Hi all. Sorry for this installment's delay and brevity. More work issues, and...February is a short month. I know, excuses. :P I hope you enjoy, nonetheless.
Zurich Interlude
Until the day we left for Zurich, I hadn't seen William flirt with anyone in Sion. We didn't start the day knowing we were going to leave for the capital; it was as unexpected as my turning the corner and finding him almost shoulder to shoulder with three leggy blonde girls dressed like snowbunnies.
"Hey William," I started to call out. The words caught in my throat when I saw the girls. They had heard anyway. Four blonde heads turned toward me: William's golden curls still touseled from sleep, the girls' tastefully wind-blown and ranging from ash to platinum.
My stomach hadn't sunk quite so far as when I'd first seen William and Alexis together, but it was close. I tried to smile and seem at ease. "Good morning. Sorry to interrupt."
Three sets of eyes – icy blue, frosty gray, and uncanny green I was sure were contacts - blinked at me. I couldn't discern from their perfectly-made up faces whether they understood.
"William, I must talk to you," I said. "It's urgent."
"Ok." William said something in a mellifluous language that I didn't know and winked at the girls. Their laughter was a merry peal of bells. The shortest girl, with her green eyes and white blonde hair, actually kissed William on the cheek, then drew back with an unmistakable pout that made my skin crawl.
I wondered what William had said to them to end the conversation, indeed, what it had been about to begin with. It seemed too insecure to ask him, so I tried to refocus on the business at hand. At the time, it had seemed exciting, even groundbreaking. After the sight of William with the snowbunnies, however...
"We're leaving for Zurich! This morning!" I announced when I'd shut the door behind us.
"What?"
Cyrus had brought an entirely unexpected jackpot of intel this morning. Sometimes I wondered why Cyrena bothered to send Intelligence documents at all, there was so much junk in them. "Simon never read all that," William pointed out almost every time he saw me absorbed in a stack of parchment. I refrained from recapping the fate Simon had met, but it was always on my mind. Suppose he had overlooked a document, or even a scrap of information within a document that might've saved his life. And so I read. I sifted. I marked up. I made notes. I only threw the most useless pages into the fire. The rest, I transfigured into postage stamps and hid them in a souvenir album with a lovely embossed scene of Sion's twin castles.
William eyed the the stamp album at the center of the desk. "Have you been reading all morning?" he said with mock concern. "I think you've had enough intel for today. How about some breakfast?"
"This is serious, William." I made sure the door was locked and opened to the second page in the stamp album.
Removing the transfiguration charm on the stamp of a mountain sunset revealed a thick stack of papers. "Listen." I re-read what I had hilited.
Svein Jensen, Dark Forces soldier
Station: Fangher
Appearence: gray eyes, pale complexion, ash blonde hair — buzz cut. Pierced eyebrow (silver ball) and left ear (silver spike). Medium build, muscular.
"Very interesting," William said, cautiously. He knew as well as I that learning the identity of a Fangher guard could mean an end to late-night and early-morning watches, crouched in the snow with nearly frozen feet. Despite our efforts, our stakeouts had yet to reveal anything useful. The prison had a complicated shift system. We could never be certain when the change of guards would be. Many nights, no one came to the church. When someone actually appeared, we didn't dare accost them, even for the sake of learning their identity. Fangher had the entirety of their resources to send against us, and they were just on the other side of the mosaic window.
Most nights, clouds obscured the moon, and though I had tried to rig the rafters with subtle little lights, I had yet to hit on a winning combination that allowed both secrecy and visibility.
"What does this have to do with Zurich?" William said,
"Listen to this."
Miscellaneous information: fan of the Dark Omega band, attended their concerts regularly in Zurich with prisoner 33756 and hosted him at his flat afterwards.
I didn't add that they used these concerts to find women interested in kink hookups. I had a hunch that prisoner 33576 was Captain Rodrigue, the one who had been about to torture me to get information out of William. If William knew that, I doubted he would let me approach Svein alone, and I already had a plan in mind that required just that.
"That's brilliant!" As always, William's smile melted me inside. "I guess that's it for Sion, then. Natalia and her sisters will be so disappointed."
"Indeed." I turned to the desk so he couldn't see my smile.
{****}
The interregional train ride from Sion to Zurich was estimated to take around 3 ½ hours, a long journey, but a welcome break to what had become a hectic day.
The route spirited us through the picturebook scenes of snow-cloaked mountains and crystal forests sparkling and winking in the sun. The view could havve enraptured me the entire time. But, as General York would say, there was work to do. Reluctantly, I turned from the window and proceeded to explain my plan to William.
