Hermione woke with a most bitter taste in her mouth the next morning. It was to blame on her new habit of smoking, and she scrubbed her mouth until her gums hurt and her tongue tasted of cold winter air.
She stared at herself in the mirror, the naked bulb behind her flickering every now and then, throwing weird shadows, and she traced the past two weeks on her features. Her hair whisked barely above her shoulder now, locks curling much tighter than she'd allowed them to in years. Frizzy wisps framed her face and stood weak against the light, surrounding her head like a halo.
The circles underneath her eyes had deepened. Nights had always plagued her, and the Norwegian air did nothing to soothe her nightmares. The only somewhat peaceful night she'd had was at Theo's, only a deep, dreamless sleep – that was until she woke with Draco's wide eyes mere inches from hers, his palm pressed over her mouth, almost scaring her to death, and tearing her from peaceful hibernation.
Only two weeks ago, she had spent late nights in her crammed Ministry office, a mindless gear turning, apathy greasing her every move, every thought, every word.
She would never go back.
She sat in the shower that morning, water beating down her back as last night's revelations did, steam obscuring the mirrors and soothing her joints. She wondered how it felt, to have the Obscurus pulse right along her own blood. She made a mental note to ask Draco about it.
The house's hallway was still dark and cold when she scurried through it, only wrapped in a towel and drops of water marking her path. When she left her bedroom minutes later, barely dressed for the day in cotton trousers and a simple shirt, the light in the bathroom was back on again.
It should feel awkward, she thought, now. With all she'd told him, and vice versa. But she merely felt herself get pulled into the doorway, watching him as he wiped the condensation from the mirror with a toothbrush hanging out the corner of his mouth, sleep still tugging at his clothes and untamed bed hair.
He jumped when she appeared, his yelp muffled.
"Merlin, you need a bloody bell," he mumbled through the toothbrush. Hermione stepped forward, reaching for her hairbrush on the side of the sink.
"Good morning to you, too."
He emitted another grunt that sounded somewhat like "Morning". She pulled the brush through her hair as he scrubbed his teeth.
"I've been meaning to ask – what is that wooden square frame in the corner of Anette's room?"
He made a noise of recognition, leaning forward to spit.
"It's a sandbox."
He turned on the faucet and drank from it directly, and then tipped his head back to gurgle. Hermione's brushing motion had stopped dead.
"A sandbox?"
He spit again, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Yes. Did I have to ask for a permit to get her one?"
"What in Godric's name is she doing with a sandbox? That's way out of her age group–"
"Merlin Granger, it's a sandbox. She asked for it while you were getting Nikolai's file. I had no reason to say no, did I?" he asked, rubbing a towel over his face after splashing it with water.
Hermione considered him for a few seconds, crossed arms and pursed lips, but really unable to be genuinely annoyed at his weird purchase. No, teasing him was much better.
"She's got you wrapped around her little finger, hasn't she?"
He looked toward her suddenly then, eyes squinting, as if the mere proposition of it was an insult.
"It's just some bloody sand–"
"Yes, but she asked for it, didn't she?" Hermione chirped, feeling rather cheery now, and she skipped away, down the stairs.
"Shut up!" he called half-heartedly, and she crossed the living room with a smile.
Anette shot into the kitchen like a cannonball minutes later, skidding across the floor to bump into the counter next to Hermione.
"What are you making?" she asked, like every morning now, and Hermione poured water into the back of the machine.
"I'm making coffee, dear."
"Can I have some?" she asked, like every morning now, and Hermione's smile grew somehow.
"No. It's not for children. You can try when you're older, but it tastes really bitter, anyway."
Hermione looked down at her after she pushed the button on the machine, and found Anette with crazy hair fanning around her bedhead and a pout on her lips. It was wiped away within the second of a new thought arriving.
"Can I have pineapple juice?"
May I, a voice in Hermione's head nagged, but she could not quite find it in herself to genuinely mother the little girl. "Sure."
