Note: most of the other chapters have just been gone over, lengthened and corrected a bit. This one has been pretty much revised. Hope you like it. I'm certainly happy to be back with this story, which is, I hope, worth the effort.
And don't own Harry Potter, etc...you know the drill. Feedback, of course, is always welcome.
7.
It was something of a war council, and a pretty damned pathetic one.
There wasn't, and there should have been, a big, round oak table. Dim lighting, as well, so that their faces were in dramatic shadows. And most certainly, Hermione should have been shuffling papers, rather than paper napkins with semi-coherent scrawls on them.
She sat at a single table in the basement cafeteria, trying to ignore the stickiness of the floor and the pervasive smell of fried chicken. Harry sat next to her, shifting uneasily, and dripping quietly onto the floor. It was, apparently, raining. Hermione hadn't seen the sky for days.
All this magic, and this place was no more pleasant that the one where she'd eaten her PB&J in 2nd grade.Colette was there too, looking askance at Hermione, who still had a charming brown bruise decorating one side of her face. She had greeted Harry with the aristocratic calm of the French for which Hermione was incredibly grateful. She needed someone who hadn't gone all hero-worship.
The lights were magic. Why, then, did they have all the unflattering qualities and irritating buzz of fluorescent?The rest of the table was crowded with a half-dozen aurors who knew vaguely what was going on, and could be spared from the busy, chaotic anthill hurry that the Ministry had turned into. No coffee. No paper, either, for some reason, which was why Hermione had resorted to napkins. No leads in the past three days, either.
And another team had vanished.
Hermione felt a sudden start at that. She had been reasonably close with the team head--Adrienne Welsh--and she felt suddenly guilty about listing coffee first in her list of worries. No, this was truly unsettling; the teams, these days, had remained in constant contact, and suddenly Adrienne's end had gone dead somewhere in Russia.
Untraceable. People had to be somewhere, didn't they? Even if, and Hermione shuddered at the thought, all the teams had been killed, they should still be somewhere.
Neither could anyone find Fudge, although that was a different matter. Nobody had really liked him, especially those working under him. And half the aurors had been quite observant in little matters like bribes with Malfoy seals on them. Actually, she realized, Colette was expressing exactly these thoughts aloud and Harry was nodding, his face grave.
It had been easier than she had anticipated to talk to him again--aside from terse, distracted Happy-Christmas-Birthday-Thankgiving-Etc phone calls. He inevitably spent such events at the Weasleys, which made such calls very brief indeed.No; under cover of panic, all things were made simple.
She realized, surprised, that no one was talking. They were simply shuffling papers or staring at their hands.
It was a terribly unpleasant silence. Harry continued his dripping, which only succeeded in breaking the quiet in arrhythmic increments. Hermione glanced, surreptitiously, at the faces around her: grim, gray, lost and frustrated. Lost friends were on the table here--lost or dead, made worse in uncertainty.
"Hermione," Harry said gently. "You're the boss. Say something."
"Boss?" she ejaculated, startled.
Colette gave her one of the 'don't be an idiot' looks the French are so skilled at. Hermione conceded. "Alright. We have to realize that unless we find a tracking spell that works, repeating the old ones isn't going to do any good. I think our best bet is to strengthen our defense, and get word out to the British wizarding community."
"How?" said Colette, just as Harry said "Defense?"
"Call Rita Skeeter," Hermione said to Colette. "As for your question, Harry, I don't think there's anything we can do besides defense. We don't know where they are. Or even who, for the most part. However, they know where the Ministry of Magic is because it's in a big building labeled 'Ministry of Magic.' Bit problematic, no?"
He gave a rueful grin.
"We've been treading water for the past week. We need to do something. Is there, in fact, anything we can do?"
People started talking quietly. Hermione tried to listen, but found herself becoming strangely lightheaded.It was kind of pleasant.
Rapidly getting less so, actually, and her vision seemed to be fading into little bright sparkly flashes of light, like a snowglobe or a TV-station with poor reception. She managed, though it was disturbingly difficult, to collapse forward onto the table, rather than fall off the cafeteria bench onto the sticky tile floor. She lost the battle to keep her eyes open, and felt, distantly, her breathing become raspy and uneven.
Hermione had fainted once before, after some sort of childhood inoculation, at age eight. It had been a similar experience--same lightheadedness, same sparkly vision.
Only...Only then, the sparkle hadn't been quite so overwhelmingly silver and green.
The stuff resolved itself, slowly, into a figure. A cold, handsome face and a smile that was either very charming or deeply disturbing, depending on if you'd ever seen it in context before. He radiated power.