"This is probably the most important part of the file," I whispered, so close to Williams's neck but I could smell traces of his soap. It had a simple, clean smell that was distractingly masculine. With an effort, I return my focus to the business at hand. "His wand."
Important magical items or weapons subject may carry: wand carved from ebony, 13 inches, 13 ½ with crystal topper. Wand is wrapped with a braid of unicorn hair, which allows the carrier to tolerate long periods with Dementors.
"If we can get Svein's wand, we'll be able to sneak into Fangher." This part I said in a barely audible tone as I cast my gaze around the car. We chosen it specifically because it was empty. Neither William nor I sensed any magical energies in it. No one on the train had regarded us with any particular interest, either. Still we remained alert.
"I can see how his wand would help us with the Dementors," William said. "But how is it going to help with our disguise?"
"We're not going to be disguised," I reminded him. I waved my hand over the intelligence documents. They shrank back down to postage stamp size. I replaced the mountain sunset in its sleeve. "I'm going to use Influence."
"Hermione," William ventured, "I know that you're excited about finding new ways to use Influence, but do you really think it's powerful enough? All it'll take to blow our cover is for a guard to brush against you going down the corridor."
In our many experiments, William and I had discovered that if he touched me while under Influence, he could resist the spell's effects.
"Do you remember the night we found Alexis's hair on your fleece jacket?" The question raised my heart to my mouth.
The few seconds William took to answer felt like an eternity. "I guess," he said, his face and voice a study in impassivity.
During one of our practice sessions in Sion, I'd found a long black hair on the back of William's red fleece jacket. It could only be Alexis's. I'd reached out to remove it, a little irritated by sudden mental images of her packing William's bags, and the two of them possibly having goodbye sex. I hadn't wanted to break my concentration or my influence over William to throw it into the fire, so I just wrapped it around my fingers. Once again, I made William think that I was Alexis. The hair had distracted me somewhat, and I unintentionally said something to William about Alexis. Usually mentioning Alexis while pretending to be her broke the spell. That day, however, William had just laughed. "It's cute when you talk about yourself in the third person."
I'd said a few more out of character things. The spell remained strong. I stopped for a minute to think. What was different about this situation? The dark hair binding three of my fingers together caught my eye. It had to be Alexis's hair! Did it also have the power to preserve the spell if I touched William?
It had always been an irritating puzzle to me, the fact that Influence could not stand up to touch. I had tried to solve that mystery in a variety of unsuccessful ways. That night, I started by touching William's hand as he conversed with "Alexis." He talked on, uninterrupted, unconcerned.
It had worked. This could be big!
I tried a few other touches just to be sure: squeezing William's hand, rubbing his shoulders, even messing up his hair. As far as he was concerned, I was still Alexis.
"Amazing," I whispered.
My eyes drifted to his lips. They'd been redder since we came to the cold of Sion. I wondered if the wind had roughened them or if they were still smooth. Before I really thought about it, I was answering my question with my own lips. William returned the kiss, drew me close to him so I was sitting on his lap. His tongue entered my mouth and explored. We drew back, breathless. It was warm in the room, so warm. William wanted me, that I knew. Or was it Alexis? He reached out and started undoing the buttons on my sweater. My heart beat so fast I could barely see straight.
"'Lexis," he murmured.
I had to stop this. I couldn't deny how I wanted him, but I didn't want to sleep with him as 'Alexis.' I twisted my fingers free of her hair and let it drift to the floor. As I did, the fog filling William's eyes cleared.
"Okay, that's enough for tonight," I said, stooping to pick up Alexis's hair.
When I first started practicing Influence on William, I had written logs of what he remembered. These were short entries that informed me he only regained memories after the spell had been broken.
As practice refined my efforts into skill and I became busier with our Fangher infiltration, I had neglected these notes. After what happened that night, I kept very busy so I didn't have to meet William's eyes and perceive his reaction. It was unlikely that he retained any more memories of the night I'd kissed him than he had at other times under my Influence. Still, he had awakened to find me on his lap. What did he think of that? Perhaps he was pretending it hadn't happened or hadn't mattered to him because it was important to him as well?
Lacking an answer to that but being unable to bring myself to ask frustrated me. It wasn't entirely an elephant in the room between us; it was more like an added dimension to my secret feelings. I never permitted things to get romantic again in our practices. It was a simple matter to quell William's desire with a second stream of Influence.