By the time Draco finally graced them with their presence, Anette was already sat at the kitchen table with her pencils and unfinished drawings spread around where she was making a new one, and Hermione was staring into the fridge, attempting to mentally put together a suitable breakfast. Draco was quite good at assembling all their meals every day, but Hermione had never quite grown a knack for it. She'd never cared for it.
"What are you making?" he asked, leaning over the open door to peer into the fridge. Hermione frowned. "I don't know."
She reached for the butter and a jar of strawberry marmalade, remembering how much Anette had eaten it over the past few mornings.
"Do you want to see the drawing I did?" Anette spoke then with a meek voice, and they both turned towards her. But she was only looking at Draco, with the glassiest, most fragile eyes Hermione had ever seen.
And the night had melted his edges away.
"Of course. Show me everything," he replied softly, kneeling down beside her chair and taking the drawing she had held up, ooh-ing and aah-ing. And Anette lit up like the sun.
And Hermione smiled at the strawberry marmalade.
"When is Theo coming?" Anette asked for the dozenth time, and Hermione felt the urge to smash her own head into the table.
"He's coming soon, okay? Just focus on this subtraction here–"
"But when is soon?"
Something squeaked in the back of Hermione's throat, and she held it in as best as she could. How were children so impatient?
They'd sent a message up to Theo's house only half an hour ago, and he'd replied within minutes that he would come by as soon as he could. This was clearly not enough to appease Anette, but simultaneously enough to completely derail Hermione's poor attempt at homeschooling. She glanced over to the couch, where Draco had been lain for the past half hour, but he was as always, sprawled out and reading Mélier's diary mere centimeters away from his face. The distance between the tip of his nose and the pages had shrunk considerably over the past ten minutes.
"I don't know. He didn't – look, just finish this exercise and we'll be done for the day, okay?" Hermione pleaded, and Anette stopped drawing squiggles into the margin of the schoolbook, scanning the simple nomographies to practice subtraction with a pout.
"But I don't know how."
"You just have to count up from the bottom number to the one at the top and hold that–"
Hermione's words were interrupted with a knock, and she finally drooped in her seat with her forehead bumping the table as Anette instantly jumped out of her seat, shooting towards the front door.
"Come in!" Anette called, and the front door opened, inviting the cold wind and Theo clapping his snow-covered shoes outside. Anette squeezed through the gap and charged at him, throwing her arms around his stomach with a squeak.
"I heard there was a sandbox to be installed," Theo laughed, and Anette began to babble away about how fun sandboxes were and how she'd always wanted one and all the toys she got to go with it and how she'd always wanted to go to a beach, anyway. Hermione waved her wand to stow away all the books and papers and folders with a sigh.
The pair soon disappeared upstairs amongst Anette's loud chatter about sand to be put into boxes and all the figurines she could play beach in them with, and with their voices receding upstairs, Hermione approached the couch and its occupant hesitantly. Draco had lain back and now given up all pretense of reading, faced turned inwards towards the cushion and his eyes were peacefully closed in what Hermione imagined to be a quite comfortable doze.
She grabbed the worn copy of Mélier's diary from his slipping grip and he stirred slightly, sleepy eyes peering open with a slight air of disorientation. He'd been suitably tired the past few days, but not to the extent of falling asleep before lunch.
"Are you feeling alright?" Hermione asked just merely above the strongest awkwardness that such an inquest would imply – being, that she was worried for his well-being, and whatever other feelings of genuine care that could hint at – and his eyes found hers with a clear reading of utter exhaustion in them.
He only grunted, nuzzling his face back into the cushion, and Hermione summoned a glass of water, left it on the coffee table and followed the two upstairs with one last look towards her dead beaten partner.
The afternoon passed quick. Hermione spent half her time up in Anette's room, watching and participating in the finishing of the sandbox and the accompanying dozens of toys Draco had bought, playing games, doing puzzles and whatever else she wanted. Theo was doing remarkably well with her, Hermione thought; and he seemed as much at ease as she could believe him possible.
