Ack! Sorry folks; major cock-up with me repeating chapters! It was quickly spotted by you all (Gosh, tough crowd...) and here's the fixer-up. Enjoy the proper version of chapter three, the longest yet.
Disclaimer: Same as last chapter.
&&&&&&&
"Harry?"
"Mmmm?" He'd almost been asleep, but rolled over anyway.
"Tell me you don't want to kiss me."
He blinked away exhaustion, frowning. "What?"
"Just say it. 'I don't want to kiss you, Hermione. I won't kiss you.'"
Harry propped himself up on an elbow. She looked up at him and mouthed, 'say it'.
"I don't want to kiss you Hermione." All in one breath, as though it were a joke.
"No! Say it like you mean it. 'I will not kiss you, Hermione.'"
"I will not kiss you, Hermione." Confusion added reality to his voice, and it came out sufficiently angry. She nodded.
"Okay, now kiss me."
"But-"
"Just do it!"
He kissed her, trying to reassure himself, taking his time. She pulled away. It wasn't working.
"I'll ask you this time, and you say 'no.'"
He shook his head helplessly.
"You have to say it. Kiss me." He leaned forwards, obedient.
"No, Harry! You just have to say 'no' back to me. Hard, like you mean it."
He stared at her. Harry was a very intelligent man, but love is blind.
"Okay."
"Kiss me."
"No."
"More. Like you mean it." She sat up, earnest, trying to communicate her idea to him. "Like you really hate me. As if the idea of kissing me makes you disgusted."
If Harry had refused to co-operate at that moment, he would have gained her interest. Instead he said, "Fine," in a resigned voice.
"Kiss me."
"NO." She started to laugh. He grinned back at her, happy this thing of hers was over. He tried to kiss her again, since he was awake anyway. She stopped laughing.
"Thanks, Harry." Rolling over, back to him.
"What? Hermione-"
"Goodnight."
&&&&&
Ron was only too pleased to join in a conversation about Hermione's strange behaviour. He confessed his kiss to Ginny, looking both stricken and excited.
"I still haven't told Harry. But their anniversary..."
"Was three days ago." She finished for him. "Okay...Ron, still don't tell Harry for a bit yet."
He looked at her, miserable in deceit. She disliked Hermione for a moment, for stirring up all the old feeling in her brother, that should have been let to die away when they broke up.
"You didn't do anything wrong," she said. "I'll get it sorted out."
He didn't look convinced.
&&&&&&&
"I'm sure you're tired of hearing this question," Ginny said from behind her desk, 'but is there anyone you can think of, at all, who could possibly be connected to the attempted assault?'
"To the assault; not attempted," said Draco, whose scratches had taken three applications of Heal-It cream to vanish.
"But is there anyone?" She was not to be deviated.
He frowned, rocking back into the settee, and then standing on an impulse and beginning to pace around the room. When he came to a stop, he was in front of her desk.
"Maybe one," he said.
"Hermione Granger," She said for him.
His eyes flicked to find hers, surprised. "How did you know?"
"When I saw the kiss, at the restaurant," She watched his reaction, saw the disgust. He watched her watching him, struggled to find the words to express what Hermione had been doing to him, the back story to that kiss, and failed completely.
He nodded, telling her to go on, and retreated to the settee.
"It was just such a weird reaction, on her part. And afterwards, in the car, when Harry mentioned the cookies she laughed and laughed." Ginny came round to the front of the desk, in an unconscious attempt to make things less formal. Draco's case had come closer to home in the last few days.
"Yes?"
"And then I remembered a conversation I'd had with Harry; he was worried because-" she paused. The reasons for Harry's worry were too personal to tell Draco, so she skipped around it. "He was worried about her. He said she'd been acting strangely, and he traced the reason back to her last reporting assignment."
"Which was?" Draco sat forward, elbows on knees, intent. Encouraged by his attendance, she continued.
"Your trial. At the Wizengamot."
