AN: OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I AM SO SORRY FOR THE DELAY. A lot happened over the last year, namely, me starting uni. But I am back and determined to finish this story! If anyone is still reading, that is. Enjoy! This is 2000 words - I'm aiming to do chapters this length or longer, once a week or so.

Chapter Eight: She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

Ron's long body crumpled into itself, and Hermione dragged him over to his bed. The fact that he was Potter's best friend wasn't the only reason she'd chosen him; he was too poor to afford a valet, meaning no servants slept in his room the way she slept in Pansy's. Helpful not to have witnesses around when you'd just knocked someone out.

She straightened up and prepared to begin investigating his room. Her heart was pounding with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. No matter how many assignments she went on, that edge of fear never disappeared.

His room was even larger than hers, if that were possible: here was clearly someone Dumbledore liked. Irritatingly, it was also a mess, with clothes rumpled everywhere and candles perched precariously on odd surfaces like a closed trunk. It was a miracle the moron hadn't burned the Tower down by now.

She scanned the room. There was a desk in the corner – always a good place to start. Then she'd move onto his trunk, and if that proved fruitless she'd begin a systematic search of the room. Hermione had just begun to move towards it when she froze.

Someone was tapping on the door.

Shit.

Growing impatient, whoever it was proceeded to try the handle, useless since the door had locked itself behind them. She held her breath as she waited to see if they had a key. Who was it? Potter? Lady Ginevra? One of the assorted other Weasleys? Gods, what if it was the king himself?

"Granger?" a voice hissed from behind the door.

She nearly passed out with relief. "Malfoy?! What the hell are you doing up here?"

"Coming to help you, what else?" His voice was distinctly annoyed. "Do you think you could let me inside now? Before someone sees me waiting outside a Weasel's place?"

She swung the door open and dragged him inside.

Draco looked slightly the worse for wear since she had seen him last. His hair was mussed, and he had clearly been availing himself of the Firewhiskey; its pungent smell made her wrinkle her nose. If not for the fact that Ron stank similarly, she would have ejected him from the room in case the odour set off Ron's suspicions when he awoke the next morning.

"You didn't fuck the Weasel," Draco said. He ambled over to the bed. "Ye gads, is he a lightweight or what?"

"Actually I rendered him unconscious through the employment of the nuchal pressure point," she corrected. His gaze swung to her, burning silver.

"That was hot. You're so hot when you talk all clever, Mudblood."

She bit back her smile. "Come on, Malfoy. We have a job to do. Let's start with that desk."

Parchments were scattered all over it, which actually helped – they didn't have to worry about Ron being alerted by any disorder. She shuffled them up into a pile and handed half to Draco. He blinked down at them.

"What am I meant to do with these, exactly?"

"Just look for anything suspicious," she said, skimming through her own pile. "You know, inconsistencies, slightly off letters which means they could be written in code…"

She made a mental note to review Draco's pile herself as well.

They fell into silence, broken only by an occasional snore from Ron – whose unconsciousness had transitioned seamlessly into drunken sleep – and the riffle of parchment. Words and numbers blurred before Hermione's eyes. She hadn't gotten much sleep last night, what with disposing of Goldstein's body, and the darkness of the room wasn't helping. More than once she caught herself drifting off and awoke with a slight jerk.

Hermione was on the point of setting aside her pile of parchment when she froze, her gaze catching upon a small table sketched in the corner of a hangover recipe. It was very faint, graphite rather than ink, but she could just about make out what it contained.

1985 : 2000

1986 : 2200

1987 : 2700

And so on it went, ending at '1993: 3600'. At first glance, there seemed nothing suspicious about it: whoever had drawn it clearly had hoped it would pass inspection as part of the recipe. But 2000 was the number of men and women each county (except Slytherin, of course) was permitted to recruit into its own personal army. And the numbers in the left-hand column were dates: the first one marked one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five years after the founding of Hogwarts by the Four Founders, which was the date system employed by the land. They were currently in the year 1993.

A feeling of faintness rose up in Hermione as she scanned the table. If she was correct – and she was fairly sure that she was – it looked as though the House of Weasley was, totally and utterly illegally, building up its private army.

No. It looked as though the county of Gryffindor was building up its private army. And whom did Gryffindor hate the most? Which county was least likely to benefit from whatever was happening here?

Her own, of course. Especially when Slytherin didn't even have its own army.

Her heart was roaring in her ears. "Draco!" she hissed. "Come here right now!" In her agitation, it even escaped her that she had accidentally slipped into using his first name.

He jumped from where he'd been nodding off over his own pile of parchment. "Huh?" he said groggily.

She held her breath as Ron grumbled and turned over in his sleep, then snapped quietly, "Come and read this!"

He did so, eyeing her curiously. She watched his expression change from sleepy bemusement to slightly-more-awake bemusement as he read.

"Granger, I'll have you know that my own hangover recipe is a damn sight better than this one, and – "

"Not that, you idiot!" She pointed at the table. "Here. 2000. Does that number have any special significance to you?"

"I can only think of two," he said slowly. "One, that we're only seven years from the two-thousandth anniversary of the founding of Hogwarts. And the other…"

"Yes?" she said encouragingly. "Think!"

