Chapter 4: What Were They Thinking?
Hermione came down the stairs after her heat-to-the-bones shower reading the book Draco had recommended. She twisted her lips. She was having trouble seeing the comparison to Jane Austen. She wondered if Draco hadn't got confused by Enid Blyton instead or Beatrix Potter. Except this was far worse than either of those author's offerings.
She turned the page and started down the stairs while Miss Friya was laundering Mr. Gorseshoe's best breeches. It went into scathingly torrid detail about the domestic act.
"What were they thinking?" she mused at the author who thought a simple Muggle interaction warranted three pages of detail.
"Draco, this book... " she flicked through it, brow furrowed as she tried to find anything remotely remarkable in the prose.
"Hermione, be careful," Theo's voice appeared slightly alarmed when she didn't watch where she was going while stepping down the narrow and uneven surface.
Draco laughed. "Theo, watch the stairs, she's fine. They always catch her."
Hermione quickly cast her eyes to where a stair elongated to ensure her safe passage. They only did this for her. And only alone. She went back to looking through the book.
"This is no Jane Austen at all. It's causing me a scepsis of the highest order."
Draco gave her a dramatic flourish. "Oh no! Another scepsis, Granger? Whatever has caused your dire philosophical doubt now?"
She pouted at him. "No need for such mycterism. I just simply don't believe this to be a novel."
"Elaborate, please."
"The level of tedium prevalent within its pages rendered me unconscious last night before our friend's arrival and it has collected no further redeemable qualities in today's perusal."
"I don't know, Mother likes them." Draco shrugged at her as she sat beside him on the couch. "I don't feel so bad waking you up last night if Theo did it, too."
He put an arm around her while she sat sideways, leaning against him.
"You should feel bad," she told him, tilting her head back on his shoulder to look at him upside down.
A quizzical look crossed him, eyes flicking to the side to try and remember if he'd done anything outside their agreements.
"Why?" he asked when his memory came up blank.
"Because you woke me up twice, not once. You moved. In a most distracting manner, I might add," she twisted around, deciding the book was not worth her time and leaned across Draco, placing the 'novel' on a small table beside him. She threw him an amused smirk and resettled herself.
He hid a smile behind a feathered hand glancing away from her, furthering the impression of a thriving inner marital life.
She'd felt Theo's attention on her since she'd descended but she had been successfully ignoring him. She had no idea how to act around the man, so she'd decided to not do anything until she'd figured it out. She gazed blandly in his direction.
The ochre zest in his brilliant green eyes was playful now. She could feel them piercing the chrysalis of their so-called life with the precision and incisiveness of a scalpel.
"So what do you do, Hermione? I doubt you are as lackadaisical as Draco," Theo's voice began a careful laceration. Her candles quivered, warning her. He intended to dissect them. He wanted to probe and find out how she and Draco worked.
"Draco is very industrious actually," she retorted, her tone even and chiding.
"As lackadaisical as myself then," he rebutted easily.
A lie. She knew it as surely as she felt her magic spilling in her veins, swirling with curiosity. No, she was far too familiar with that aspect of mystery and adventure he had about his person. Harry had it too, she could practically smell it coming from her necklace. Gunpowder and ozone, hints of ichor and tinges of copper with that thick pounding musk so similar to heady jungle air.
"I am a Bookkeeper for Magical Law Enforcement."
Theo's laugh burst out in surprise sounding like a tower of stones collapsing on itself. The cracking and clattering filling the room with harsh and wild gravity. "No, you absolutely are not."
This wasn't a dissection; it was a vivisection. He intended to discuss the findings of his social surgery while his living, breathing subjects were in front of him. There would be nothing dead about this at all.
Her candles hopped their flames nearly off their wicks with a nervous dysphoria. She conjured a tealight and went over to them. She lit the smaller candle, carrying it back and letting it sit near her on the coffee table. It fluttered gratefully. As much as they liked scandal, they worried about her more.
Theo had watched the action with a cunning interest as if she was proving his theory.
She leaned on Draco again and his arm went back around her. He appeared curious, she had not refuted Theo's exclamation.
