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Chapter Text

His name was on everyone's lips. He was a scandal, a symbol, a medical mystery--anything but an injured man. His comatose state set fire to the rumours, since he couldn't speak for himself. Anything could have been the truth. There was nothing but a hornets' nest of speculation, and Hermione had set out that day to kick it. Not many people were authorized to visit an unconscious stranger in hospital, but she had high security clearance. With her DMLE badge in hand, she could pass through almost any door.

He was in a protected area of the Potions Misuse Ward at St. Mungo's, under some unspecified "quarantine"--it could have been to protect others from his unidentified malady, or it could just as easily have been instated to protect his prone body from the media madness that waited outside. On her way to the ward, Hermione passed no less than three reporters. Two of them were flashing their press credentials to irritated nurses, and one was in plainclothes, trying to convince a Mediwizard that he was a relative of the Malfoy family. Hermione recognized his face despite the blond wig that made up his pathetic disguise. She stopped on her way to tell the Mediwizard that he was with the Prophet, and the reporter gave her a dirty look for blowing his cover.

At the entrance to the protected ward, Hermione claimed that she was there to check security on behalf of the DMLE, but that wasn't true at all. She was there for the same shameful reason as those reporters: curiosity. She had to see it for herself. The person she had once known as a childhood bully, who had morphed slowly into a war-torn teenager and stopped just short of becoming a murderer, now a man who'd nearly killed himself in a desperate bid to remove his Dark Mark.

A nurse escorted her to Draco's room, where Hermione persuaded her to leave in the interest of privacy. She was reluctant to go, having been tasked with giving a tour of the ward's security, but she also had many other patients. Hermione convinced her that her other duties were more important.

"Just pretend I'm not here," she had said.

Another nurse stood in the room beside his bed, staring out the window with her back to the door. Hermione rapped her knuckles against the doorframe as she entered, but the woman didn't move. She stepped cautiously into the room and saw him: Draco Malfoy slept in a maddening contradiction, his face impossibly serene while a horrible silent war was fought on the surface of his skin. All of his exposed flesh was covered in black markings, each one moving independently. Some darted quickly across his skin, while others crawled as slowly and deliberately as the sun across the sky. Graceful and jagged, ugly and elegant, they battled. They broke each other, separated, grew back anew, and multiplied. They skimmed his fluttering eyelids, climbed the refined slope of his cheekbones, and hid beneath his hair.

"May I help you?" asked the nurse from the window. Now that she'd turned around, Hermione noticed her small, bony hands clasped in front of her stomach. Her grey hair, dry like straw, was wrangled into the tightest possible bun behind her head, but errant strands stood out around her face. Backlit in the waning sunlight, it looked like some twisted mockery of a halo. Her name tag said "ARLEY."

"I'm here on behalf of the DMLE," Hermione said. She showed her badge again, and the woman scrutinized it with evident suspicion. "In response to security concerns."

"Security concerns?" Nurse Arley smiled with crooked teeth as grey as her hair, and Hermione was becoming deeply uncomfortable. "I knew you were coming, but not for that."

"You were told otherwise?"

"Yes," she said. "You could phrase it that way." She glanced at her wristwatch and furrowed her brow. "Please excuse me--I've a prior engagement."

"Of course," Hermione said. As soon as Arley left the room, she felt relieved.

She turned her attention to Draco. He looked so small, so weak and disfigured, and who was she to see him like this? She, who had flagrantly abused her authority, taken advantage of her position in order to fulfill a whim that was voyeuristic at best. Now that she was here, she could not find the strength to leave. He was too fascinating--too strange.

She moved closer in the heavy silence, softening her footsteps so as not to disturb it. At his bedside now, she noticed his left arm, the site of the wound that had started the war. The first shot, Muggles might say. It looked like someone had sewn an ink bottle under his skin and then shattered it. His whole hand was black, shiny like it was wet, but no ink escaped--his white sheets were clean. His fingers twitched violently, and she jumped.

No, he hadn't awoken. It was only a nerve malfunction.

As though of its own free will, Hermione's right hand reached itself toward him, extended its own twitching fingers capped with ragged-bitten nails, with paper cuts on the index and middle digits from earlier that morning. Centimetres away from the subcutaneous oil slick, Hermione's hand hovered. And then, without her permission, it moved down and down, and it touched him.

His skin was so ice-cold that it froze her, but only briefly. When she thawed, she snapped that errant hand back, gasping, and cradled it against her chest. A harmless gesture, she told herself, and no one would ever know. All she'd done was graze his arm with her fingertips--she was backing up now, stumbling, not looking where she was going, oh no--far from a violation, far from anything that could have caused harm. Yet, maybe from the ice crystals that lingered on her fingertips--still gasping, she had backed up into the doorframe and bumped her shoulder, but her eyes stayed on him, and she could not look away--it felt somehow like the worst thing she had ever done.

She grasped for her former professional demeaner. She placed one foot in front of the other with calm, even steps out of the room and into the hall. She kept going until she was outside. She pushed her fingers into her mouth and sucked them hard like a snakebite.

***

Hermione's dreams that night were fantastically mundane, which was the odd part. During the week before her visit to St. Mungo's, she'd been plagued with unsettlingly strange near-nightmares; the sort of dreams where nothing bad happened, but everything about them was unnerving somehow. Something about the colours or the way things moved or didn't move. But it was over now, or at least she'd earned a reprieve. In her dream, on the night after she touched Draco Malfoy, she was drinking tea alone in her own kitchen. It was exactly what she did every morning. Nothing unusual happened.

She woke at seven o'clock the next morning, and the dream came true. She read the Prophet, which contained more articles about Draco. They could only speculate, since no one had gotten to his room except her. They guessed what his condition might look like, and they got it wrong. She looked down at her fingers and noticed that the newspaper ink had smudged and left a mark. She wiped her hand on her black robes, but the ink didn't come off. It must have soaked into her paper cuts, and so she went to the sink and washed her hands. The stain had deepened when she was done: once a greyish echo, there was now one shining black dot on each finger. She washed her hands again. She washed them a third time, scrubbing her fingertips hard with a scrap of steel wool for stubborn, baked-in grease. It hurt badly, but it did not help.

