"You know you've got frosting at the corner of your mouth, Malfoy?"
Draco Malfoy looked deliberately at Hermione Granger, standing on the opposite side of the lift, and stuffed his gob with the final, massive bite of the chocolate frosted donut pinched with aristocratic decorum between his fingers. Without taking his eyes off her, he chewed, swallowed, and swiped his thumb at the corner of his mouth. Then he slid the tip of his thumb between his lips, and sucked.
When he pulled his thumb out of his mouth, it made an audible, wet pop.
"Better now?" he asked.
"Disgusting."
"We all have our appetites, Granger. Can't help if mine are a little naughty. What did you have for breakfast? Overnight oats with chia seeds, seasonal fruit and a splash of unsweetened vanilla almond milk?"
"I prefer soya," said Hermione before she could stop herself, and then, quietly, "Damn it."
The lift slid smoothly down to Level Nine of the Ministry, and disgorged them both into the quiet of the corridor.
"Do you have your weekend all planned out, then?" asked Draco. "Perhaps some yoga, a bit of gratitude journaling, take your cat for a walk?"
Hermione refused to give him the satisfaction of rolling her eyes. It was Friday, and he'd burned through her last nerve on Wednesday.
"I have a perfectly lovely weekend lined up, thank you for asking. Do you plan to enjoy your usual debauches at the Manor? Does everyone involved sign a confidentiality agreement, or are they free to share what goes on behind closed doors? I imagine things can get a little sticky."
"Oh, an air-tight non-disclosure, always." Draco pulled open the door leading to the Department of Mysteries and held it for her, the corner of his mouth tugging up in the earliest stages of a smirk. "Although all of that may be, sadly, coming to an end. You'll have to hold your breath for juicy details from some other quarter."
Hermione entered the round foyer of the Department. The formerly unmarked doors once revolved at random around the entry room's circular walls, but they now stood still, and were flanked by neat brass plates displaying titles, such as Magico-Neurology, Affective Studies, and Thanatology. She drew her wand from the pocket of her fitted, cropped trousers, held it against the knob of one of the doors, and watched a small light just above the knob flash green.
"Gods this place is pedestrian since you lot Muggle-ized everything." He poked a finger at the brass plate reading Temporospatial Research and Development.
"Government transparency is something of an adjustment, I realize." She swung the door open, and he followed her through. "Things like oversight and broadly agreed upon rules for the use of human test subjects may be indispensable to the ethical expansion of human knowledge, but I see how you might find them tiresome."
"I do. I like this style you're experimenting with, though," he said, watching her remove her jacket. "The trousers, the loose, tucked—that's a t-shirt, correct? Like a refined tee? Very laid-back, California woman-entrepreneur getting down to business, if anyone actually conducts business in California. You look centered, empowered, and ready for a midday mojito. I'm waiting for the imminent arrival of golden highlights and beachy waves." He sucked at the opening in the lid of a paper take-away cup of coffee and winced. "Why is this coffee such absolute shite?"
"Your capacity for complaint is positively supernatural," said Hermione. "I keep telling you, if you wait until we get into the office, I'll do a proper brew. The witch at the tea cart thinks coffee is a Muggle conspiracy and prepares it accordingly. And stop reading my fashion magazines."
"But I'm addicted now," he drawled in his oval aristocratic tones, "to your hateful beans, and to Who Wore It Best?" He flung the leather satchel he'd been carrying, embossed in black-on-black with the initials of a highly exclusive Wizarding fashion house, onto a weathered desk at the left side of the room. Then he set down his coffee cup, removed his outer set of robes, and hung them from a peg by the door.
When he turned around, Hermione was staring at him.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing. Only you look like an M16 agent about to motor about Rome on a Vespa in search of a decent cappuccino. Do you mean for your trousers to be that tight, or have war reparations made sufficient fabric an unaffordable luxury for the Malfoys?"
Draco looked down at his suit, a close-fitted, matte-black affair in fine-grained wool.
"It's called tailoring. I understand that fit is an unfamiliar concept when one is accustomed to over-sized cardigans and blouses from the high street cut at nothing but right angles." He lifted his chin and regarded her. "Do you realize that I heard you use the term 'sweater paws' when you were muttering to yourself the other day? And what's a Vespa? Some kind of Muggle street-cleaning equipment? Would I look good on one?"
"No." Hermione slammed her own plain olive-drab canvas bag down on a matching desk on the opposite side of the room before turning back to him. "You wouldn't."