"You're going to lose this house, Draco," Theo said this with such inevitability while looking at the candle that Draco tilted his head as if requiring an explanation for the statement but seemed to believe him.
Hermione looked around the cottage. A possessive growl snarled in her mind, the flame of the tealight canted forward as if comforting her.
She glared at Theo. It was jealous and warning to not insinuate such a thing again.
Verdant impishness danced in him and he drew his bottom lip oh-so-subtly between his teeth, smug in the knowledge she'd break the glare to note the movement. She stretched her legs out as heat pooled in the underside of her knees.
"So, you share that covetous streak Draco favours," Theo leaned even further into his seat, indulging in taking up as much space as possible while he followed the slow elongation of her limbs along the couch. "I simply meant the cottage will follow you Hermione, wheresoever you decide to go. It likes your magic too much. This house… will no longer be a Malfoy property," he tipped his head to the eaves of the ceiling, as if hearing the wood whisper to him.
Draco tapped his finger on her shoulder where his arm wound around her. "I think you're forgetting she is a Malfoy. And she'll always be a Malfoy."
Hermione smiled like that wasn't news to her. However, in reality it was a breach of their agreements. A small one, but they'd decided no talk of forever or of extending their arrangement until three months before it was to be dissolved. He must be feeling threatened. She kissed his inner wrist where it brushed across her collarbone, communicating it was OK and she understood.
"I think… not." Theo said the last word with a quiet deliberation and Hermione felt Draco shift like spilling sand in an hourglass. "She hasn't taken your last name, has she?"
Draco laughed. "You try telling the wizarding world to stop referring to her as anything other than Golden Girl Hermione Granger. It's impossible. We thought we'd save ourselves some paperwork."
Theo lips tipped in a smile. It curved with titillation, harbouring a shared secret.
"There is much intrigue afoot today," he conjured three glasses and a whisky bottle to cha-cha from the kitchen. He made sure to look at Hermione. The way he mirrored how she used her magic making that unique warmth unfurl in her. It curled up from her stomach and seared vertically to her heart before spreading across her chest and down her arms. It prickled in whirling desirous ambiguity and Hermione curled a hand under Draco's inner thigh just above his knee to remind herself who held claim to her.
Summered cut-grass green and sugared gingerbread danced out of Theo with an arresting sparkle, and she wondered if his eyes would ever not hold her captive with their subtle and grand changes. The warmth hummed like racing electricity and magnetism, slowly translating to heat. Potent, clenching heat.
Draco was right. They'd needed an eleven and it was quite clear they had failed.
Nott was pouring them each a glass of whisky. Hermione waved her hand to set the jug boiling again. A flourishing beckon with her hand and a tin of condensed milk hula'd around a can opener with a rhythmic grinding noise.
Nott turned to watch the dance as Draco sighed.
"You two are as bad as each other," he squeezed Hermione a little, teasing her.
A kitchen cupboard eased open with another flick of Hermione's hand and a teabag peeked out of it like a child trying to sneak downstairs for a midnight snack. It edged out and creeped along the bench until it hopped into a waiting mug.
The condensed milk was now pouring itself into a crystal bowl and the jug finished its whistling tantrum, dousing the waiting tea bag in liquid heat. Hermione copied Theo's galloping teaspoons from the previous night and added them to the crystal before bringing both bowl and mug over in a zig-zagging path as if they had already felt the effects of whisky.
They set themselves upon the table and Hermione reached over to pour the alcohol into her tea then added a few generous spoonful's of condensed milk before stirring it.
"You never can be plain or simple, can you?" Draco tsked at her, swaying her gently against him, summoning his own tumbler straight into his hand.
"Though Rita Skeeter has commented on how plain I am since I was fifteen, I have never once been accused of being simple," Hermione held out a spoonful of the syrupy confection towards Draco, cupping a hand beneath to catch any stray droplets before he took it from her with a twinkle in his eye. She knew how much he loved sweet things.
"You got to satisfy your craving after all," he whispered in her ear and she nudged him with an elbow while he laughed. "And Rita Skeeter has never printed anything true in her life so reporting on your simplicity has been a major oversight on her part."