Hermione was no stranger to ink stains, of course. Her fingertips had been black for the better part of the last decade, leaving stealthy spots near her lips and eyes when she touched her face. Usually the ink was outside her skin, though.

Fixating on it would have made her late for work, and she put it out of her mind. The marks would rub off in time as the broken skin healed.

Work distracted her in the worst way. Right after Draco had landed himself in the hospital a week ago, they'd put her on her first big case with the DMLE: the grisly murder of two young children, six-year-old identical twins who'd already lost their mother. The primary suspect was their father, who had prior domestic disputes on his record. A neighbour could place the father at the scene within hours of the killings, but he'd fled soon after and hadn't been seen since. As soon as she found him, it looked like it was going to be an open-and-shut case. As chief investigator, Hermione's first task was to coordinate the manhunt. She had a map on her desk of wizarding England--no unauthorized international Portkeys had been detected since the murders--and she'd blocked it off into colour-coded sections for each of the teams. She gave the team leaders their regional assignments and sent them out for the day.

Since it was such a high-profile case, she also had to deal with the media. After impassioned appeals from grieving family members and tabloid-reading busybodies alike, she'd yielded to the pressure to bring in a Seer. She had another appointment that day to assess the woman's progress, which had thus far been negligible. She knew that real prophesies came out every so often, but they were rare, and her main problem with Seers and other mystics was their compulsive opacity. There were only two reasons to be so deliberately and consistently vague: either a person didn't know anything, or they didn't want to tell. Seers loved to claim the latter, to say that a skeptic like Hermione didn't deserve or couldn't comprehend their truths. The underlying issue, of course, was that only a terrible person would willfully withhold information that could provide justice for those children--regardless of how unworthy the skeptics of the world might be. Hermione found it unlikely that one hundred percent of Seers were sociopaths, which only reinforced her conviction that they had no idea what they were talking about.

The Seer, Haigha, had been offered a temporary office at the Ministry, but she didn't "respond to the energy of the space." As though Hermione needed another reason to be annoyed with her, she insisted upon working from home. Checking her progress meant walking all the way down to the Atrium and taking the Floo to Haigha's personal residence in Grimsby--its proximity to the sea, apparently, made it a far more "lucid" place to "scry." There really were not enough scare-quotes in the world to describe dealing with Seers.

Since these visits always took a great deal longer than they needed to, Hermione organised her desk and locked her office before leaving. She fished around in her bag for a protein bar, which she ate in three large bites while waiting for the lift. It was so thick and sticky that she was still chewing when she landed in Haigha's sitting room.

"Ah, yes," Haigha called from the next room, "her majesty has arrived." Her majesty the skeptic, in other words. As Haigha puttered around her kitchen, like time meant nothing, Hermione used her fingernail to dislodge a caramel-coated oat cluster from between her teeth. If extra clutter could be counted as progress, she would congratulate Haigha on the several new crystals littering the coffee table. There were all different sizes and colours now, each one attached to a slim leather cord. They lay in clusters around a print of the same map that Hermione had in her office, except this one was marked with unfamiliar symbols in glowing purple ink.

She took a seat in one of the floral-print armchairs, which all looked much more comfortable than they actually were, and waited. Haigha liked to keep her waiting--some kind of psychological power game, most likely. As a strategy, it was more or less effective. After a few more minutes, Haigha brushed aside the beaded strands covering the doorway and brought in a tea tray.

"Care for a biscuit?" she asked. The cups and saucers jangled precariously as she set the tray in a clearing between crystals on the table. Spending time with Haigha meant resisting the constant impulse to ask for her age: one moment, her wrinkled hands barely seemed functional. The next, she was as nimble and sharp as an owl on the hunt. In Hermione's estimate, she was somewhere between fifty and one hundred and thirty.

"No, thank you," Hermione said. "I've just eaten."

"That's a relief--I haven't got any." She gave a low, brittle laugh and eased herself into the armchair opposite Hermione's. The wooden frame creaked, and so did her bones.

"Then why did you offer?"

"To be polite, dear," she said, like reprimanding a child. "You could stand to learn a thing or two about being polite."

"All right," Hermione said gamely. There was no point arguing with someone incapable of logic. She also knew better by now than to start asking questions right away: Haigha would offer a progress report at the precise moment that she was ready, and challenging her internal clock could set that moment back by an hour or more. She watched in silence as Haigha poured the tea, this time without a tremor in either hand. She hummed an odd, disjointed tune while the steam rose over her fingers and clouded the stones on her rings.

She handed one cup to Hermione, with a wedge of lemon on the saucer. "Sugar?"

"Yes, please," Hermione said. "One lump."

"Sorry, dear." Her forehead creased in concern. "Ran out this morning." After this, she leaned forward and looked into Hermione's eyes; this time, it was a test.

"No, I'm the one who should apologise." She had to force herself, but she said what she needed to say. "I should have asked if you had any first."

Haigha leaned back, satisfied, and nodded slowly. "Precisely. One should never assume."

"I agree." Hermione picked up the lemon wedge, squeezed it, and dropped it into her tea. She closed her eyes and inhaled the medley of citrus and herbs, congratulating herself on how well she was doing now that she knew the rules. Perhaps, she fantasized wildly, she could be walking back into the Floo within the hour--

"No, no, no!"

She jumped hard enough to spill all over her lap. "What?" she asked, forgetting her hard-won illusion of Manners. Her robes had soaked up most of the liquid, but still the heat stung. "What's the problem now?"

"You're cheating, that's the problem!" Haigha pointed one shaking, crooked finger at her while the other hand, perfectly steady, held her tea. "You are not patient, and you shan't insult me by pretending you are! As though I'd never met you before in my life. Some nerve." She clucked her tongue and shook her head. "Shame on you."

Once again, Hermione swallowed her pride. "I'm sorry," she began tersely, "for attempting to--"

"No. Too late." Haigha narrowed her eyes, and the shadows sank deeper into the wrinkles above her brow. "You should go. Come back tomorrow at the same time, and we shall try again." She stood, earning another round of high-pitched complaints from her ancient chair, and exhaled heavily from the exertion. Hermione could only stare, with her mouth hanging open. She had really thought she'd learned the rules this time, and so she felt the stupidity twofold: once for thinking she could reason her way to proper madness, and twice for trying this hard to get answers that wouldn't help her anyway.