Through some miracle, he might actually feel some remnants of nostalgia when playing with the sweet girl; tainted by grief for sure, but the joy creased into his laugh and lighting up his eyes as they hooted and talked was unmistakable adoration. She had never seen him quite so lively. Not that she knew him well enough to really judge that, but it was a stark contrast to their first meeting.
She spent the other half of her time down in the living room, quietly cleaning all of Anette's toys distributed throughout the space and checking regularly if Draco was still, well, alive. Mélier's diary alluded to a lot of weakness and tiredness in the first stage of the bonding, mostly for the transient. He supposed that this varied upon every transient, even if there were two, and even so, those recollections were centuries old.
They were dabbling with magic so desolate and unknown, they could not possibly begin to fathom what to do if anything were to go wrong, or outside of what Mélier's diary had led them to expect. And so Hermione could not shake the anxiety of seeing him so knocked out and tired, and felt the urge to probe his vitals every ten minutes at least.
The diminishing daylight hours waned at three in the afternoon. By half past, Theo left yawning and stretching, saying his mild healing potions depleted him quickly, and Anette hung by his sleeves until the moment the door behind him closed. She immediately ran to round the couch and began babbling about baking with Theo soon, but found her beloved uncle still dead asleep. Hermione tugged her away with hushed words, telling her that he needed some rest, and would play again with her soon.
"What is that?" Anette asked, pointing at a large book Hermione had pulled from the back of the bookshelves as she'd cleaned them. "They look like photo albums. We used to have them too, but my grandma kept them all–"
Hermione grabbed the book and they sat down by it, and she cast a light Muffliato spell around them to not wake Draco.
It was large, the cover adorned with some kind of intricately decorated leather fabric and years engraved along the top: 1951 – 1953.
Three to four pictures decorated one page at a time, all with little subtitles explaining what was happening. Hermione could not bother to translate the foreign words, and left Anette to browse it in quiet awe, only watching over her shoulder. It was clearly a family that lived in this very house once; Hermione recognized the front porch in the background of many pictures, the kitchen window facing the street, the small pier out front, and the view from the living room window. Everything looked far nicer, paint less chipped, wood less rotten, light less gloomy. There were five recurring characters; A jolly looking man with a fisher hat on his head in every picture, a woman always caught looking at him with a soft smile, and three children, growing up as the pages continued.
"Did they live here?" Anette asked, thumbing one particularly shaky picture of differently sized shoes lining the wall along the front door.
"Yes, they must have. Long before the house was overtaken by our workplace."
"They look so happy."
Hermione glanced at Anette and expected sadness. But Anette only stared with reverence and awe, eyes sliding across the images easily.
And then, as she looked at her, she realized that they were both quite parentless. Hers might not have died, but they might as well be. And feeling Draco's presence behind her still, she thought, his situation was not quite much better – with an imprisoned father and a mother he had no contact with.
Quite a bunch they were.
"You know," the words slipped from her so easily, "I lost my parents too. I know how it feels."
Hermione had known Harry for over a decade now. The most famous orphan of their world; and she knew quite well, that she would never understand how it felt to lose your parents at quite such a young age. But Anette would not mind the lie, she hoped.
"Really? How did yours die?" Anette replied with a regrettable easiness, half her attention now firmly placed on Hermione.
"They… went travelling once, and never came back. I'm not quite sure what happened to them."
She knew what happened to them. She had happened to them.
"Do you miss them, too?"
The look in her eyes could have toppled dynasties. And Hermione fell, too.
"Yes. I miss them a lot."
Anette hesitated. Awkwardly thumbing the edge of a page, eyes darting around the pictures.
"I do too. But it's all better now, right? Uncle Nikolai is back. He still cares for me."
Hermione swallowed heavily. Her throat stuck and hurt.
"Yes. Yes, we're here for you, we're–"
"Can we take a picture? Like they did?" Anette interrupted, directing her mind elsewhere - whether by design or by fact of being well, nine, Hermione could not tell. She nodded with a difficult smile.
"Yes, actually – you've never seen wizarding pictures before, right? They move–"
"They move?!" she squeaked excitedly, and it made Hermione laugh, and right then, her spell seemed to have worn off, because there was shuffling behind them.
