The glass of red wine she had treated herself to with dinner had to be spoiled. How else could Hermione explain to herself why Draco Malfoy was standing in her living room and had just dumped a hopefully unconscious body onto her living room floor?

"You said to inform you about any abnormalities. I guess this is as abnormal as it gets."

Despite the situation, his voice was even. With the swish of his wand, he let the body float onto her couch. Only then did Hermione notice that it was not just any body Malfoy had dragged into her home, but another Draco Malfoy! Unlike the Draco Malfoy she was currently talking to, this one merely wore a dark green bathrobe and grey striped pajama bottoms. They might be wearing different clothes, but there was no denying that they were exactly alike. Her brain stopped working for a moment as she tried to process what she was seeing, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly. She was not without questions that she could ask, there were enough of those buzzing around in her mind, the issue was deciding which to ask first.

In the end, she settled on a simple, "How?" putting all her disbelief into that single word.

"Your guess is as good as mine. One moment I have a bloody migraine and the next…" He gestured towards his doppelgänger.

"Who is he?" she whispered, not wanting to rouse him. She studied his features. His hair was slightly tousled and fell into his face. He looked relaxed, at peace; it was an expression she had never seen on Malfoy before.

"He's not under the effects of a Polyjuice Potion, if that's what you're asking," Malfoy explained, stepped closer to the sleeping form and crossed his arms over his chest. "From what I gather, he is me."

"From what you gather?" she repeated. Had he run some kind of genetic test? Is that how he knew?

After a moment's hesitation, he looked at her with those even, grey eyes that betrayed not even a single sign of emotion.

"He confirmed it with rather-" For a fraction of a second his jaw clenched shut before he continued, "specific memories," Malfoy stated without going into detail.

Hermione had the faintest suspicion that she had just missed a tiny lapse in Occlumency from him. But then again, Malfoy often carefully contemplated what he said, so she could not be sure. Even the slightest hint of having a chance at catching a glimpse of a gap in his Occlumency intrigued her.

"Well, maybe we should wake him up. We could see if he can help us solve this puzzle." Her suggestion caused a miniscule tightening of his hands around his biceps. Another slip in Occlumency? Drawing her wand from her pocket, Hermione pointed it at the mysterious double, ready to wake him up.

Before she could even perform the first hand movement of the spell, Malfoy grabbed her wrist, halting her. "No, Granger. We will do no such thing. He will stay unconscious until you can find a way to reverse this." For a moment, Hermione thought there could have been a ripple across his smooth mercury pools.

"I don't have the means to research or reverse this at home, Malfoy. And my office is in lockdown." Just this morning, she had informed him about the complications that had occurred in her department and its subsequent, temporary closure.

"I doubt I'll have access to anything before Monday morning. What I can do though," she said, fixing him with an exasperated glare as she continued, "is run some tests, but you both have to be conscious for those." His grip on her wrist only tightened as she tried to free her hand from his grasp.

"He will stay as he is." There was a finality to his statement. In the face of his unwillingness to be sensible in this situation they found themselves in, Hermione felt irritation rise within her like a snake about to strike.

"Neither of us know the necessary spells to keep him in this state for this long without risk," she retorted, stamping her foot for good measure. "And going to St. Mungos is not an option. If this is the result of my experiment, it has to remain a secret, you know that!" Why was Malfoy so damn stubborn? If he continued to disregard her reasoning, she would surely hex him and Merlin knew he would deserve it.

"Fine, I will take him back to the Manor and we will continue this on Monday." Finally, Malfoy released her. Returning to the Manor was not an option, though. If this was a side effect of her potion then she would have to monitor them both, due to being unsure as to whether this disengaged version of Malfoy would remain stable. The possibility of something happening to them while unsupervised was not something Hermione wanted to gamble with, regardless of how unlikely it might be.

"You can't leave! I have to monitor this. Merlin knows what else the potion could cause. For all we know, he could be dangerous," Hermione cautioned him. The thought of him passing out in the Manor and nobody noticing, was at the forefront of her mind.

"He isn't dangerous," Malfoy reassured her.

Hearing this, Hermione decided that he would pose no threat if woken up.

" Rennervate! "

A groan left the doppelgänger's lips. His eyelids fluttered open. He looked, for lack of a better word, confused.

"Hermione?" he asked as his eyes focused on her.