"Fine," she said. She slammed her teacup onto the table, and it rattled around in its saucer with tea spilling over the sides. "I'll come back because I have to--some of us have real jobs, you know--but if you had any decency at all, you'd tell me everything you knew about who killed those children."

"And if you had any sense, you'd know that events can't just go happening higgledy-piggledy! They'll occur at the proper times, else there wouldn't be a schedule at all."

Hermione was officially finished with this conversation. She shot one final hard look in Haigha's direction and stepped into the Floo without another word.

After she landed in the Atrium, she attempted to brush the soot off her hands, except it wasn't soot. Some of it was, but there was another substance entirely on the first two digits of her right hand. Her ink stain was spreading, shiny and black all the way down to the first knuckle. It shocked her when she saw it, and for a moment all she could do was stand in front of the fireplace, blocking the foot traffic, and stare at her fingers. She turned her hand this way and that, moved it closer and farther away, bent and straightened each finger one at a time. The light hadn't tricked her. This was real.

"Hermione?" Cassandra, a woman who worked down the hall in the DMLE, stood before her. "Are you all right?"

In response, Hermione held out her right hand with the first two fingers extended. She watched for a reaction, hoping for a mirror of her own concern, but there was only confusion.

Cassandra examined Hermione's hand, and the problem was right in front of her face. "I don't understand," she said. "What's wrong?"

"Can't you see it? Look at my fingers." She wiggled them around, as though to demonstrate, and it occurred to her that she was maybe not acting so mentally-stable at the moment. "They're... stained."

"Are you talking about these paper cuts?"

She took her hand back and smiled as naturally as possible. "Oh, those--no. I just... I'm sorry, it must've been the light. I thought I saw something odd. Sorry."

"Oh, don't worry about it," she said. Because she really, honestly could not see what Hermione saw. "I've done the same thing! Did you have a lot of caffeine or Pepper-up today?"

Hermione nodded, even though she hadn't. She didn't want her coworkers to spread rumours that she was insane.

"That'll do it," she said sagely. "If you drink too much of that stuff, you'll start to see odd colours and funny little shapes in your peripheral." She used her fingers to demonstrate, swirling them in random patterns along the sides of her face. "That's how you know it's time to cut down." She smiled, patted Hermione on the shoulder, and brushed past her to the Floo. "'Til tomorrow," she called over her shoulder.

Hermione returned to her office with her hand in her pocket. She locked the door behind her, closed the blinds, and sat at her desk. With her wand in her left hand, she cast several cleaning spells on her fingers, each more powerful than the last, but none of them had any effect. A glamour would hide the problem, but there wasn't any point if no one but Hermione could see it anyway. She knew, then, that she could not fix this on her own; she also knew that she couldn't concentrate on anything else until she found a solution. The teams were due to return soon with their findings, but they could report just as easily to her boss. She went to his office and gave him an update: Haigha had nothing, and Hermione wasn't feeling well. She needed to go home and rest, and he should owl her immediately with any important updates. Hermione did not typically take sick days, and so her boss wished her a speedy recovery and sent her on her way.

She didn't go home, and she didn't rest. She went to the hospital.

***

The press frenzy had died down by then, since Draco's coma had continued with no interesting developments--or, at least, none that anyone knew about. The staff wasn't talking, and neither was he. The speculation continued unchecked, but the reporters must have realised that the hospital wasn't on their side. Hermione walked the same path she'd taken two days ago, past nurses and Mediwizards who saw her badge and waved her through, until she was in the empty hallway of the quarantined area.

In Draco's room, a nurse she'd never seen before was grinding something in a marble mortar & pestle beside the bed. This time, Draco's prone body was enveloped in an iridescent magical forcefield. She could still see him clearly, though, with all the violent ink on his skin. The nurse, who wore a paper mask and elbow-length white gloves, turned when she heard Hermione at the door. Her name tag said "SHARMA."

She pulled her mask down and let it hang around her neck. "May I help you?"

"Yes." She held up her badge and reverted to the same script she'd used before. She didn't want to talk to a stranger about her hand; she wanted to talk to Arley. "I'm Officer Granger. I'm here on behalf of the DMLE to check the security of the ward."

Nurse Sharma set down the mortar and pestle on a glass counter beside several open jars of medicinal herbs, so potent that Hermione could smell them from the doorway. "Good afternoon, Officer Granger," she said. "I wasn't informed that you'd be returning so soon."

"There were a few things I forgot to look at. It was difficult before with all the reporters."

Sharma nodded. "They made everything harder around here."

"I'm sure they did." She gestured to Draco's new force field on the bed. "How long has the patient been magically contained?"

"Weren't you here two days ago?"

"Yes, I was."

"He was covered then." She narrowed her eyes, either suspicious or confused. Possibly both. "He's been covered constantly since he arrived. I thought you'd visited his room."

Hermione grasped desperately for an excuse, but she'd been thrown off-balance. Her pulse sped up, even as she stood so still. "He has?" she asked. Sharma nodded. "Is the cover removed during treatments?"

"No. Our gloves are charmed to pass through the field." She held up her hands, and Hermione noticed the similar iridescent magic that flowed over the fabric.

"Well. I spoke with Nurse Arley last time. Is she here today?"

"Nurse who?"

"Arley."

"'Arley,' did you say?"

"Yes."

Sharma took a few cautious steps toward her. "Are you certain you're remembering the name correctly? We haven't got a Nurse Arley on staff that I know of."

"I read it on her name tag," she said. "A-R-L-E-Y.”

"That doesn't sound familiar." Sharma moved closer, tilting her head with an expression of concern. "May I see your badge again, Officer...?"

No, she could not. Hermione backed out of the room without saying another word. She broke into a run as soon as she was through the door, and behind her Nurse Sharma was calling for security. She reached the fire escape and took the stairs down two at a time.

