A/N:
This pair of drabbles was written as a Christmas present for Isha (Gossipsoundsgood) as part of the HPFC Secret Santa event organised by the wonderful Sophie (Screaming Faeries).
Merry Christmas and happy reading everyone!
Jasmine
Three down, seven to go.
Hermione closed the book and pushed it over the side of the desk. Instead of falling it floated towards the nearby portable bookshelf and landed neatly on top of Modern Enchanted Seals, vol.2. The witch sighed, scribbled something on a sheet of paper, and silently summoned her 1808 edition of Entrapping Magicks. She spent the next hour and a half alternating between reading the aged pages and frowning at the rapidly increasing number of notes rotating around her. Sometimes she would rearrange them with a flick of her wand but that never seemed to help. They were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn't really fit together.
The case she was working on was getting out of hand. She had what was probably the most extensive private library on magical artefacts, she knew the best engineers and antique specialists in Europe, and despite all of the resources at her disposal her progress so far had been laughable.
Harry's team had brought her an intricate piece of clockwork machinery after one of their raids several months ago. It looked remarkably like a muggle pocket watch but was roughly the size of a coffee table. She had no idea what it was meant to do; all she knew was that it was clearly broken and that it reeked of magic even more strongly than Voldemort's horcruxes had. The evil thing just stayed there, ten feet or so from her desk, mocking her.
Hermione let her gaze wander past the mysterious device and towards the far end of the room, where Draco was working quietly. He had fashioned himself a working station much like the one from his old shop. Half a dozen floating marble surfaces of various size occupied his side of the lab. Most of them hosted tools, muggle and magical alike, all meticulously ordered in a way that seemed perfectly natural to Draco but was completely incomprehensible for Hermione. A long and narrow surface equipped with an adjustable magnifying glass on one end served as his working table.
Unlike Hermione, who could easily spend hours on end bend over her books, Draco preferred working on his feet. In the privacy of their lab he forsook his robes and wore dark trousers and a T-shirt instead – loose sleeves posed an unnecessary risk when examining delicate magical artefacts. His pale skin contrasted sharply with his clothes and almost blended with the marble giving him an eerie look from a distance. Hermione could barely make out the bandage around his left forearm but she knew that even after all these years he still kept the Mark covered.
Draco consulted a scroll of parchment, then a second one, and made his way to the device in the middle of the room. Hermione watched him gently trace the delicate engraving with his fingers until something clicked and he dislocated a small piece of the watch. He then carried it to his table and proceeded to inspect it under the magnifying glass. All of his movements were patient, reserved and orderly. Hermione thought that even if someone suddenly broke into the room and started yelling curses he would keep on working with the same calm.
'You're staring,' Draco said, his eyes not lifting from the piece of machinery.
'I like watching you work,' she confessed.
'It's a good thing I like working then,' he moved towards the parchment and started sketching the clockwork. 'There is a leak somewhere but I can't find it.'
'A leak?'
'Whatever the thing inside that pocket watch is, it's emitting quite a lot of magic. And it's doing so through a leak somewhere, otherwise the metal would be saturated. There's no way I can tell whether the leak is intentional or not until I find it though. How's your work going?'
'Not great,' Hermione said bleakly. 'I've gone through more books that I can count and I still can't figure it out. It just doesn't make any sense.'
She paused to look at her notes and then continued talking, this time more to herself than to Draco.
'At first I thought the pocket watch was a hiding spot but we can't shrink it and it's not exactly inconspicuous as it is. But if it's supposed to stay big, why design it as a pocket watch? And one can very easily mask and make use of the magic leak, but no one's bothered. That, and anything powerful enough to produce such a leak should have been reported missing already...'
'You're thinking aloud and it's distracting,' Draco said. Hermione hadn't noticed him move to her desk.
'I'm sorry. It's just that I can feel all of this magic right at my fingertips and I have no idea where it comes from and it's driving me crazy.'
He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers one by one.
'Don't worry, love, we'll figure it out. We always do.'