Hermione, long a connoisseur of the decadence of sleeping entirely alone, stretched out from corner to corner in her bed with her arms and legs spread like a starfish, but found the pleasure spoiled by the engine of anxiety sparking away in her stomach.
Dawn had progressed into daylight proper before she made her way to her room and collapsed against the sheets, cool and taut under the military sharpness of Grix's corner tucks.
Her exhaustion was as much of the mind as it was of the body, and in spite of the light streaming past the open shutters and across the coverlet, she sank into a gloom as tangible as the water in a lukewarm bath.
While she settled her head one way and then another, bunching and rebunching her pillow, rotating and flipping it, and then herself, barbs of distress pricked at her heart, each one a reminder of a mistake she had made the night before through blindness and distraction.
The deceiving pocket, the misdelivered notes, the faultless people misled.
She imagined the Time Turner sitting in its drawstring bag beneath a camellia bush, and then recollected herself, in a moment of sexual abandon, tugging away at years' worth of carefully tightened restraints in the same fashion that Draco, dutiful brother that he was, loosened her stays.
Her mind set it all before her as though it were a play. Once it had rehearsed the scene of the ball to its own satisfaction, it tackled the errors of the previous two weeks, then tracked backwards to her separation from Ron, forwards through the weeks that followed, and then on.
By way of a climax, the past six years of her life stood shoulder to shoulder across the proscenium line of the stage like Roman sagittarii, nocked their bows with irreparable regrets, and pierced her with a volley of self-reproach.
She was cold, but too tired to rouse herself and find a solution. Instead, she pressed her eyes closed harder than was helpful, and passed the morning kicking her linens away in convulsions of deferred embarrassment only to shiver and pull them back again, the minutes drawing themselves out in a cunning deception so that they each went on ten times as long as they ought to have done.
The early July day getting on with its business outside her window was offensively exquisite.
A clematis grew against the south face of the cottage, stretching its arms up weather-grey lattices to curl in curiosity around Hermione's window, where it walked its fingertips across the sill and steeped the room in the almondine scent of its star-shaped blooms. In the great old oak just beyond, a pair of red squirrels with orange coats and tufted ears scrambled over and around the heavy branches, insulting one another and scratching audibly at the bark as they ran, taunting her with their wakefulness and good cheer.
She resented them all: the churlish squirrels, the fragrant flowers on the vine, the fresh jar of yellow roses in the windowsill, and the depressing brightness of the indifferent sun.
Spent and numb, she had left the snuff box behind in Draco's room, abandoned like an appalling paperweight on the little table beside his bed.
She wasn't afraid of it then, but on the opposite side of the landing, with her eyelids closed, she watched it flicker into life and snatch him away from her with its arms of inexplicable fire, toss him through the gaps in the universe into fertile and unidentified fields, and lose him there forever.
If that happened, she'd be forced to go and fetch him.
A series of unsuccessful readjustments brought the cool side of her pillow up, and then the warm, and then the cool again. Finally, urged on by her nervous discomfort, and in the interest of not spending the remainder of her life tethered to a Time Turner in the search for him, she rose from the terrible disappointment that her bed had become, and drew her dressing gown around her shoulders.
In his room, far darker than hers, the shutters were closed and latched, and he lay on his side, facing away from the door.
The frame creaked as Hermione sat at the edge of the bed, but beyond his shallow and steady breath, he didn't move. She slid closer to him, and stroked her fingertips over the bare skin of his shoulder.
"Are you still awake?"
He shifted beneath his linens and sighed, a prolonged exhalation of pure fatigue, but didn't turn to look at her. "Unfortunately."
"Oh. I was—"
She drew up short at the sight of the snuff box, wallowing on the shadowed nightstand like a malignant toad.
It faced her head-on, shameless and vulgar. The dark obscured the finer details, but she picked out the circles of its eyes, simultaneously leering to either side and trained straight forward. It watched her, unblinking, as she slid across the bed and drew herself so close to Draco that her knees jostled the backs of his thighs.
She'd been assaulted by a pungent pine and lemon smell the moment she pulled the snuff box from her pocket after the ball, and its traces permeated the air over Draco's bed. Brown gelatinous globs of soap crowded into its orifices, and a fine film coated its entire surface, giving it the look of a creature wrapped in dirty cobwebs, with wet, rheumy eyes and a mouth full of rabid, pond-colored froth.
The gears of the nervous motor inside Hermione tightened, and the machine picked up speed.
"I was wondering—" She flushed with unanticipated self-consciousness, and spread her hand over the center of her chest. Recollecting that her dressing gown covered her admirably, she let it fall.
"Wondering what, Granger?" He turned to look at her, then shuffled his arm from beneath the bedclothes and scratched at the back of his ear. "It's late. No, gods. Early."
"Could we sleep together?"
Draco blinked.
"I don't mean in the sex way," she whispered.
"I didn't think you meant it in the sex way."
"It's only that you're in here with the—" She gestured at the snuff box, glowering at the pair of them with its mucousy eyes.
"Are you nervous about it all of a sudden?" he asked. "You seemed to think it was safe enough when you were marching about with it in your pocket."
"Yes, but that was me."
He leaned up higher and scowled. "Are you worried I'm going to run off with it?"
"No," said Hermione. "I'm worried it's going to run off with you." She pinched the striped coverlet draped over Draco's hip between her fingers, then drew her hand away.
"You're worried it's going to run off with me?"
"Yes. And if something set it off while you were alone, and it took you—" Another wave of mortification swept over her. She wrapped her arms around her middle, and fixed her gaze on the snuff box.
"I'd manage," said Draco. He poked at the box with a finger. "Gods, what a miserable object. It's seen some action, hasn't it?"
"Yes, it's horrid. I've been telling you as much since you first introduced it, but, Draco—if you weren't alright. If I couldn't find you straight away."
He narrowed his eyes at her and brushed his fingertips together to rid them of whatever pollution the snuff box might have soiled him with. "You're really worried."
Her face must have explained to him that she was, because after studying it for a while, he rolled out from underneath his linens without another word.
"Are those—" Hermione began.
"Are what?" He neatened the sheets and quilt, tucking them up as though making his bed for the day.
"You're wearing boxer shorts."
"I am."
"Are those the ones you had on when we arrived here?"
"No," he said. "I transfigured them. I'm not especially keen on wearing an ankle length dress to bed."