"Interesting," she murmured, more to herself than to either of the men before her. Malfoy never used her first name. It was an alien feeling, hearing him use her name for the first time. She liked the sound, the way his mouth formed the syllables. Summoning a notebook and ballpoint pen, she quickly noted her observations down onto paper. Even the smallest detail could be crucial to reversing this.

"How do you feel?" Presented with such an unusual subject and the one-off chance to study his emotions, Hermione had immediately switched into research mode.

"Like a Hippogriff kicked me in the head." At that colorful description Hermione looked at the original (was he, though?) Malfoy with a raised brow.

"My Stupefy might have been a little stronger than was necessary," he admitted, but did not seem sorry about it at all. More things to note. At his comment, Hermione rolled her eyes, followed by a question to change the subject: "Do you still have a migraine?"

"No, that completely vanished after the separation."

"I see." Her pen swiftly moved over the page. She turned back to the doppelgänger. "How about your Occlumency?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Hermione noticed the original glaring at his doppelgänger.

"I can't occlude." The doppelgänger answered, scrunching his nose as if Occlumency was distasteful to him. That was more of an expression than Malfoy ever showed during their sessions.

"And you?" She wrote down some more observations and turned towards the original.

"I can, but it's rather difficult." He pressed his lips into a thin line and averted his gaze. Usually, Malfoy always met her questions head on, never even once avoiding her eyes.

Hermione bit her tongue before an enthusiastic, "Very interesting" could leave her lips. Instead, she tried to write down all the thoughts running through her mind at that moment about what could have caused the separation and what implications it had. She was buzzing with ideas and, had her department not been in lockdown, she would have rushed to her laboratory right away.

"Do you mind if we run some tests?" Even with the limited equipment she had at home, Hermione did not want to waste time. Whatever tests she could run, she would. After all, any information at all, would be valuable.

Without hesitation, Malfoy answered that he would indeed mind running some tests.

"He really does mind," affirmed the double, while not sounding affected in the least.

Hermione's eyes bounced between the two. Could they read each other's mind? This was getting curiouser and curiouser.

"So, you know what he thinks?" Disappointingly, the doppelgänger shook his head.

"No, I don't. But knowing myself certainly helps." Snark. Hermione remembered it well from their school days, it had been completely absent during their sessions, up until now. If the double kept displaying this level of emotion, Hermione would fill her notebook in no time. Despite him meaning it as a jibe, she could not help but be amused by his sharp tongue.

"I am sorry to say this, but some tests are necessary. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of the terms of the contract you signed at the beginning of the study." Hermione applied her no-nonsense voice, which otherwise was strictly reserved for the heads of other departments that wanted to meddle in the Department of Mysteries' business. Even though she did not like to be the bearer of bad news, she had no qualms about it, when it came to her work.

For a moment there was silence, Malfoy pinched the bridge of his nose while the double glared at this blatant display of annoyance.

"Fine," the original gave in, his voice emotionless once again.

"Who wants to go first?" The doppelgänger's hand was already half-raised when the other stepped forward.

"Lead the way," the Original Malfoy cut in, determinedly pushing the Other's hand back down.

Before she escorted him to her office, she turned towards the double.

"This may take some time. Make yourself at home. The kitchen is right through this door," she said motioning to the door on the other side of the room before continuing, "and the bathroom is the second door on the left down the hallway." Hermione gave him one last reassuring smile, before she led the original into her office.

In her periphery, she saw him quickly scan the room before he moved to one of her upholstered armchairs and sat down.

"Before we start, I have to inform my department of this situation," she explained as she walked around her desk to her owl who was sitting on the window sill, preening its feathers. Hermione quickly penned a letter with the key information to her head of department, requesting to have her other probands checked.

Hopefully, Malfoy was the only case, or they would have to arrange for some kind of secret quarantine to be put in place.

When she sat down in the armchair facing Malfoy, she cast a series of diagnostic charms over him.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

She wrote down the results and finally locked eyes with Malfoy.

"Please fill me in on what happened after our last appointment." While she had seen some ripples of emotion in his eyes upon his arrival at her apartment, now his eyes were as unreadable as ever.

"I went back to work." Short. Factual. No emotion.

"Anything unusual?"

"Slight headache, but nothing out of the ordinary."

Hermione hated his answers, short and to the point. She always felt the absence of emotion. More so than with her other probands.

"Any possible contact with magic?" She continued her questioning.

"No, only paperwork."