"Then I'll find something else to ride," he said, lifting an eyebrow at her.
Hermione breathed out in irritation as she made her way to a table in the center of the room supporting a complicated-looking machine, and began fussing with a row of knobs.
The apparatus consisted of a series of brass tubes and gleaming glass lenses, and mounted in its center was a small hour-glass filled with subtly shifting, luminescent sand. The hour-glass was circled with interlocking brass rings that began rotating slowly when Hermione tapped them with her wand. Below it a wide, highly polished lens hung directly over a round basin filled with a still, dark liquid.
Draco opened his satchel, pulled out a metal object, and brought it to the table.
Hermione had been twisting an etched brass dial, and stopped.
"What do you mean, 'All of that may be coming to an end'?"
"Are you suddenly taking a legitimate interest in what I get up to during my after-office hours?" he asked.
He set the metal object at the end of the table.
"I'm not in the least bit interested in what you do with your—oh, good gods." Hermione stared. "I thought you said it was shaped like a swan?"
Draco looked at the object.
"It is."
"That has never looked like a swan in its entire life. How could you possibly..." She trailed off and shook her head as if to clear it. "If anything—and this is being extraordinarily generous—it looks like a recently deceased badger."
The object under scrutiny was a small silver-metal box, roughly the size of a woman's fist. Two hinges connected the top and bottom pieces on one side, and a perfunctory clasp held it closed on the opposite. There was, one would have been forced to concede, a certain quality of extreme repose in the figure. It may have been dead or merely sleeping, but the essential fact was that it had come to its place of rest. Whether it was a badger, a swan, or some intermediate species heretofore undiscovered, was open to lively debate. What must have been agreed upon, in light of the evidence, was that it was loosely in the shape of an acorn lying on its side, with a pert triangular tip at its wide end like a little tail, and a series of lumpy, improvisational protrusions at its narrow end. It was delicately etched over its entire surface with what might have been feathers, and might have been thick strands of fur, the grooves having oxidized to black and setting the fine, ambiguous work of the craftsman in sharp relief. There was a pair of what were clearly goggling round eyes—a triumphant exemplar of the artist's ability to wordlessly convey meaning—and the stately open chambers of a pair of ears or, perhaps, nostrils, depending on which part of the figure was supposed to be the head.
It smelled like stale cigars.
"This treasured object has been in the possession of the Wiltshire Malfoys for at least eight generations," Draco said with a frown and no small degree of hauteur. "Every single one of them has referred to it as the 'cursed, swan-shaped snuff box'. It is an avant-garde objet d'art, and has been sitting on a shelf in the large drawing room at Malfoy Manor for two hundred years. Forgive me if I defer to the expertise of its faithful stewards over a caffeine-peddling, Muggle-minded swot like yourself."
"I didn't know you felt so strongly about the cursed metallic mustelids you keep lying about the place," she answered, "but if that's a swan, I'm a harpy."
"There's nothing to say to that which isn't going to end in my losing something of great anatomical value to me."
Hermione looked at him with disdain. "Will you just help me adjust the focus on the Potentiograph? It's gone soft."
"Has it? It looks fine to me."
"It has. I can see it plain as day. Get your hand over the glass and help me fix it."
Draco moved close to a raised square of glass at the far end of the machine, and tapped it with his wand. It was suddenly illuminated from below with a diffuse, bright white light, which projected upward into a long run of glass lenses mounted in tubes and interspersed with angled mirrors, ending at the Time Turner suspended over the basin. He placed his hand over the glass, and looked over at Hermione.
"Well?"
Hermione peered down at the reflective surface of the liquid in the basin.
"Oh!" she said in genuine surprise. "That's unusual."
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
"Oh my. Say that again. I'd like to file it away for later."
"Shut it and come and look," she said, motioning for him to trade places with her.
He did.
She stuck her hand over the glass where his had just been. "What do you see?"
"Your hand. It's forty five minutes into the future of your fingernails, and you haven't stopped biting them."
"And what else? Look at the background, not the hand."
"Oh! Well that's interesting, isn't it?" His brow furrowed. "Is that...it looks like mud, maybe? Rather deep at that. Merlin, you're actually grabbing a handful of it, how pastoral of you."
"I'm sure I will have a perfectly good reason," she said pointedly. "Minus the mud pies, I saw the same when you put your hand on the platform. Interesting, eh?"
"Very."
