James doesn't move as Hermione takes her leave. He can barely process the fluster of words, and even after she is gone - the scent of lavender and soot lingering in the air - he doesn't move for a few moments, frozen.
When he finally does move, it is only to fall back into the couch; elbows on his knees, he leans into his hands, running his fingers through his hair.
The kiss had been unexpected, but what had surprised James more was his own reaction to it; how quickly he had reciprocated. In his mind, he curses at Sirius; clearly, his oldest friend's statements the week before had gotten into his head.
Hermione, however, appeared to have gotten under his skin.
He moves his hands from his hair to his face, running his fingers over his jaw with a rough grip, growling his frustration. This was his son's best friend; a young woman 19 bloody years his junior. Of course, there was also the fact that they were currently working together. Neither of them needed this complicating their professional lives. And yet…
And yet, the moment their lips had touched it was like lightning had replaced the blood in his veins. He had hesitated, but only because the burning in his veins refused to let him respond.
In truth, no one had coaxed such a reaction from him in…
Far too long.
He looks over to where Hermione's cloak lays forgotten, draped over the arm of the armchair neatly, and throws his head back as he falls back into the couch, groaning in frustration.
"What the fuck!"
.oOo.
Hermione is still shaking when she arrives home, bursting through the fireplace so fast she almost trips over the rug in the drawing room.
Why the fuck had she done that? It is a question that still burns through her mind as she makes her way upstairs, into the bathroom, and turns on the shower. She needs to wash away the feeling that still lingers on her skin.
By the time she crawls under the flow of the water, she is shaking as one thought repeats in her mind; he didn't pull away, he didn't pull away -
Which is exactly why she needed to.
This was her best friend's father. It wasn't the age gap itself that gave her pause; honestly, she could care less if it was one year, or four, or twenty. It was the fact that this was Harry's father that made her neck burn. He had known her since she was eleven years old; he had watched her grow up, watched her friendship with Harry grow; her innocent, childhood friendship with Ron flourish into love. He had been around when she had been at her best, and her worst. When she and Ron had wed at the Burrow under a canopy charmed with twinkling lights, and when she had buried him, not a year later, in the same place with his brother.
Suddenly, somehow, the list that Hermione has been compiling as she tries to wash away the aching in her bones becomes less about everything that is wrong with what she had done, and instead, about how maybe - just maybe - it might be quite right.
.oOo.
Regardless, Hermione refuses to see anyone she knows for the rest of the weekend. In fact, she barely leaves her room. She ignores the owls attempting to deliver to her; letters, notes, packages, or even the Daily Prophet; she lets them all pile up on the ledge outside her bedroom window.
It's embarrassment more than anything. She can't imagine that James hasn't said anything to someone about what happened on Friday night, and imagining the knowing looking someone might give her makes her feel sick.
Monday finally rolls around, and she toys with the idea of owling in ill, but she can't risk even a single day with Dolohov still on the loose, so she finally gets ready and arrives at the Ministry with minutes to spare; and instead of her usual jaunt past Harry's office, she goes straight to the Hit Squad's offices and straight to her own desk, without a word spoken to another person.
She is surprised when she settles behind her desk to find a stack of files; the same ones she had been trying to take home for the weekend on Friday. James has obviously back-tracked and left them for her after she had left that evening,
With the ongoing case and her temporary assignment with the Aurory, she was excused from morning training, which meant she would be alone in the office probably until eleven, for which she is thankful. She tries to distract herself by starting into the files from Friday, but her wandering thoughts have other plans.
By nine-thirty she still feels as though she has accomplished nothing.
When she hears a soft knock on her cubicle wall at nine-forty-five, she actually sighs in relief. Harry pokes his head around the barrier.
"I was expecting you to check in first thing this morning," he tells her, and she can feel her cheeks already starting to burn.
"Uh- no, sorry. I forgot some files I meant to go through this weekend, so I wanted to do that first," she tells him, avoiding meeting his eyes.
"I owled you like, four times on Saturday and Sunday," he tells her.
"Yeah, I just - needed a weekend to myself."
"Everyone missed you on Sunday," he pushes. And when she doesn't respond, "Are you okay, Hermione? You seemed like you were doing really good on Friday, and then -"
"Harry, bloody hell I'm fine," she finally snaps, her narrow eyes looking up to meet his. "I had a great time on Friday, but I just needed to be alone for a few days. Why is that so hard -"
"I get it, fine, geeze, 'Mione," Harry cuts her off, holding his hands up in retreat. Immediately Hermione regrets her tone, and sighs.
