Chapter One
Hermione looked down into her compact mirror, and gently pressed the skin under her left eye. The bruise may have been gone, hidden by magic, but the skin was still sore and tender. She caught her own gaze and sighed at how lifeless her eyes seemed now. She had tried so hard to keep her morale up, to go about her business as usual, to come to work, to sit at her desk in Department of Magical Law Enforcement, to…enforce some law, or whatever her job was these days. However, looking at her dull eyes and sunken face, she couldn't help but wonder if she was doing a good enough job.
She pressed the skin under her eye again.
"Accident..." She whispered to her reflection. She was sure it had been an accident. Ron was summoning (yet another) Firewhiskey bottle from the kitchen and she hadn't ducked in time before it hit her in the face.
It wasn't funny, but he had laughed and laughed as she quietly reached for her wand and healed the bruise with a spell she used all too often. It wasn't the first time she'd got in the way of Ron's Summoning spells.
It was an accident. Just like they're all accidents.
Ron wouldn't really let her be hurt, not on purpose, surely? The Ron that she had known for so long, had grown up with, had risked her life with…that Ron wouldn't want her to be hurt. That Ron had shouted and cursed and cried when Hermione was being tortured in Malfoy Manor. That Ron had cared about what mattered to her, eventually. That Ron had been jealous of any and all attention she had got from any other man. That Ron had proudly joined her and supported her at all of the events that they had been invited to as war heroes. That Ron had spoken so passionately to the journalists about how proud he was of her, and how comforted he'd been by her presence in the final battle.
Maybe That Ron and This Ron were no longer the same person.
She was abruptly pulled out of her thoughts by the door to her office bursting open.
"Granger, have you seen these latest — bloody hell, you look like crap."
She rolled her eyes sardonically. "Good morning to you too, Malfoy."
Draco Malfoy had stopped in the doorway, a pile of parchment clutched to his chest. His eyebrows furrowed under the lazy flop of blonde hair on his head, and after a beat, he came fully into the room, closed the door and sat down in one of the spare chairs.
"Make yourself at home," Hermione murmured, out of habit more than anything. They had this conversation, or a variation of it, at least three times a week. After a year and a half of working with the Healers at St. Mungo's on Magical Healing Negligence cases, Draco Malfoy, now a fully qualified Healer, had become her liaison on all of the cases dealing with defending the hospital when magical healing procedures went wrong.
At first, it had been strange partnership, full of tension, working so closely with the man of the boy who had bullied her so ruthlessly at school, the man of the boy who watched her be tortured at the hands of his aunt. However, the death of Voldemort and the end of the war seemed to have lifted a physical and emotional burden from Malfoy's shoulders, and on the whole he was tolerable to work with. Sometimes he was even pleasant. Either way, he was inherently passionate about Healing, and just as passionate about making sure his colleagues were not wrongfully punished for doing their job when the outcome was less than desirable. The fact of the matter was simply that magic could not heal everything, even in a Healer's capable hands.
"No but seriously, Granger… what happened to your face?" Hermione jolted out of her reverie somewhat, her hand flying instinctively to the tender remains of her black eye.
"What?" She said, louder than necessarily. "Nothing, nothing's wrong with my face."
Malfoy leaned over her cluttered desk and peered closely at her. "You look different."
"You're imagining things," she croaked, feeling guilty and not knowing why.
"I try not to," Draco said lightly, still scrutinising her face. "I tend to imagine the stuff of nightmares."
Her wide-eyed, shocked expression at his frank admission quickly became a grimace of pain as he suddenly jabbed a thumb onto the bone beneath her previously bruised eye. "Ouch!"
Draco's face was suddenly thunderous. "Who gave you a black eye, Granger?"
Hermione was at an utter loss. "Wha—how—?"
"I'm a Healer, Granger, not an idiot. I know a botch-job touch up of a black eye when I see one." He gripped the wrist that she had rested on the desk. "Who did this?"
"A botch-job?" she spluttered. That was her best healing spell, and Hermione Granger never did a botch-job of anything.
Draco quirked an eyebrow. "If you'd done it properly, it wouldn't still hurt, you daft girl." She flushed, and attempted to cover up her embarrassment with indignation.
"Don't call me daft, Malfoy," she huffed, leaning back out of his reach and rolling her eyes. "I'm fine. What do you want?"
Still holding her gaze with a dubious stare, Draco evidently realised he was fighting a losing battle. For now. She could almost see him storing away their interaction away in a corner of his capable mind, saving it for another day. She would have to be on her guard; it was bad enough that he'd caught her out with the injury.