She would have drawn back, if she could move.
He laughed. No one, anywhere, ever, could have mistaken that laugh for anything but evil. It was worthy of a Disney villain.
"Having fun, Granger?" Draco asked pleasantly, and she woke, trembling and nauseous.
Hermione's recollection ended there, and she came around somewhere between her flat and the ministry, being carried gently by capable Quidditch-star arms. She groaned.
"Are you alright?" Harry asked. "What was that?"
"Ugh. Put me down, please."
He tried, but the Hermione's legs refused to bear her weight, and he picked her up again. "Tell me when we get to your apartment, sweetie," he murmured, and only later would Hermione remember "sweetie" and worry about it.
Apparently, the assembled group has surmised that she had simply been working too hard and collapsed from exhaustion. She explained to an increasingly grave Harry the few details of her little Draco-trip, and finished with a request that he get back to the ministry and keep things running until she could get back.
"You aren't safe," he snapped in response before she'd finished listing her reasons.
"No one's safe," she said in return, and if Hermione Granger hadn't been a witch and gone to Hogwarts, she would have been a champion of her high school debate team.
"But he's targeting you!" Harry snapped. "For God's sake, stay put. I'll talk to the Ministry, but I'm sure they'll agree. If they're after you, you're going to keep a low profile."
Harry was gone within five minutes, leaving Hermione feeling like a bad case of flu.She glanced at the ugly red-numbered alarm clock next to her bed. It was only 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Oh well. If she tried to go back to work, they'd only send her home again. Might as well never get a full 8 hours' sleep.Nothing ever went as planned in Hermione's life. In less than three, a man without a heartbeat darkened her doorway for the second time.
She was sleeping quietly, curled up in a ball like a cold kitten, with quilts pulled up to her chin and tangled brown hair sprayed across her face. Her shoulders hunched and what little of her face he could see looked worried and tired and very young. Well, she was young, he told himself. Far too young to be doing a job that, as of yet, had not boasted a completely capable candidate.
"Broke in again," he said from the doorway. "You don't take advice well, do you?"
Hermione mumbled something incoherent.
"Time to wake, Miss Granger. You have a job to do."
She did, slowly, and not without regret. "You told me I was making myself sick," she argued plaintively. "You said to sleep. Everybody did, point of fact."
"Such luxuries must be done without in times of trouble. What's wrong with you, anyway?"
"Draco...did something to me," she said drowsily, before he could speak.
"I know. I can feel it. Some sort of vision, yes?"
"Yeah...I think he was trying to taunt me. I dunno. Harry said he thought I was a target and to stay here because I was in a lot of danger..."
He crossed the floor and placed a cool hand across her forehead. "No," he said slowly. "Something more than that. He took something from you..."
"WHAT?!"
"Shh..." he paused. "Some bit of information, some little mind-read...an incredibly difficult spell to perform when not in the actual physical presence of someone and probably requiring more than one spellcaster. You would have noticed if he hadn't used the vision on top of it as a diversion."
"So what does this mean?"
"It means that, although you are indeed in a great deal of danger, you're not the target. Other than that, I can't tell until I examine what exactly Mr. Malfoy needed from you. You don't know, do you?"
"What I might know that Malfoy would need? No idea. I mean, there's Ministry stuff, but nothing nobody else has knowledge of."
"And most others would be a far easier target," he mused. "Well, we'll need the information."
"And how do you plan to do that? I mean, you're an Occlumens, but..."
"More complicated than that, you're right but it can be done. For now, stay here and pretend to be extraordinarily shaken by what was no more than a mere overconfident gloat on Malfoy's part." He sighed. "And if you might lend me a shower briefly, it would be greatly appreciated."
She looked at him, her still blurry vision starting to focus...he was wearing black pants and the black trench coat, so old and worn that it was more gray than black.
Grey, light enough to show the bloodstains.
"HOW did that happen?!" she cried, hurrying to him, suddenly shedding both her fear of Snape-the-overly-cruel-professor and Snape-the-vampire.
Snape rolled his eyes. "Its fine. I assure you." Hermione, to his disgust, had begun to examine the stain with concern.
"You lost a lot of blood," she said accusingly. "It's a wonder you're standing."
"It was quite some time ago," he retorted, still annoyed with the wasteful blood loss. "And, while irritating, it isn't life-threatening. Or it wouldn't be, if I had one to threaten. As to how, I was examining a lead and ran into trouble."
"A lead?"
"Too late. And with every...ah...run-in, our mastermind becomes a little more careful. I think, right now, you're the best lead we've got."
And he smiled the most terrifying smile Hermione had ever seen in her life.
