Author's Note: You know what I love?

Um… me neither.

Ten points if you catch the very tiny Good Omens homage.

And I think Jane is an awesome middle name, and I am of the opinion that Hermione and Umbridge sharing it bears a dose of literary power that JKR somehow failed to observe. Nyah.

Chapter Twelve

The Dangers of Desperation

"Extreme dehydration," a quiet, slightly hoarse voice was sighing.

"We tried," a familiar female voice with an unfamiliar quaver replied.

"I'm sure you did. I doubt it helped."

"Not in the slightest, the little git—"

"Ginny. He can't even fight back."

"Sorry, Remus."

Hermione opened her eyes. The room was dim, the ceiling unfamiliar, the blanket draped over her pleasantly warm. She was lying on a couch, and the voices originated from a place behind it.

When she tried to sit up, however, there was a flood of searing pain in her midsection like Hell on fire with choking sulfurous clouds and a few vindictive, pitchfork-wielding demons thrown in for good measure.

Or perhaps for evil measure, given the circumstances.

Whatever the case, she heard herself give something between a cry and a groan as she abandoned the endeavor.

"Hermione!" Ginny gasped, her footsteps scrambling nearer, her face coming into view.

"Back and better than ever," Hermione lied.

There was a moan from behind the couch.

"Never… eating… peanuts… again…"

"I doubt it was the peanuts, Draco," Remus noted.

"They were pretty salty," Harry cut in.

Remus paused. "I think this is a pointless topic of debate."

Momentarily, he had coaxed Draco to his feet and guided the staggering blond over to the chair by the couch, where said blond sat looking very pale and very bewildered.

It was the fact that his mouth wasn't motoring at eighty miles an hour that really scared Hermione, however.

"Now," Remus said. He went over to his coat, which was lying on the floor by the door, and retrieved from one of its pockets a chocolate bar of epic proportions. He returned to the cluster of people around the couch, unwrapped it, and broke it in half. One part went to Draco, one to Hermione; and then Remus Lupin licked his fingers absently. "There," he concluded.

Hermione was a tiny bit skeptical until she started eating. Her very blood felt thicker and richer, and she saw color coming back into Draco's cheeks as he inhaled his portion like a pale vacuum cleaner.

Remus, his hands on his hips, looked very satisfied.

A bit of breakfast (with, at Remus's insistence, chocolate milk) and a few attempts at dissuasion from Harry and Ginny later, Hermione sat up, stood up, and went for her coat. She was fairly assured that she was quite healed, though the possibility that her willpower simply outweighed her infirmity certainly existed.

Yeah, that was probably it.

"I'm fine," she insisted, gently refusing the swarm of hands that arose to help her. Remus, apparently unconvinced, disappeared into the kitchen, presumably to seek more chocolate, just in case.

"Are you ready to go, Draco?" she inquired, half over her shoulder. "I have some files I need to look at tonight."

"You can't possibly be intending to go back to work tomorrow," Draco said.

Hermione looked at him. "How many meetings do I have?"

"Well, five, I think, but—"

"And what are those people going to do if I don't show up?" she inquired pointedly.

"Well, they can go screw themselves, or possibly each other, but—"

"But what, Draco?" she interrupted. "I have to be there." She shrugged her coat on.

"Hermione Jane Granger, you get back in here!" Draco howled.

She turned. "Draco," she said, "you sound like my father. Which is dancing on the line between Electra complex and just plain weird."

"Hermione Granger," he said, "you have lost your mind, which is a pity, because it's an excellent one. Sit down and get better. Be responsible."

"Draco Malfoy," she retorted, "after the way you spent your Friday night, you're hardly in a position to tell me to be responsible."

"You know what—" he started.

"What, Draco?" she interjected. "I know what you did, and I know how incredibly inconsiderate it was, and I can't think of anything else I ought to know."

"How about knowing that I'm sorry and getting over it?"

Remus stepped back into the room just as she was drawing in a breath to shout back, his smile shining and a little too wide, three huge, festive, chocolate incarnations of Santa Clause in his hands. "Who's up for a little bit more?" he asked cheerfully and a bit too loudly.

Despite herself—nigh on involuntarily—Hermione took some.

Okay, took a lot.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Draco, of course, was no match for a woman with a mission. Both he and Hermione were back at work bright and early Monday morning, her gritting her teeth to grin through the persistent throbbing in the area of her injury, him sulking about the fact that she wouldn't listen to any of his self-proclaimed worthy advice. She wanted to show him and his worthy advice a strategic finger, but that wasn't very appropriate workplace behavior, so she refrained.

Two meetings came and went, Draco orchestrating them masterfully despite the sniffy tone of You-Know-I'm-Right in his voice, and Hermione treated him cordially enough, though more than a hint of You're-Not-What-You-Are-Is-Stupid probably came through in hers.

It was like they were at school again, only some of the psychotic teachers were working for her now.

