Harry Potter and his universe belong to J. K. Rowlings -- this is only a fan fiction.
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For some reason, Hermione was certain she could find the right street, easily. She had been there before. This was odd. She had been walking the same neighborhood over and over, looking for Draco Malfoy's place.
And, she was annoyed to realize, it was magically hard to find. For instance, just when she thought she saw the street, she'd walk up to the corner, and it would turn out to be some other cross street. She found herself walking north without turning north, when she'd been clearly walking south just a moment before. And on occasion, trying to get at it from a another way, she'd walk east on another street and find herself walking north on a completely different street, without seeing the shift.
This was a whole new level of annoying. She wondered if she should curse break, but that seemed rude.
She tried to remember how she got to the street before – and it had been by not paying attention and simply heading up town. So, she didn't pay attention, and blindly headed uptown.
That didn't work either. She arrived uptown. And so, by this time hungry, Hermione went into a small corner diner, found a small table by the wall, and got a menu and water. Then, what do you know?, Draco arrives, looking like the most comfortable person in the world, not at all tired, hungry, annoyed or confused. He sat down with her as she was making her order.
So he ordered too, and when he ordered, he had no problem ordering like a muggle. Hermione looked him over, and decided this was the real Draco.
He must have noticed as he smiled and said: "I'm the real thing."
That was a conversation they couldn't have in a muggle restaurant, and she wasn't going to throw up a talking spell for no good reason. Especially when she wanted the waiters to notice when she needed refills or service.
"I couldn't find your place," she did say.
Draco paused, and she was happy to see he didn't throw up a spell to let them talk privately either. "How did you get there last time?"
"I was just walking and ran into Denner on the street coming out."
"Then my house is smarter than I am," he concluded.
The food came and Hermione ate. The best interviews were the ones where you didn't care if you got the job or not, she'd decided. That's when she made her best answers – not that any of them had netted a job she wanted yet. But, best to go down feeling good.
"Everyone's scared to look like the bad guy," said Draco around a meatloaf sandwich which he washed down with tea.
"Something you don't have to fear," said Hermione.
"Me more than anyone!" said Draco with stylish defensiveness.
It was so patently untrue, Hermione wondered if he even believed it.
"No one is hiring me," pointed out Draco.
"Are you looking for work?" asked Hermione.
"Not as much as I tried that route, and it didn't work."
"What did you want?" she asked.
"Let me tell you back at the lab," he answered. "But first, you have to try their cakes; this place has an amazing baker."
"You know the employment records of the bakers in various diners across the city?"
"We're on the corner of the block where I live," he said.
Hermione glared.
"My house is smarter than you too?" he asked, innocently. "It's soooo annoying."
Hermione decided Malfoy was still annoying, but she did have random cake # 3. Draco, on the other hand, had something very specific, with a specific name, a specific filling, and it sounded like he knew the provenance for the recipe. Even if it was simply random cake #3 to Hermione, she did enjoy it, and the food did cheer her up.
Draco paid the bill, and Hermione let him, walked her out, and then escorted her to his stoop, and Hermione let him. Along the way he pointed out some landmarks that would help her find it again. Some of them were moving landmarks, like a bird perched on a tree or a specific color of car parked at a specific angle to the curb. "The bird stays there?" she asked.
"No," he answered. She looked at him curiously. "The bird moves, and the house moves – it seemed safer that way."
"That's a huge spell," she said, as they walked up his stairs.
"Not as big as you'd think," he replied. "I made the tiny townhouse my residence, and not the mansion."
"Your mansion is in the country," she said absently.
"Not that one either." He opened the door and guided in his unscheduled appointment for the day.
This time they went into the regular front office which was less personal and less comfortable. It looked like an insurance agent's office – clean, proper, with full shelves, but not a lot of them, and handbooks with recent dates.
Draco sat behind the desk, threw his feet up on it, and said, "I have a proposition. I'm well known to be evil, so you work for me and you get to work on the stuff no one wants touched anymore. You're well known to be good, so the ministry will trust you with the permits to do the research. It's a match made in heaven."