"Understandable. Neither am I, really." She sat back on her heels and watched him.
The rumor mill had been correct; he did have defined abdominals.
She would never admit that she'd attempted to Transfigure a new pair of knickers for herself out of a handkerchief, nor that she'd given up after repeatedly producing a fuchsia lace thong with a cheeky black velvet bow at the back.
Once the bedding was smoothed down, Draco lay back down on top of the lot. "Alright then." He pushed at Hermione's hip, then when she moved away from him, tugged the bedclothes out from under her and held them open. "Get in."
"What are you doing?"
"Welcoming you into my bed. Get in so I can go back to sleep. I'm exhausted, and the two of us have rather a lot to think about tomorrow."
"But you'll be cold—in just your pants, on top of the bedclothes like that."
He fumbled for his wand at the side table, pointed it at himself, and cast a warming charm. "There. Are you less concerned?"
She supposed that she was, and said so.
As she slid between his sheets, he turned away from her and faced the wall again. He didn't move, and Hermione thought he must have been asleep.
For long minutes she lay on her back, tracing the web of cracks in the ceiling plaster and worrying at a loose stub of thread at the edge of the coverlet.
Then quickly, before she could think better of it, she rolled towards him.
She slipped an arm around his waist, and as best as she could while pinched beneath the layers of his linens, nested her body into his from his shoulders to his hips, the tops of her feet tucked over his bum and her knees bunched into the center of his back.
"What are you doing?" He sounded perfectly awake.
Hermione flattened her hand against his chest, fingers splayed open, and rested her forehead at his nape.
She breathed in.
Pine and lemon, lavender and linen, tired flesh and the sweat of her own contrition.
The hot, frantic machinery inside her cooled, and then slowed, and as it stopped, a debilitating need for sleep began to take hold.
His heart marched briskly beneath her palm.
"If that blasted vole goes off again," she murmured, "it can take us together."
He didn't say anything at all to that.
She wondered whether he'd fallen asleep at last, until his hand closed over hers.
"I never meant that letter for you," she said. Her voice had slipped out of focus.
He took a very long time to answer her.
"Who was it meant for?"
"Ronald." She yawned, and began to drift away in earnest.
"Roland," he said.
"That's him."
There was another stretch of silence.
"What have you been up to, Hermione?"
"Nothing."
"It's not nothing." He tightened his hand over hers.
"It can't be anything," she mumbled. "The timing is all wrong."
He fell quiet again, and her mind sauntered down the path to sleep, unhurried and unconcerned.
He spoke once more, scarcely audible.
"It's a swan."
She might have laughed, or only dreamed that she did, but her thoughts, spent from racing from one end of her mind to the next, had grown scattered, and then dispersed, and the distinction no longer mattered.
—
She slept like the most thoroughly extinguished of the dead, and by the time she woke, the shadows sprouted from west to east across the floor.
Draco sat up against the headboard with his book in his hands, by appearances entirely indifferent to Hermione's legs twined around his left thigh.
She lifted her head from his chest and wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist.
"Have I been drooling?" Her throat was dry, but there was a damp patch on his skin where her mouth had been.
He turned a page. "Only a little. The snoring was of greater concern."
"I always snore when I'm overtired."
"I know."
She settled her arm around his waist again, and enjoyed a gaping, feline yawn. "You're a furnace."
"All to the good, because your feet are freezing. You should consider seeing someone about your circulation."
"My circulation is extremely robust." She huddled up against the radiant heat of his skin. "When did you get under the covers?"
"At the point that you stole the coverlet out from underneath me, kicked me in the back end and said 'Stop pinching me.'"
"I don't recall doing that."
"Doesn't mean that it didn't happen."
"Why were you pinching me?"
"I wasn't. I believe it was a complaint about not being able to steal the sheets as well."
"Mm." She yawned once more, scrubbed the soles of her feet along his nearly hairless calves and arched her back. "I don't think I've slept properly even once since we arrived here."
"And how did you fare on this side of the landing?" He raised his scarred eyebrow, but didn't shift his attention from his book.
"I've drooled on you, haven't I?" She ran the pad of her thumb over his bruised and swollen lip. "Look at you, broken man. Does it hurt?"
"Only when you touch it."
"You ought to have Grix see to it."
He allowed her to trace her fingers over the cuts and bruises on his face, fading fast but still evident. "He brought a tray up earlier."
"Did he?"
"He did."
Hermione pushed aside the notion of Grix walking in to find her asleep and slobbering on Draco's sternum, and admired the breakfast tray sitting at the side of the bed. It remained untouched except for a missing teacup, which had migrated to the bedside next to Draco's elbow.
"I think he's taken pity on us. It's proper breakfast tea with milk and sugar." He brought his cup to his lips, blew on it, and took a drink. "I have no idea how it tastes, but the idea of it shores one up all the same. I haven't the courage to inquire after donuts."
She shifted up in the bed, poured herself a cup, then joined Draco in leaning against the headboard.
She didn't want to say it, but it needed saying.
"We're going to have to test it." She sipped her tea, and regarded the gruesome snuff box with contempt.
"Gods," he sneered, eyeing it sidelong. "I suppose we must."
"Breakfast first."
With her lips at the gilt rim of one of Martin's charming cups, Hermione discovered how dearly she missed a proper milky tea in the morning.
Grix's black tea was excellent, steeped strong and held piping hot in its silver pot.
She was astonished to also learn that sitting up in Draco's bed, stalling whatever doom the snuff box had in store, blowing across the surface of the tea to cool it before each swallow, she felt ...
… happy.
She rifled through her proverbial warm, dark, inside cupboards, searching for the middle-grade anxiety she always kept on hand, and found it quite unaccounted for.
She slid further down the bed and leaned into his arm, and when he lifted it over her shoulder and pulled her near, morning sweat-smelling boy that he was, she was happier still.
Her body suggested that it wouldn't be overly inconvenienced if she were to lie with him in his bed in the sex way rather than the not-sex way—that it was, in fact, standing entirely at the ready to do so—but the train of thought was swiftly retired from the line and broken down for scrap.
Barring that particular form of morning exercise, all they wanted for was—
Hermione sniffed, and glanced inquiringly at the tray. "Has Grix given us sausages?"
"He has."
She grumbled her carnivorous contentment.
"It's funny," she began some minutes later, belly lined with glorious grease and caged again at his side with her hot cup of tea, "but it feels out of time entirely, doesn't it? Like ..."