Draco had turned onto his stomach and faced them, one arm hanging down the side of the couch, and he was watching them with a subdued air of post-sleep haze.
"Morning," he mumbled with a gruff voice.
"Pictures can move?!" Anette cried again, and a lazy smile spread on his cheeks.
"Yes, all around the world."
Hermione summoned this morning's newspaper and showed it to Anette, who watched the small scene in the Minsitry's busy Atrium play out over and over again with an awe possessing no single attempt of concealment.
"Can we take one?" she asked soon after, and Hermione nodded, remembering an old camera stored somewhere in the depths of her purse. Draco stretched and groaned as she asked Anette to get it, and she was out of the room, up the stairs, within seconds.
"What time is it?" he asked, and Hermione glanced at her wristwatch.
"It's almost four. Theo's come and gone, he invited us – or more, Anette - to come bake with him tomorrow."
He sat up, hands running through his pale hair. "You shouldn't have let me sleep so long – "
"Don' be ridiculous, you need the rest. Why risk over exertion? It's not like – "
"My, my. I'm flattered, is that concern I hear?" he jested with a crooked smile, just as Anette blustered down the stairs and flung Hermione's purse at her, the owner of which now did her best not to flush a deep red.
" Accio camera. Don't flatter yourself, my interest in the succeeding of this mission has no connection to your physical wellbeing."
"Ouch."
No merit found in continuing the banter, especially with sleep still surrounding him and Hermione being the clear winner of this particular argument.
"Take a picture of us!" Anette called, utterly and willingly oblivious to her uncle and his friend jesting, and came to stand by Draco, who leaned forward from his seat on the couch and wrapped an arm around her middle; and he laughed, loud and bright, his face hovering just above Anette's shoulder and next to her gummy grin, and though Hermione could not tell if he laughed for her blunder or the camera, she snapped the picture with an equally bright smile.
Positions switched and timers were set, and soon, several pictures lay facedown on the table left to develop, and the evening was spent cooking, eating, watching TV, talking and laughing, and after Anette went to bed, working on translations and rune history on the living room floor.
The next day passed nigh as quick as the one before. Early in the morning, shortly after breakfast and a harrowing Ministry article by Skeeter recounting all of Hermione's past accomplishments, now turned regrets and a short correspondence with Theo, Draco stayed behind to "clean the house" and Hermione visited Theo with Anette running ahead. She had very consciously not commented on the rings underneath Draco's eyes as he stared at her almost daringly after announcing he stay behind, knowing very well if she were to turn on her foot and reenter the house right now, he would likely be laying somewhere completely passed out again by now.
As Hermione watched the two mix and knead dough – Anette spent most of her time forming little figures out of the dough and miraculously made them stand on their sugar dough feet – she thought, Theo was still doing well. Responding to every one of Anette's questions, not once appearing exhausted or annoyed, answering every time with the same elation and smile and matching her excited energy quite well.
Perhaps she didn't have to supervise them as much anymore now. He knew the danger inside of Anette, and understanding the stage of the bonding, being close by, keeping Anette and himself busy – yes, she thought, this could be great.
They got home just for lunch, carrying a large lunchbox with still warm cookies, and they found Draco in the kitchen, surrounding himself with a heavenly sweet smell. Anette shot towards him while holding the tin of cookies above her head and chattering away about all the nice dough men she made, and Hermione hung up their jackets, seeing the TV running on a random pay per view, albeit muted.
"I made crêpes," Draco called from the kitchen, and Hermione followed the heavy smell to find Anette bouncing off the walls with a half-rolled pancake stuffed as far into her cheeks as possible. Draco dropped a piece of butter into the pan, instantly sizzling away, a bowl of batter on one side of the stove and a small tower of finished pancakes filing on top of each other on a plate.
"When are they all done?" she asked, halting in front of the fridge, where he'd pinned up last night's pictures while they were gone. They'd not taken much, since her camera only had few instant films left, and they'd already looked at them with Anette plenty last night. Their own smiles and giddy laughs greeted her into the kitchen now.