"What are you researching?"
"Generally – curse breaking."
"Lovely. Specifically?"
"I'll need an agreement confidentiality first."
Hermione paused. That was new and bad. Draco pulled out two documents from the desk drawer, the only pieces of paper in there, both with Hermione's and his names on them. One was a contract and said how much he'd pay and what he'd expect for hours and that it covered two months, with the expectations that they would know in two months if this was a working partnership. The other was a confidentiality agreement.
"Partnership," she said, having read the contract.
"I want a curse broken, and you aren't cheap."
Hermione thought to herself, I feel cheap these days, thinking of her tiny apartment, her cheap clothes, her basic foods, and her lack of mad money.
"We could start with the curse on you, if you'd like, but again, how about the confidentiality agreement first."
"There's no spell on me, I checked," she said.
Draco walked out waving for her to stay. She did, looking around. The room seemed like a basic room for paper work, but unlike yesterday's room at the ministry, this one had sun. And even plants. Little green tufts of leaves seemed like puff balls on top of trunks that grew in loops and curves: odd, but the plant was clearly doing fine.
Draco walked back in, and put something wrapped in cloth on the desk in front of Hermione. He sat down.
"What's that?" she asked.
"Curse detector," he answered.
Hermione pulled out her wand, and tried to find out what it was and what it would do. The best she could tell was that inside the folded fabric was a black rock that seemed like a black rock from an old river: smooth, palm sized, surprisingly heavy, and cold. It, as far as she could tell, responded to magic by twitching and, she guessed, changing color. Or that's what it seemed to do inside it's wrapper. The wrapper kept it contained and not detecting things until it touched them directly.
"Nice wrapper," she said.
"Made it myself," he replied.
Hermione looked thoughtfully at Draco, and then the fabric. Draco knew it wasn't an angry glare, and the fabric had not seen the furrow in her brow. Hermione unwrapped the rock, and it was as expected. She picked it up, and it seemed to prick her hand. She felt little tiny needles, like her hand was asleep, that then stretched to her whole body, until subsiding. Hermione found it unpleasant, but what was more unpleasant was that the rock was vibrating and a beautiful shade of blue. Unmistakable indicator.
She looked up at Draco, down at the rock, over at her wand, and then the rock again. It subsided and looked like a rock. She wrapped it in the cloth, and returned her gaze to its owner.
"The confidentiality statement says that we will have secrets specific to our partnership, and these secrets will be what we are working on, what we are planning to work on, what we have decided not to work on, and how we plan to approach the problems we address in curse breaking. Information about what curses and how we break them is confidential, and will be kept in confidence, unless it broaches upon secrecy or life threatening exigencies."
"That part's not a magical agreement," said Hermione, looking it over, and staring at it through a lens she brought for this purpose. The two month contract was a pain in the neck and magical and had invisible elements that she read through her lens and found to be boilerplate, somewhat fair, and annoying. The confidentiality agreement, though, was just paper and pen.
"You can't force trust," said Draco.
"You're drawing up a contract," said Hermione.
"I'm trying to be clear."
"And what do you mean by 'you can't force trust'?" asked Hermione.
"I'd do this with a handshake, but I wanted to be clear." said the surprising former nemesis. "It may be necessary in the long run to break the word of this one in order to keep the spirit."
"What's the spirit?"
"A mission to allow wizards and witches to be healed of curses which prevent them from having friends and family."
"You're under a curse that prevents you from having friends and family?"
"I said we'd start with your's first," replied grey-eyed, evil guy.
"You evil, me good," muttered Hermione.
"Don't get too comfortable with that, or you'll have to be evil to make up for my inadequacies in the category," said Draco, who signed twice and passed the papers across the desk to Hermione.
"I'm not going to to do blind research for you," she said.
"Ah, blind research, and I was so hoping for useless results," he answered.
"And I'm not going to do something that I think will produce a new unforgivable" she added.