"Like an overstimulating holiday," he offered.
"Exactly."
"I know. It's the strangest thing."
"When you think about it, isn't this what we've dreamed of doing all along?" She peered up at him.
"You mean sitting abed with you in my pants the morning after a party where no one loses any teeth, having a cup of tea? That's the dream, yes."
"You know what I mean. Studying the past in person. That's the entire thrust of the ten-year plan for the department."
"The ten-year plan I drew up."
"Why are you the worst?" Hermione stroked her cheek against his chest. "I suppose it's a very good ten-year plan, as ten-year plans go."
"Have you ever come up with a better one?"
"No. Mine have all been disastrous."
"I'll own it projected a bit more intentionality to the time travel and significantly less hand-to-hand combat, but it has occurred to me that this is a perverse sort of professional success. Assuming we haven't upset the apple cart so thoroughly we come back to find we were never born."
Hermione huffed out a dry, snorting laugh.
"What? he asked.
"Nothing. Only I just thought how funny it would be to never find it."
"The Time Turner?"
She turned her face in towards his chest and surreptitiously smelled him. "Mm hm. You could become a fisherman. Grow a beard."
Draco's ribs twitched with a silent snicker. "I don't know if I have a beard in me. But I would try, if that's what you wanted."
Tentatively, Hermione grasped his left hand in her right.
He made no protest.
"I'll learn to knit and do you up a closet full of cable knit sweaters." She threaded their fingers together.
"Thank you very much. Patch my Mac as well."
"Darn your socks. Gut all the fishes. Make fish soup. I'll be a literal fishwife."
"Figurative one, too."
"Shut it." She closed her eyes and sighed, then felt him squeeze her hand.
"Not a fish sister?"
"We can't be fish siblings," she said emphatically. "Because clearly we'll have to have fish children. In order to continue the fish line."
"How many?"
"Fish or children?"
"Of these fish children of yours."
"Eighteen."
"Perfect." He blinked his eyes in approval. "Bossy little Granger girls, all of them."
"In cable knit jumpers."
"Especially the infants."
"The infants cabled right up."
"Great tempestuous masses of curls."
"The babies as well?"
"Naturally," he said. "We'll need to get started soon if we're going to fit in—"
He stopped speaking.
Then he pulled his hand away from hers, and became deeply absorbed in the work of drinking his tea.
"Ron would be devastated." With no forewarning, he poured the words over Hermione like a bucket of ice water.
She flushed with embarrassment and moved away from him, threw back a swallow of tea, drew a sharp pull of air over the burned surface of her tongue, and set her cup down on the breakfast tray with an unsteady hand.
"As will your mother, and Harry, and a whole lot of other people if we don't make it back."
Without ceremony, she leaned across his lap and grabbed the soapy wombat from the nightstand.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm taking it with me while I get dressed."
"No, you're not!" His tea sloshed over the rim of his cup as he set it aside, then captured her hips in his hands before she could haul herself out of his bed.
"Let me go, Malfoy." She twisted her back end about one way and then the next, but he didn't release her. "I'm not leaving it in here alone with you."
He hauled her back to himself. "And I'm supposed to be alright with you walking off with it?"
"I'll be fine."
"What an astonishing hypocrite you are! Neither of us has the faintest idea what that thing might do, and I have absolutely no interest in being in another room when it happens."
"You were willing to sleep with it."
"I'm willing to sleep with just about anything, remember?"
She gave up trying to free herself from the hold he'd secured around her middle, and sat back on her heels. "It's nearly gone two o'clock. I need to dress."
"As do I," he muttered into her neck.
"We have a problem then, don't we?"
They struck a compromise.
Hermione crossed the cool floorboards of the landing on her bare feet, snuff box in hand. Draco trailed behind, with only the slight tug at her back to suggest he had taken hold of her chemise.
"Help me into my stays," she said when they'd made it to her room and closed the door.
"Be nice."
She lifted up her hair and cast a glance at him. "Please help me into my stays."
He'd learned, and learned well, over several mornings of practice. His hands moved with confidence, cinching her quickly and giving the laces a final tug at the bottom before looping them closed. He tied her petticoat, too, then gathered the skirts of her white linen dress in his hands.
"Arms up." He hooked the dress over her head and let the skirts fall, then fastened the buttons up the back with swift fingers while she slipped her stockings on and tied her hair up into a passable bun.
"You'd think there would be spells for all this nonsense," he said, reclining on her bed while she floundered with the ribbons at her thighs.
"I wasn't aware of any spells for exactly this when we arrived, and I don't have access to an adequate library. I tried the shoe-lacing spell, and let me advise you that a boot and a corset are not the same thing. If we had another month here I'd devise an improvement, but we don't, and I won't."
He had stretched himself out fully across her bed, crossed his arms behind his head, and had chosen to wear his most insufferable, smarmy look. "Are you sure it's not because you like it when I dress and undress you, Hermione?"
She glowered at him. "I'm quite sure."
Draco smuggled a handful of her skirts in his fist as they crossed the landing back to his room, and the heat beneath her indignation rose and began to simmer.
As they met the threshold, she twisted around without warning and collided with the barrier of his chest.
"We're going to have to separate at some point, you know," she said, looking up into his unreadable face. "We can't go on clinging to one another in perpetuity." He didn't respond, so she lifted up the badger and pointed its nose at him. "It wasn't instantaneous before. We had some warning."
"You're not to leave the room with it unless I'm with you." His fingertips dug into the flesh of her hip.
"That is not nice."
He rolled his eyes. "Please, Miss Granger, kindly do not walk off with the catastrophe swan by yourself."
"What if I need the loo?"
"I'll wait outside the door."
She looked at him skeptically. "Then the same applies to you."
"Where's it going to sleep tonight?" he asked.
"In my bedroom."
"Then I'm sleeping in your bed."
"Fine."
"Good."
She slipped out of his grasp before he could tighten it again, tossed herself across his bed and curled up in the center, face politely averted while he pulled on his trousers and shirt.
Only a moment ago, she thought she wanted to slap at Draco's anxious and patronizingly helpful hands, but she was forced to swallow her pride when he parted from her to dress.
She immediately felt ill at ease.
Within the last few hours, six feet away had become too far.
She'd never experienced anything like it in all their years of work, despite one or two lost fingertips and the time she accidentally Dislocated a substantial hank of her hair, close to the scalp.