"Stop the Turner then start it again and see what happens. It may just be acting up. We've certainly seen stranger things," she said.
Draco brought out his wand, tapped it to bring the Time Turner at the heart of the machine to a halt, then restarted it again.
"What now?" asked Hermione.
"Your hand is in the lab. You're making me a coffee."
Hermione offered him a personally crafted expressionless stare.
"It seems like just a bit of potentiality leakage. Nothing we haven't seen before in one form or another. No playing about in a field of muck for us today, unfortunately." He reached over and tweaked the focusing dial. "Focus is dialed in. Shall we have a look at the cursed snuff box?"
Hermione looked uncertain.
"Do you have your emergency jump kit on you?" she asked.
Draco looked anywhere but at her.
"Merlin, Malfoy, you cannot be serious. I've told you a thousand times at least. They need to be on you at all times: Time Turner, age-stabilizer potion. Both, at all times." She pulled a heavy leather pouch out of her left trouser pocket and shook it at him. "Honestly, I'd report you to Shacklebolt if it wasn't your own self-interested, toff backside you're putting on the line by not having your safeguards in place."
"Having that kit in my pocket ruins the lines of the suit." He laid a hand protectively across the waistband of his trousers. "And I need a well-fitting suit to lure unsuspecting witches to my depraved orgies."
"No witch in the entire Ministry could possibly be unsuspecting at this point," snorted Hermione.
"That's true. Every witch on the premises is perfectly informed about what I get up to at the weekend."
"And do you want to bring this lab down with you?" Hermione went on. "You're welcome to live out the rest of your days as a peat cutter in the year 1386 if that suits your fancy, but we've only had two full years with these new Time Turners. If you'll recall, they took us three rather frustrating years to re-develop in the first place, with those nearly useless notes on the previous models. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with the spelled restraints placed on them, let alone what's possible if we can demonstrate that it's safe to take the restrictions off."
"Fine," said Draco. "I'll put the potion in my pocket, but there's no need for us both to carry an emergency Time Turner. If we get in a spot of trouble, we'll use yours." He walked to his desk, pulled a vial of shimmering puce-colored potion out of his drawer, and shoved it in his pocket.
Hermione caved to temptation and enjoyed a deeply satisfying roll of her eyes, then slid over to make one final adjustment to the focus dial.
"Alright. Go ahead and put the badger on the projection plate."
Draco looked at her meaningfully, placed the awful ornamental snuff box on the illuminated square of glass, and came to stand beside her, looking into the basin.
Nothing happened for a long moment, and then the surface of the liquid flashed an alarming neon yellow. The apparatus shook slightly, and the Time Turner made a sort of grinding noise, and seemed to reverse itself. There was a high-pitched squeal, a metallic ping, and the Turner came to a complete stop, and went dark.
Hermione realized after a long moment of silence that in her alarm, she'd dug the fingers of her left hand into the expertly tailored right sleeve of Draco's suit jacket. She looked up at him and unhooked herself.
"That wasn't anything we've seen before." He brushed off his sleeve and looked at the Potentiograph as though it was about to start spouting live kittens like popping corn in the machine at the fair.
"I don't understand," she said, glaring at the machine. She pointed her wand at the Time Turner, and gave it a resounding tap. It remained dark and motionless. Next, she leaned in and gave it an irritated plink with her index finger. "What the blasted, withering—damn it! We've viewed scores of cursed objects, and none of them has ever broken the bloody machine. How many Curse-breakings have we looked at ahead of time now?"
"Hundreds."
"We've seen every known family of curse on this wretched thing, given the Curse-breakers foreknowledge about everything from exsanguination to instant death to boils on the bollocks. I honestly can't think of what could possibly be so awful the machine's just decided to pack it in."
"Well, I suppose it's best to set it aside and let the Curse-breakers know. Are you keen to make me that coffee yet?"
"Sod off, Malfoy."
Hermione was incensed. Not only was the machine apparently broken, but they'd failed, and failure made her itch. When she itched, she needed to work.
"I'm firing up the Dislocator. We can pick up where we left off on Tuesday with the apples."
Draco shrugged. "Alright. We'll put the recalcitrant machine in a time out so it can think about what it's done." He picked up his now cold cup of coffee, took a drink, and set the cup down on the corner of the Potentiograph table. Then he turned to a wooden bench that spanned the entire length of the rear wall.
On the left end of the bench sat a machine built along similar lines to the Potentiograph, only it was much smaller, and instead of a basin and lenses, it stood on brass legs over an empty wooden platform.