Hermione was a big believer in making people work for answers. It was fortunate for her that teaching was one of the professions forbidden to her on account of her Mudblood status, because any pupils she taught would rapidly have grown to resent her.

"Well, that's the number of people those gits keep in their armies," Draco said. "The army I can't have," he added with a scowl. "I tell you, when I'm king, I'm going to enjoy putting that bastard Dumbledore on a –"

"Exactly," Hermione cut in. "And according to this table, they had the standard 2000 soldiers in 1985… but now, eight years later, they seem to have grown to over 3000."

The news hit Draco like a bullet. "What the fuck? Those bloody hypocrites! I knew Potter and Weasley were up to no good! People that poor are always up to no good!" He advanced menacingly upon the prone figure on the bed, a martial light gleaming in his grey eyes.

Alarmed, Hermione stepped in front of him. "Draco, no. We can't do anything yet! We need to leverage this information. Besides…" She bit her lip. "Don't you think it's a little too, well. Obvious? The table was very blatant. What if we're jumping to conclusions? I just can't believe that information this sensitive wouldn't be placed under lock and key."

Draco scoffed. "You, Granger, clearly have not been exposed to Weasels for any length of time. This is exactly how stupid they are."

"Still, we need to look for more evidence before we can act," she said. With renewed alertness, she turned back to Ron's desk. After protracted grumbling on the benefits of murdering weaselly little weasels, Draco did the same.

Several hours later, Hermione called a halt to the proceedings.

Draco had, unsurprisingly, long since grown bored; her spoilt little princeling was currently amusing himself by going through Ron's wardrobe and sniggering at the number of holes and darns in his garments, particularly in his underwear drawer. Hermione considered reproving him – after all, her own clothing had been in worse condition a scant two years ago – but quickly thought better of it. She had better things to focus on.

Namely, the fact that she now had incontrovertible proof that the House of Weasley was secretly arming itself with supplies and men.

In addition to the table, she had unearthed a fragment of letter, in between the pages of a book, sent to Ron from one of his older brothers Lord Charles Weasley. The letter referred cryptically to a 'stockpile' of something in the Gryffindor capital city of Ottery St Catchpole. Most damning of all, she had also found an invoice from someone named Igor Karkaroff. The invoice itself was, harmlessly enough, for a new Niffler-skin rug. But Hermione the spymistress knew that Karkaroff was leader of the Durmstrang Initiative, a private mercenary group. Things were looking black for the House of Weasley.

What remained to be discovered was the motive. The Weasleys were already in power: Ron's best friend was Lord Potter, heir to the Sorting Hat. Moreover, he was likely to select Lady Ginevra as his bride at the end of the Yule Ball, giving the family even more influence. Why were they amassing men? And perhaps more importantly, did King Albus know about it? Hermione shuddered at the thought of the uproar the Dukes of Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff would raise if they knew that Gryffindor was giving itself more men and that the king himself had sanctioned it. The entire balance of power in Hogwarts – an uneven balance, since Slytherin was defenceless in comparison, but a balance nonetheless – was in danger of being destroyed.

Surely, Hermione thought frantically, the Weasleys hadn't decided to stamp out their Malfoy rivals once and for all…

She gathered together her little pile of evidence. "Listen up, Draco," she said. "You have to leave now. Take these parchments and keep them in your room until the morning. Then – pay attention – I want you to go into my room to where my trunk is. There's a false bottom to my trunk, three inches tall. You can access it by tapping in this specific pattern – " she demonstrated with two fingers against the palm of her other hand – "then put the papers inside. Make sure nobody sees you. Not even Pansy. Do you understand?"

Draco was frowning suspiciously. "Where will you be? Why can't you do it yourself?"

She took a deep breath. "I'm going to stay here. I have to be here when Ron wakes up, to convince him we really slept together last night."

"No," Draco said, rising from his cross-legged position on the ground in a sudden blast. "Absolutely not. I forbid you utterly, Mudblood. Don't even think about it." His features were set in lines of irritation.

It was, to be honest, no less than Hermione had expected. Draco seemed to have developed an oddly territorial streak where she was concerned, and she could not say she didn't like it.

"Look, Draco, think about it logically," she said persuasively. "Ron is clearly an extraordinarily useful source. I'm going to need longer than one night to search his room. Morning's nearly here anyway. If he happens to discover the loss of these parchments, the fact that I stayed for so long will convince him I had nothing to do it – especially if he watches me leave and knows I have nothing on me. Alright?"

There was a long pause while he glowered at her. With a pang, she saw that the violet shadows under his eyes from a night of sleep deprivation made him look younger, sulkier, and above all incredibly adorable. She curled her hands into fists to repress the urge to hug him.

"Fine," he finally grumbled. "But don't you dare fuck him."

She shook off the pang and raised an eyebrow. "Jealous, Malfoy?"

"Not at all. It's just the fact that the thought of a Weasel plus a Mudblood is enough to make me lose my breakfast," he retorted. And, before she could claw back having the last word from him, he swept out of the door.

AN: I know I don't really have the right to ask for a review after my long absence, but it would make me very happy :)