They'd both thoroughly lost their minds.
"Do you think we've been affected?" she asked. "By the time travel I mean."
"In what sense?"
His trousers rustled as he pulled them on, and she fixed her attention to the snuff box sitting on the bed beside her.
"You know—impacted. Mentally. By being thrown about through spacetime. Or if there's a curse attached to this ghastly creature, which I suppose there must be. It might have altered our personalities, don't you think? Maybe we're addled."
"I'm not addled."
She fought hard against the urge to turn over and watch him settle his trousers on his hips. "I must be," she muttered to the snuff box.
She prodded at its latch with a fingertip, then flipped it open, revealing nothing inside beyond a soggy blob of soft brown soap.
She drew her wand from her pocket. "We ought to try a spell. Something very simple."
"We could summon it," he suggested, muffled inside his shirt. "It's what got us into this mess. If it doesn't react, it may have spent its curse."
"Something simpler." Hermione tipped the box closed again with her wand, and struck it once soundly on the nose.
"What are you—" Draco crossed the room with three heavy footfalls and took her ankle in his hand.
"What are you?" Hermione asked, pistoning her foot.
His hold was both soft and uncompromising.
"You're messing with it!" he said sharply. "It's terrifying!"
"So you're going to grab onto my foot in case anything happens?"
"Yes."
She pushed her wand down into her pocket, flipped onto her back and held up her empty hands. "Look. I'm not an idiot, Draco. I wasn't going to perform any spell work until you were done dressing. Now let go of me."
Draco, shirt still unbuttoned, did no such thing. He went on looking down on her with fear and annoyance, like she'd been preoccupied with a book and wandered into a minefield.
"You just about gave me a bloody heart attack."
"We're both being extremely silly," she said.
"It's not going to seem extremely silly if you find yourself sitting on Hadrian's wall being stared down by a Roman cavalry unit."
"We've never been afraid of our own research, Malfoy. I'm ashamed of us this morning. It's high time we take the badger by the horns—"
Draco covered his eyes with his available hand. "Gods help me."
"—and do what we need to do to get ourselves home."
"How would you like it if I was across the room from you, prodding it with my wand just for fun?"
"We're not discussing your recreational prodding habits." She pointed at the small mirror on his bureau. "Go and look at yourself. You've broken your head, you can't smell anything, you've permanently bisected your eyebrow, and now you're going about pugilizing yourself against other men's fists."
"That's not how boxing works."
"It seems that's how you work." She raised her free leg and flattened her stockinged foot against his chest. "And we cannot spend night after night huddled up together in our pants—"
"You haven't got any pants."
"—out of a possibly ungrounded fear that one of us is going to get chucked back in time and hauled off by horsemen, or eaten by pteranodons." She pumped her captured leg again, but his grip didn't ease. "It's untenable and absurd. It's—" Hermione's eyes searched for the clock on Draco's bureau "—just after two o'clock. The sooner we can prove this dreadful thing is harmless, the sooner we can stop trailing after one another like a pair of motherless ducklings."
"Stop poking the badger, Hermione."
"Don't tell me what to do! I'll poke all the badgers. Watch me do it." She reached over her head, felt around on the bed, and once she'd found the snuff box, she flipped its latch.
"How many pteranodons do you think you can take on by yourself?" he asked.
"Do I have my wand?"
"What?"
"If I have my wand, twelve. At least."
He shifted his hands to the undersides of her calves and yanked her away from the snuff box and to the edge of the bed.
"You've lost your mind."
"That is exactly my point." She looked down and found her knees, in their white silk stockings, bracketing Draco's hips.
A half dozen centimetres of skirt and chemise stood between her modesty and providing Draco with a front row seat to a rather exceptional show. She quickly shoved her skirts down and flattened her hand over her chest.
He had evidently experienced the same revelation, evaluating the tops of her stockings at her open thighs before looking back at her face. His expression resembled that of a man who'd been told he won the lottery and had to decide in the next five minutes on an annuity or a lump sum payment.
"You've messed up my hair." Even to her own ear it sounded childlike and peevish.
It was the wrong thing to have said.
Quick as a curse he folded into her, pelvis snuggled between her legs, her legs wrapped around his waist.
Neither of them said anything. Their sole mutual concern was to join their mouths in a fit of damp supplication and keep them like that, sighing at the relief of it and the taste of tea and strawberries between them.
They kissed, and nothing more, for a very long time.
If he'd moved a hand to a breast, or worse yet, to where she lacked even the feeble defense of a pair of cheap-looking pink kickers, it would have been over. She'd have slid her hand into his trouser front and embarked on the data collection phase of the research into how, exactly, mingling their anatomy in that particular way would alter them.
But his hands had settled on either side of her head, tangled in her hair, and remained there.
It became manifest that the decision lay with her: whether to stop, or to continue as they were, or to induct him into the highly selective secret society of men who'd been permitted to fumble around beneath her skirts.
She would have done the latter. It had the finality of a rain shower that had already begun.
She needed to tell him something—before it happened, not after. It was terribly important.
She didn't know what it was.
She pushed at his chest and they parted, both of them gasping for breath.
His eyes were wide and wild, but he waited, watching her, his lower lip agape and gleaming.
Before she could say anything, something red and round, like a small rubber ball, shot through the open window, impacted Draco's temple, then rebounded onto the bed.
"What the fuck?" He jerked back reflexively, brought a hand to the side of his face, and stared out the window in shock.
Hermione froze, then felt above her head.
Something lay on the coverlet, cool and small and soft.
She folded it into her hand, brought it between them, and held it up.
"It's a strawberry." Hermione thrust it towards Draco for emphasis.
Draco gawped.
"Why are strawberries flying through my window?"
The hoarse and rattling call of a crow carried over the windowsill.
"Oh! It's Martin's crow."
Draco's face twisted under the strain of his effort to comprehend. "Martin has a crow?"
"He does. It's a thief."
"What does it steal?"
"Strawberries."
"And it throws them?"
"I suppose—well it would seem so. Maybe it was a squirrel?"
Draco closed his eyes and let his head fall towards his chest. "Either way."
The moment was broken.
He rolled away from her, dropped his arm over his eyes and lay prone on his back, breathing hard.
"You're right," he said. "I'm addled."
Hermione pushed her skirt and petticoat back down her thighs. "I told you we were."