A knock on the door interrupted her from asking the next question. The doppelgänger entered, and shot her a grin. Where the original was a cold winter evening, the doppelgänger was a warm summer day. Occlumency truly was an interesting piece of magic. How people could lock away emotions and memories so well that their appearance could be so different, was beyond Hermione. She was too easily swept away by emotion. Was the doppelgänger a true representation of what Malfoy could have been, had he not occluded so heavily? To be honest, Hermione rather liked the doppelgänger, so far.

"I won't bother you for long." With a few quick strides he was standing in front of his twin and reached into the inside pocket of the original's jacket, pulling out a magical spectacle case. Unlike Muggle ones, it was charmed to be paper-thin when closed. He put on the rimless glasses and left the room.

Hermione had never seen him wear glasses before, but then again she only saw him during their sessions and none of her tests required reading. The glasses complimenting his face, did not surprise her in the least. He had always had good taste. While wizards were often drawn to gaudy and outlandish spectacle frames, his were simple and classic.

The short tap, tap, tap of the original's fingers against the armrest, brought her attention back to the task in hand.

"Where were we..." She glanced at her notes. "When did you go home?"

"About 8 p.m." She nodded and wrote it down. The potion usually lost its effect after an hour or two.

"I had a cold dinner. Afterwards, I did some light reading in the library."

The Malfoy Manor library. Hermione's envy for that library was immeasurable. It was supposed to be one of Wizarding Britain's largest private libraries.

"I went to bed around 1 a.m." He paused for a moment, thinking. "I took a potion for the headache."

"Did you have problems occluding that night?" Like many other Occlumens, Malfoy had the habit of occluding as a form of a recap of the day before going to bed. He had told her this was to restructure his thoughts, memories, and emotions in more detail than he did during the day.

"No."

Hermione wished he would just go on with his recounting without her having to urge him on, but this was not how things worked with Malfoy.

"Fine. Friday?"

"I woke up at my usual time and went to work." He was over-simplifying. Hermione needed details to figure out what could have possibly gone wrong with her potion.

"What about your headache?"

"Still there." One slow blink. "But it got worse throughout the morning."

Hermione circled the word headache in her notes.

"How about your Occlumency?"

"I felt more irritated, I guess. It might have taken me a little longer to occlude certain things." He shrugged.

"Any contact with magic?"

"No, the red tape within the Ministry is a real issue , Granger." The sarcasm caught Hermione slightly off guard. It was the first time Malfoy had ever shown any frustration with his work. Sarcasm and frustration were underlined in her notes.

Having written it down, Hermione raised an eyebrow at him. Next?

"I went home a little earlier because of the headache. I had taken another potion around noon but it hadn't helped."

Hermione started a quick mind map around the word headache on the next page that she could keep adding to. It had been a recurring point, after all, and could be a major clue.

"When was that?"

"Around 4 p.m."

"And at home?"

"I wanted to call it a day and hoped to sleep it off. I was just getting ready for bed when the headache turned into a migraine and became unbearable. I passed out." It was like he was telling the story of another person and not his own, so detached was his voice.

"Did nobody find you?" It worried her to think that he could have hurt himself.

"My mother is in France with relatives." Malfoy adjusted his posture in the armchair, seeming a little uncomfortable under her worried gaze for a moment.

"How long were you unconscious?"

He checked his watch."Two hours probably. When I came to, I found him passed out next to me."

"Migraine?"

"Gone."

Another comment added to her mind map.

"Did your other self take long to regain consciousness?"

"No, he woke up shortly after me."

She drew up a timeline next to her notes, so she could easily track the progress of whatever had happened later.

"And then?"

"We argued."

"You argued? About what?" Instead of answering, Malfoy merely stared at her. She underlined it in her notes. She would try her luck with the other one later. Defeated, for now, Hermione sighed.

"Fine. And then?"

"I stunned him and Floo'd here." Hermione glanced at her watch and wrote down the estimated time of his arrival.

"How did you manage that, by the way? My Floo is not open to the public." It had, of course, not escaped her that it should not have been possible for Malfoy to Floo into her apartment. There suddenly being two Draco Malfoys had been rather more important at that moment, though.

"Auror emergency technique."

Hermione blinked. Although she worked in the Department of Mysteries, which had access to all kinds of intelligence, Hermione simply had not had the time to learn about every secret, yet.

"I see." Having retraced his steps from when she had last seen him, Hermione put down the notebook and opened her desk drawer.