She tried to Disapparate when she left the building, but a protective magic rejected her attempt, which didn't make sense. Apparition wasn't possible in the hospital, for the safety of the patients, but she'd never run into a restriction outside. She caught her breath and started running again, without a thought to where she was going or why she was in such a hurry. She wasn't an impostor, after all; her badge was valid, and she could have simply showed it to Nurse Sharma and made up an excuse about misremembering Arley's name. It wouldn't have been true, though. She was certain of what she'd seen, both the letters on the name tag and the missing forcefield. She had touched him, for heaven's sake, without any gloves--and Arley hadn't been wearing them, either.

It had simply been too strange to stay and talk, to stand there in a hospital and explain the inexplicable. Gradually, as the pavement slid by under her feet, her pace decreased. No one was chasing her. Soon she was walking slowly, acutely aware of her sore legs and what they said about her current level of physical fitness, and she had finally started to notice the cold. Her ears and nose were numb, and the icy wind whipped around her face. She was far enough from the hospital that she could certainly Apparate, and she should have, considering her inadequate jacket and the fact that she didn't know where she was.

She'd been trampling through the alleys behind sleek and indistinguishable commercial buildings, dodging their dumpsters and their rats, straining to see in the waning light as the sun set behind her. The streetlights came on, and she stopped completely. She'd long since entered Muggle territory, and ahead of her lay a residential neighbourhood, with dead grass on the lawns and warm lights behind curtains in the windows. A walk would do her good, she decided. The unfamiliar scenery made her feel free and open.

She wandered down the pavement, taking time to admire the Muggle lawn decorations. She liked that Muggles had so many things that did nothing; things that only sat still and waited to be looked at; things that never had to justify their own existence. She kept a healthy collection of such things at her flat. In fact, she had a whole album full of Muggle photos she'd surreptitiously taken at Hogwarts. Early on, she'd been embarrassed enough to charm her camera to look like the magical ones, and even now she rarely showed the pictures to people she didn't trust.

She took her hand out of her pocket and held it in front of her face, and the stain remained. It seemed to have spread just a little bit farther down, but she couldn't be sure because she could barely look straight at it without panicking. Now that she thought about it, she wished she'd have asked Nurse Sharma about the ink stains on Draco--could she see those, or were they invisible to most people as well?

She heard rushed footsteps coming from behind, the sound of high-heels clicking on stone in a hurry, and turned around. Backlit in the streetlights, she recognized the halo of white straw-hair, pulled tight, shining above a black shawl. The woman looked up and made eye contact, and there was no mistaking her. "Nurse Arley?" she called.

"Do I know you?" Arley asked. She kept moving at a steady clip until she reached Hermione and passed her, but she looked over her shoulder with curiosity.

Hermione caught up and fell into step beside her. "Yes, we met a few days ago at St. Mungo's. Officer Granger, from the DMLE." She offered her hand sideways, and Arley shook it without stopping. It was odd to walk and shake hands at the same time, but it was better than losing track of her only lead.

"Oh, yes, it's you! I should have known. What are you doing here?" For an older woman, Arley moved with incredible speed. Hermione found herself nearly running to keep up.

"I was going for a walk," she said. "I just came from St. Mungo's--do you know a Nurse Sharma?"

"No," Arley said. "But I don't know a lot of nurses."

"But you're a nurse."

"I most certainly am not," she said, as though it were an offensive accusation. "Where on earth did you get that idea?"

"You were at the hospital," Hermione said, "wearing a uniform and name tag."

"And so you jumped to the conclusion that I was a nurse?" Arley shook her head and tutted. "That's what being young'll do to you. Always coming up with the most preposterous of notions."

"That's not preposterous at all," she argued. "Why else would you have been there, dressed like that, caring for a patient? You know, it's illegal to impersonate a medical professional."

"Which I wasn't doing," Arley said. "I was only visiting Mr. Malfoy."

"Why? Do you know each other?"

"No," she said. Hermione really was running now--Arley's speed steadily increased, but it didn't seem to take any effort on her part.

"Then why were you visiting him?" Hermione, on the other hand, was gasping for breath and nursing a monstrous stitch in her side as she tried to keep up. As soon as her schedule let up, she'd make it a priority to get back to the gym.

"I don't see how that's any of your business," Arley said. "Besides, your reason wasn't any better."

She almost lied again about security matters, but she was so out of breath that it wasn't worth the effort. "Wait," she said desperately. "Can you stop walking for a moment?"

"Why?"

"I want you to take a look at my hand." She held it out to the side, since Arley clearly had no intention of stopping, and the woman took it and dragged her along.

"Hm," she said. "Definitely infected."

"So, you can see it?"

"And now you think I'm blind!" Arley shoved her hand back so hard she nearly lost her balance, and she had to sprint to catch up again. "My eyes are still sharp as a hawk's, young lady."

"No, that's not it at all." Blatant absurdity aside, Hermione couldn't risk offending Arley--she'd just proved that she was the only person who might be able to help. "It's just that no one else can see the problem."

"If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" Arley looked at her sideways and held eye contact for a few seconds, and then Hermione ran into a wall.

They'd stopped while she wasn't looking, and now Arley held the handle of a large stone door beside the aforementioned wall into which she'd just crashed. Her left elbow had taken the brunt of the impact, and she held it with her infected right hand and hissed in pain. She counted herself lucky for her height, though: if she'd been only a few inches taller, she'd have cracked her head open on the steel lamp directly above.

"Look where you're going, dear," Arley admonished. In the improved light, Hermione could see her familiar grey teeth. She made to open the door, but Hermione moved in front of it and stood in her path.

"Please wait," she said. "I need to know what to do about my hand."

Arley looked annoyed at first, but she softened surprisingly quickly. "Fine," she said. "But you'll need to make an appointment--I'm much too busy right now."

"Of course. Where is your, er... office?" This woman could not possibly have a job, Hermione thought, but she kept acting like she did.

Arley pulled her wand from her pocket and used it to conjure a business card. She turned it over to the blank side, tapped it again, and an appointment date and time appeared in elegant script: 2:17 A.M, the next night. She handed it over and tried to open the door again, but Hermione grabbed her arm.

"Does this say 'A.M.'?"