"Fuck that crow."
"Agreed."
"And fuck my life."
She turned towards him. "Your life? What about my life? Having strawberries thrown at you by crows may not be your usual impetus for coitus-interruptus—"
"That is not what just happened."
"—but you've had enough weekend shags that you must be used to awkward Monday morning lift rides by now. I'm certainly not."
He shook his head, arm still resting over his eyes. "You never get used to them."
"I shouldn't think so. And I refuse to have an uncomfortable lift ride with you, of all people. Only angry ones."
"No, I don't want one either."
"We've made plans, Draco. They're important to me. I thought they were important to you." She reached over her head and picked up the muskrat. "But we've been losing our minds over your idiotic heirloom and its time travelling sex curse for days. It's completely unprofessional."
He moved his arm and looked at her, eyes wide and morose. "Hermione, please stop manhandling the swan. It's repulsive. And I really don't think either of us is properly equipped for dinosaur fighting." He sighed hard, then rotated onto his side. "How could you even suggest that our work isn't important to me?"
His shirt fell open, and Hermione found herself contemplating the smooth, pale skin over his right pectoral muscle.
"Is it? Sometimes it seems like it's all a joke to you."
"Would I have spent the last five years of my life being forced to enjoy coffee and being told off by you if it wasn't?"
"Being offered excellent coffee and being forced to enjoy it are not the same thing."
"Aren't they?"
They lay there, side by side, and breathed.
He rubbed his fingertips over his eyes. "What do you want to do?"
She wanted to lick his nipple.
"I want to test the box," she said.
"Alright." He dropped his hand to the bed and stared at her mouth.
She wanted to shove him further away, but only succeeded in reaching out and laying her hand over his heart. "No more kissing."
"I'm sorry about the kissing."
"You don't need to be sorry. It's not your fault. There's something wrong with both of us. But no more of it. And no sex, either."
"Can I sleep in your bed?"
"Yes, but not in the sex way."
"I shouldn't think that will be an issue if there's not going to be any kissing."
She curled her fingertips into his skin.
His eyes wandered over her, from her massacred hair to the hem of her dress, still tugged up to her thighs.
He sighed hard.
"We're going to need to change it."
"Change what?"
"The ten year plan."
"Why?"
"It's only a detour, I hope."
"We've only been gone for two weeks, Draco, it's hardly a detour."
"Are you serious? It's only been two weeks?"
"When am I ever not serious?"
"All the time. Do you remember when you made the spikey crown out of leftover brass strips and wrapped your cardigan around yourself like a scarf—"
"It was my stola."
"—and told me you were Lady Liberty? That crown's still hanging up next to the small wrenches on the wall behind the Dislocator by the way. You could put it on again."
"That was two years ago, and we'd been working on the Potentiograph for thirty six hours without a break. I'm talking about right now."
Draco brought his fingertips to Hermione's cheek, and swiped his thumb across her bottom lip. "Right now?"
A hard knot formed in Hermione's throat. "Yes. Right now."
His hand fell away. "It would be funny if we stayed, wouldn't it?"
Hermione nodded, hot beads of tears taking shape in the corners of her eyes. "Hilarious."
"But right now," he said quietly, "you seem like you very much want to go home."
"Acci—"
"No!"
The snuff box ogled them from the center of Draco's neatly made bed, where it luxuriated in a band of bright afternoon sunlight cutting across the coverlet.
In the full light of day it looked haggard and pathetic.
It was ugly to begin with, but its misadventures had turned it into suitable fuel for nightmares. Standing beside Draco on the other side of the room, she nearly felt sorry for it.
She angled her body into his side as best she could without causing his wand arm to wobble.
"Something simple."
"It doesn't get much simpler than Accio," he said, arm tensed under the crush of both her hands.
"Simpler than that."
Her instincts for both fighting and escape were sharply honed, and her feet tensed and lifted, readying her to take off at a gallop in any direction.
He dropped his wand to his side.
"Do you actually want to do this? We can hold off. Take another approach."
"No." She tightened her jaw and straightened her spine. "We need to get some kind of reassurance that it's not going to explode in our faces and send us back to the Upper Paleolithic."
"That sounds tremendously boring."
"I don't know about that."
His brow lifted. "Is that what was going on in that romance novel you read the other week?"
"Yes. But I am not letting you fill me with your increase in some lightly inhabited jungle, Malfoy."
Draco stared at the snuff box, then back at her.
"What was the title again? I'm going to ask Theo to put it on hold for me at the library."
"In the Caverns of Her Desire. It's the second book of a pentalogy." She waved her hand at the bed. "Do a Wingardium Leviosa. Simple."
Draco rolled his head in a half circle one direction, then back the other way. "Fine. Are you actually ready for this, Granger?"
"Yes."
"Wing—"
As his hand moved in the air, Hermione shifted behind him, still squeezing his right arm.
"You're going to need to be still, you know. If I cock up the spell I'm throwing at it we may be well on our way to realizing your caveman fantasies. Are you biting me?"
Hermione pulled her mouth away from the back of Draco's right arm.
"Do it. Quickly."
Draco shook his head, then lifted his wand again.
"Wingardium L—oh come on, Hermione. This is exactly what you insisted we do today."
She'd moved around behind him, and had begun a futile effort to pull up onto her toes and look over his shoulder.
"Go on then," he said.
He held his elbows back, and Hermione used them as leverage to jump up and string her arms around his shoulders, clamp her thighs around his middle and cross her ankles tightly over his navel. "Now." She pointed over his shoulder at the snuff box on the bed and swished and flicked her imaginary wand.
"Are we feeling secure enough?" he asked.
"Yes. Do it."
Bent slightly forward to adjust for her weight on his back, Draco lifted his wand once more.
"Wingardium"—he flinched as Hermione bit softly into his shoulder—"Leviosa."
She eased her teeth from the fabric of his shirt, and the two of them watched in reverent silence as the snuff box rose into the air, hovered a meter over the bed, and began turning idly on a horizontal axis like a chicken roasting on a spit.
"Oh," said Hermione.
"Oh indeed." He hooked his elbows under her knees and anchored her tighter to his back. "You really ought to warn a fellow that you bite."
"I don't bite hard. And only when I'm really worked up."
"I'll remember that when I'm hauling you to my cave over my shoulder. It's not doing anything weird."
