Special Services in the Room of Requirement Chapter 12

AN: Hello everyone! I want to thank you all for the feedback you gave me on last month's poll. I can now confirm that Harry and Hermione will continue to use the room and sleep with other people while remaining in a devoted relationship to one another.

I know that this story has been a little slow going, but I wanted to reassure you that with Becoming Harry's Favourite concluding this month, I'll have more time to dedicate towards this story. We're just past the halfway point, so there's still several more months of this story to come. I will try to post 2 chapters of this story each month starting in June so that we can get things moving a bit faster. The first chapter of next month will have a sex scene in it too.

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It took a while before Harry was able to find Hermione. He had tried all of the obvious places: spots around Hogsmeade, the Burrow, her home, Diagon Alley, and anywhere else that he could think of, but she was nowhere to be found. Everywhere he’d gone, people had stared at him oddly, but he was desperate to find her. Rita learning about the goings on in the Room of Requirement was her worst fear come to life, and as much as Harry wanted to go after Rita with Neville and Hannah, he knew that his first priority was to find Hermione.

Eventually, he realized that she had gone back to somewhere safe and comfortable: Hogwarts.

At first he had checked their rooms, but she wasn’t there either. That was when he had an idea. He left the Gryffindor dorms and strode out onto the seventh floor and weaved his way around to the Room of Requirement itself. As he’d expected, the door to the room was present.

The door unlatched at his touch, and Harry swung it inward. He hurriedly stepped inside and closed the door behind him. It was only after he turned back around that he realized where he was.

Hermione was sitting on the floor a few feet away from him staring at the room within the Room of Requirement. It looked exactly as it did during their set times with black drapes obscuring the exterior of the room and the small section where the men waited for the women to get into position. Hermione had her knees drawn up to her chest and her head resting on top of her arms as she stared at the room.

“Hermione?” Harry spoke softly despite the fact that she must have heard him come in. Hermione didn’t reply, so Harry took a few tentative steps forward and sat down beside her. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes and then looked back at the room. Harry wanted to say something or comfort her, but he didn’t know what he could say to make things better. So, he simply put his arm around her waist and hugged her against his side.

It was several minutes before Hermione finally spoke. “This was all such a stupid mistake,” she murmured sadly.

“I don’t think so,” Harry replied as nicely as he could.

“We did this because we didn’t want to have to deal with the stresses of dating in the public eye,” Hermione countered passionately. Harry could hear the anger and frustration in her tone. “We did this because it was anonymous,” she stressed. “Now, it’s all going to come out, and who knows what will happen. We never should have joined this in the first place.”

“If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have gotten together,” Harry pointed out, squeezing Hermione’s waist comfortingly. “I definitely wouldn’t have had the courage to ask you out.”

“You don’t know what would have happened,” Hermione said, shaking her head slightly.

“No, I don’t,” Harry admitted. “If we hadn’t come here, maybe we would have ended up together and maybe we wouldn’t have; neither of us can predict what would have happened. But what I do know is that it was because of this room that we got together. I’ll never regret coming here because of that.”

Hermione sniffled and wiped away something off of her face. “I don’t either,” she admitted. “But . . .”

“I know,” Harry said. “But we’ll get through this together. We have to trust in Hannah and Neville to deal with Skeeter, and then we’ll go from there.”

“You’re right,” Hermione murmured, letting out a shuddering breath. She didn’t sound too sure, but at least she was trying to be positive for Harry’s sake.

Seeing Hermione distressed like this made Harry feel like he’d been punched in the gut. He hated seeing her hurt or sad like this, especially after all they went through in the war together. He just wanted her to be safe and sound and to never have to deal with problems like this. But that wasn’t the world they lived in.

“Come on,” Harry said, pushing himself to his feet. He held out his hand for Hermione. He wasn’t going to let her stay miserable like this. “Let’s get out of here and—”

Something heavy crashed against the door of the Room of Requirement; the door nearly burst inward, but the magic that compelled it to say shut held it in place. There was another loud thud and a series of bangs from out in the corridor.

