Author's Note: Don't ask me why the chapters are so much longer this time around.
Psh, not like you're complaining.
As for all the people clamoring about the cause of the explosion, never fear. Everything will eventually be explained, and I'm certainly not spoiling anything now, no matter how many reviews you leave asking about it. Though your investment is touching. And slightly creepy.
Chapter Eight
Awooga Takes His Due
After Hermione, laughing, ushered Jonas back out of her office, returning his cheery wave as he started down the hall, she noticed the two cups of coffee on Draco's desk next to his Magic 8 Ball.
"Oh, you got it!" she noted. "Sorry, I got caught up in the meeting and all."
Draco looked up and offered a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. Before she could inquire about it, he had started speaking. "It's all right," he assured her. "It's probably still pretty warm. There was a line." He picked it up and handed it to her, and the slight coldness in his smile was gone, as if it had never been.
Had it ever been?
"I'm afraid you're on your own for lunch today," she reported. "I'm meeting Ginny."
Eloquently, Draco pointed to the open page of her appointment book, where his usual indecipherable scrawl was, on this particular occasion, overlaid with pink highlighter. At Hermione's raised eyebrow, he explained, "It's Ginny's favorite color."
"Her favorite color is green," Hermione informed him.
"The fathomless emerald of the dashing Mr. Potter's eyes, perhaps?"
She grinned. "Presumably."
"Well," Draco concluded, crossing his legs and itching at his ear with the end of his quill, "you tell the unfortunately-named Mrs. Ginevra Weasley Potter that I send my salutations."
"They're still engaged," Hermione corrected. "They're working out the fiscal things."
"But I thought my man Potter was well-endowed," Draco said.
Hermione tried to frown and failed. "Nice," she remarked.
Draco grinned. "Oh, good, you got it."
"Yes," Hermione responded crisply, "and I think you should keep your filthy mind out of the gutter in the future." She started into her office, adding over a shoulder, "I'm sure Jonas would be willing to have lunch with you."
"I," Draco replied equably, "would rather hang myself with today's specimen of abominable tie."
Ah. Or, as a farmer who had a dog once said, Bingo.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As Hermione was reassembling the contents of her purse, which she had spread all over the room looking for her good pen earlier, the door opened, and Draco stepped in.
She smiled. "Yes?"
Draco didn't waste any time in slipping his arms around her waist, drawing her over to the other side of the office, and backing her up against the wall to the right of the door. "Just wanted a proper goodbye," he told her. He then proceeded not to waste any time in applying his lips to her neck.
"Draco," she said, arching her back and stifling an appreciative sigh, "Jonas is—"
"The Necktie Demon of old mythology; I know." He laid a line of kisses up to her ear. "There are countless tales of the Necktie Demon seducing beautiful women and crushing origami cranes, after which he sucks the blood of the former and burns the latter in a great, swanky festival dedicated to Awooga, the God of Misery, Lameness, and Colorblindness."
"I was going to say, 'Nothing more or less than a work colleague,'" she replied, "but he does have rather poor taste in accessories, now that you mention it." She paused, Draco took the opportunity to nip the curve of her ear very gently, and the rest of her rejoinder came out in a rush as she tried not to melt into an unsightly Hermione-colored puddle on the floor. "And shouldn't Awooga be the God of Sirens?"
"Clearly," Draco commented, his mouth sliding along her cheekbone, "you haven't done your research." He paused and drew back just an inch—just enough to meet her eyes, raise a pale eyebrow, and smirk slowly. "Good thing I like you." It was only then, after all the buildup, that he took possession of her lips with his.
It lived up to the hype.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Ginny had arranged to meet at noon exactly, since Hermione only had an hour for lunch. At twelve-thirty exactly, Ginny arrived.
Hermione, who had been drinking water and trying not to snack on bread, packets of fake sugar, and Saltine crackers for half an hour, got up and hugged her anyway.
"I'm so sorry," Ginny was repeating. "We're getting new carpets put in Thursday, because the ones we have smell like someone died on them and they performed the autopsy on-site, and the guy called right as I was leaving, and the man would not shut up; I even told him I was meeting with the Prime Minister, and he told me he was doing his carpets on Friday."
"I find that to be a slightly dubious claim," Hermione decided, sitting again.
