Distraction
The day seemed to drag on after she and Draco had had coffee together. She couldn't focus on anything – their little outing kept coming back to the forefront of her thoughts, banishing the important things she should be have been focusing on, like how to improve Time Turners, which was after all, the entire goal toward which she and Draco working together, the reason behind this charade.
The Arithmetic equations and Runes seemed to dance before her eyes, making the entire page look blurry.
The theory behind time travel was actually surprisingly simple. In fact, Hermione had been astounded to find that the equations and runic work behind the time turns weren't more than a couple of pages long.
Of course, that didn't mean that actual time travel was easy. There were so many details that need to be factored in the building of a Time Turner that just thinking about them gave her a headache on a good day, and that was just for the old versions, the ones limited in range.
Admittedly, a lot of the research had been destroyed when they had fought Death Eaters down here back in her fifth year, which meant that the stock of Time sand they had access to work with was dangerously low. Making more was a dangerous and lengthy process after all, and though the Unspeakables had started manufacturing it as soon as they had realized what they had lost, it would take years before the stock got back to what it was.
But it was her job now to try to find ways to get around those problems – Draco was more focused on the protective enchantments meant to prevent time aberrations etched into the sand's casing. She was supposed to focus on ways to make the time travel part more efficient, and usually her brain would be filled to the brim with ideas, but now it just wasn't so.
Still, she'd be damned if she showed up at the meeting scheduled in two days to report on their progress with nothing. There was no way Draco would one-up her on this, even if it was the last thing she ever did.
(that didn't mean she wasn't glad when the time came to clock out)