“What is that?” Hermione asked, wiping away the unshed tears from her eyes. She got to her feet with her wand in her hand, and Harry drew his own.

“I don’t know,” he replied with a slight frown. He was about to take a step forward when the doors to the Room of Requirement suddenly burst open and a flurry of coloured lights soared inward.

“Protego!” Hermione shouted, bringing up a perfect shield charm. Half a dozen spells struck the shield and exploded into hundreds of sparks and a thick cloud of smoke.

“She’s getting away!”

“Neville?” Harry called out, coughing as he tried to wave away the smoke. It sounded like the Gryffindor man, but it was impossible to see him. “Ventus!” He called out with a flick of his wand.

A jet of wind blew away the smoke, and Harry saw Neville and Hannah slamming the door to the Room of Requirement shut behind them. They both looked disheveled and out of breath as their eyes scanned the room wildly.

“What’s going on?” Hermione asked them, her gaze starting to instinctively scan the room too.

“Skeeter’s here!” Hannah called out. Suddenly, her eyes focused on something and she jabbed her wand forward. A jet of blue light shot out and struck the ceiling, sending a bunch of powdery plaster moulding tumbling to the floor.

Through the debris, Harry spotted a tiny blue beetle flying through the air towards the room within the Room of Requirement. “There!” He pointed with his finger, and Neville fired off a stinging hex right towards it. The beetle dove downward and disappeared half a second before the spell would have struck it.

“She never left the Hog’s Head,” Neville explained as he came up beside Harry and Hermione. “She was hiding under the roof just outside the front door waiting for us. After you two left, she tried to hide in Hannah’s robes, but I spotted her. We’ve been chasing her all around, and we finally got her back to Hogwarts. She can’t apparate in her animagus form, so she’s trapped while we have her cornered like this.”

“And she can’t apparate off of school grounds,” Hannah reminded them.

Harry let out a sigh of relief. You could always trust Rita Skeeter to go after a story, and to get greedy to try to get more out of it. “Thank you, both of you,” he said sincerely. “We need to catch her and figure out what to do with her.”

“We could always squish her like the bug she is,” Hannah said with a malicious gleam in her eye. Neville nodded along with her, but Harry saw the reticent look on Hermione’s face. He knew that she wouldn’t want to commit to anything until she’d had the time to think it through properly, and that was a difficult thing to do with her current emotional state.

“Let’s try to just capture her for now,” Harry suggested. They had blackmailed Skeeter by threatening to reveal her status as an illegal animagus, but given the fact that she was now back to digging up dirt on Harry and Hermione, he suspected that it might not be a viable option again. It wasn’t innately obvious to Harry as to how he should solve this, but he felt confident that the four of them together could come up with something.

“I’ll keep watch back here to make sure that she doesn’t try to sneak past us and slip out,” Hannah told the rest of them as she took up a defensive position by the door.

Neville brushed away the sweat from his brow. “She nearly gave us the slip a few times,” he said tiredly. “I’ll be glad to see her dealt with.”

“I really appreciate you helping us out like this, Neville,” Harry told him.

Neville gave Harry a slight smile. “You two aren’t the only ones that’d be hurt by this. Hannah and I have a duty to make sure that everyone else stays safe too.”

Together, the three of them started off towards the room within the Room of Requirement. With a flick of his wand, Harry yanked back the dark drapes that obscured the entrance to it. His eyes were continuously scanning for any sign of the tiny blue beetle as they entered, but there was no sign of it anywhere.

“Homenum revelio,” Neville murmured with a wave of his wand.

“It won’t work,” Hermione told him quietly. “Animagi can slip past most human-detecting charms and enchantments.”

“Right,” Neville said a little sheepishly, but then his gaze suddenly fixed itself on the wall in front of them. If Harry didn’t know any better, he would have assumed that Neville had gone loopy for a second. “She’s in there,” Neville said suddenly, sucking in a deep breath.

“She’s back in her human form?” Hermione asked sharply, anxiety tinging her tone.