"I'm sorry, Harry, I didn't mean to snap at you. It's just - oh fuck." she laments, burying her face into her hands. Muffled, she continues: "Something happened this weekend. Something really quite embarrassing, and you know you're my best friend, but I really, really don't think I can talk to you about this," she admits. Which is entirely true. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to have to tell the man she kissed his father. No. She is definitely not going there today. "I don't know if I can talk to you about this ever," she mumbles into her hands.
Harry frowns, but doesn't respond for a moment before dropping his tone very low and asking, all while looking slightly horrified, "Hermione, did Sirius come onto you?"
Hermione looks up, staring at her friend for a very long moment, brow furrowed, before a small giggle bubbles up her throat. The next thing she knows, she is laughing hysterically, (if not slightly maniacally,) holding her stomach with one hand while wiping tears from her eyes with the other.
"Did - did - did S-s-sirius come on-on to me?" she asks, and she realises the hysterics is most likely because her friend doesn't realise how close to home the question is. Well, other than it was her doing the coming-onto and it being the wrong much-older adult. "That's ridiculous, Harry," she says, more to comfort him than to speak the truth.
"Is it?" he asks, the terror that had been written across his face slowly giving away to a small bit of amusement, "I really can't tell with that one what's ridiculous and what isn't."
"Oh, trust me," she assures him, "With Sirius Black it's all ridiculous, but it's all also very real."
"So you didn't like… make out with my godfather?" he asks again, and Hermione shakes her head. "Oh thank merlin," he exclaims, shoulders sagging in relief, and Hermione is biting her cheek so hard she swears she can taste the coppery tinge of blood on her tongue.
Hermione nearly collapses into her chair 20 minutes later when Harry finally leaves. She doesn't get to relax long, however, as the rest of the Hit Squad starts trickling in from their morning training session.
Not particularly wanting to talk to anyone else at the moment, she gathers her papers and starts heading towards the interview rooms, hoping to find a quiet room not in use she can use instead.
.oOo.
James arrives at work at precisely the time he is meant to, as per his usual schedule. He had forgone his usual morning visit to the cafe around the corner from his flat, opting instead for precious extra moments in bed - not that they were spent properly resting, so much as staring at the ceiling - and relied instead on the instant coffee that he kept for emergencies in the cupboard.
When he finally arrived at the Aurory, he immediately retreated to his own office, door mostly shut - open just enough so he could see the traffic in and out of Harry's across from him.
But Hermione never came to see his son.
It was unusual. Most days one of the first things Hermione did when arriving at work was slink into Harry's office. Then again, she had also always been painstakingly prompt with replies to owls and correspondence, and yet James himself had written to her no less than six times since Friday, and had not received even a peep out of the witch.
James tries to plug away in his office for the morning, but then not long after nine-thirty, he hears the door to Harry's office open, and watches his son head off in the direction of the Hit Squad's offices. He tries to distract himself, sitting at his desk pouring over paperwork, lazily twirling his wand between his fingers, but his mind isn't where it needs to be.
He decides instead to review the interview transcripts from the week before.
He is grateful for this decision the moment he opens the door to Interview Room 4 and finds a young, bushy haired witch sitting at the table, files poured over the table in front of her.
When he had originally owled her the multiple times he had over the weekend, it was in the hopes he could assuage her embarrassment about what had happened on Friday. 'We all had quite a bit to drink,' he planned on telling her, 'It's really nothing to worry about.' he meant to assure her.
But the moment his eyes fell on her in person instead of in his head or on paper, that all went out the window.
"Oh! - Hermione," he starts, startled by her, and when she looks up at him like a deer in the headlights of a muggle motor vehicle, everything he means to say is promptly gone from his mind.
"Oh, for Merlin's sake," he hears her mutter.
"I owled you," he starts again, taking a step towards her, "Should we - ?"
"Talk?" she finishes. "Probably. But I am thoroughly mortified."
"Don't be," he says, and it feels more like pleading than what he had intended.
"Can we just - pretend that never happened?" she asks, "I - I like talking to you, James. Being around you has helped me more than anything else in the last four years, and I don't want to ruin it just because I can't keep in my knickers when I drink."
For some reason, her words are cutting, but he nods regardless. "Of course," he replies quietly, trying his best to quell the disappointment burning at the back of his neck. Slowly, he moves so he is sitting across from her. "What are we working on, then?"