Malfoy now tossed some of his parchment onto her desk. "New case. It's not a nice one."
She sighed. She loved her job most days, but as much as she liked the majority of wizarding-kind, there were the odd few who were desperate to make a few Galleons, even if it meant discrediting the name of a very competent Healer.
She thought about the last few times Malfoy had told her it wasn't a "nice one". There was the case last month, when an old man claimed to have suffered "unmentionable swelling in his nether regions" after visiting the hospital to have a tooth removed, which they had lost. Healer Pennyweather had failed to note that the gentleman did not react well to Numbing Charms. The time before that, a young lady, recently accepting her own place at the Healing Academy, lost a little finger in the process of removing a cyst on the side of her hand. She had won that one, and St Mungo's had lost one of their best Healers, who had been suffering from the recent loss of her husband, and hadn't told her superiors that she was unable to hold a wand steady. That one in particular led to a particularly harrowing trial in the Wizengamot, and the poor Healer had to undergo some very humiliating psychiatric testing in the process.
So it was with a heavy heart and a heavy sigh that Hermione picked up this new wad of parchment. She cast her eyes over it for a few seconds, and felt Draco watch her as her expression transitioned from apprehensive, to shocked, to downright flabbergasted, and then the intrigued, curious look he knew all too well from their years at Hogwarts.
"What in the name of…" she breathed, gazing wide-eyed at Malfoy.
"I know," he said simply. "Told you it wasn't a nice one."
"You can say that again…a child was set on fire?"
That definitely put her problems into perspective.
"How was this even possible?" This situation had definitely perked Hermione up. Her eye didn't even hurt that much anymore now she had such an interesting, if confusing, case.
Draco sighed as he settled into his chair, knowing he was going to be sat in that office for a while.
"Okay, so we have Melinda Pillett. Lindi, to her friends. Ten years old, came to the hospital for a very advanced emergency procedure...had an accident in her mother's potions laboratory and ended up ingesting an unfinished potion that was essentially eight-five per cent bloodroot."
Hermione's hand flew to her mouth. Draco quirked an eyebrow. "I assume by that reaction, you know what bloodroot is?" He drawled.
"Bloodroot... a perennial flowering plant with delicate white petals and a yellow reproductive system. Bloodroot and its extracts kill animal cells, and is used as an ingredient for the Bloodroot Poison...ingesting that is inadvisable and most likely fatal!" She frowned as Malfoy rolled his eyes. "What?"
"Ever the little know-it-all, even after all this time," he smirked.
"Shut up."
Malfoy sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers arrogantly. "Fine."
There were a few moments of silence, in which Hermione glared at Malfoy, and he smirked at her in return. When the silence stretched on, and Hermione realised that he was going to take her words literally and not say another word, she reached over and swatted him with her quill.
"Stop being an arse, carry on explaining."
"So fickle! And eloquent. I always forget how much I love working with you, Granger."
Hermione said nothing, just looked at him pointedly and waited for him to continue.
"Fine, fine..." He eventually sighed. "Okay, so she got bloodroot in her system, and once her mother found her unconscious, approximately fifteen minutes later, she brought her straight to St. Mungo's. The Healers whisked her into a procedure room, and began prepping her for the Poison Specialists, who needed to essentially siphon every last drop of the poison off the walls of her digestive system. It was never going to be a quick procedure."
"I can imagine," Hermione murmured.
"Don't interrupt, Granger."
"Sorry."
"Anyway. The Healers -"
"Which ones?"
"What did I say, Granger? If you want me to tell you, you need to stop butting in. Healer Hardsmythe led the procedure, and he was accompanied by Trainee Healer Edgecombe."
"Wait...Marietta Edgecombe? The one from Hogwarts?"
Draco actually growled and Hermione was caught between a surprised gasp and a giggle. "I can't help but ask questions, Malfoy. It's not as though they're unhelpful questions."
"They're unhelpful to me, you keep upsetting my flow!" He huffed in response, to which Hermione rolled her eyes but said nothing. "But yes, Marietta Edgecombe. She finished her education abroad, and after the war, returned home and decided to train as a Healer. She's in her final two months of Training."
"Does she-" Hermione began, but decided quickly it wasn't worth the argument with Malfoy again, and closed her mouth.
"Thank Merlin, you're learning." Draco passed a piece of parchment across the desk. "Here's the medical report. Healer Hardsmythe offered Edgecombe the opportunity to perform the incision spell to open up Miss Pillett's abdomen to begin the procedure. But as soon as she touched her wand to the skin..."