"Let's give the two months a try, and see if this works," he replied. "I don't think that's what I'm asking, but that's exactly why the ministry won't give me my permits."
"So the permits," said Hermione.
"We don't need a permit to identify a curse. Wanna see my mad scientist laboratory? It's Frankenstein and everything."
Hermione said yes.
Draco touched first finger to the half signed the documents on the desk. Hermione read again, and signed, dated, and looked up.
"That says 'boss' and not 'partner,'" she pointed out, regarding the agreement.
"Let's see how we work together," he said, bouncing up, suddenly energized as if he were happy.
He led her out, down a narrow corridor to a stair way going down that was housed beneath a stair way going up. "Welcome to the laboratory of doom!" he said, melodramatically, leading Hermione down to a boring, standard, well stocked, and decent sized room. Everything in the house was narrow, but this was slightly less narrow. It was stocked with some magical equipment, but mostly there was space, light coming in basement windows, chalk boards, and chairs.
"Wanna lie on the lab table and let me do hocus pocus?" asked Draco, pulling out his wand. Hermione sat on the desk which otherwise had a few papers on its surface. She did not lie back, but they did get down the the business of figuring out what was the curse lurking around her.
Draco did a few passes.
Hermione did a few passes.
Draco enchanted a paper to be Hermione's aura.
Hermione tried to externalize her sense of fate.
Draco put her on a magical scale that gave both volume and an analysis of contents.
Hermione made hand and finger prints to see what else was pushing with her hands.
This went on for hours.
At one point, Hermione argued his rock was wrong, and she charmed one of her own that gave the same reading.
Eventually, Draco took some of her hair, put it in a magic book, let it sit, and then opened it up to read.
"Hermione," he asked in a falsely sweet voice.
Hermione was itching for a fight and asked what.
"When did your luck turn to zip?" he asked.
"I don't believe in luck," she muttered.
"Cute, OK, when did statistics start gunning against you?"
Since I started trying to move on, she thought to herself. "I don't know" she said.
"Can I come home with you tonight and see your stuff?" he asked. "This is clearly stuck to you, but not coming from inside you."
"What are you reading?" she asked.
"It's a novel about all the bad things that could possibly happen to a recently Hogwarts graduate. Mud, rain, bad finances, no romance, no work, and that's the beginning." He flipped ahead in the book. "Oh, look: destitution for years, a sense of defeat, illnesses that take away what joy is left and," then he flipped forward again, to the end. Hermione didn't want to hear it, but there it was, he said: "and then an ending; it's a fairly meaningless and lonely one." He closed the book.
"No, really, what were you reading?" she asked.
"It's a book – take a piece of a hair from a cursed person, and the book makes a novel about the sorts of things that might happen to them going forward, but it doesn't tell me what the curse is. It's the symptoms, not the cause."
"Is that legal?" she asked.
"Why not?" he replied. "Let's go to your place – I don't like my workers to be cursed by people other than me."
They got food from the corner place and then got a cab back to her apartment.
Hermione knew there's nothing to be embarrassed about with poverty, but Hermione was embarrassed. Draco, however was not. He was unaware. He did notice something else, and five minutes after he arrived, he was angry.
"What is that?" he asked again, pointing at the agenda that seemed to try to skitter away.
He shot bolts of something that looked like miniature lightning at it, and oddly enough, it seemed to shoot beams of green light back at him. Draco tripped trying to move toward it. It fell off the table, and seemed, in a weird moment of gravity shifting and the world going insane, to be about to fall out the window. Draco spelled the window shut and the book bounced onto the floor, where it inched toward Hermione.
"Don't let it touch you," he said, through gritted teeth, as he muttered other phrases to his wand.
Hermione was surprised. She found herself listless, unable to mood, beset by a sense of meaninglessness. Why struggle? None of this meant anything anyway. She got what she deserved, and the apartment was fine. She could live, and it was enough. She should probably get some other ministry job, as that was safer, too, now that she thought about it.