Hermione turns her attention back down to the piles of papers in front of her. "Land deeds," she explains, pulling a few loose sheets from the mess. "These are the deeds for all the land that came together to form the Lestrange Estate," she explains. "The purchases, anyway, and these are the deeds for when the titles were reverted to the Ministry's restitution fund after the war," she explains, and begins matching them up. "I noticed a couple days ago that the number of land titles in the Lestrange name did not match the number of titles transferred to the Ministry. It took some time to collect up all of the original records, but this little parcel of land of the estate was never transferred over."
In a sweeping motion, she clears the papers to the side to reveal a map on the table. She reaches into her pocket, pulling out a small crystal pendulum. She holds it low over the map, twirling it just enough to start a wide circle.
"The whole of the estate was warded with blood magic," she explains, "So when the titles were transferred to the Ministry, the wards were broken." With a snap, the pendulum meets the paper, as though there is a magnet pulling the two together. Hermione marks where the pendulum has fallen with her quill, and then checks the coordinates against the titles. "See? They didn't use traditional unplottable wards - most of these families relied heavily on blood magic. Otherwise even with the transfer of the land, the estate would remain unplottable. However -"
She begins circling the pendulum over the map again, and this time it reacts like the magnet has been reversed. The pendulum is jerking over the map, refusing to meet the paper.
"Wherever this bit of land is, remains unplottable. I'm not sure if the blood wards are still intact, or if they didn't use blood magic to ward it to ensure it would remain hidden."
James frowns. "Where does the original land title say it is?" he asks, and Hermione grins.
"It doesn't. There is absolutely no location information whatsoever for this piece of property. All I can find for a description of the property is that there is a hunting cottage of some sort there. I think this is the best place to start looking."
James agrees, taking the land title from her. "Okay, so. How do we go about finding an unplottable, unlocatable, hidden hunting cottage?" he asks aloud.
"Well, it won't be the quickest process," she admits. "My suggestion is we take a small team, including a curse-breaker, and survey the property line of the estate. Look for any anomaly, no matter how small. Finding it will be the hard part. Once we have done that, it will just be a matter of testing how comprehensive the wards are, and dismantling them." She looks up at him. "Hopefully," she clarifies, with a small shrug.
"How sure are you there is anything worthwhile to pursue here?" James asks.
"I'm not saying there is," she admits. "But we have to start somewhere, and this is at least something."
James has to agree this is the closest thing they have had to a lead since the attack on the Ministry, so he nods. "Let's take this to Harry and Brockert," he says. Then, as she is packing all of her papers up, he asks, "Do you have a curse-breaker in mind?"
Hermione thinks for a moment. "There are a few adequate curse-breakers in the Department of Mysteries, but if the choice was mine I would take Bill Weasley on loan from Gringotts," she tells him. "It may be nepotism and bias seeing as he's my brother-in-law, but I trust him with my life.
"Good enough for me."
As they start to make their way back towards the Aurory, James ponders over their earlier conversation. He realises that he let Hermione have her say, but he didn't particularly get to express anything he had wanted to, so he starts to say; "Listen, Hermione - I know you said you want to preten-"
But his words were cut off when she exclaimed, "Harry! Just the wizard we were looking for!" in a voice far too chipper to actually be happy to see him. He gave his son a quick glance out of the corner of his eye, trying his best to mask his disappointment in his appearance at that exact moment, even though he knows he was probably failing miserably at it.
He allows Hermione to carry on, her words a mile a minute.
"I'll see if Gringotts will loan Bill to us," he agrees finally, "And so long as they agree, you can start the search tomorrow. I'd like you to get together a list of three teams, each with two Aurors and one Hit Wizard, to assist."
Both James and Hermione nod their understanding, and with that Harry is off again.
Hermione starts to walk away, but James reaches out, catching her wrist in his hand. "Hermione -" he starts, but she quickly cuts him off again.
"Please, James," she pleads, but she doesn't pull away from him, "I can't do this. Not here. Not now."
He wants to argue, but her skin feels like fire under his, and he can hear muffled footsteps coming their way, and he doesn't want their conversation to be interrupted; so he relents, letting her slip through his fingers.
"You pick the aurors," she says, her voice almost a whisper, "And I'll pick the Hit Wizards."
With a turn and twirl of her robes that is so flawless it might as well have been a purposeful flourish, Hermione turns on her heel and is gone.
