-1Chapter 6
Hermione still held the paper crane by her fingertips when she returned to the common room. The whole situation was definitely a shock to her. Why is Draco Malfoy acting weird all of a sudden? Maybe her cover was blown? Her heart was racing madly. Did she somehow let a clue slip? Or, is there really a soft side behind the cold, hard Malfoy smirk?
Think, think think…
She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip, she rehearsed the steps in her head: smile, tell Harry and Ron everything went okay, and go to her dormitory and reread Spying for the Spy. Telling Harry and Ron about Malfoy's behavior would eventually lead to why she had to lead him up to the tower in the first place, which was not something that she would like to tell them. She was going to slowly read the book. When in doubt, read. Tomorrow, she'll head down to the Great Hall for breakfast as usual and everything will be fine, fine, very fine.
"I just had this thought a few minutes ago. Since you take Arithmancy, maybe you can work out a connection between the numbers," Harry rushed to Hermione as soon as her feet reached the entrance to the Common Room.
"Oh, I'll just check some of my books in my dormitory. I'm actually kind of tired tonight. Goodnight," Hermione said briskly to Harry and ignored Ron's curious stare as she headed up the curved stairs. Her nervous thoughts were making her brain pound against the inside of her skull. As she slammed her head on the pillow, forgetting all about checking her books, she discovered something she could learn from Malfoy: not caring. The last thought was swirled with her cauldron of other thoughts. They swirled and stirred in with her memories.
"I'm just another boy."
"Mudblood!"
"Who are you?"
"Fat molar monster!"
"Have you ever felt lame before?"
"Bushy haired beaver!"
As long as she kept the last sentence of her thoughts in her head, she was safe. But like a simmering cauldron, the thoughts she wanted to avoid kept on bubbling to the surface of her mind. She was losing her focus. She had a mission, she had to find the Recondite Butterfly. She took a deep breath and restated this to her mind: Malfoy is the enemy, he doesn't have a nice side, never has, never will. Even the through iron repetition, she couldn't stop doubt from inching into her brain.
Hermione ascended the staircase slowly to the Astronomy Tower the next night. She needed to harden up and not feel sorry for her enemy. She needed to concentrate on the riddle. What did the poem mean? Why were there numbers on top of the paper? As she repeated the numbers in her mind, she had a feeling that she could make a connection, but what was it? She went through her entire arthihmancy textbook this morning and couldn't find any information that related to those numbers. She tried translating them into letters, adding them all up, ordering them from least to greatest, nothing seemed to work.
Hermione was lost in her sea of thoughts with her heart heavy when Draco's voice came from behind her.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked when he arrived at the top of the tower.
"Just thinking about when you'll tell Filch about me trespassing the tower, that's all," Hermione blurted out a safe response.
"Sometimes, I wonder when you'll get over your cheekiness," Draco commented cockily.
"I'm not being cheeky," Hermione retorted. In her head was the same question that Draco had. Why was he being cheeky all of a sudden. It seemed as if every night she had met him on the tower, he had a new personality.
"Fine, you still didn't tell me what you were thinking about. Is it about me?" he asked in the same cocky tone complete with a smirk on his face.
"Oh of course, how can I not spend all my time obsessing with you?" she replied in a sarcastic tone. What was Malfoy playing at?
"You're making me blush," Draco suddenly said in a dead serious tone that made Hermione laugh. Malfoy blushing? She had only witnessed it three times in her entire Hogwarts career.
"Haha, very funny" Hermione said in the same sarcastic tone.
"Your voice sounds much more beautiful when you laugh," Draco complimented instead of responding to her sarcastic comment.
Hermione blushed deeply and hoped that the moonlight wasn't shining on her cheeks right now. Was Malfoy flirting with her. Her own reaction was the most frightening. Instead of feeling disgusted she felt kind of like….grinning. She rarely got complimented on her physical features. Maybe this is why all the Slytherin girls were falling for Malfoy. Whereas he was snobby and mean most of the time, he seemed to have a way with girls. Hermione bit her lip and connected the constellations in the stars to avoid responding to Draco. If she said anything back she would make a fool of herself.
But why did she care all of a sudden? She didn't have any feelings for him. She couldn't fall for someone just because he had a few conversations with her in the night and complimented her. It was the mission, if she made a fool of herself, she would ruin the mission. Discovering an excuse for her feelings was one thing, convincing herself to believe was another.
"Do you believe that your fate is written in the stars?" Hermione asked Draco to try and steer the conversation off herself.
"I don't know," Draco replied sounding serious this time.
"Why? Isn't it a yes or no question?" Hermione pried. Perhaps if he cracked under pressure, he would slip some information about the Dark Lord.
"To me, fate is something that my father planned out for me. I already know what I'm going to do after I graduate from Hogwarts. I'm probably going to marry a girl that he chooses for me and serve-" he paused before continuing, "the family honor and continue the business."
"I don't mean fate as in that. I mean fate as in who is your true love, what will you accomplish in your life time, things like that," she said while facing the ceiling of stars.
"I have no choice in marriage, I will have no opportunity for true love. My accomplishment will probably be to increase the wealth of my family," Draco said in a dejected tone. It made Hermione feel sorry for him. He was pouring his heart out to her, a stranger, and she was bound to, she will have to betray him.