"You can take them already, I'm just finishing the batch. Also, I forgot how to switch channels."
Hermione rolled up a crêpe with her fingertips and took a sweet, savoury bite of it. The fried batter melted in her mouth and she poorly suppressed a groan. He noticed her reaction and the corners of his eyes barely lifted. He poured a swoop of batter into the pan with another loud sizzle, lifting it from the stove and tilting it around so it ran to all the edges.
Anette snatched another crêpe and shot back into the living room, glued to the TV screen and switching channels.
Hermione watched him flip the pancake, chewing on her own still. Almost every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, he had cooked for them in one capacity or another.
It was odd enough that he even knew how to cook. The fact that his food was good didn't make it any less mysterious.
But the weirdest part of all, the one she could simple not get over, was that he cooked almost exclusively like a Muggle. She'd rarely ever noticed him using magic to his aid. Even if she knew how to cook, she would still likely do it less Muggle-like than he did.
Not that she didn't enjoy the sight of a man cooking well. Merlin save her if Ron had ever even known how to turn on an oven.
"Why do you only cook the Muggle way?" she asked, brushing right past the conundrum of how he knew how to cook in the first place. She watched him flip the crêpe, golden crispy on one side. He waited with his answer.
"It takes longer. I had a lot of free time."
Hermione nodded slowly. Feeling that there was more to it, to his life in France, and how much he'd adapted to Muggle life.
He knew how to drive, even. Draco Malfoy was more adjusted to a magicless life than many other Muggleborn and half-blood wizards and witches she knew.
And his tone was not heavy, like it was a burden to talk of it. They were managing a casual conversation of a part of his life virtually no one knew about, and he was allowing it. The knowledge bloomed behind her chest.
"And why did you have a car?
"Well, you see, you can use a car to move from point A to point B–"
She swatted him as he lifted the pan and tipped the finished pastry onto the pile, white steam wafting and condensation gathering on the edge of the wooden cupboard above.
"You know what I mean."
He began another one, and she saw that the batter was coming to an end – there was barely enough left for one or two more.
"Like I said, I had a lot of time to spare. It didn't feel right to use magic for everything anymore."
Hermione didn't press anymore. She felt lucky enough he even deigned to answer her questions, however curiously so; a week ago, she was sure, he'd have scoffed and ignored her.
Baby steps.
It was the second night of working together after Anette had gone to bed. And Hermione soon made a most curious discovery - that lifting the verbal translation charm after closing the girl's bedroom door behind her, since they did not need it anymore revealed something completely new to her.
Draco Malfoy spoke a lot of French.
The nature of the translation charm had allowed this to escape her notice until now. It converted every word spoken aloud into the language most preferred by the listener; it changed the vibrations of the sentences and words, and transcribed the meaning of the words rather than blindly translating it word for word. It was how they managed to communicate with Anette without a hitch, who most likely heard them speak Norwegian just as they heard her only speak English.
However, this charm translated all languages. Even small words slipped in between.
Small words Hermione was only now hearing, sitting hunched on his bedroom floor with his open suitcase glowing in the corner. He was sprawled out on his bed, arms and shoulders and head hanging over one end where he was muttering endless spells she'd never heard of at a century old parchment, one in a pile of many.
"Vulgate der Explicandum. Merde, non. Non, c'est pas ca. Non, c'est –"
She couldn't tell if he even noticed he was doing it, he was so deeply lost in endless translations. Not that she was going to complain; her own broken French appeared even more laughable in comparison to his smooth words. It only meant that she mostly understood what he said. Though it was not much.
She liked the sound of French. It sounded nice .
Sue her.
She'd stopped reading the rune book around ten minutes ago, dazing off to his low muttering. They had not made any progress at all so far.
Her books could not give her the least bit of information on the symbol. Nothing she didn't know already, at least. And Draco, retrieving the original studies from Mélier from a safely guarded hiding spot in his office, had not had much luck either. Most of what he'd translated was little more than worthless potion recipes for healing and other odd household practices, that had long gone out of fashion, if they were ever in.