"Oh." He sat back again, not knowing how much she already knew and protecting himself with impassiveness.
"Harry thought you had talked there." She rubbed her hands together. "So I used my privileges to view the building's security spells. I saw her stopping you at the exit, and everything else. There's no sound on the spells, but I could guess what happened."
"Jesus." He got up, and paced the room again, making it small. She leaned against the desk.
"And then, I went to Ron."
"Weasley?"
"Yes, my brother. He had a funny story to tell me too; the long and short of which is that Hermione got him to kiss her as a 'test'."
He turned towards her with an incredulous look, and she felt herself matching it. She sounded like she knew what was going on, but she was just as confused as he was.
He ran a hand through his hair, a curiously boyish gesture. "She sounds like she's insane," he said.
The room filled with silence. He looked at her, and she looked at the floor. He lowered his hand slowly, unbelievingly. "She is insane."
"I'm not for certain." It was her turn to pace, just a few steps in front of him, forward and back. She was expressing what had hitherto been a notion, and now was filling her mind as a certainty. "Something happened to her, about four years ago. That was shortly after the War, you know-"
"I know the dates of the War." She couldn't tell from his face whether he was affronted, and after a pause in which he didn't say anything, she went on with her story.
"It was a breakdown; delayed stress from the War. She went into a coma. Harry-" She paused, remembering. "I've never seen him so distraught. He looked after her so fiercely; over those few days I realized he was in love with her." She smiled a little. "When Hermione finally woke up, she was fine. Harry never had her checked to make sure the coma hadn't affected her brain, because he thought it would be too upsetting. And he was probably right; she lives on her mind, you know; it's like her weapon. If she thought it was damaged she wouldn't know what to rely on." He took all this in with a slight frown, but nodded when she looked over, to say he was listening.
"After a while Hermione got better; got stronger, returned to her normal self. She was happy again, and so was Harry. There was no sign of anything wrong, so I let it be."
"Until now."
"Yes. Until you." She rested against the desk, tapping a finger absently. "I don't know what it was, but something triggered. Maybe she was actually mad all these years and we never noticed. She still might not be mad, mind you..."
"...But it's unlikely."
"Right. Draco-" she surprised them both with his first name. But then she continued brazenly, because this had turned away from a routine case and had come so much closer to home that business pretences were stupid.
"I'm going to have to ask you a favour. And I know-"
Shit, shit, she was going too fast. His eyebrows had gone up at her using his name and now she was about to impart information that could place Harry in his hands, and after all that he owed her nothing; not a thing.
She turned back to the desk, sat down behind it; a vague grasp at safety. He watched her, in control of himself now and back on the settee.
"I know you don't have any reason to agree with me after everything Hermione's done, but this has gotten tied in to people I know, and everything has gotten more confusing."
She looked across at him despairingly, then realized she hadn't given him enough information yet because his face was still uncomprehending. She gave up, came round the desk, and got ready to plead with him if that's what it took. "The thing is, the results from the wand ID were here this morning when I got in."
He straightened a little. "Yes?"
"And the wand of your attacker belongs to Hermione Granger." There, now he knew, and Harry's well-being sat in the balance. All because her sense of professional duty had forbade her from withholding the information that he was legally entitled to know. He didn't seem to appreciate the power she had given him; he just sat.
"Hermione Granger?"
"Yes." The terror in her face made him look for deeper meaning. Finally he said, thinking aloud: "You get into trouble for assaulting someone."
Now he was understanding the legal implications, and she collapsed a little. Regardless of the actual motive, Hermione's attack was going to look like a hate crime against a man whose innocence had just been proven to the whole world. That combined with the extremely high profiles of the people involved would turn it into a media extravaganza: merciless. It would be huge, and right in the middle of it would be Harry, because he would never let Hermione go alone. He loved her, and the shock of hearing that she was likely mad and definitely obsessed - with another man - would tear him up. That and the media attention, which he had managed to avoid for so long, and the implications and the scandal; just when everything was finally righting in his world this had to come along and make it wrong again.