When lunchtime arrived, they sat across from each other in silence for a full five minutes. Hermione was not going to be the first to speak. To speak was to surrender, and she was fighting to the death on this one, no matter how many soldiers would lie strewn across the bloodied field because of it. She was going to hold the high ground with her dying breath. Bayonet in hand, she would shoot deserters on sight—no regressing, no retreating, no surrender. Bullets might fly, blood might splatter, intervention from sane people like Ginny and Harry and Remus might take place, but—

"We're being retarded," Draco announced, well before she'd finished with the elaborate imagery she was crafting in her head.

"I believe they prefer 'differently abled' nowadays," Hermione informed him, slightly stiffly.

"Then they shouldn't mind terribly if we borrow 'retarded,' for us," Draco replied equably. "Love, I'm sick of this, all right? I was wrong to do what I did, but I never intended to hurt you by doing it, and I'm sorry that that happened."

Hermione took a deep breath. High ground—bayonets—moment of truth—

"I'm sorry I was a total bitch about it," she heard herself sigh.

Well. So much for that battle. And that elaborate image.

But Draco's face lit up like an electric lantern, and then his mouth went off like a racecar again, so clearly everything was all right.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hermione glanced at her wall clock, with its open, round white face and simple black numbers. It was two minutes ahead, and it read 5:02. She then consulted her desk clock, a little fold-up one that also displayed the temperature, the air pressure, and a fair amount of other useless data. This particular specimen of timepiece was three minutes ahead, and it read 5:03 (and twenty-three seconds, but Hermione didn't tend to quibble over those).

The warm, vaguely fuzzy idea of a job well done, like a worn coat that had conformed to fit, settled over Hermione and tugged a little smile into being on her face. There was something uniquely satisfying about finishing a successful day at work, knowing that a quiet, relaxing evening at home with Draco and Sparky and the no-longer-orange couch lay ahead. It was like the last moments of the Titanic would have been, had the iceberg been a great, hulking mass of cotton candy heralding the entrance to Fairy Land instead of an astronomically massive chunk of ice that would signal the miserable doom of thousands of innocent people.

Hermione paused. She shook that very morbid conceit out of her head. And then she pressed a finger down on the button on her phone that connected it to the one on Draco's desk.

"Are you ready?" she asked, leaning in over the speaker.

Hermione was expecting some incarnation of "I have been for a while"—be it "I've been ready since eight this morning," "I've been ready since I was born," or "I've been ready since the word 'ready' came into common usage."

What she received was silence.

She hesitated, then jammed the button down again. "Draco?" she prompted.

Nothing.

Her hands were shaking as she threw her things into her bag and shouldered it. It was nothing. He'd gone to deliver something. He'd gone to talk to someone. He'd gone to get frozen yogurt, which he was going to spill all over his shirt and moan about until she Tergeo-d it off for him. Everything was perfectly normal. Everything was under control.

Everything was not under control.

It took her ten minutes to scour their part of the building. The huddled figures having a conspiratorial discussion near the fountain—there were always two or three of them; she suspected it was a Ministry mandate—looked at her warily and a little disdainfully as she barreled past, but she ignored them. She ignored just about everything. She wanted Draco, and she wanted him now.

By five-fifteen, she was flushed, harried, disheveled, and absolutely desperate.

Desperation, as everyone knows, is a very, very dangerous thing.

The Hesperides had just gathered their hot-off-the-runway bags and were about to clickety-clack their way out when Hermione caught them at their adjoining desks.

"Have you seen Draco?" she demanded. If anyone was going to be paying him an undue-to-the-point-of-being-unnerving amount of attention, it was them.

"I thought his name was Ardoc," the redhead remarked, her voice airy with an edge of spite, as she retrieved an emery board from the depths of her gold purse and swiped absently at her already-perfect nails.

Hermione had gotten her panting under control enough to frown. "I wouldn't have come to you if it wasn't important," she told them.

"Oh, so we're important now?" the brunette inquired, her poison-apple-red lips drawing into a thin smile.

"If we're so important," the blonde cut in, "why'd you tell Dynesy Cranot that if we were in your department, you'd fire us all in one go?"

There was a pause.

"I… never said anything like that," Hermione said slowly.

The brunette smacked the blonde on the arm. "We made that rumor up, remember?" she hissed.

The blonde's eyes widened. "Oh, yeah…" Blissfully she smiled. "That was a good one."

Pursing her lips now, the brunette considered Hermione, who shifted her weight uncomfortably. "We saw Draco leave, if that's what you're wondering," she announced.

Hermione vaguely registered the fact that her fingers had clenched around the back of someone's chair. Fortunately, said chair was unoccupied, or its inhabitant might have been rather disturbed. Her knuckles went white. "With whom?" she pressed, breathlessly.

They stared at her.

"Ohmigawd," the redhead murmured. "Did she just say 'whom'?"

"I thought only, like, college professors said 'whom,'" the blonde whispered.

"That, and, like, Shakespeare," the redhead whispered back.

"Will you stop analyzing my grammar and tell me?" Hermione cried.

The brunette sighed and flipped her voluminous hair over her shoulder. "He left with some bloke," she yielded.

"What kind of 'bloke'?"

The brunette shrugged elegantly. "I don't know. Some old-ish bloke. On the ugly side. A little scruffy."

Hermione had a very bad feeling that she knew exactly who that extremely ambiguous description indicated.

Or, rather, whom that extremely ambiguous description indicated.