Something in his expression, frightening as it was, gave her hope.
Draco Malfoy was playing with fire.
And don't own Harry Potter, etc...you know the drill. Feedback, of course, is always welcome.
7.
It was something of a war council, and a pretty damned pathetic one.
There wasn't, and there should have been, a big, round oak table. Dim lighting, as well, so that their faces were in dramatic shadows. And most certainly, Hermione should have been shuffling papers, rather than paper napkins with semi-coherent scrawls on them.
She sat at a single table in the basement cafeteria, trying to ignore the stickiness of the floor and the pervasive smell of fried chicken. Harry sat next to her, shifting uneasily, and dripping quietly onto the floor. It was, apparently, raining. Hermione hadn't seen the sky for days.
All this magic, and this place was no more pleasant that the one where she'd eaten her PB&J in 2nd grade.Colette was there too, looking askance at Hermione, who still had a charming brown bruise decorating one side of her face. She had greeted Harry with the aristocratic calm of the French for which Hermione was incredibly grateful. She needed someone who hadn't gone all hero-worship.
The lights were magic. Why, then, did they have all the unflattering qualities and irritating buzz of fluorescent?The rest of the table was crowded with a half-dozen aurors who knew vaguely what was going on, and could be spared from the busy, chaotic anthill hurry that the Ministry had turned into. No coffee. No paper, either, for some reason, which was why Hermione had resorted to napkins. No leads in the past three days, either.
And another team had vanished.
Hermione felt a sudden start at that. She had been reasonably close with the team head--Adrienne Welsh--and she felt suddenly guilty about listing coffee first in her list of worries. No, this was truly unsettling; the teams, these days, had remained in constant contact, and suddenly Adrienne's end had gone dead somewhere in Russia.
Untraceable. People had to be somewhere, didn't they? Even if, and Hermione shuddered at the thought, all the teams had been killed, they should still be somewhere.
Neither could anyone find Fudge, although that was a different matter. Nobody had really liked him, especially those working under him. And half the aurors had been quite observant in little matters like bribes with Malfoy seals on them. Actually, she realized, Colette was expressing exactly these thoughts aloud and Harry was nodding, his face grave.
It had been easier than she had anticipated to talk to him again--aside from terse, distracted Happy-Christmas-Birthday-Thankgiving-Etc phone calls. He inevitably spent such events at the Weasleys, which made such calls very brief indeed.No; under cover of panic, all things were made simple.
She realized, surprised, that no one was talking. They were simply shuffling papers or staring at their hands.
It was a terribly unpleasant silence. Harry continued his dripping, which only succeeded in breaking the quiet in arrhythmic increments. Hermione glanced, surreptitiously, at the faces around her: grim, gray, lost and frustrated. Lost friends were on the table here--lost or dead, made worse in uncertainty.
"Hermione," Harry said gently. "You're the boss. Say something."
"Boss?" she ejaculated, startled.
Colette gave her one of the 'don't be an idiot' looks the French are so skilled at. Hermione conceded. "Alright. We have to realize that unless we find a tracking spell that works, repeating the old ones isn't going to do any good. I think our best bet is to strengthen our defense, and get word out to the British wizarding community."
"How?" said Colette, just as Harry said "Defense?"
"Call Rita Skeeter," Hermione said to Colette. "As for your question, Harry, I don't think there's anything we can do besides defense. We don't know where they are. Or even who, for the most part. However, they know where the Ministry of Magic is because it's in a big building labeled 'Ministry of Magic.' Bit problematic, no?"
He gave a rueful grin.
"We've been treading water for the past week. We need to do something. Is there, in fact, anything we can do?"
People started talking quietly. Hermione tried to listen, but found herself becoming strangely lightheaded.It was kind of pleasant.
Rapidly getting less so, actually, and her vision seemed to be fading into little bright sparkly flashes of light, like a snowglobe or a TV-station with poor reception. She managed, though it was disturbingly difficult, to collapse forward onto the table, rather than fall off the cafeteria bench onto the sticky tile floor. She lost the battle to keep her eyes open, and felt, distantly, her breathing become raspy and uneven.
Hermione had fainted once before, after some sort of childhood inoculation, at age eight. It had been a similar experience--same lightheadedness, same sparkly vision.
Only...Only then, the sparkle hadn't been quite so overwhelmingly silver and green.
The stuff resolved itself, slowly, into a figure. A cold, handsome face and a smile that was either very charming or deeply disturbing, depending on if you'd ever seen it in context before. He radiated power.
She would have drawn back, if she could move.
He laughed. No one, anywhere, ever, could have mistaken that laugh for anything but evil. It was worthy of a Disney villain.