She watched Draco following her thoughts, step by step, perched on the blue settee. Suddenly the couch seemed too close, the room too small, and when he stood up he filled her whole vision.
She stood as well, feeling sad and weak and stupid, because it would all be her fault in the end.
"And your favour?"
"Please..." She cleared her throat. "Don't say anything. You don't have to bring it to trial. You could let it be."
He was already standing, now his presence filled the room like a million people, making her small.
"I don't think that would help anything at all, Ginny."
The return of her name startled her. His presence disappeared, leaving a man in dark blue robes who looked tired and beautiful. Draco paced a few steps, rubbing his hands over his face.
"You don't understand. I spent three months in a courtroom, in front of the entire Wizengamot. I don't have any desire to go back to court again. If this can be settled without legal measures, that's what I want to do."
Her heart flipped a couple of times, waiting for the '...but'.
"But I don't think we can just let it be. Potter should know, at least."
"No, please. He can't." She took a few steps forward. "It'll ruin him, Draco. Harry won't survive this; he loves her to pieces. He can't find, after all these years, that not only is she obsessed with another man, but it's with you, of all people."
He wondered tiredly whether he should take umbrage at that, but let it go as she went on: "We can't let Harry be hurt. Please."
He looked at her curiously. "It's Potter you're worried about."
"Harry, yes."
"'Harry,'" he echoed. It sounded foreign on his tongue.
"I have to take care of him," she said. Immediately, she knew she'd said the wrong thing.
"Take care of...? You never got over him, Weasley? After all these years?" Back to last names, back to the schoolyard; something had changed. He looked down at her with the familiar cruel gleam in his eye, and she began to be scared again.
"You don't understand," she said, wondering where she'd gone wrong.
"No, I expect I don't. But what I do know is that it would be stupid not to tell him." The gleam was gone. He was an adult, after all. "This is just common sense, Weas- Gin-" He floundered with her name for a moment before abandoning it. "Can't you see? First of all – and I'm thinking about Hermione here for a change – she's going to keep after me if we don't do anything. All personal considerations aside, she needs professional help. We can't give that to her unless someone is told, and that someone happens to be Potter, because he's in love with her." She wondered why he'd stressed the words 'in love', but was too ashamed of herself to consider properly.
"Ok, you're right," she said, and was pleased to hear her voice come out strongly. "I wasn't thinking about her well-being at all. But we can make this work out, I know it. Isn't there some way – so that Harry won't -"
"No." Their eyes met, and he won. She looked away.
"You're right." She said, barely above a whisper. "Oh, god."
"Ginny," She looked up at him dully. "I think you're underestimating Potter's strength. He got through the War; his breaking point is higher than this. Think, please." He pulled away to pace again, his impatience filling the room. "This will be much worse for him if it's not stopped immediately. You know, at least, that I'm not going to prosecute. But what about the next person Granger gloms onto?"
"There might not be a next person."
"Oh, Ginny. Stop being so obtuse. You did all that brilliant detective work to come to this point, and now you're shutting your brain off." He came to a stop in front of her. "There will be a next person, because she's crazy. And Potter's going to figure that out eventually, and what are you going to do? Say, 'I knew a long time ago but I didn't tell you'? For all you know, it could be a time-pertinent madness that can be cured if we get help soon enough."
He read her reaction on her face.
"No; you weren't thinking of cures, were you."
"I'll go and tell him tomorrow." She said, tired, awed by how a single case had done so much to disturb her life. "First thing in the morning."
"Good. That'll be fine."
"It'll work out. Harry won't die." More to herself than him.
The evening was creeping in. Silence settled in the room; she realized how dark it had gotten and reached for the lamp.
"Potter will have you. He'll be fine." Her hand stalled on the lamp as she looked over at him. She couldn't read his expression in the shadows, and when she flicked the light on, his face was blank.
&&&&&&
Review! Review! I deserve it now I have the proper chapter up, yes?