.oOo.
It is raining outside, and the droplets that hit the glass of the window are large. Antonin Dolohov watches as water runs down the window pane, creating rivets of rivers, mostly ignoring the blathering going on between the Lestrange brothers and the raw screech of Alecto Carrow.
The Lestranges are mad; unlike the Blacks, it is not the result of inbreeding or genetics. Dolohov's opinion is that it was a combination of the exposure to Bellatrix (he cringes at the thought of not just one of them, but both of them being utterly infatuated with the woman, and whatever messy triad they had carried on while she was alive) and, of course, their many years in Azkaban. Alecto, on the other hand, is simply an annoyance.
But all three of them are needed now for him to accomplish his goals.
It is a miracle he escaped Azkaban himself with his mind intact; of this he is very aware. During his years imprisoned, he had felt the darkness of madness creeping in through the edges, but he had always held tightly to one simple thought, one simple feeling; it was not a happy one, per se, but it was a truth he knew deep inside.
It was not fanatical worship of a man - because yes, Tom Riddle had only been a man - with a made up name, a pretty (or, later, terrifying) face, whose less than desirable paternity sparked an inferiority complex so profound that it created one of the most feared dark wizards in centuries.
No. It was the knowledge that regardless of the face of their cause, or the damage the face itself may cause, the cause itself was right.
He was right.
And he had clung to the thought like the lifeline it was.
Now, however, there was a problem with that thought…
"I can't wait to get my wand on Potter's little Mudblood and -" he hears Rabastan hiss behind him, and before the man can finish the sentence, Dolohov is on him, his wand to Rabastan's throat and his fingers curled into the other wizard's collar.
"The Mudblood is mine," he snaps, his voice low and dangerous, though he purposely speaks loud enough for the others to hear the claim he stakes. "She will be apprehended, unharmed, for me."
Rabastan squeaks, involuntarily, under the pressure of the wood at throat, nodding his agreement. He sputters as Dolohov releases him roughly, grasping the mantle of the fireplace for balance, and Dolohov turns to the other two with narrow eyes, pointing his wand between them.
"Is that understood?"
They both nod; Alecto, trying to keep her composure, and Rodolphus slightly more frantic as he rushes to his brother.
"Now get the fuck out of here."
Yes. Potter's little Mudblood - the chit who has brought his life's beliefs into question. The bitch responsible for so many of his friend's imprisonments, for defeating so many that had fought for his cause. It was hard to continue to claim their superiority all the while someone who by all means should have no access to magic whatsoever managed to best them at every turn.
She was a puzzle he would solve; he would take her apart, piece by piece, put her back together, and do it all again until he understood.
This obsession had started years before; the first time he found herself face to face with her, he had not hesitated. His signature curse, one of his own making, had left none alive before; it would burn them up from the inside out; painful, excruciatingly painful; it was not a quick or kind way to go.
And yet she had lived.
The news had startled him; flabbergasted him even. He chalked it up to having had cast the curse non-verbally. Perhaps without the verbal command it had lost some of his power. Yet, since, he had been sure to try this on others, to test the efficacy of curse non-verbally on others.
Still, no other had survived.
Through the years, he had allowed their lives to become more and more intertwined in his search to understand. He took from her what he could; her parents (who, though even he had to admit, were notably brave in the face of their own demise, were also not nearly as interesting or as durable as their daughter), and her husband a few years later. With the Weasley boy, though he did not nearly put up enough of a fight as one would expect from an Auror, at least he was in a position to see how loss affected her; how it tore through her and pulled her apart. Their own fight that night he got to see the way she channeled that pain into raw power; he may have had the leg up on her in the beginning, but quickly, far too quickly, she had gotten the edge on him.
He touches the angry scar marring his face; the wound was deep, the scar itself angry and puckered as it runs down from over his brow, skipping his eye and continuing over the curve of his cheek.
He had never seen a slicing hex cause quite so much damage. It had been deeply fascinating.
Though he had been disappointed with just how quickly she had managed to find his breadcrumb trail through Europe. He had so much more planned; so many more pieces for her to plant, but he had instead been forced to rush things. His aunt, the terrible wench of a woman, he had not necessarily meant to involve, but it was not a big loss, and he had needed for the Russian Auror's niece to be found.
He needed her to see, to understand, why she was so fascinating.
He needed everyone around her to understand that none of them, but her, most importantly, were not safe.
He was going to figure her out.