"She set the girl on fire instead?" Hermione gasped. It all sounded too surreal.
"Wrong. The girl caught fire. That's an entirely different matter, I'm sure a lawyer like you can appreciate the distinction," Draco said firmly. Hermione nodded, slightly embarrassed at her assumption. Her job was to assess facts, and do her best to keep Healers out of the firing line, and yet here she was, jumping to conclusions that Marietta Edgecombe had set a girl on fire. It wasn't a mistake she would usually make. She decided to blame it on the last week of sleepless nights.
"What injuries did Miss Pillett sustain?" she asked, making her tone as professional as possible.
"Absolutely none," Draco replied. "She didn't get a single burn, despite being alight for a full five minutes and being immune to all extinguishing incantations."
"What?" That didn't make any sense at all.
Draco nodded in agreement. "I know…bizarre, right? Actually, the only person who was injured was Trainee Healer Edgecombe, who sustained serious burns to her wand arm."
Hermione winced. Burns were easily treated, but only if you were willing to endure a day of pain as the burn paste did its job. There was no love lost between her and Marietta, but she still didn't like the sound of a burning arm, not to mention the shock of having a child set on fire in front of your very eyes.
"Did they manage to finish the procedure?" she asked, suddenly remembering the severity of Lindi Pillett's situation.
"They didn't even start," Draco grumbled. "The Healers couldn't get close enough to make the incision, let alone siphon the bloodroot."
"But…wasn't it urgent?"
"Very. Bloodroot only takes twelve hours to kill someone."
Hermione nodded gravely. "Poor Lindi. So now her parents are bringing an action for…what, exactly? Medical manslaughter?"
Draco frowned. "She's not dead, Granger."
"But —- You said—"
"I don't believe I ever mentioned such a thing, Granger," the blonde man sighed. "You really must learn to listen. Maybe if you stopped asking so many questions you'd actually hear people talk for a change."
"Maybe if you weren't insulting me every other sentence, we wouldn't have this lack of clarity," she huffed in response. "This happens every time. Now, just finish the rest of the case summary, or so help me Merlin…"
Draco smirked briefly before returning to his notes. "We — that is to say, the Senior Healers — performed a highly complex and risky set of spells, to…well, to freeze her body in time, I suppose is the best way to describe it."
"What?!" Hermione had never even heard of that sort of magic, and Hermione Granger had heard of everything.
"Essentially, the Healers have stopped time for Lindi's body. She will continue to exist day after day, but her body will be in the same state, frozen. She's in a magically induced coma, and hopefully this means the bloodroot poison won't spread any more than it already has. Of course, this is a hugely risky process, and if any element of the spells isn't one hundred percent accurate…well. I'm sure you already know."
Hermione nodded. "The poison will continue to spread, and Lindi's frozen immune system will have even less of a chance of slowing it down."
"Exactly."
Hermione gave an involuntary shudder. It was quite a chilling prospect, and it was times like this she both loved and hated her job. Loved, because she learned about new types of magic that she could never have dreamed up, and hated because she knew that somewhere in St Mungo's lay a little girl and her terrified family, and Hermione had to cook up a way to tell them that it wasn't the Healers' fault that this was happening to them.
"So, what we have is an action against Healer Hardsmythe," Draco continued, "for magical incompetence."
Hermione nodded. She had expected as much. Melinda Pillet's parents were more likely to want to sue the Head Healer on the case, rather than the Trainee, as he was responsible for her actions in all aspects of her Healing training.
"I don't need to tell you, Granger, that if we lose this case..." Draco pulled a face of utter disgust. "It will end the career of not only a very senior, absolutely amazing and world renowned Healer, but also end the career of a very diligent Trainee Healer who hasn't even had the chance to get her career off the ground."
"Quite. Very undesirable."
Draco rolled his eyes. "That might be the understatement of the year, but yes."
"Well then," Hermione stood and pulled all of the parchment on the matter onto her chair before moving towards the door. "We'd better get started."
"About bloody time," Draco muttered, before following her out into the corridor.
A/N: So...I've started writing again! It's been a while, you know how life is. I'm not going to make this a super long A/N, I just wanted to say hello again...I was going to wait till I finished this story before I posted it, but I got too excited and just had to get it out there. Expect updates to be slow, but they will happen, and hopefully they won't be too short. I'm interested to see what you think, and if you have any suggestions or thoughts about where you think this story might go. So leave a review and let me know what you think!