"It isn't, is it?" Hermione breathed out, pulled her wand from her pocket, then kicked her heels into Draco's haunches. "Walk me over there. I'm going to Scourgify it. It's disgusting."
In the nappish hour between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, Draco and Hermione emerged from Draco's bedroom and made their way downstairs.
A fire hissed and sparked cheerfully in the fireplace, and the smell of baking bread flooded the room. Margaret McClure sat by the hearth, chattering away, while Martin shouted back at her from his packet of Tartan wraps about his enthusiasm for butter and colliding with a lively dance partner.
"The young people, Miss Margaret!" Martin gestured, knocking his hand against the side of his teacup. "They like a break from the monotony, and they shall get it from me! A little piétinement de la mule heureuse, a little to when one is expecting a fro, keeps things interesting!"
"I should imagine it does, Mr. Martin!" said Margaret. "I was told there were an extraordinary number of couples, and there were so many guests that Miss Parkinson had to have extra chairs Transfigured in the dining room. I can't but wonder how hot it must have been. It's a miracle there weren't more than two rows in the garden!"
"There were two?" asked Draco, lowering himself down against a sofa cushion. He sounded disappointed. "Who had the other one?"
"Oh! Mr. Granger, you do look a fright," said Margaret. "Shall I go and fetch some of Mr. Grix's wonder ointment from the cabinet?"
"I suppose a little wonder ointment won't hurt." Draco draped his arm along the back of the sofa as Hermione sat beside him.
"Your crow's been throwing strawberries at my head," he said to Martin.
Martin's white-crowned head jolted to attention. "Has he?"
"He has." Draco pointed at his temple. "Got me right here at an extremely inopportune moment."
"What a bastard!" Martin's eyes glinted.
"We could not be more in agreement," said Draco.
"We'll show him who's king of the strawberries tomorrow."
"Where's Grix this afternoon?" Hermione asked.
She settled herself on the sofa beside Draco, and perched the snuff box at her knees, where it sat facing out into the room like a teacup terrier.
"Gone to Tobermory!" shouted Martin. "Back tomorrow! Time to eat the kraut!"
"I'm on the very strictest orders to keep you out of Mr. Grix's crocks," said Margaret, bustling back into the room with a tiny ceramic pot in her hand. She paused in front of Draco and held it up. "Shall I, or…?"
Draco took the ointment from her, lifted the lid, sniffed at the contents, and frowned.
"Oh, Draco. Give it here," said Hermione. She set the snuff box aside and took the jar from him, and sniffed it herself. Its odor was pungent and antiseptic, but pleasant. "It smells of tea tree oil." She dipped a finger into the pale yellow ointment inside, and began to daub it on the cuts and bruising at his lips.
Margaret regained her chair by the fire, and picked up a folded page.
"Mr. Grix has taken up an urgent errand, and gone to his brother on the Isle of Mull. He had no notice, and expressed his regret that he wasn't able to give you any. He sent for me this morning and asked whether I might come and assist Mr. Martin while he was away, and as I'm beforehand with the dresses for the Fitzswilliams's wedding, I said I'd be delighted. Mr. Martin's been showing me the proper way to perform a—how is it that you said it, Mr. Martin?"
"Ciseaux!" Martin offered.
"That's the one, and it sounds like a lovely step, very bold for a ball, but he nearly had one of Mr. Grix's crocks on the floor along with all of that lovely cabbage he's put up, so we've decided to have a sit. Mr. Martin has had a swallow of port, and now we're very calm, and snug as toast, and conversing like we always do."
Draco flinched as Hermione swiped the ointment on his chin.
"It's only the tiniest scratch," she whispered.
"But it hurts." Draco mooned at her with his great silver-grey eyes and plumped out his lower lip.
"Be strong," she murmured.
"I am so strong, Granger. You have no idea how strong I am."
Hermione shook her head as she patted the pad of her finger around a circular bruise on Draco's jaw, then put the lid back on the pot and set it aside.
"We're about to read a letter from a very old friend at Oxford, aren't we Mr. Martin?" Margaret held up her sheet of letter paper, and then jolted in her chair. "Oh! I'm very sorry. You've had two owls as well this morning, Miss Granger. Only you and Mr. Granger have been abed, and I wasn't going to disturb you." She lifted a book from the table beside her and produced two envelopes, one sealed with silver wax, and the other with red.
"Who are they from?" Hermione asked as she took the envelopes from Margaret.
The first was stamped with the Malfoy seal, and contained a letter formally inviting everyone at Twiggybroke Cottage to a picnic at Malfoy Manor the following week.
The other was sealed with a plain, hasty stamp in the wax.
Her name appeared on the outside of the envelope in a strong and flowing hand, and when she opened the seal and unfurled the letter, she recognized the sender before she'd taken in what it said.
Dear Miss Granger,
An urgent letter from home has brought me back into Devonshire sooner than expected. I had intended to call on you and your brother as early as this afternoon, but I cannot anticipate a return to Wiltshire and your company until, at the earliest, the picnic at Malfoy Manor Saturday next.
Until then, only know that were it possible, I would say more, and if it is your wish, I am—
Yours most faithfully,
Roland Weasley
"Who's writing to you, Hermione?" Draco peered sidelong at her while she read.
"No one." Hermione folded the letter and returned it to its envelope, then secreted both pieces of correspondence away in the depths of a pocket and adjusted her skirts at her knees.
"Mr. Martin," she said, grabbing the snuff box and thrusting it towards him, "my brother and I have come across this object, and it strikes us both as being potentially cursed."
Martin's vast nocturnal eyes fixed on the box and widened to luminous discs behind his spectacles.
As their fear had eased and their confidence grown, Hermione and Draco had cleaned and polished it to a level of shine it probably hadn't had since the time of its obscure and diabolical manufacture. They repaired its failing hinges, and straightened its clasp. It looked whole again, approaching a self-referential sort of artistic coherence, with the russet glow of the fire in the hearth reflecting in the discomforting circles of its eyes and blazing against its foul fur.
"Ha!" Martin folded forward in his chair to get a closer look. "What a delight!"
Draco drew up in interest. "You think it's handsome?"
"It's hideous!" Martin answered.
"Oh, come on." Draco flattened himself back against the sofa, and his knee began to bounce irritably.
"Well, well done, the both of you!" Martin continued. He pointed a knobbly finger at the box. "What an extraordinary accomplishment!"