Neville nodded slowly.

“Then it’s time to sort this out,” Harry said as he slipped past Hermione and Neville. He walked through the winding passage and stepped through the next black drape into the large room.

Rita Skeeter was crouched down several feet away, peering through one of the waist-high holes in the wall with a curious look on her face. “You know, I honestly didn’t believe what I heard from you all earlier,” she said, not even bothering to look Harry’s way. “I thought you’d noticed me and were trying to trick me with a ridiculous story, but here we are.”

“I thought we had an agreement,” Harry said as he sensed Hermione and Neville come into the room behind him. “We wouldn’t report you for being an illegal animagus and you wouldn’t write about us anymore.”

Rita gave a sickly-sweet smile and stood back up to her full height. “The deal was to keep my quill to myself for a full year, which I did.”

“And now you’re back to your old tricks,” Harry glared at her.

“My dear, sweet boy,” Rita said, taking a couple hip-swaying steps towards him. “I’m just reporting on the important news that people want to hear.”

“You’re a gossip-monger, nothing more,” Neville snapped.

Rita shrugged. “If that’s what you want to call me, that’s fine. The public knows what it wants, and I fulfill that desire by reporting on the stories that they care about. If you don’t like it, why don’t you stop my readers from reading?”

“If you aren’t supplying that garbage, then people won’t be able to read it,” Neville argued.

Rita laughed haughtily. “Please, if I wasn’t the one writing these stories, then someone else would be. It’s how it’s always been and always will be.”

Harry didn’t like this. He knew that Rita was an excellent manipulator, but she seemed supremely confident for someone cornered like this. There were only a few reasons she’d feel that way, and none of them were good.

“We don’t want you to publish anything else on us, ever,” Harry told Rita clearly.

She arched an eyebrow his way. “And I would like to be richer than the Malfoys, but that isn’t likely to happen either.”

“We’ll reveal your animagus status,” Neville threatened.

Rita grinned. “You go right ahead and do that.”

That confirmed Harry’s fear. “You registered with the Ministry?” He asked.

“Precisely,” Rita cooed. “You can’t blackmail me with that anymore. You know, I have to thank you for doing that for me. I kept my animagus status a secret for years and I was so worried about it getting out, but once you blackmailed me, I knew my secret wouldn’t last forever. I came clean and registered with the Ministry. Perhaps you should consider letting your secrets become public,” she said, gesturing to the room around her. “It can be quite freeing.”

From the look on Rita’s face, she knew that that was the last thing any of them wanted to do. She seemed to revel in the uncomfortable standoff between them, and the realization that they couldn’t blackmail her anymore.

Harry could feel his grip on his wand tightening, and he forced himself to relax. “I think I’d prefer to come to another sort of arrangement.”

“Oh?” Rita drawled, looking terribly curious as to what Harry had to offer her. “And what would that be? Any dark secrets you’re willing to spill to keep this one safe? It had better be something juicy.”

“It won’t work, Harry,” Neville whispered quietly. “Whatever you give her, it’ll never be enough. She’ll always have this over us.”

Harry glanced at his friend. “I know, but—”

“You don’t need to do this, you know,” Hermione said passionately, finally speaking up.

Rita smiled at Hermione. “I don’t need to, but I can. And I want to.”

“Obliviate!”

Harry jumped and whirled around, pointing his wand at Hannah who had sneaked up on them. Her hand was trembling as she drew her wand back, but her face revealed her conviction in what she had just done.

“Hannah!” Neville exclaimed. “What did you—”

“I did what was necessary,” Hannah interjected. “She was going to cause so many problems for us and everyone else who uses the room. Besides, it’s not like she hasn’t had this coming for years.”

As Neville went over to Hannah to have a heated but hushed conversation, Harry turned back towards Rita to see that Hermione had approached the older woman. Harry walked up alongside her and saw the damage that had been done.

“She’s completely out of it,” Hermione murmured, staring into the vacant eyes of Rita. The older witch was swaying back and forth gently with her jaw hung open lazily. She didn’t seem aware of her surroundings in the slightest.