Still, I longed for that closeness again. It was especially hard in those moments when I really did feel like William's fiancee, when he took my hand to help me through the snow, when he brought me breakfast on a tray in the morning while I pored over Intelligence documents, the times he smiled at me, and his eyes seemed to say This is just between us. Such things happened so often, they couldn't just be wishful thinking or the whim of his charm. At those times, my intuition cried out that William wanted me as much as I wanted him. But for all my yearning, I could not break the silence. What would it take for our minds to meet?
Now, of course, I would have to broach the subject, but I would reveal as little as possible for as long as I could
In subsequent experiments, I determined that I could not only Influence William into believing I was Alexis while holding that errant strand of her hair; it seemed to work just as well for personal items. Alexis had slipped a pendant into William's suitcase – "for luck," her note read. It also instructed that he return it to her when he got back to Cyrena. Both the note and pendant had the same effects on Influence as Alexis's hair.
I had never given William the full details for these experiments, as it might have interfered with the Influence. Now I explained them in full.
"Okay, I understand why you want the wand. What's your plan for getting it?" William's eyes and voice had gone stony. Something was wrong, but what?
"I was going to lure Svein to me at the concert by revealing that I am a witch. There are wilding magic users who never left their Muggle lives for one reason or another. That should intrigue him, especially if I seem dazzled with the Dark Omegas...and him. When he takes me back to his flat -"
"No!" William glanced around and overcompensated by speaking in a ragged whisper I could barely hear. "I don't like you getting that invovled with Svein. You realize he's probably just like Captain Rodrigue, right? Into torture and worse. Can't you steal the wand?"
"I doubt he carries it with him around Zurich." My response was crisp enough, though inside I was reeling. Were those mere protective instincts on William's part, or something more?
"It'd be wise for you to keep your distance."
"What other choice do we have? We don't have months. This mission is urgent. For whatever reason, Cyrena needs this Snape guy."
William scowled, a rare sight. Even after a long day of everything going wrong, his face never darkened like that. "There's no 'we' about it, Miss Granger. You're the Intelligence officer. It's for you to make the plans and give the orders, and my duty to obey them."
Confusion twisted in my heart. William hadn't called me Miss Granger since we first met. I hadn't realized at the time, the formal distance it put between us.
"But if you're really doing this, you'd benefit from some input from a subject matter expert."
"Oh? What's the subject?"
"Flirting."
My face turned hot, and my eyes darted for cover. Suddenly my shoes and the carpet around them were enthralling.
"It'll help you distract him," William went on, his enthusiasm growing. He seemed to be enjoying how uncomfortable the topic made me. "You don't want Svein to pick up on your intention to steal from him, right?"
"Right." I dragged my gaze back to William, who was fighting back a smirk.
"Show me how you're going to approach him."
Merlin's beard, not here, not now! I hadn't fleshed out this part of the plan. But how could I do this in front of William? Add to that, I felt ridiculous for feeling, well, ridiculous.
William, meanwhile, stroked his chin, appraising my awkward, frozen stance. "Self-conscious might work on him, but you have to give him a taste of something more..."
I had actually planned to address Svein directly, commenting on how we both shared a magical gift. I refrained from mentioning this to William. I had a feeling that he was about to divulge a great secret that would let me glimpse how he perceived the world. He did not disappoint.
"You need to tempt him. Try this." William lowered his head while gazing up at me, a captivating stare that made the air in front of it crackle with energy. His lips, still ruddy from the cold, parted slightly. Then he pulled them back in a languorous, inviting smile.
Every last one of my nerves sang with desire. But more, an entirely new world opened up to me. Suddenly I understood how William spoke to stunning girls like the blondes from this morning. So this is what he focused on.
"Following my example will get his attention," William said. "From there, it's up to you. Now show me that you can invite him near you with your eyes."
Oh no. Not again.
My cheeks felt stiff, like the icy wind from outside had numbed all feeling out of them. I stared at William, a deer wide-eyed in the headlights, and a guilty one at that.
William covered his mouth with his hand, though not in time to hide his smile. "Tell you what, Hermione. We'll have a mirror in Zurich. Practice in front of it until it looks and feels right."
It was such a relief to break her eye contact. "Right then."
In the subsequent silence, I turned to the window. The color had faded from the sky as the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Beneath this horizon of violent and gray, a valley village came into view. Their lights were a vein of gold running down the white hillside. Tears prickled my eyes at the beautiful sight. I lifted my hand to wipe my cheeks. When I lowered it again to the armrest, I brushed against William's hand.
"Excuse me," I murmured and started to relocate my hand to my lap.
To my surprise, William's hand, warm and strong, closed around mine.