"Yes," Arley said. "You need to move, or you'll make me late." She wrenched her arm free and pulled on the door, and this time Hermione stepped aside and let her open it.

Her mind filled with questions as Arley disappeared, but she was still breathing hard and hurting and more than a little confused. The door slammed shut, followed by an audible click as it locked. Hermione tried it anyway, but it wouldn't budge, even with the aid of her wand. She looked at Arley's card, which listed only her full name--Blanche Arley--and a Floo address. The Muggle neighbourhood was just barely still visible in the distance. For some time, they'd apparently been walking down a straight cobblestone path through a field. She stepped back to get a better look at the building she’d run into, and it couldn't have been much larger than her office at the Ministry. There wasn't anywhere Arley could have gone unless there was a staircase leading underground, and Hermione wondered what must exist below her feet.

The moon and stars were in position, clearly visible from the centre of the wide-open field, and it was long past time to go home. She tucked the card safely into a pocket inside her robes and Disapparated. She wished she could have called Harry or Ron, even just to see a friendly face, but they were both working on their own assignments for the Auror Office: they all had important work to do the next morning, and she wasn't about to disrupt their sleep just to make them look for something they wouldn't be able to see.

Chapter Text

She slept so poorly that it hurt to open her eyes all the way when morning came. The first thing she did upon waking was to search her work robes, just to prove to herself that it hadn't been a dream. Arley's card was right where she left it, and she had until 2:17 A.M. to decide whether or not to show up. On a perversely encouraging note, the stain hadn't spread any farther. She found herself hoping, as she always did with her own health issues, that it would go away on its own so she wouldn't have to deal with it.

She sleepwalked to work, guilt pulsing with every step. This case was the kind that was hard not to take personally, and the gravity of it affected everyone involved. Even her boss, the unrelentingly practical Evander Hooksworth, was bending rules to accommodate the investigation--unheard of. For her part, Hermione beat herself up for every little oversight, everything that took time away from the search, because it felt like another injustice against those children.

She settled down in her office with a strong cup of tea, but that wasn't what snapped her out of her stupor: it was the folder waiting on her desk. The autopsy reports had arrived. She ran her fingers along the top, feeling for where the pictures were; she knew what had happened to those children, and she didn't want to see it. She read the first page carefully, stalling. The coroner reported in-depth about the external and internal condition of the bodies and determined that the most obvious option had, in fact, been the cause of death: decapitation. She'd felt pictures on the next page, and so she turned it slowly, lifting up the corner centimetre by centimetre, but it only contained the same photo that had been used to confirm identity. The three children lay side by side, covered up to the chins with a sheet, eyes closed, with their bodies arranged so it looked like their heads were still attached. They would have looked peaceful in a Muggle photograph, but the magical one betrayed their unnatural stillness.

Wizarding photos brazenly created their own tiny worlds where only one thing ever happened, and the photo's occupants could only hope it was a pleasant sort of infinity--as though such a thing could exist. A Muggle photograph never tried to be anything more than a frozen instant in the past, and it couldn't help but carry the message that things wouldn't be that way forever.

There were more pictures later on, and she covered them with her hand as she read: there was no point inspecting them when the findings were described in print below. The fact that she'd seen things just as awful in person actually made her less able to tolerate them now; images like these could trigger flashbacks or worse. She had to keep herself under control, and so she did not look unless she had to. According to the report, there was no evidence of trauma to the bodies other than the single deadly injury: no further bruising, no other cuts or scratches, no residue of magical torture. The coroner concluded that the killer had used a simple Severing Charm. They probably hadn't suffered for long.

She closed the folder and stared at the wall, still seeing them in her mind, so small and still.

The image stayed with her all day, on the insides of her eyelids every time she blinked. None of the search teams had found anything, and the tension was rising as the department's public image came under fire; it was enough to make her wish the reporters had gotten more out of the Draco Malfoy story at St. Mungo's, because now she was the one under the microscope. Everyone wanted justice served, nothing less than the killer's head on a platter, and she wasn't serving it fast enough.

Arley's card was still in her pocket, and she found herself pressing her fingertips against the corners whenever her hands were empty. There was nothing good to think about: it was the children, their father, the pressure, the search, the stain, the illness, the madness, or the pain. There was no in between, no upside. It was all spiraling down as one and knitting together, so dark and heavy that it sucked the breath right out of her. At the end of the day, with progress at a standstill, she sat at her desk for an extra half hour to bypass the evening rush. She didn't want to have to talk to anyone.

When she got home, she set her alarm for 1:30 A.M. and went straight to sleep.

***

She awoke disoriented by the darkness, expecting morning out of habit, especially with her mind scattered every which way to begin with. She put all the pieces together as best she could, dressed, and clutched Arley's card in her infected hand as she sipped a cup of tea. At 2:03, she decided it wouldn't do to wait any longer.

The Floo trip took longer than usual, she noticed; the magic wrung her out, stretched her taut, and turned her inside-out. It felt like something was pulling her from below, like slender hands wrapped around her feet, and it submerged her in a different kind of air--thicker and stickier than usual. Her feet landed on the packed, mossy earth of a perfectly cylindrical tunnel. It had no flat surfaces, just smooth edges all around like the inside of a pipe. The ends of roots poked out alongside jagged-edged embedded rocks. The meagre light came from glowing lumps of fungus scattered randomly along the floor, ceiling, and walls--although, as with any round thing, there was no way to say where one part ended and the next began.

Hermione took care not to trample any of the luminous spores as she walked forward. She tried to supplement the light with her wand, but her Lumos did something she'd never seen before: instead of appearing at the tip of her wand, the glowing sphere hovered approximately ten centimetres to the left. When she moved her wand, the light moved with it, but they weren't connected. It was so disconcerting that she put it out and continued in the shadows. Before long, she found a round wooden door nestled into the dirt; it was locked, and so she knocked. For a long time, nothing happened. As she waited, she noticed that inside the first door was a smaller door, and inside that one was the smallest door of all. She inspected the knotty wood and the dirty little brass handles, feeling stupider with each passing moment, like she'd fallen for some elaborate prank that had cost the entirety of George Weasley's bank vault to pull together. Realistically, however, the only person he'd work this hard to trick was Ron. She blinked rapidly and shook herself, in case she was dreaming and needed to wake up. She touched the side of the tunnel with the fingertips of her unstained hand and found it unsettlingly moist. The littlest door opened at last, just in time for a stranger to catch her in the act of wiping her hand on her robes. One yellow-gold eye peered at her through the circular hole, narrowed briefly, and disappeared when the door closed--she heard a click as the miniature latch snapped into place. Then, the second-smallest door opened to reveal the face of a man with smooth dark skin and high cheekbones; his chiseled features and shockingly bright eyes put together made him one of the most attractive human beings Hermione had ever seen.