Thankfully, she had some materials at home that could be used for her emotion control test. The concept was simple: she would show the proband a series of pictures to evoke emotions while a spell monitored heart rate and pupil contraction. She had accumulated quite a variety of pictures; her selection always consisted of images to arouse emotion with a general viewer, as well as specifically chosen pictures for each proband.

Studying Occlumency and how to inhibit it was no easy task; people who occluded did not tend to tell you outright what they locked away within the confines of their minds.

Malfoy had let her know that he used some kind of filing cabinet system combined with a sort of wall to close it off from the rest of his thoughts. He had described it as, "rows and rows of filing cabinets." Each row for different chapters of his life, while the drawers connected to memories with the files inside being the corresponding emotions, images, people, and places. When it came to her other probands, Hermione already knew whether she had made a good or bad guess at what could stimulate them. With her selection for Malfoy, she was still very much in the dark.

"We will continue with the emotion control test," she explained as she sat back down across from him. Hermione had high hopes for this test run. Although he was even more stoic and concentrated during these tests, she had already caught glimpses of ripples tonight. Maybe she could cause some waves.

The pictures were sorted from least to most stimulating and divided into positives and negatives. She always started with the general pictures and ended with the personalized highly negative pictures. Malfoy had some of the nastier ones if she was honest. She had felt the need to add them, as he was the strongest Occlumens in the group.

Hermione set up the heart monitoring charm and showed him one slide after another. The general ones drew no reaction from him, as always. The impression of ice always came to her when she observed Malfoy during this test. To Hermione, looking into his eyes felt like trying to make out what was underneath a thick layer of ice. The way he did not move a muscle conjured the image of ice sculptures in her mind. He was void of all emotion. Not even the personalized positive pictures could melt that ice. Only the personal negative stimuli remained.

Thestral.

A slight narrowing of his eyes. Heart rate picked up momentarily.

Hermione still remembered the first time she realized that the carriages that transported the older students to Hogwarts were not magical at all, but pulled by those ghastly creatures. That they could only be seen by those who had witnessed death only exacerbated the chill down her back whenever she saw them.

Hogwarts Astronomy Tower.

Twitch of the eye. Heart rate picked up again momentarily.

During their hunt for the Horcruxes, Harry had told Ron and her about how Dumbledore had offered to help and protect Draco.

Dumbledore's gravestone.

A flare of the nose. Heart rate picked up once more.

Malfoy had been spared from Azkaban on the condition that he complete his schooling. On the first day of the new term, the returning students had to attend the eulogy for the former headmaster. Malfoy had been missing.

The Dark Mark.

Knitted eyebrows. Heart rate picked up for a slightly longer duration.

No matter the weather, Malfoy always wore long sleeves. Even in the summer, when Harry would often complain how stuffy the Auror office could get. Hermione figured that he either did not want anyone to see, or be reminded of it himself. Maybe both. From what she knew, the mark could not be concealed with a glamour.

The Wanted poster of his aunt Bellatrix Lestrange.

Had his eyes flickered to her left forearm? Heart rate picked up for longer this time.

This was the one Hermione had hesitated to put into his selection. It was not only a negative reminder for him but also for her. Still, her feelings should not affect her research and she had included it in the end.

All those pictures she had chosen based on what she knew about him, except for the last one. The last one was something she had picked up when she had studied his Death Eater file. It had taken some time to get it cleared from the Auror office, although in the end, they had seen her reasoning. The final picture was the one with the most potential in her opinion. When she had read his recollection of this event, Hermione had felt sick. It was a disgusting and abhorrent tale.

Charity Burbage.

The Professor of Muggle Studies.

Killed in front of Draco Malfoy in his own childhood home.

Hermione watched the ice crack. She had been right about choosing this picture. Malfoy briefly squeezed his eyes shut and dug his fingers into the armrest, his knuckles turning white.

When Malfoy regained his composure, she put away the stack of images, before writing down her observations.

"These have been the most noteworthy results as of yet." It was a nice way of saying that she now knew for sure what she had already suspected. She had made a good selection with those personalized negative stimuli.

He made a non-committal sound.

"That should be all. For other tests, I would need my supplies from the Ministry."

The moment she told him that they were finished, Malfoy was up on his feet. It was not unusual for him to leave right after they concluded the tests, but this was different. The tense shoulders, blank expression and clenched jaw… Hermione got the impression of flight.