Hermione, torn between her desire to not take false credit for the production of the object and her wish to be agreeable, merely said, "Thank you."
"Hermione and I have run all of the diagnostic spells within our combined reach," Draco said, "and nothing has turned up out of the ordinary."
Half an hour before, perched on Draco's back and throttling his waist with her thighs, Hermione had performed half the spells, and he'd managed the other.
"It's possible that it's only an ordinary snuff box, but we thought that in order to be able to get a good night's rest, a second opinion was warranted." Hermione held up the box again, gleaming and dimly malign. "Could you take a look, and tell us if you notice anything unusual?"
"Besides its being awful to look at?" Martin asked with a smile fixed to his face.
Draco hoisted his chin in show of stoicism. "What we mean to ask is, does it appear to have any kind of spell, or curse, or really any magic attached to it at all, as far as you can tell?"
"Beyond what you've done to it?"
"We've only cleaned it today," said Draco. "I think we've done an admirable job."
Martin nodded, and considered it for a while, then drew his spry applewood wand from his blankets and waved his hand in a relaxed arc. Hermione tensed as the box rose into the air, drifted across the center of the room and hovered in front of Martin's chair.
He whispered a slew of unintelligible incantations, and a spray of vivid light burst from its surfaces in oval arms, like a thousand petals of a spherical flower, each one a different color and pulsing with a haze of its own luminescence. Some petals flared bright and dense, and others were wan and translucent.
Hermione had scoured more volumes in the libraries at Hogwarts and at the Ministry than anyone of her personal acquaintance, and never seen anything exactly like it.
Draco's hand slid across Hermione's knee, and when it found hers, she let him take it to his own lap, and keep it there.
The snuff box rolled slowly within the starburst of magic, first horizontally and then vertically, and then drawing the spell along as it moved, it settled down into Grix's hand, lighting the old man's face in shades of electric origin. Shifting lines reflected from the lenses of his spectacles like streaks of neon lights passing through the window of a car on a rainy night. He scrutinized the box, flipped it over, opened it, and shut it again. Then he lifted it to his nostrils and took a wary sniff.
"Smells like soap," he observed.
"Yes," said Draco. "It's been recently used in that capacity."
Martin blinked in approval. "I like lemon."
He whispered to the box again, and the flower wilted and disappeared. He muttered to it a final time, and it rose from his palm, then floated back across the space between him and Hermione, and seated itself in her lap.
"What do you think?" Hermione asked.
"Tremendous amount of magical residue," said Martin, tucking his wand away and steepling his fingers beneath his chin. "I couldn't tell you how it was done."
"Do you have any idea what sort of curse it was?" Hermione asked.
"No idea." Martin bundled himself down in his blankets. "It's all gone now. We can all curse it again later if you want." He smiled at Margaret. "Let's have this letter."
While Margaret sipped her tea and picked up Martin's correspondence, Hermione turned the snuff box over in her hands.
There had been something, and now it was gone. What was it?
She handed it to Draco, who took it from her with a resigned lack of haste.
"It's yours, I suppose," she said. "Another curse dispelled from a family heirloom. I promise I won't put it back on."
"Fantastic." Draco set it on the low table beside the sofa, where it twinkled its incivility at everyone in the room. "I'll just tuck it in my pocket when it's time to go, shall I?"
"My dearest friend," Margaret began, "I hope this letter finds you in excellent health, and that you are continuing to enjoy your retirement."
Martin sat up taller in his chair. "Fukkink!"
Draco stilled.
Margaret read down to the bottom of the page, and found the signature. "That's exactly right!"
Confusion evolved on every feature of Draco's face.
"Fucking?" he asked.
"Fukkink at Oxford," Hermione clarified.
Draco looked at her with suspicion. "Who's fucking at Oxford?"
"Nobody's fucking at Oxford," she said. "It's only the metallurgy don."
"Why is it only the metallurgy don gets to fuck?"
"Fukkink the metallurgist, ha!" Martin erupted. "Fukkink the scoundrel!"
"That seems ill-advised," said Draco, "but alright."
"Fukkink the sheep!"
Draco recoiled. "What?"
"Fukkink the circus clown!"
"No."
"Nobody's copulating with a clown, Malfoy," said Hermione.
"Fukkink can go and boil his—" Martin began.
"I'm writing to you today with extraordinary news," Margaret continued. "And will trust in your natural discretion and in the enduring integrity of our friendship to maintain this secret between us until I'm ready to publish the discovery. Early this morning I received an object via express owl that has been for some time a subject of great mutual interest. It came to me from sources unknown—I can only assume a black market collector stumbled upon something that he believed to be of value, but wasn't able to identify, and therefore was not able to sell. It appears to be broken, or adulterated in some fashion, but I believe it to be, my old friend, none other than a time travel device."
Hermione's pulse tore off at a gallop.
"The fucking metallurgist has the Time Turner," Draco said out loud.
Margaret read on. "My most ardent wish is that you will come to Oxford, at your very earliest convenience, to examine this object and give me your opinion, which I have always held in such high esteem."
Hermione leaned into Draco's side and brought her mouth to his ear. "We have to get to Fukkink as soon as possible," she whispered. "It's desperate."
Draco went rigid. "Spell this word for me."
"I should like to see you again, my old friend and convivial contender," read Margaret. "It's been a great too many years, and I have much to ask you, and much to share. My trust in your guardedness in this matter is unswerving. I await your prompt response, yours, etc. etc." Margaret looked up at her audience and smiled again. "Jan Fukkink."
Draco spoke close to Hermione's ear. "It's his name?"
"Yes. He's a Dutchman."
"That explains nothing."
"Draco." Hermione snatched a fistful of his shirt front and looked him straight on. "It's Fukkink: F-U-K-K-I-N-K. The point is that he's got it, at Mettleworth College." She twisted her hand harder into his shirt. "We know where it is. All we have to do is go there and steal it from him."
She felt her eyes blazing, and realized she'd gone a quarter of the way to straddling him in her frenzy.
Draco pushed at her waist to shift her off of his left thigh. "One thing I really appreciate about you is that you're all in when there's an opportunity to do something unlawful."
"My chair, please, Miss Margaret!" Martin wriggled loose from his wraps and set to work hauling himself out of his chair and onto his legs. "Bring me my cap! Write to Fukkink! Tell him I'm coming for him!"