"I'm driving today," he said. Hermione indulged herself with another luxurious roll of the eyes, and moved to retrieve a shiny brass stopwatch from her desk. With a wave of her wand, a roll of parchment rose into the air and bobbed along beside her, with a quill hovering at the ready over its surface. She took a position at the far end of the bench away from Draco, where there stood a slightly raised wooden surface identical to the one under the Dislocator machine.
There was a bowl of apples, with hazy, speckled yellow and blush-pink skins, sitting next to the machine, and after Draco tapped the Time Turner at the heart of the device with his wand, he used a pair of tongs to carefully set an apple on the wooden platform below it. It seemed to wink out of existence with a soft pop.
Draco reached into the bowl of apples with his hand, grabbed a particularly large one, and looked at it philosophically.
"Do you think eating time-shifted apples is going to do me any harm?"
"One can only hope," muttered Hermione.
He took a laggard bite of it while the machine continued to hum cheerfully.
"Not to worry," he said once he'd chewed and swallowed. "We'll get the Potentiograph up and running again in the afternoon, and take a look at the near future of something particularly good. There's a cursed pair of Italian loafers in the storage closet that I'd like to wear to the Ministry Solstice party, and the more information we can have about them before I put them on my feet the better."
Hermione twitched her lips in irritation, and kept a keen watch on the empty platform in front of her.
"We've certainly had worse days," said Draco. "Everyone's going home with all of their personal bits and bobs in place today." He made steady work of his apple, pulled a seed from the core, and flicked it, hard, across the wooden platform under the Dislocator, where it disappeared mid-flight.
"What did you mean, before? About putting an end to your single life," asked Hermione, narrowing her eyes and still refusing to look at him.
"I don't believe I used those exact words," he said carefully. "In any case, it's nothing you need to worry about, I'm sure." He fidgeted with the perfect knot of his elegant tie before bending down and slinging a second apple seed into the machine at an upward angle.
"Now I am worried about it, because you've brought it up."
"And now you can forget it," he said, terse even for him.
"Alright, I will."
"Good."
"Good."
The second hand of Hermione's stopwatch twitched audibly.
"It's only that you live for your swinging bachelorhood," she mumbled.
"Who ever actually said that I'm putting on sex parties at Malfoy Manor?" There was a laugh threaded through his words, but his voice was sharp with agitation. "Does that even seem plausible to you?"
"Seems plausible enough, yes. With the..." she gestured up and down at him, "...suits."
"My suits, Granger?"
An apple appeared on the platform in front of Hermione, perfectly round and unbruised.
"Four minutes, 37 seconds," she said, clicking the button at the top of the stopwatch. The quill took note.
"Aging?"
Hermione picked up a brass tube with a cut crystal set in one end, like a kaleidoscope, and looked through it at the apple. "Fifty...two seconds."
The quill scratched dutifully away.
"Getting better."
"Markedly so." Hermione moved the apple to a bin on the floor and consulting the figures on the parchment.
An apple seed came flying across the platform next to Hermione and hit her squarely in the arm.
Thirty seconds later, another one came zinging through the air at a steep upward angle, and managed to hit her in the chin.
Hermione spoke without looking up form her work. "You're such a spoilt child."
"And you're a bloody-minded know-it-all," said Draco, wrestling with another budding smirk. "And thus we remain as we have ever been."
Without any warning, a new apple appeared on the platform next to Hermione.
"We've sent one back," said Draco.
Hermione directed the quill to note the time in a different column on the parchment, then picked up the new apple, and repeated the procedure with the brass tube.
"Seven point two."
Draco adjusted a series of knobs on the Dislocator, then they repeated the forwarding experiment with another apple, which aged at a slightly slower rate than the first.
"Shall we do back, now?" Draco asked.
"I suppose."
Draco tapped the Time Turner in the Dislocator with his wand, and it came to a stop. He adjusted the knobs again, then tapped the Time Turner a second time, and it began to whir in the opposite direction. He picked up an apple with the tongs, and set it on the platform.
It disappeared just as the other two had before it.
"Time," said Draco.
Hermione looked at her stopwatch.
'Six minutes." She tapped the tip of her index finger against her bottom lip. "That's a...point zero two rate of de-aging."
"Excellent."
A brass knob came flying across the platform next to Hermione and hit her in the hip.
"Ow!" she cried out. "Gods, that actually hurt." She rubbed at her hip. "I've put up with your damned apple seeds, but that's solid brass. How hard must you have thrown that?"