"Having fun, Granger?" Draco asked pleasantly, and she woke, trembling and nauseous.
Hermione's recollection ended there, and she came around somewhere between her flat and the ministry, being carried gently by capable Quidditch-star arms. She groaned.
"Are you alright?" Harry asked. "What was that?"
"Ugh. Put me down, please."
He tried, but the Hermione's legs refused to bear her weight, and he picked her up again. "Tell me when we get to your apartment, sweetie," he murmured, and only later would Hermione remember "sweetie" and worry about it.
Apparently, the assembled group has surmised that she had simply been working too hard and collapsed from exhaustion. She explained to an increasingly grave Harry the few details of her little Draco-trip, and finished with a request that he get back to the ministry and keep things running until she could get back.
"You aren't safe," he snapped in response before she'd finished listing her reasons.
"No one's safe," she said in return, and if Hermione Granger hadn't been a witch and gone to Hogwarts, she would have been a champion of her high school debate team.
"But he's targeting you!" Harry snapped. "For God's sake, stay put. I'll talk to the Ministry, but I'm sure they'll agree. If they're after you, you're going to keep a low profile."
Harry was gone within five minutes, leaving Hermione feeling like a bad case of flu.She glanced at the ugly red-numbered alarm clock next to her bed. It was only 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Oh well. If she tried to go back to work, they'd only send her home again. Might as well never get a full 8 hours' sleep.Nothing ever went as planned in Hermione's life. In less than three, a man without a heartbeat darkened her doorway for the second time.
She was sleeping quietly, curled up in a ball like a cold kitten, with quilts pulled up to her chin and tangled brown hair sprayed across her face. Her shoulders hunched and what little of her face he could see looked worried and tired and very young. Well, she was young, he told himself. Far too young to be doing a job that, as of yet, had not boasted a completely capable candidate.
"Broke in again," he said from the doorway. "You don't take advice well, do you?"
Hermione mumbled something incoherent.
"Time to wake, Miss Granger. You have a job to do."
She did, slowly, and not without regret. "You told me I was making myself sick," she argued plaintively. "You said to sleep. Everybody did, point of fact."
"Such luxuries must be done without in times of trouble. What's wrong with you, anyway?"
"Draco...did something to me," she said drowsily, before he could speak.
"I know. I can feel it. Some sort of vision, yes?"
"Yeah...I think he was trying to taunt me. I dunno. Harry said he thought I was a target and to stay here because I was in a lot of danger..."
He crossed the floor and placed a cool hand across her forehead. "No," he said slowly. "Something more than that. He took something from you..."
"WHAT?!"
"Shh..." he paused. "Some bit of information, some little mind-read...an incredibly difficult spell to perform when not in the actual physical presence of someone and probably requiring more than one spellcaster. You would have noticed if he hadn't used the vision on top of it as a diversion."
"So what does this mean?"
"It means that, although you are indeed in a great deal of danger, you're not the target. Other than that, I can't tell until I examine what exactly Mr. Malfoy needed from you. You don't know, do you?"
"What I might know that Malfoy would need? No idea. I mean, there's Ministry stuff, but nothing nobody else has knowledge of."
"And most others would be a far easier target," he mused. "Well, we'll need the information."
"And how do you plan to do that? I mean, you're an Occlumens, but..."
"More complicated than that, you're right but it can be done. For now, stay here and pretend to be extraordinarily shaken by what was no more than a mere overconfident gloat on Malfoy's part." He sighed. "And if you might lend me a shower briefly, it would be greatly appreciated."
She looked at him, her still blurry vision starting to focus...he was wearing black pants and the black trench coat, so old and worn that it was more gray than black.
Grey, light enough to show the bloodstains.
"HOW did that happen?!" she cried, hurrying to him, suddenly shedding both her fear of Snape-the-overly-cruel-professor and Snape-the-vampire.
Snape rolled his eyes. "Its fine. I assure you." Hermione, to his disgust, had begun to examine the stain with concern.
"You lost a lot of blood," she said accusingly. "It's a wonder you're standing."
"It was quite some time ago," he retorted, still annoyed with the wasteful blood loss. "And, while irritating, it isn't life-threatening. Or it wouldn't be, if I had one to threaten. As to how, I was examining a lead and ran into trouble."
"A lead?"
"Too late. And with every...ah...run-in, our mastermind becomes a little more careful. I think, right now, you're the best lead we've got."
And he smiled the most terrifying smile Hermione had ever seen in her life.
Something in his expression, frightening as it was, gave her hope.
Draco Malfoy was playing with fire.