"Do you have an appointment?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "With Blanche Arley." She tried to look around him through the hole, but she couldn't see anything past his broad shoulders.

"You're early," he said. "Wait here while I put some things in order." As soon as the last word was out of his mouth, he slammed the door. Like Arley, he spoke and moved unusually quickly. They were clearly part of the same group, and it made her wonder when the lot of them found the time to breathe.

Again, she waited for a long time. When she couldn't handle it anymore, she knocked again. After another moment, the tiny door reopened to show a different eye--ice blue and surrounded by fair, wrinkled skin. The small door closed, and the largest one opened.

"You're late," Arley said, as she beckoned Hermione inside a dimly-lit room with rough stone walls and an uncomfortably low ceiling. It didn't have a floor or any windows.

"No, I wasn't," she said. "I was standing out there for half an hour!"

"And it didn't do you any good, now did it?" She paused just long enough to shake her head disapprovingly, then turned and walked away with her heels echoing against the stone floor.

As she followed, Hermione tried to tell her about the locked door and the man who'd told her to wait, but she didn't seem to care. Arley led her down a corridor so narrow that they had to edge along sideways to fit. It ended at the landing of an iron spiral staircase, which they followed deeper underground. At the bottom, they took a small wooden bridge across a strange and misplaced stream, then curved around another winding stone corridor. After several forks and turns, they arrived at a room filled with several identical doors. Arley pulled a large key ring from her pocket and selected an old-looking key, which she used to open the second door from the left on the longest wall. The room, which was about the size of the bathroom at Hermione's flat, contained three wooden chairs around a plastic table, like the kind Muggles used on their patios. The space was so small that all of the chairs backed right up against the walls. There was a blond man sitting in one of them with his head buried in his hands.

"Have a seat," Arley said. She stretched her arm toward the flimsy chairs and grinned, wide and grey. Try as she might, Hermione couldn't will herself to do so just yet; she couldn't stop looking at the man with the familiar hair. "Ignore him," Arley added after a moment, as though she'd just noticed the extra person less than a metre away from her. "We aren't sure what to do with him yet."

"Who is he?" Hermione asked. When he heard her voice, the man lifted his head to look at her with blank eyes. He was thinner and paler than usual, so much that his skin looked paper-white, but he was unmistakably Draco Malfoy. She clapped her hand over her mouth and choked on air, but he didn't react. He only studied her face, like he was trying to figure out how they might've known each other.

"He showed up a few weeks ago," Arley said. She brushed past Hermione, sat beside Draco, and patted the empty seat. "Come on, sit down."

Hermione moved forward until she reached the chair and held onto it as an anchor. "Draco?" she asked.

Again, he didn't react. Still he stared.

"We're calling him Mr. White because, well, look at him." Arley gestured toward Draco with a dry, nasally laugh. "Also, he didn't have a name when he got here, so we had to call him something."

"Who are you?" he asked. If there had been any doubt about his identity, hearing his voice dispelled it.

"How did you get here?" she asked back, too shocked to introduce herself. Even if he'd been memory charmed, his skin was completely clean--even his left arm. Furthermore, she'd seen him in the hospital only the previous day.

He opened his mouth to answer, but Arley interrupted. "Don't mind him--I haven't the time to listen to you two converse. Let's take a look at your hand."

"But--" Arley cut her off by grabbing her hand without warning. She held it against the table, inspecting the fingers. "You saw him at the hospital," Hermione continued. "This is obviously Draco Malfoy."

Arley glanced at him briefly, tilted her head, and nodded. "Now that you mention it, they are rather identical." Her voice was casual as she ran her crooked nails along the lines in Hermione's palm.

"And this 'Mr. White' showed up at the same time Draco went into a coma?" She wanted to yank her hand away, but this new problem didn't erase her old ones. She still had to deal with them in order, if only to retain some semblance of a logical life.

"Yes, it would've been around that time. Relax your hand." Arley touched each of her fingers in turn, bending them forward and back and squeezing the tips. "Now make a fist." She complied, and Arley rubbed her knuckles painfully hard.

"Aren't you the least bit concerned about these coincidences?"

Arley wrapped her own hand around Hermione's and turned it over to inspect her wrist. "No. Coincidences are dreadfully common," she said. "Best to just ignore them until they go away. It's only when you can't solve a problem that they begin to seem important."

"But sometimes they are important."

"I suppose that's true, but usually they're more of a nuisance than anything." Arley lifted Hermione's hand to take a closer look at her stained finger. "This is going to get worse before it gets better."

"It's going to get better on its own?"

"Yes, but not until after it gets worse and before it goes away entirely." Arley let go of her hand at last, and Hermione clasped it against her chest.

"How much worse?"

"There's no way to be certain. However, you may notice some time hiccoughs, and some things might be a bit more east than usual."

"More what?"

"More east," Arley explained, with little patience. "Less west. About the same amount of north and south."

She still didn't understand, but she dropped the issue anyway. "What do you mean by 'time hiccoughs'?"

Arley checked her watch and then looked at her wearily, as though she were wasting time on purpose. "Haven't you ever had the hiccoughs?"

"Well, yes."

"Like that, but with time. There could be less of a smoothness."

"I see." She didn't.

Arley stood and brushed off her skirt. "I really must be going. Can you show yourself out?"

"I'm not sure I remember the way," she said, which was quite an understatement indeed.

"Fine," Arley huffed. "Mr. White will show you--he may as well make himself useful around here."

She left the room without another glance, and Hermione turned to face Mr. White.