Something knocked against the window, and they both looked up to find a large owl fluttering and bumping against the glass. Hermione jumped up and retrieved a neat package, rewarding the barn owl with a pet and a Knut, and it was gone again within seconds.
"What is it?", he asked, and Hermione turned the package over in her hand to find any indication of such. A smile spread on her face within moments of seeing the return address.
"It's from my Austrian contact!"
Her excitement soon waned. The attached letter spoke of condolences and apologies for not being of more help; not the detailed analysis of the symbol she'd hoped for. And the package was only another history book, focusing on religious organizations since the Middle Ages and the visuals they used.
"Well?"
Hermione pouted.
"He found nothing. Just sent me a random book to soften the blow."
She looked up at Draco, who had sat up and watched her patiently. He reached for the book and she reread the letter as he leafed through the pages.
"He thinks the symbol possesses characteristics of wizarding cult and sects of the past. Specifically the branches winding away from the main body. That's what he sent the book for," she clarified after a few moments, and Draco hummed.
"Well, good luck with that."
"Have you found anything yet?" she asked, nodding at his busy work as she took the book back, dropping back to the floor with a sigh.
He looked back down at the ancient parchments and his notes besides with quiet relent.
"Not really. There are some potions whose purpose I can't figure out, but the instructions don't sound good."
She stepped closer, perching down to read what was brokenly translated. The paper was held together by little more than strong restorative magic; five centuries on its back and most of it spent in a dry, dark space in one of his estates, had not prepared it for actual use out in the open air. She picked one up, thumbing the discoloured and torn edges.
She stared at the words, a proper list of ingredients she could not begin to comprehend in their combination. Horse hair, rotten eggs, maw – she could not remember any modern potions with those same ingredients, no way of knowing what their effect could possibly be.
But she noticed something else. Under the black ink, the paper itself, pale and welled up by time.
"Where's Mélier's diary? The original, I mean."
Draco summoned it quickly. It fluttered out from its safely guarded spot deep in his library.
She opened it carefully, and held the potion recipe next to the pages. Performed a quick spell to identify and prove her suspicions.
"Look. It's completely different paper and ink."
He leaned closer, eyes flitting back and forth across the glowing inks in starkly different colours, exaggerated by her spell.
So far, they'd believe that all of the potions and spells had originated from Mélier's studies, except for the potion that was going to reject the Obscurus from Anette.
"Well, this doesn't mean much. We knew not everything here was from him."
"Yes, but then who wrote it? All of these – ", Hermione lifted the pile of parchments he'd been working on, knowing there were dozens more in his library, "– they have to come from somewhere. The handwriting differs, too. Is there no identification on any of these?" she thought out loud, scanning parchment after parchment. Draco perked up at the end of her musings.
"Actually, there's a word in the margin of many of these – I thought it was just scribbled notes, but I couldn't translate them–"
He shoved a half-translated parchment into her hand, pointing at a word in the edge. The letters were barely decipherable, smudges and squiggles forming blobs of ink.
"If it's a kind of signature, the name could have gotten caught up in all the translation spells. You'll have to trace them all back to beginning."
"Mélier was a bloody paranoid con , and he didn't even always use the same spells-," he began to curse away, and Hermione picked up his sheet of notes. There were dozens of translation spells she had not ever seen in her life. She could not begin to imagine how long it'd taken to find them all in the first place, and then perform them correctly. They were centuries old and had long been replaced with far more universal and easier translation charms, like the one she'd helped develop for their department.
They mostly busied themselves from translating one ancient language into the other. The original Middle French was difficult enough for a fluent French speaker nowadays, but it was coupled with translations from Middle French to Latin to Tuscan to Middle Low German to Early Modern English all the way back around. This had resulted in a jumbled mess, more distorted with every singular spell, resulting in something one could only compare to a clutter of symbols that barely looked like letters – if you only squinted a lot.