Theo took a sip of the amber libation, the chink of his teeth on the glass followed by a cracking spit from the fireplace.
Hermione turned to look at the hearth, curious. It appeared the house liked his magic too. It had copied the sound. Maybe it had copied him because she had. That was only going to further his conviction. Hermione thought there was no saving their ruse now.
She turned back to Theo. He was smiling in his drink, a knowing cast to his face like he knew what she was thinking.
The air was tinged with hopeful melancholia. Hermione felt like she was ever-so-slightly hovering, elation and dread engaged in combat, lifting and sinking her. But she'd always been an optimist.
Grasping tighter when her heart made a small swell in her lilting disposition, she idly sucked the side of her thumb where a globule of condensed milk had landed.
The saccharine burst of sugar dazzled her tongue, the pad dragging over the slight saltiness of her skin.
Immediately, she wished she hadn't for Theo's eyes darkened to the shade of the proverbial forest where big bad wolves reside. The rest of him was still, as if gathering energy to use in a single burst. Danger loomed before her, whispering that she should have stayed safe on the path.
Her body grew taut with its bestial fight or flight response. Her heart rate picked up and her left foot twitched, a movement that caught Theo's gaze for a brief moment before he flicked it back to her.
But something deep and primal burgeoned in Hermione. She took the little spoken of third option: she stayed exactly where she was and challenged the danger to come closer. A wavering in the air that held a seductive submission. His chocolate flecks flashed with caramel. A thick addictive sweetness that made her suddenly have to swallow.
She found herself tiring of leading the resistance. The warmth that she had tried so valiantly to quell, she unleashed. The parts of her it had not yet touched lighting up like drought-tinged bracken. His surprise slid over her like a billowing silk sheet, light and sensuous.
She took a sip of her family recipe hot toddy. Draco readjusted beside her and she scribed a otiose rune on his inner thigh where her hand rested.
But it was Theo who captured her attention. He had gone beyond interesting to fascinating. Their magics wanted to tangle them together, her curiosity pinching at glowing threads, giggling at thoughts of macrame and embroidery. Knots and needlepoints. A flash of rumpled bedclothes and rhythmic sensations, sighs and night-time vision quivered through her.
It was only a matter of seconds, but Hermione was suddenly violently aware of everything around her.
Her blood was vibrating in her veins, a metallic tingling was sitting in the base of her skull, strumming at her brain stem. She breathed in through her nose and bowed her lips to exhale through her mouth. She could feel every swirl of the air curl through her nasal passage before diverting some to her lungs, the rest tickling the soft palate on the roof of her mouth as it danced back out into the world again.
A muscle tightened and released at the joint of Theo's shoulder as he watched all these tiny delicate nuances and a curious feeling stole over her cheeks like thousands of small querent Lilliputian hands were scrabbling across them, straddling that shaky fulcrum between excitement and fear.
She revelled in the strident convalescences of their wills. That unique tension like when two magnets of the same polarity came close together thickened in the air. The force compelling one or both of them to yield. But the cottage was on her side. The tealight candle bobbed on its wick, tilting toward Theo in admonishment and the hearth let out a series of snapping sparks, burning hotter than before. The rebuke in its nature clear.
Theo grinned again and sat back, conceding defeat and Hermione relaxed with a thrilling victorious tilt to her smile. He addressed Draco.
"Mate, how is it you're not feeling any of this? There's a war on and you've not even dressed your ships for battle."
Draco gave a surprised laugh. "What are you on about, Theo?"
But Theo leaned forward again and rolled his right sleeve higher to just above his elbow. He was fastidious and careful.
A humming chord pricked in her mind, the excitement of the unknown causing her brain to become ravenous with a need to sate her burgeoning curiosity.
And Theo knew. Acutely aware how every inch of skin revealed was watched over by the fanged monster of her need to know, to consume, to devour. The salivating mandible of her mental acquisitiveness wrinkled in a growl as something was fully revealed she had never seen before. A feat that became rarer the longer she retained her current position at her place of work.
The cuneiform and compass tattoos were fully visible now. Hermione translated the ancient language easily. She gave a small puff of laughter. How terribly clever of him. That must be useful for the work she suspected he did.
