Breaking Hermione

Carnal Desires

I had no idea that Tom had long since given up chasing me until a Portrait of an elderly scholar reprimanded me on the ground floor.

"What are you running from, girl? Yourself?"

"What? Oh..."

Luckily for me Professor Slughorn's office was on the sixth floor, not too much of a mission to get to. I approached, knocking smartly on his closed door as I waited for him to respond.
After a moment of distinct silence, I knocked again, this time louder and hard enough for my knuckles to hurt.

Nothing.

I stepped back, weighing up my options. I could go to Headmaster Dippet. There was a chance Slughorn was already there having a good old banter with Dippet with a bottle of Oak Matured Mead in hand.... I paused, and then reaching a decision began making my way up to the Headmasters office, walking as though expecting Tom to leap out from behind a corner and yell avada kedavra!

But nothing happened. Tom didn't show up, I opened his diary in the secluded corridor outside of Headmaster Dippets office feeling as though I'd just hit the jackpot. However the feeling died almost as instantly as it came, as I opened Tom's diary all I saw was pages of...

Nothing.

"Damn it!" I yelled. Tom had gone and erased the entire contents of the diary! But how?

"Is there something wrong?" Of course it was Professor Dippet who came hobbling toward me from out of the shadows. I felt like I was going to scream. I was seconds away from a breakthrough, and was crushed at the last most critical moment by Tom Riddle. I grinned a wide, unnatural smile as he slowly came closer.

"I'm fine Professor, I was just uh, admiring that gargoyle over there." I lied through my teeth.

"It's a curious thing, I find." Headmaster Dippet said lightly. "Sometimes we say things that are irrelevant to mask the things we were originally wanting to say."

"Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm following you Headmaster..."

"Well if I could chance a guess about why you were standing outside my office, I'd say it would have had something to do with what is left of that book in your hands."

I looked down and sure enough Tom's diary had split cleanly down the binding, ripped in two by my sheer frustration.

"Youre right." I said after a pause.
"I was going to show you this diary of Tom Riddle's that he had written in regarding me."

Headmaster Dippet gave me a sharp look. "And what was it that was written inside of it?" He took the book out of my hands looking over it with academic interest.

"It was... Things about me." I said quietly. Pages of notes about me. But as soon as I came here all of the pages became blank."

Dippet drew his wand and tapped the binding, the book knitted itself back into it's former untarnished self, the pages slowly filling with that elegant inked script from Tom's own hand.

Headmaster Dippet read a few pages, a grim look on his face.

"Ah, unrequited love." He murmured with a reminiscent smile. "I remember being in the same position as poor Tom here! Quite some time ago of course..."

I frowned. Something wasn't right here.
I craned my neck for a better look at the pages Dippet was seeing and much to my horror I saw that there was nothing about me at all! Instead pages filled with neatly inked heartbroken drivel that could've easily been written by a lamenting Moaning Myrtle. I clenched my fists. So Tom had put some kind of glamour on the book, did he?