Draco jumped up from the sofa, and crossed to Martin, crouching to slide an arm around his back.
"No one's going to Oxford tonight, cousin," he said. "Let's sit you back down wherever you want to be for the moment. Dinner isn't too far off, and I have a vague impression that the room smells like bread."
Margaret had shot to her feet as well, and tucked the letter inside the book beside Martin's chair.
"You won't say anything?" Hermione asked, leveling a look of concern at Margaret. "About the letter, and what Mr. Martin's friend has told him about?"
Margaret laughed, warm and sincere, as she worked to straighten the books and papers around her and Martin's chairs. "I have more secrets than I have stories to tell, and you know I've no shortage of them." She plumped the small pillow that supported Martin's back while he sat. "There is bread, which is almost done now," she said, "And stew with dumplings, and our Katherine has sent over a sponge."
"Cake!" Martin clapped his hands and rubbed them together as Draco helped to reinstall him into his chair.
"You and me both, cousin. Shall we come with you to Oxford tomorrow?" Draco set to work replicating the folds and tucks of Martin's customary sandwich wrap of blankets. When he was finished, he pressed Martin's shoulder with a degree of affection that caused Hermione's heart to tumble over itself and come close to losing its balance.
"Yes! You and Hermione both must come. We'll let Fukkink know what we think about his broken object, won't we?"
"Show that crow what we think of his strawberries, too."
Martin took Draco's hand between his, and patted it. "He's a bastard."
"You have no idea."
They ate their cake first, and then their mutton and potatoes, with Margaret's soft and savory dumplings and bottles of hard cider that made Hermione's stomach fizz.
Just before bed, Hermione had a bath—very long, and very hot—and sang cider-fizzy songs from Muggle pop radio to herself while the ghastly snuff box leered at her from the edge of the tub.
She washed with lavender bar soap, and then washed some more, listening to Margaret chatter away while she put Martin to bed, and to the rustle of each page of Draco's book as he turned them from his seat outside the bathroom door.
She declined to relay the snuff box to Draco as she passed him in the hall, only told him over her shoulder as she walked up the stairs that she'd left him a clean towel on the side of the bath.
Between her and Draco's and Martin's spells, and in the absence of a Time Turner, the snuff box had lost its terror for her.
In the general mood of ease that arose in their detente with the box, loathing and revulsion had made way for pity. It was a homely object that no one wanted, cursed through no fault of its own, and now that it was impotent, it seemed sad.
She gave it pride of place beside the clutch of yellow roses in the jar in her windowsill. It looked well there, for such a contemptible thing, but no closer to attaining the shape of a swan.
She turned it away, averting its obnoxious eyes while she dried her body in her room, then back again once she'd slipped on a clean chemise.
There were times she left her hair to dry without a spell, and she allowed it to tonight, water falling every now and then from the tips of her curls in lavender-scented drops that felt cool and pleasing on her back.
Margaret had lit a fire in her little hearth, though the night was warm, and Hermione lay on her stomach on her bed with the window open, drawing her fingers through the strands of her hair as it dried, and reading one of Martin's books.
She and Draco were just as lost as they were that morning, she thought, perhaps even more so than she'd realized then, but a sense of ease had begun to grow in her belly and spread outward through her limbs.
The clematis no longer cloyed, and the quip and warble of an argumentative owl were welcome adjuncts to the snap of the fire in the hearth.
A trio of soft raps called her away from her book and to the door.
She eased it open to find Draco leaning in her door frame, hair damp from his bath, smelling of soap and mint.
His boxer shorts sat on his hips, but tonight he'd put on a white cotton t-shirt as well.
"How are you?" he asked.
"I'm doing very well, thank you." She indicated his shirt, crisp white and fitted. "Did you Transfigure this?"
He glanced down at himself. "I did."
She was good at Transfiguration. Extraordinary, actually. The first task she would undertake upon their return, once she was herself again, was perfecting the transmutation of a handkerchief into a pair of sensible but attractive cotton pants.
He looked over her shoulder, at the snuff box in her window.
"I can take it to my room tonight if you'd like," he offered. "I promise I won't let it run off with me."
"You can make no such promise."
"Can't I?"
"No, you can't."
"Then how can you guarantee that it's not going to snatch you away in the night?" he asked.
"I suppose I can't." She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned her hip against the door frame. "But I feel quite confident all the same."
He stood for a long while, looking at her freshly scrubbed face, and at her hair, still dripping onto her shoulders at rare intervals.
"Am I not allowed to feel secure around my own heirlooms now that they've been proven harmless?"
"No. Not around your appalling shrew, anyway. You're welcome to put on those loafers as soon as we're back at the Ministry."
His voice lowered. "Are you concerned about me?"
"No." She slid one foot over the other to soothe her nerves. "Yes."
"Then how is it that I'm not allowed to be concerned about you?"
When Hermione tipped her head in acknowledgement, he took the fabric of her chemise between his fingertips.
"I liked sleeping with you last night, Hermione Granger. Very much. In the not-sex way." His mouth pulled up at one corner, though the sentiment didn't reach his eyes. "Even though you steal the sheets. And you kick." He gave her chemise a subtle tug. "And you bite." He paused, seemingly lost in thought. "But I don't want you to be in a position where you have to worry about explaining anything. I wouldn't want you to have any regrets about anything that happens while we're here."
Hermione turned her face upwards, and took him in.
There was something so artless and pure in his expression that Hermione felt like he had been made new, just for her, washed clean in the bath of something more than the prosaic corporeal film left behind by the goings on of a day and a night.
"Is this your way of telling me you don't want to sleep in my bed?" she asked.
"No." His answer came fast. "I'm telling you that if you want me to, I will. If you'd feel more secure."
"Would you? Feel more secure in my bed?"
His eyes were impossible. She didn't know why they needed to be so sincere.
"I would," he said. "And I promise I won't kiss you again while I'm in it."
She couldn't stand to look at him anymore, so she examined the floorboards beneath her, worn and clean, solid as the trees they came from. "No awkward lift rides."
A long silence opened between them, and into its spaces flowed the hypnotic tick of the grandfather clock in the cottage below, the tidal breath of a breeze in the oak, and the far off science fictional churr of a nightjar.
"No," he said finally. "That won't happen."
The breeze curled across the windowsill, and Hermione's candle guttered.
"Alright," she said.
"Alright?"
Hermione stepped aside, and made room for Draco to come in.