"So, you do know what this is," Theo raised an eyebrow at her, daring her to refute it. She slowly moved her head indicating she did.
"DMLE, indeed," Theo said with a roll of his eyes. Her hands were vibrating with her need to experiment, but she dutifully kept them to herself. Once she started, she knew she wouldn't be able to stop. His eyes met hers and now they were abyssal and chaotic. Vibrant as doubly ionised oxygen, the hue rich with triboluminescence.
She dipped her interest back to the tattoos, black lines standing stark, slightly shifting with his small movements, rebalancing on his skin.
"Hawaiian?" Hermione guessed. "Tahitian maybe? Not Māori. I don't think Samoan or Tongan either."
"Who says I didn't actually go to Atlantis?" he smirked at her.
Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. "You know why not. And really? The bastardisation? Surely the peoples of Aeternalis have suffered enough."
He chuckled. It rumbled from his chest like playful thunder that hadn't brought rain or lightning. Instead, it suffused the air with fizzing tension that crackled along Hermione, making her goose pimple. A throb pulsed low, and she damned him for emanating such a tantalising allure.
Draco was looking between them like they were speaking an alien language.
Oh, that would be because they were.
She narrowed her eyes at Theo's trickiness for slipping them in Bhugat. The twelfth Leylander language sounded like home wherever you went unless you were unfamiliar with it.
She spoke again in English. "Sorry, Draco. Just discussing Theo's tattoo origins."
Theo's contemplative gaze dipped to the shrunken Galleon around her neck. "I see. So, Potter is your touchstone." He placed an elbow on one arm of the chair and leaned on it, grinning at her again. It was the last peg needed to crumple the flapping magnificence of her and Draco's circus. Nott knew beyond reason, doubt or any other speculation that if Harry was her touchstone and not her purported husband, something was terribly amiss.
Theo quirked his brows in admiration. "It was a valiant effort, quite convincing. Shame I'm me, really."
"Don't be rude," Hermione told him, again in English. Draco looked at her confused again as Theo had continued on in Bhugat.
"Didn't think you'd want Drake to know that." The veridian of Theo's eyes crossing timezones from suspected to known and Hermione slumped, she felt defeated. Like she'd failed.
"Know what?" Draco queried.
It was so many things. Her true occupation. The winter magic she was capable of. The worlds beyond Theo clearly travelled to. How she knew because she did, too. How they weren't supposed to directly speak about it. Theo's title wasn't called that for just any reason.
Her anxiety began ticking in a metronomic fashion, the pendulum knocking against her heart and lungs. A singular word pounding with the tempo. A word she'd tried to bury ever since Theo's arrival but had throbbed stronger with every pushing test he had made of her resolve. Want.
She wanted every very infinitesimal thing that made him who he was. She wanted his atoms and the spaces between them. She wanted the ephemera of his neurons that defied physics and sustained the darkest creatures of the realms.
She wanted to touch him. Wanted to feel the drag of her fingers over the hairs of his skin hovering above to tantalise and scintillate until she suffered from acute nemesism for not allowing more.
She wanted to steal his air and gift it back. She wanted to command the ground to collapse beneath him to ensure he fell when she did.
She wanted their scents to tangle in a perfume wholly their own. She wanted to know his third scent. Everyone had one. She wanted to know what accompanied the chalky rock dust and illuminating and libidinous fragrance of ivy-crushed opoponax. She wondered if she licked him would she find out?
She wanted to tear out the parts of herself he'd taken with all his padeutic reasoning then freely return them. She wanted to erase the collodian ambrotype impressions he had of her so perfectly presented, stiff and two-dimensional and give them back as ferrofluid that moved with the whims of his magnetism.
She wanted to crave him when he was gone and wanted this same polarising tension when he was here. She wanted to hate him for showing her everything she didn't have. She wanted to love him for allowing the rediscovery of potential.
She wanted an ouroboros of despair and desire to flow in a cosmic whorling that was slowly being sucked into a singularity. She wanted to feel his skin inside her own. She wanted to taste his shadow and feel every wide, hard, caring, minuscule way he moved. She wanted every raw, aching passion, every in flagrante delicto.