"I have no idea. I haven't done it yet." He looked troubled.
"You'll need to explain yourself in about six minutes," said Hermione, scowling. "Merlin, that's going to bruise." She bent over at the waist to pick up the knob, and as she did, a brass screw flew across the platform and whizzed through the air directly over her head.
"Hermione." Draco stared with evident concern at Hermione's end of the bench. "Move away from the destination platform, please."
Hermione complied with his request without offering him any argument, and the moment she stepped away, a shower of shattered brass and glass fragments came flying out of the air above the destination platform, and into the space that Hermione had recently been standing in.
As both she and Draco gawked wordlessly at the detritus now covering the floor, an empty paper coffee cup with a hole burned through the bottom shot into the room from above the platform, landed on the floor, and lolled back and forth like a pendulum in a lazy, ever-diminishing arc, until finally it lay still and peaceful, calmly smoking.
"I refuse to believe that I've chucked all of that into the Dislocation field," said Draco.
"That is a lot, even for you."
"What's going on, then?"
Hermione frowned. "I don't know."
"I liked it better when you said that before. Now it's just disconcerting."
They both looked around the room.
"I suspect..." said Draco, "...that we now have about five minutes left before we need to get out of the room."
Hermione nodded gravely.
"We have to think. What's out of the ordinary?" she asked.
They both looked around.
"The box," said Draco. "We've left it on the Potentiograph lens."
"Alright. But the Potentiograph is totally dark." Hermione waved a hand in frustration. "It shouldn't be able to do anything. I suppose we move the box anyway?"
Draco inched toward the swan-shaped snuff box. As his fingers began to close around it, he let out a loud shout, and pulled back his hand as though he'd been burned.
"It's zapped me," he said, shaking his fingers.
"'Zapped' you?"
"That's what I said."
Hermione grabbed the set of tongs sitting next to the Dislocator, and went to grab the snuff box with them.
"Steady on, Hermione, I'm not sure that's a good—"
The moment the tongs touched the box's irregular surface, Hermione shrieked as a glowing jet of what looked like chartreuse lightning shot out of the box and nipped at her fingertips.
"Alright. Zapped is fair. No grabbing," she concluded. "Spell?"
"I'm not sure adding magic is a solid plan, here. I think we're better off putting a containment spell around the table, so we can localize the damage. We've run the scenarios, your Arithmancy is solid. There's nothing these machines can do under any circumstances that will impact more than the immediate area."
Hermione looked devastated.
"What if it doesn't work? We'll lose all of it, Draco. Everything we've done over the last five years—gone. They'll shut it all down, over that blasted...badger!"
Draco let her taxonomic error slide, and seemed to consider their options.
"Alright. I'm going to try to summon it."
"What if you you're right, though?" She saw that even in these circumstances he couldn't stop the beginning of another smirk from sprouting on his face before he squashed it down. "We have no idea what adding additional magic directly into this situation will do."
"Do you have any better ideas?"
Hermione hesitated.
"No, but it doesn't follow that—"
"Accio snuff box," shouted Draco before she could finish, pointing his wand at the swan-badger sitting in feigned innocence on the Potentiograph platform.
What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion. Given the nature of the department it happened in, it may well have.
When the spell hit the snuff box, the lemon-lime neon light that had merely licked in warning at their fingers before now exploded from the box in a fan of crackling stripes, the tip of each one snapping at either the Time Turner at the heart of the Potentiograph, or Draco and Hermione themselves.
When two of them struck Hermione in the chest and arm, it felt as though twin holes were being bored straight through her, sending vibrating shocks of pain radiating out to the tips of her fingers and down through the soles of her feet.
She watched as Draco's moon-pale hair stood on end, and then lit up as though it were made up of the fragile white-hot filaments of a thousand incandescent Muggle light bulbs.
Hermione felt pinned into place by the shock of the curse, and the movements she made toward Draco were as slow and deliberate as wading through freshly poured concrete.
When the jagged yellow tongues of the curse's energy hit the Time Turner in the Potentiograph, it sparked to life and began to spin, at first slowly, and then with increasing speed, until they could hear the movement of its brass rings slice through the air in a high-pitched, oscillating whine that beat in nausea-inducing waves against the shores of their ear drums.
"Hold on," shouted Hermione, finding Draco's fingertips with her own. Wrenching his hand into a firmer grip, she pulled herself toward him, and finally wrapped her arms ferociously around his torso.