"I don't know the way, either," he said, marking the first time he'd ever spoken to her in a pleasant tone, except that this wasn't really him. "I've never actually left."

"And I can't just Disapparate?"

He shrugged, easy and elegant. "Try if you'd like, but I don't know what would happen."

She slumped down in her rickety chair and leaned her head back against the stone wall, staring straight ahead. After the odd way her first spell turned out, she had misgivings about Apparition anyway--ten centimetres in the wrong place could make a big difference. "You never told me where you came from," she said, shifting her focus. One problem at a time.

"You never told me who you were," he said, with cold defiance. In a way, it set her at ease to hear his familiar disdain, even through the mouth of a rather identical clone.

"Granger," she said. She would've told anyone else her first name, but Draco had never used it, and it would've sounded funny if that were to change. She offered her hand across the tiny table, and he shook it. His hands were quite cold. "I met Arley through...work." Even Hermione herself didn't know why she'd felt the need to explain at all, much less to lie, and she could tell Draco didn't believe her.

"Right. Well, I woke up in a field one day," he said, "and then someone brought me in here. I suppose it's better than the alternative." She assumed he meant freezing to death in the field, in which case she tended to agree.

"Did it have a long stone path, leading from a Muggle neighbourhood up to a little building?"

"That's the one. Is that how you came in?"

"Not this time. I took the Floo."

"Oh." He adjusted his position, and from the sound of things, that poor little rotten chair could just barely handle the strain. "I've seen you before, you know."

"Only for seven years of school," she said, although she doubted that was what he meant.

He considered her. "No, that's not it. I've only seen you in dreams--well, one dream, really. I only have one dream. I'm lying in a white room next to a table covered in jars of plants, and I'm paralyzed--I can't even open and close my eyes, but somehow I can see, and different people come in and stand over me. You were there twice." He paused and drummed his fingers against the plastic table, causing it to wobble against the dirt floor.

She turned his words over and over in her mind: they answered all her questions and replaced them, one by one, with a whole new set. "That makes a lot of sense, actually," she said.

"It does?"

"You'd be surprised."

"What does it mean, then?" It seemed like a bad idea to tell him. "Is it some sort of subconscious symbolism?"

"I wouldn't say symbolism," she began. Mercifully, she was interrupted: the beautiful man she'd met at the door poked his head into the room.

"What are you two still doing here?" he asked. His yellow eyes shone brighter than the fungus in the tunnel. "I need to use this room. I booked it in advance." He stepped all the way inside and crossed his arms over his chest.

She almost asked what, exactly, he or anyone else would want with a room like this, but finding her way home took precedence. "I don't know the way out," she said. "Can you show me to the Floo?"

"And Arley told me to stay with her," Mr. White added, to her extreme surprise.

"She did? When?"

"Before you arrived. She said I was your problem now, since it's partly your fault I'm here."

"What? That's not possible! You were in--" A coma, she almost said, but stopped herself. "You got here long before I had anything to do with this, and I still don't!"

"Don't snap at me," he said, curling his lip. "I'm just repeating what I was told, and she made it sound like you already knew. She wants you to take me to Haigha."

"The Seer?" Now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense that Arley and Haigha ran in the same circles.

"Maybe. How many Haighas do you know?"

The beautiful man cleared his throat. "You people really do have a penchant for wasting time," he said. She didn't know which "people" he meant, but it seemed to include both her and Mr. White. "Follow me."

He walked away with small, swift steps. Hermione caught up easily, but Mr. White had to move the table out of the way just to get out of the tiny room, and she heard him running behind her. They followed the same path as before, across the little bridge and up the spiral staircase, until they reached the round door.

"Goodbye," said the beautiful man, without a hint of warmth.

As he left in extreme haste, Hermione turned to Mr. White. "She wants me to take you to Haigha now?" she asked. "In the middle of the night?"

"Unless you've got somewhere else to keep me." She could tell from the bite to his voice that all the hurrying hadn't improved his mood. They went out into the tunnel and followed it to the end, where a small fireplace was waiting with Floo powder. She didn't want to barge straight into Haigha's living room at such an odd time, so she called out her own address and pulled Mr. White along with her.

Her living room was better-lit than the caverns, and she could see that he was even paler than she'd first realised. Even his hair was nearly white; he looked like Draco Malfoy after someone had accidentally washed him with the wrong load of laundry. Before she could get her bearings to Apparate them outside Haigha's house, he caught sight of the Muggle photographs on her mantle.

"Is this how they all are above ground?" he asked. "They aren't frozen down below."

"No," she said. "Those are Muggle photos--the magical kind still move up here."

He nodded. "So, these are Muggles?" He'd heard about them, she assumed, from Arley and whoever else had been taking care of him, but he couldn't possibly have met one.

"Some of them. Those are my parents," she said, gesturing to an old wedding picture.

"Interesting," he said. "I wish I had parents."

Hermione, incidentally, wished he didn't. Well, that was harsh; she only wished the parents he did have were better people. "Maybe, er, you'll find them someday," she offered weakly, avoiding eye contact.

He studied her face with suspicion. "It's starting to seem like you know more about me than I do."

"No, we just met," she said. "You're merely rather identical to someone I used to know."

"The one you and Arley were talking about?"

"Yes."

"Does he know about me?"

"No, he's sick."

"In a white room with herbs?"

Draco had always been far more clever than Hermione had been willing to give him credit for, and so too was Mr. White. "You should probably talk to Haigha about this," she said.

"She won't tell me," he said, suddenly desperate. His wide eyes and frantic tone tugged at her sympathy. "Not if she's one of their people--they all speak as if they're allergic to specificity."

"Trust me, I know. It bothers me, too, but I don't know if it's a good idea to tell you about my... other acquaintance. To be perfectly honest, I'm a tad out of my depth here." Things Hermione Granger never thought she'd say, especially not to Draco Malfoy's doppelgänger.

"What could it hurt to tell me? I just want something to think about."

He had almost no knowledge, she realised. He'd been dropped out of nowhere into a field without even knowing his own name, and she couldn't imagine the torment of a blank mind. "I don't know," she said. "It just seems like it might cause, you know, a time hiccough. Or something."