She wanted to know it all. And it burned. Gods it burned.
It was so far beyond barely being an anything and he'd already uncovered so many of her hidden places. What was one more?
So, she let herself flutter, a real one. Nervous and flighty, with that tangy feel in her mind that was so specific to having a crush on someone. That beautiful discomfort teasing her stomach like a field of flowers blooming all at once. Petals creasing and bowing before a zephyr wind.
She made the mistake of looking into his beautiful eyes again. Malachite, silky and opaque emitted out of him, a nebula of reciprocation pulsing over her. He'd never denied it and finally seeing her acceptance the heat too quickly became an inferno. She quivered, panicking.
Theo knew what he wanted too though, and he was not one to wait.
"I've rumbled you Draco. This," - he gestured between Hermione and his friend - "is not real."
Draco shrugged nonchalantly. "Name one way it isn't, taking into account the standard pureblood marriage."
Theo pointed at Hermione while giving a sardonic look to Draco. "She is not pureblood. Your argument falls at the first hurdle there, mate."
Suddenly the tumultuous kaleidoscopic turning in her fell into a need to darrain. Her furloughed loneliness clawing its way up to remind her why this cannot happen. Why she needs this accord with Draco. Why they both do.
Hermione's candles were tall and flickering, picking up the drafts of the house in their alarm. The hearth collapsed its logs and sent a spitting ember towards Theo.
Hermione halted its trajectory and rapidly stood. "Hey!" she called to the fires. "Before you go making a nuisance of yourselves, I doubt he will jeopardise us. Isn't that, right?"
"What is going on?" Draco asked, he looked around him and the house creaked with keening nervousness.
The rest of the lights had dimmed cloaking Hermione in darkened shadow and quavering sunsets. The yellows and oranges of the fire caressing her skin, needing to be soothed. She huffed at Theo for not being more sensitive, sending him a pleading look to back off.
"Hermione's house is scared that I am going to ruin everything she has built here with you. But that is not my intention, nor will it ever be," he looked to Hermione, hands braced on the arms of the chair. "It's trying to change the wards and force me out. Can you make it heel please?"
Hermione's mind whirled. She'd never come across this before. Instinct took over, picking up the tealight and she stared deep into the waxing dark zone, focusing her mind into what would appease it.
The hollow umbra looked into her solemnly and she could hear the hissing white noise of the candle's frequency as it reacted to the atmosphere, pressing into her.
The fire's crackling, spitting vocalisations resounded in her mind.
"Really?" she asked it and it murmured confirmation.
"I ask again, what the fuck is going on?" Draco repeated. He seemed amused as if they were performing some sort of pantomime, blind to the room's aura.
Hermione caressed his cheek, still staring into the planar subspace between flame and wick. "I beg you, hush for now. We'll tell you soon."
There was silence and she read out what the fire gave her: "Mechanoreception, Pain, Touch, Taste, Interoception, Smell, Hearing, Temperature, Vision. You have to choose."
"To give one up?" Theo's reply was quick, disbelieving.
"Apparently so. Choose carefully, this is not easily undone," a bead of sweat ran down her neck at the effort of keeping open the line of communication to the element.
"I think it has to be Touch, doesn't it?" Theo's voice was resigned.
Hermione's face creased and a pang throbbed through her. She didn't want that, but time was running out. "Why?"
"It's one I haven't experienced yet, I can't miss it then. I use Smell and Temperature for my touchstone, otherwise I'd choose one of those."
"Intero or Mechano? What about Pain, surely?"
Theo laughed. "You want me to become incontinent around you? And just imagine how difficult things would be if I lose my balance. Pain though-" he contemplated it then shook his head.
Hermione could feel the house still trying to physically eject Theo. They needed to be quick. She was beginning to shake from the concentration needed.
Theo continued. "No, if you cause me pain, I want to feel it. Cutaneously. Somatically. Viscerally. It's the only thing that will help, a barrier. It has to be Touch."
"Fuck... fine." She cleared her throat and clucked her tongue to create a whipcrack and the flames abated, satisfied.