The door was a mere ten feet away. If they moved now, together, they could press against the enormous, crushing pressure building up in the room, and make it there. Each of the laboratories in the Department of Mysteries was warded and spelled beyond comprehension against spreading impacts from any of the projects going on behind the closed and still-mysterious doors.
If they could get out, the explosion—because quite clearly there was about to be an explosion—would happen, and then they could go back in and assess the damage.
Ten feet, now nine ...
Hermione's arms clenched viciously around Draco, whose arms were wrapped around her shoulders, tight and possessive. They moved like that, pulling, pushing, and dragging one another through what felt like the lightless lead weight at the bottom of the ocean.
Eight ...
Seven ...
When Draco and Hermione were six feet from the door, the snuff box disappeared with a theatrical burst of noise, like it wanted nothing more from life than everyone's complete attention.
The Potentiograph exploded.
There was a penetrating rain of brass shrapnel and shards of hot glass. The viewing basin launched itself into the air, held on to its sticky black liquid contents through pure centripetal good fortune as it sailed through the burning brass all around it, then overturned itself and evacuated all over Draco's desk and his expensive designer satchel.
Had they still been in the room, Draco and Hermione would have been shot through with shattered metal traveling through the air at a murderous clip.
It was perhaps for the best that they'd popped out of existence just behind the snuff box.
After the noise was all over, there was a courteous silence while the table that had housed the Potentiograph lightly steamed, as though waiting for a round of applause that never came.
#
It was black.
Following close on the heels of the black, which was boundlessly, poignantly devoid of all light, there entered into the experience, without warning, a searing green-white-blue strobing stellar explosion that seemed to come from behind the eyeballs and a bit to the left. Next it went black again, and then color wasn't important, because everything was encompassed by a world-bending dizziness and the feeling of being rotated in two directions at once, top to bottom.
Next was the mud.
Hermione opened her eyes, or perhaps her eyes could see after a time where they couldn't. Semantic details retreated into negligibility in the void.
The sky was a cheerfully ignorant dome overhead, forget-me-not blue and dotted with round idiotic poofs of cloud that would have smiled in smug satisfaction with themselves if only they'd known how to do it.
The mud.
The mud.
The mud reeked.
It was thick, glorping, heavy stuff, nearly black, and rolling away from Hermione in deep grooves like waves on the surface a solid pitch-dark ocean that smelled like horse manure.
She heard groaning a short distance away, and sat up.
Draco was already sitting up vertically, facing away from Hermione, his legs spread in an ungentlemanlike V, and shaking his head abruptly from side to side as though he had water trapped in his ear.
Hermione felt her heart jump up and sprint at the realization that they were, beyond probability, alive, and in whatever this was, together, sprawled about eight feet apart in the middle of what appeared to be roughly an acre of recently tilled farmland.
Judging by the pornographic squelch made by her left foot, it had recently been raining.
They were together.
They were alive.
Both of them, under a blue sky, sitting in a field that smelled like horse shit.
Hermione almost howled with relief.
Draco swiveled around to look at her, and there was no masking the look of irrepressible gladness that crossed his face, before it gave way to a shrewd and watchful wariness.
His hair had for several years been trimmed into an undercut, the length at the top forever flopping about over one eyebrow or the other with a maddening look of thoughtless, casual perfection. It was allowed to adopt a tousled nonchalance that made one think "Bed," in a way that made the loins wobble a bit, and the void hadn't done it any harm. He was sitting in a field of mud, and yet somehow managed to look shaken and wan in a consumptive, poetical sort of way rather than in a disassembled and muck-smirched way like Hermione was sure she must have done.
Against the black mud, his paleness shone, and his silver-grey eyes reflected the limitless blue of the sky.
For a moment, Hermione almost felt something like positive regard towards him.
Then, like an idiot, he smiled.
That smile.
The audacity of that preposterous, galling, brilliant, disrespectful smile.
"You sod," she said quietly. "You cack-handed, self-important, pompous prat. You blew ... up ... my ... lab!" She had started at a piano, worked her way through a rapid crescendo and ended in a feral fortissimo.
His face dropped.
"Your lab? What do you mean your lab?" he argued, fatally.
She rose to her knees, then bent down to scoop up a generous handful of that midnight-black, rain-soaked, fecund, yielding, horse shit-smelling mud, and chucked it straight into Draco Malfoy's beautiful, pale, vainglorious, idiot face.