"So do I," Ginny agreed. "I think he really just needs to get a girlfriend. Then he could call her, and drive her phone bill through the roof, and make her friends wait half an hour for her." She took a deep breath and then brightened. "So! How's work?"
The one upside to Ginny's being late was that Hermione no longer looked quite so flushed and disheveled as she had when had first arrived. "Excellent," she answered, unable to keep from grinning. "How's the Gringotts stuff going?"
Ginny rolled her eyes. "We're still having some major difficulties with the sector you lot shredded with that dragon—"
"—while we were saving the world as we know it," Hermione reminded her.
"Well," Ginny persisted, "you could've been a bit more careful about it, don't you think? Anyway, it's mostly cleared up, but every now and then, a beam falls on someone, and then it's all under suspicion again. Happened just last week, to Moody, actually."
Hermione sighed. "More kindling for his conspiracy theories, of course."
Enthralled with the menu now, Ginny nodded absently. "He thinks there're mine mites in the whole substructure. I think he's mad. Hence the nickname, I suppose. I've never even heard of mine mites; maybe I'll ask Hagrid about it."
As Ginny flipped a page, her ring caught the light and claimed it, refracting it breathtakingly onto the plastic covering of the menu.
A thousand thoughts went through Hermione Granger's mind, and she seized upon the simplest and most harmless of their number.
As her mother had told her a thousand times, when eventually she did manage to get the guy-and-grandchildren thing going, she should never wear her diamond when there was the remotest chance she'd be around her kids. Mrs. Granger had had a friend who had accidentally cut her son's face with her ring, and the instant Marina Granger had found out about her own pregnancy, she'd strung hers on a silver chain and worn it around her neck, just to get used to it for when it would really count.
And that was as much as Hermione Granger was going to think about diamond rings and lectures from her mother.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When Hermione returned to the Ministry, she found it in a state of utter pandemonium.
Well, if that wasn't the story of her life. You left those fools alone for one minute, and the next thing you knew, they were trying to burn down the whole building.
More literally than Hermione would have liked.
Jonas ran into her first. "Hermione!" he gasped. "We don't know what—just all of a sudden, the whole hall went up in flames! It's just—oh, Christ—"
A smoldering ceiling beam being blasted with jets of water from a few different wands crumbled and fell, and a wave of heat hit Hermione in the face.
People were coursing out of all the halls, out of the stairwell, out of theelevator, and she saw Tonks, her pink hair singed black at the tips, helping an older lady who was limping, and Andray Rachels looked like a raccoon, and the Minister—
She ran up to Pericles Tyrus, whose steel-gray hair was coated with ash. "What happened?" she shouted over the faint roaring of the flames in other sectors, as yet uncontrolled, and the keening of sirens growing louder by the second. "Were they after you?"
Tyrus's eyes painted a stark contrast to the fire—they were just as bright as their counterpart, but they burned sharp and cold against the nebulous scalding heat of the flames. "Three reasons why not, Granger," he told her. "First, a spell would be easier and less conspicuous; second, I'm not worth killing anyway; and third, it started in your department."
Hermione stared at him for a moment, and then another thought struck her with the force of a laden freight train. Wheels, scraps of metal, and iron bars from the track soared into the air, quite possibly impaling passerby as they came back down.
"Draco," she whispered.
Later, all she could remember was a vague haze of squeezing through the milling crowds, barely feeling the elbows that bruised her arms and her sides, pushing people heedlessly out of the way, her heartbeat like distant thunder in her ears, and one word, over and over, drowning every logical thought, strangling them one by one.
Draco.
Someone grabbed her arm, and she pried the fingers loose and shoved the hand away, but the person's other hand caught her wrist, and he jerked her backwards—
"Hermione."
She spun and looked up into storm-cloud eyes.
Draco smiled a little. "You've got soot on your cheek again," he told her. "I guess the world has realized that it makes you look like an Amazonian warrior queen."
"And by 'like an Amazonian warrior queen,'" she hazarded unsteadily, raising a trembling hand to search her face for the intrusive material, "you mean 'like crap.'"
"And by 'like crap,'" Draco replied, licking his thumb and sliding it over her cheekbone, "you mean 'beautiful.'" He cupped her face in both hands and kissed her, and she might have heard Jonas Schaeffer gasp in the background, but she was a bit too preoccupied with dying of joy to be sure.