Draco was burning her floor boards and suddenly Hermione felt upset. She sent a gush of water to put them out. When the steam cleared, her agenda was singed at the center of it. That struck Hermione as odd, but still, she was too tired to care.
"It's stealing your luck and eating your life," said the wizard, now trying to pull the binding off the back of the agenda with a set of invisible hands that had snuck up on it.
"I'd have noticed," said Hermione, tired.
Draco quit.
Hermione sat down and realized everything was normal and fine.
"It's the agenda or me," said Draco.
Hermione was a bit upset. How could he be so manipulative?
"Don't push me around," she said.
"You're fired," he said.
"We have a two month contract."
"If you hold me to it, I'll have you measure the rate of paint peeling in a room with a boring lecture as versus paint peeling in a room with absolutely nothing going on."
Hermione was considering it.
"Who made the agenda?" he asked.
"I did." She said. "I made one for Harry and Ron each, too," she added.
"Do they use them?" he asked.
"No, but they don't want me to know that."
"Good," said Malfoy. He then turned around to leave, having Hermione show him to the door. At the door, she shook his hand. He took her hand, and pulled her into the hall, turned his back on her, standing in her open door, and he cast various nasty, destructive, and generally corrosive spells on the agenda. As it melted Hermione screamed and fell to the floor. Draco didn't quit, but did activate a privacy charm. He took the time he needed to kill the little parasitical agenda.
When Hermione came to from her faint, she was in her bed. There was a burn mark on her floor surrounded by her floor boards stained pale with bleach.
She sat up, and looked around. Something was getting her attention from the table. A piece of paper was there. It stood up, as if it's corners were legs and hands, and it folded itself, amazingly, into the shape of a tiny body. Its little paper arms waved meaninglessly in the air, its paper legs stood there, and a voice recited the message on the note: "Don't get a new agenda, and see you in two days, 9AM, my townhouse. You have a nasty discolored spot in your floor boards - I suggest a rug - DM." Having recited its message, the note unfolded, rose in the air as if on a breeze, and floated back down to the table, looking like a completely ordinary piece of paper.
Hermione was exhausted and lay back down. She then realized that she felt something. When she tried to understand it, she came to the conclusion, she felt anger.
Hermione felt anger for the first time in months. The agenda had actually been making her miserable and feeding off the misery -- it was clearer now. And only the agenda could put her in the way of so much bad luck without actually putting a bad luck spell on her -- she hadn't had bad luck -- she'd had rotten timing. Because of the agenda. She then went to Ron and Harry's respectively, asked to see their agendas, and rained her anger down on them. Bleach and acid were just the opening acts. When she was done, she couldn't explain what she felt, but it felt good. She returned to her apartment, went to sleep, and woke the next day, identifying some residual anger, and went to Malfoy's lab.
He was dressed too casual, but it was his lab. He was in pants and a tee shirt. She'd worn work style muggle clothes: on the line between discomfort and respect. He didn't notice. They went downstairs. Draco had already put brown cardboard boxes the size of book boxes on a work table.
"What are those?" she demanded.
Malfoy smirked.
"People have been doing dumb junk to themselves for generations," he said. "just like your agenda. But this is the stuff people want to keep. Have you ever looked at family heirlooms through a curse lens?"
"That's what we're dealing with here? Self inflicted parasitical spells?"
"They're even better when they reach across the generations, and in part, yes."
"For that part," said Hermione, "I'm in."
Malfoy smiled.
He pulled a small jewelry chest out of a box and put it on the work bench. Hermione asked him what was the issue.
"Every piece in there is unwearable because of a spell, and the owners want to wear them."
"I'm not here for jewelry in the long run," muttered Hermione, getting to work.
"But it's so practical," laughed Malfoy, heading up the stairs. "They pay!"
Good point, she thought. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"Paperwork to say we're now officially taking curses off personal items in this room, on this date, blah blah blah" he answered, disappearing.
"Denner will file it, you know," his voice said, but he was already gone.
Hermione noticed that she felt some pride and satisfaction. She got to work.