been a job to hunt down all the books in the maze of broken and forgotten objects, but then the room had begun to help them out, directing them towards stacks of the books until they were completely surrounded, as they were now.

There had been a certain amount of excitement when they had first come to the room, having seen a new sign on the noticeboard back in the common room earlier that announced the date for their Apparition test, but that was gone now. Those who would be seventeen on or before the first test date, the twenty-first of April, had the option of signing up for additional practice sessions, which would take place (heavily supervised) in Hogsmeade.

Pansy had panicked on reading this notice; she had still not managed to Apparate and feared she would not be ready for the test. Draco, who had now achieved Apparition twice, was a little more confident, but Erica, who would not be seventeen for another four months, could not take the test whether she was ready or not.

"At least you can Apparate, though!" said Pansy tersely. "You'll have no problem come July!"

Indeed, she had managed to achieve Apparition on several occasions during their lessons now, though she didn't think it was anything to be proud of. If anything it made her feel sick and dizzy, and she had a feeling that the magic required for Apparition wasn't helping with her condition any more than the actual sensation of it was.

Having wasted a lot of time worrying aloud about Apparition, Pansy was getting grumpy as she rifled through books now, whilst Draco was struggling to finish a viciously difficult essay for Severus that Erica and Pansy had already completed, having only reluctantly come to the Room of Requirement to begin with, tagging alone purely so he didn't have to remain in the common room alone with Harry.

"It's not like- it's not like I hate him or anything," Erica huffed, slamming her own book closed as she collapsed backwards, blowing her fringe out of her face as she glared up at the high ceiling above her. "It's just that Harry is difficult and he's not going to accept help from me even if I offer it, which I wouldn't know how to do, so I don't know what Dumbledore expects me to achieve."

"Evidently he expects you to be able to do something otherwise he wouldn't have asked," Pansy frowned, sounding about as done as Erica felt as she flopped down next to her. "Can't we just go up to Slughorn ourselves and demand that he give us the real memory? You're pretty threatening when you want to be."

"Dumbledore will know, and I'm pretty sure he wants to keep Slughorn around, so threatening him is not the answer we are searching for," Erica groaned, rubbing her hands over her eyes as she tried to think. "We can't exactly slip him anything either for the same reasons, and I don't see how working with Harry at any rate is going to let us be able to get the memory when-"