"But you can always dream. Nobody can stop you from dreaming," Hermione said before releasing a paper crane that was held in her hand. She turned to leave the tower.
"Wait, how come you never ask me to meet you here tomorrow?" Draco asked as Hermione turned to leave the tower.
"How come you never ask me why I leave paper cranes behind?" Hermione asked without turning around as she descended the stairs of the tower.
As she headed back to the tower, she thought about her conversation with Draco. Is his life really that miserable? It seems so…horrid, having no choice in choosing who you will spend the rest of your life with. He seemed so nice today. Did he notice that she seemed worried and distracted and decided to compliment her? What is his motive? Is it possible that he didn't have one tonight?
When she stepped into the common room, Ron and Harry seemed to be surrounded by a fort of book while forcing their brains to remained focused on reading the fat, heavy books.
"I'm not sure how much more of this I can take," Ron groaned and rested his head on the coffee table momentarily while staring angrily at the heavy book.
"Well did you two manage to find anything yet?" Hermione asked hopefully. Maybe a new clue to the puzzle would help keep her mind off Draco. Which unfortunately is impossible seeing that her mission was to spy on him, but as she said on the tower, nobody can stop you from dreaming…
"No," Harry slammed the cover of his book closed and threw it in the 'rejected' pile while taking another from the neatly stacked tower of leathery covers.
"Give me the poem, I'll work on the numbers tonight while you two continue reading the books," Hermione suggested while Ron bulged his tired eyes open and tried to stop them from closing.
"Can't we swap? You like reading more than I do," Ron said while poking his book with his wand as if it would reveal an answer if poked sufficiently.
"Well, we're not the ones taking arthimancy," Harry said to Ron and continued reading his own book.
The room was quiet again except for the rustle of Crookshank's paws against the common room carpet as he walked from person to person to have his fur stroked and his ears scratched. Hermione took a scrap piece of parchment out of her book bag and a quill with a bottle of ink. She unscrewed the bottle of ink and dipped her eagle feather quill in it. She studied the numbers on the riddle again, she tried adding them.
2+1+3+5+1+820
She rolled her quill around the bottle of ink. What would twenty mean? The letter 'U'? Even in a dictionary, there were thousands of words that began with the letter 'U', it would be too vague for a clue. She tried converting all the numbers into letters.
2-B, 1-A, 3-C, 5-E, 1-A, 8-H
BACEAH can't be a word. Even magical spells don't spell like that. She tried rearranging the letters into words.
After a half an hour with many scribbles on Hermione's parchment and groans from Ron, Hermione concluded that converting numbers to words wouldn't work out. But those were the two most common ways codes were written in numbers. Three quarters of the arthimancy textbook was on those two methods. Almost giving up in frustration now, she rearranged the numbers from least to greatest.
1 1 2 3 5 8
Hermione's eyes widened, the gears in her brain were clicking away. There was something common about them, but what was it? She searched inside her memory for all of Professor Vector's homework assignments, but none came to mind. She turned her eyes away from the ink blotted parchment and faced the fire. She suddenly remembered warm visions of her childhood. Her grandparents bringing her presents when visiting, leaving cookies for Santa, her first day of school, baking gingerbread men with her mother, working on puzzles with her father…
This was it! She got it, she had it!
"I know! I know what the numbers mean!" Hermione screamed as she ran up to the girls' dormitory staircases to retrieve her old muggle puzzle book.
"What does it mean?" Ron asked with both curiosity at what the riddle meant and relief that he could finally stop straining his eyes at the microscopic print on his boulder sized books.
"Ordering them from smallest to biggest, didn't we try this?" Harry asked Ron as he tried to make out the numbers Hermione circled on her crinkled parchment.
"I can't believe I didn't figure this out sooner. I knew this stuff a long time ago, we didn't even have to waste all our time going through library books. We wouldn't have been able to find answers in there anyways," Hermione exclaimed as she laid the puzzle book on the table in front of the glowing fireplace. Her face flushed with excitement and from running up and down the stairs.
"Now you tell me. After I practically murder my eyeballs you tell me," Ron said while kicking his book aside.
"It was so obvious. The numbers are in Fibonacci sequence!" Hermione declared triumphantly having finally solved part of the puzzle.
"Uh, what's the fiba-, fibo-, fiby-thingy," Harry asked with his eyebrows raised.
"Hundreds of years ago, there was a man that lived in Pisa, Italy. His name was-" Hermione began her explanation but was cut off by Ron.
"We don't need a History of Magic lesson, get to the point," Ron said.
"See, this is the point. He wasn't a wizard, he was a muggle," Hermione explained.
"If he was a muggle, why is he on the clue to some magical object?" Harry asked.
"Maybe so that stuck-up purebloods like the Malfoys won't be able to solve the riddle," Hermione stated the first logical reason that came to mind.
"So what do the numbers mean?" Ron was getting impatient having wasted his entire day looking in the wrong place for answers.
"See, if you arrange the numbers from least to greatest, the sum of the first two numbers will equal the next. One plus one equals two. One plus two equals three and so on," Hermione explained pointing at her piece of parchment and the passage in her puzzle book explaining Fibonacci numbers.
"I'd hate to ruin the mood or anything, but what does this have to do with the rest of the puzzle?" Ron finally asked Hermione.
Harry and Hermione's wide grins faltered slightly.