Hermione placed her wand against Hannah’s head and began murmuring a list of diagnostic charms that Harry was quite familiar with from his time in the Hospital Wing. She had a serious look in her eye as she worked. It was understandable given how personal memory charms were for her now.

Memory charms were notoriously difficult to manage, though he knew that Hermione was at least competent enough with them given the fact that she successfully memory-charmed her parents to hide them from the Death Eaters. Hermione had managed to return her parents’s memories to them after the war, but it had been a difficult journey towards reconciliation. Once something was taken away, it could never return to exactly what it once was. Given the heightened emotions they’d all experienced today, Harry didn’t know if Hannah’s memory charm worked as well as Hermione’s had on her parents.

From behind them, Harry heard sniffling. When he looked back, Hannah had a regretful look on her face as she wiped away the tears that were leaking down her cheeks.

“I did what I had to,” she argued to Neville.

“We didn’t have to use a Memory Charm on her,” Neville groaned in frustration. “You could have given her brain damage if your spell wasn’t perfect!”

Given the look in her eyes, Hannah already knew that it was a possibility. “I just wanted her to forget all about us and to leave us alone,” she sniffled.

“I think she’s forgotten a lot more than that,” Hermione said, getting everyone’s attention. She was holding Rita still, but the woman still looked like she was lost in a haze. “She needs to go to St Mungo’s. The Memory Charm wasn’t done right, and I don’t know how to check how much memory and time she’s lost.”

“Merlin,” Neville breathed out. “This is awful.”

It really was. Memory charms were not necessarily regulated, but the non-consensual use of one on a witch or wizard was considered a crime under most circumstances. They needed to get Rita to St Mungo’s so that she didn’t get any worse and the extent of the damage could be analysed, but they also needed to figure out what they were going to do about Hannah.

One on hand, Harry was happy with what she’d done. Now, it was unlikely that Rita would be able to threaten or hurt them. On the other hand, Hannah had just wiped away a lot of a person’s memories. That wasn’t something that anyone should be able to do. If the Ministry found out about this . . .

Hermione was biting her lip in thought. “Skeeter crossed a lot of people. Maybe we can say that someone else—”

“No,” Neville and Hannah shook their heads in unison, and then they looked surprised at the other for saying what they did.

“We can’t just sweep this under the rug,” Neville said regretfully. “I’m sorry, Hannah, but we need to tell someone about this.”

Hannah nodded sadly. “I know.”

“Let’s get her to St Mungo’s before we do anything else,” Harry suggested. There was still time yet before everyone had to be back from Hogsmeade. They could head back out past the wards, apparate over to St Mungo’s and drop off Rita, and then return back here. “After that, we’ll go talk to Kingsley about this.”

The new Minister was always happy to talk to Harry, especially since it helped his popularity with the public. Although Harry hated to use his fame for anything, this was one instance where he was happy to use it to hopefully get an urgent appointment.

“Yeah, he’ll help us,” Neville added.

Harry hoped he would. At the very least, maybe he could help guide them through whatever was to come.

Hermione carefully transfigured Rita into a small book and stuffed her into her robes. The additional spell shouldn’t cause any complications so long as they returned her to her normal form within a couple of hours.

Together, Harry and Hermione led out Hannah and Neville, who were both standing awkwardly apart from one another. It was clear to Harry that there had been more to their discussion than what he had overheard. At least they were just being awkward around each other and not fighting for now.

“Maybe this was for the best,” Hermione murmured softly to Harry as the four of them made their way through the halls of Hogwarts. “It’s awful what happened, but at least it happened to someone who isn’t a good person.”

“I was thinking about that too,” Harry grimaced, glancing back at Hannah to make sure that she hadn’t overheard them. She was still obviously upset and filled with conflicting emotions over the matter, and Harry didn’t want to disturb her any further. “I just want you to know that I won’t leave your side, no matter what.”

Hermione took Harry’s hands into hers and gave him a grateful squeeze.