The warbling ominous tension ebbed away as the house settled again. She knew it had been trying to protect her. It knew her priorities and had wanted to be helpful. It was a powerful, ancient magic and it thought it knew better in that way that wise things usually do.
She flopped back on the couch.
"Happy now?" She crossed her arms and one leg over the other.
"Not particularly," Theo rubbed a hand across his forehead, relieving the pressure that must have been there not a few seconds ago. "I apologise, I miscalculated the house's affection for you. Draco isn't losing this place; it is already lost. It's yours through and through, Hermione."
She felt dealated. A raw prickling flurrying over her with sorrowful yearning. He'd pushed too far, too fast. The house had deemed him a threat to the balance of Hermione's life and taken away some of his power. She panged with the loss of something that hadn't even been real yet.
That the house was hers through magic and time and space did help ease the hurt though.
She sighed. Capricious, impatient man. What have you done?
Draco was looking between them, confused but interested in what had happened. "OK, please will one of you explain now?"
Hermione and Theo exchanged a look and she shuffled over to Draco, wrapping her arms around him, a lump in her throat and tears misting her eyes. He tentatively hugged her back, unsure why she'd had this reaction.
"What is it, Miny?"
She didn't even know how to begin telling him.
Theo did though.
He held out his arm and Draco craned forward, supporting Hermione who was curled in his lap to take a closer look at the compass adorning his friend's skin.
The design had thirteen points and runes at each one. The needle was idling between the second and seventh Leylander realms.
Draco tipped his head to the side as he studied the image. Hermione shuffled over to the couch again and sipped her sweet drink so he could look more closely.
"Where does it point?"
"Everywhere," Theo answered at the same time as Hermione said, "Nowhere."
Draco looked between them with a raised brow.
"Both," Theo clarified, flipping his other hand a few times to indicate what he said was kind of true.
"And neither," Hermione reminded him, and he nodded.
"Oh right, yes. Of course," Draco drawled out sarcastically. "Everywhere and nowhere. Both of them but also neither of them. Makes complete sense."
"That isn't really the issue," Theo tried to move him on. The underlying warning that anything further was highly classified rushing him through the sentence. He indicated the compass then touched each of the cuneiform runes. "Together, these show me how to get what I most want to find."
Draco's eyes brightened; his interest piqued.
"What do you normally need to find?" he asked.
"There's never been something normal to find," Theo shrugged. "If I had to categorise them, I guess I'd say rumours, myths, deficiencies and abundances. As well as those that speak yet do not live." He listed them with a practiced boredom, you couldn't let them know you were too interested, or they would disappear on you.
Hermione narrowed her eyes. So, he was hunting something here. She wondered what.
While she sat, swimming in a ponder, Theo stilled the needle on his skin and flicked it, sending it spinning.
It whirled as Hermione's mind did, but she was so caught up in cataloguing the various anomalies she thought might bring an Unspeakable to her little part of Wales she didn't notice how the silence rang too loud until it had clearly been several moments of abnormal stillness.
It wasn't until her flame caught itself a little on a subtle draft with a soft phwooop, phwoop noise to deliberately get her attention that she looked up.
Draco brought his eyes slowly from Theo's tattoo to Hermione. His gray eyes too calm, too idle, too willing to let clouded sea fog roll in that she grasped his hand.
"What?" The word tripped out of her like a marble falling to a linoleum floor. The ending 't' tinking around the space in a way that made her shiver.
"You," Draco answered. It was slow, unsure. His brow twitched in a furrow as he tried to work it out. "What he wants-" he gestured to Theo's tattoo.
The needle was stuck in a way Aeternalian compasses were not meant to be. The realms shifted too often for it to ever become stuck. It pointed right at her.
Surprised she gave a puzzled glance to Theo and became even further mystified when his gaze was coniferous. Constant and ever-seasonal the hazel ashy and brittle.
The tealight candle flame danced a little, proud of itself.
Theo sat back and took up his whisky again, Draco mimicked him. The two men staring each other down.
"Mm, that's right Drake," Theo was subdued yet resolute as if what he was about to say would never change but he was sorry for it.
"What I want… is your girl."