Every single specific spell to translate from one ancient language to the next was different than the next, and if performed incorrectly, could make the whole mess worse. Hermione came to salute Draco's translation skills the longer she scanned the path of spells he'd noted for each single document.
"If you find out who wrote these, it'll probably help," she interrupted his cursing, still thinking out loud. He'd been muttering to himself all this time, applying more hasty spells to the parchment in his hand.
"Bloody amazing."
She moved back to the floor, beginning to browse through the book she'd been sent. It smelled old and lay fragile in her hand, but its information was, whether valuable to their mission or not, still incredibly interesting. Hemrione had had no idea that cults and sects within the Wizarding community had been so prevalent. She supposed, in comparison to Muggles, they'd never needed religion as much to explain themselves the world. They could simply believe in themselves.
They returned to search their studying for a few moments of focused silence, only interrupted by Draco's spells and low curses. Until some thoughts sprung to her mind, that had plagued in quiet, uninterrupted moments. They brought implications she could not think of yet – ones that brought her to her knees, begging for forgiveness, utterly devastating and gut-wrenching – and she sputtered them out before she could indulge too much time in following the trail of her own destructive thoughts.
"I've been thinking about what you asked me a few nights ago. The Ministry's theories on what creates Obscurials."
His attention was caught right away. It was barely readable; a mere tensing in his shoulders and a short glance towards her. And Hermione felt weirdly proud of being able to read him so well already.
"And?"
"Obviously, there's not much to go on. But I looked through some of my old case files–," she grabbed her purse from somewhere behind her and buried her entire right arm in it, feeling around for the thick folders, " – and I noticed a lot of similarities between the cases. Well, they're pretty evident if you think about it for more than a minute, but, you see–"
"Get to the point, Granger," he yawned. She squinted, yanking out the folder at last, and opening it in the space between them.
"Well, they're all Muggleborns. Most of them lived in orphanages or foster homes or similar. The few Obscurials that didn't come from broken families were all still Muggleborn. This explains why no one knew about their magical abilities–"
"That's nothing new," he jeered again, but Hermione ignored him.
"– However, in post observation trial investigations, like years later, some of the earliest cases have been found to involve children that had close magical relations, meaning, they descended from Squibs that were only a generation or two older than them. Like Gérard."
The boy's name slipped past her completely on accident, and she bit the inside of her lip strong when she realized her mistake. But Draco seemed unbothered, from the short side glance she dared to throw.
"And so?" he asked, unimpressed.
"No idea. It's an inconsistent pattern. Some had no close magical relations at all – "
"But that stupid book – what's it called, 'An Introduction to Obscurials, Obscurus' and the modern phenomenon of deadly beasts'? It says that the cause for ancient Obscurials lashing out was the cause of their Obscurus developing in the first place, meaning, their abuser. We don't know what triggers modern Obscurials. If we figure that out – "
"–We'll know their origin. But how can we find out what triggers them? It's not like we can poke Anette and hope we don't get killed in the process."
Draco perched his chin on the palm of his hand, looking out the window as he thought.
"Well, we can exclude some things already. They're not triggered by another wizards magic, or physical contact, or I would've died years ago."
"We have to ask Anette. Find out if she… remembers when she began to feel the Obscurus. She's our best source for this," Hermione concluded.
The mystery lay at the back of her head, large, looming, bothersome. Why only Muggleborns? Especially those in less fortunate situations? Why so many orphans? Could there possibly be a connection between their lack of parents and their state as a host?
The answer to most of their questions laid in bed in the other room, in a deep, peaceful slumber, with no understanding of what was going on around her. For all they knew, Anette could have just been a normal nine-year-old who liked to eat sugar and spend her day drawing outside the lines.
Hermione forgot more often than not, that the girl had seen more death already than many people encountered in a lifetime. And how curious it was, that she still kept such a sweet and optimistic disposition for most of the time.
But looking at herself and Draco, Theo and Anette, she thought, everyone grieved quite differently. In ways she would have thought insufficient a few years ago. Unproductive and without a means to an end. But now, the realization began to trickle down drip by drip; that maybe there was no wrong way to grieve someone.