They stared at each other, and she grimaced at her own vague phrasing. In fact, much as she disliked it, she was beginning to understand why they did it: if she typically needed to worry about things like "time hiccoughs," she probably wouldn't be able to describe it any more clearly, either. The word blue did little to explain what it meant for a thing to be blue, she thought; it was something that one could only comprehend in the context of a shared experience of blueness.

"We should get to Haigha's," she added, when he didn't respond. She was about to Apparate them when a thought struck her: impulsively, she went to her bookshelf and grabbed a few paperbacks at random. She offered them to Mr. White. "These might help if you're bored," she said.

"Thanks." He actually sounded sincere, which was profoundly odd under the circumstances. She wondered what the real Draco Malfoy would think if he knew how politely his clone was treating her. He hugged the books to his chest like a child on the first day of school, and Hermione grabbed his shoulder to take them to Haigha's.

She'd been picturing the doorstep in her mind, but instead they landed in the dead flowerbed a metre or so to the left. After what Arley had said, it occurred to her to check something--she used her wand to find the direction, and sure enough, they'd Apparated slightly more east than usual. She cast another Lumos experimentally, and again, the light appeared ten centimetres east of her wand tip. The more powerful the spell, it seemed, the more east things would be. Furthermore, it made no sense whatsoever.

She suppressed her confusion and trudged out of the dirt up to the front door, where she was surprised to see that the lights in the house were on. The door opened before she had time to knock.

"Did you know we were coming?" she asked, despite herself. In that moment, anything seemed plausible.

"No," Haigha said. She wore a floral-print housecoat with pink slippers, and her irritation was evident. "I heard you stomping on my azaleas."

"That was an accident," she said. "I meant to Apparate more west."

Haigha crossed her arms over her chest, probably gearing up for a good lecture about young people and skeptics, when she noticed Mr. White standing behind Hermione. "Oh, no," she said. "No, no, no. I told Blanche I won't be responsible for him. You take him right back where you found him!" She was so incensed that she stomped her slippered foot on the doormat, resulting in a less-than-intimidating phut.

"I can't," Hermione said. "She told me to take him to you, and if I go back there, she'll only tell me the same thing again. You two need to work this out between yourselves." In her exhaustion and annoyance, she seized Mr. White by the shoulder and shoved him forward into Haigha's entryway. He stumbled, righted himself, and then sent her a glare.

"I'm right here," he said. "Would you mind talking about me like I'm a human being?"

"Technically, you aren't," Haigha said. "You're just very much like one." At the gobsmacked look on Mr. White's face, she patted his arm absently. "A specific one, if it helps."

From the look of things, it didn't. "Then what am I?"

Haigha looked between them, tapped her foot a few times, and sighed. "I suppose you lot may as well come in. No sense freezing to death if you aren't going to leave." Hermione and Mr. White stepped inside, and Haigha closed the door behind them and locked it. "I already told you what you are, Mr. White: you are very much like a human being."

"But--" He opened and closed his fists, then turned his head down and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Can't any of you talk normally for one conversation?"

It hadn't been much of a contest, but Hermione already liked Mr. White better than Draco.

"Speak for yourself," Haigha said. "You two are so insufferably direct I can scarcely understand you sometimes." She paused and gathered her housecoat tighter against the lingering chill. "Have a seat, if you must. Tea?"

It was far from the friendliest offer Hermione had ever heard, but Mr. White didn't seem to mind. "Yes," he said. "With lemon."

Haigha waved her hand in the general direction of her uncomfortable armchairs and walked away, muttering to herself in a put-upon tone. As soon as she made it out of earshot, Mr. White turned to Hermione and leaned in close. "You can't leave me with her," he whispered.

She checked to make sure Haigha was safely in the kitchen. "What else am I supposed to do?" she whispered back. "I have a job, you know."

"Perfect," he said. "You'll hardly even know I'm there."

She caught his implication and almost laughed at the absurdity--if the real Draco only knew. "Oh, I hope you aren't inviting yourself to stay with me."

"I wouldn't normally do this," he began, then caught himself and rethought it. "Well, maybe I would, considering I don't know myself very well, but you know what she's like."

"Well, I can confirm that you definitely wouldn't normally do this," she said. She moved past him into the sitting room and claimed one of the armchairs, hoping he'd take the hint. Since he wasn't technically Draco Malfoy, he didn't technically deserve the horrible fate of living with Haigha, but she had enough on her plate as it was.

He followed her in and sat beside her. "Fine. Just think about it," he said.

According to the clock on the wall, it was already 5:00 A.M., and Hermione had work later that morning. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, thinking about how relieved she'd be if this were a dream, until Haigha brought in the tea tray. She placed it on the table where her scrying supplies still lay scattered and sat opposite her guests.

"It's actually rather convenient that you've stopped by, Officer Granger," she said.

"It is?"

"Yes--I've located your suspect."

Hermione's hand went still half-way to her teacup. "You have?"

Haigha preened and stirred her tea with obvious satisfaction. "Yes," she said. "You can call off your silly little manhunt now."

"Where is he?"

Haigha pulled her wand from her housecoat pocket and aimed it at the map on the table, illuminating a golden dot near Knockturn Alley. "His family lived here for a month when he was seven," she said. "It was a motel then. Now it's abandoned, and you can find him in the crawlspace."

"Are you sure? We don't have a record of that residence."

Haigha looked at her like she was quite dim. "I know you don't, or you would have found him. They paid cash and left in a hurry."

"How did you know he was there?"

She gestured to her crystals and her map, with all the glowing purple symbols. "You have a job, and so do I."

"I must admit I'm impressed." Pride be damned, Hermione could give credit where it was due. "This means I'll have to go mobilize the Aurors." She showed Mr. White a small, sad smile that she hoped conveyed her apologies for what she was about to do. "Goodbye, Mr. White. It was nice to meet you."

He nodded grimly.

"Wait," Haigha said. "When you find him, be kind. He's quite frightened--and he's innocent."

Hermione opened her mouth to question that assertion, but suddenly she had already questioned it and received an answer and Disapparated and tried to reach her team and failed and slept briefly and woke. She sat at her kitchen table drinking tea as the sun rose, with foreign memories from lost time invading her mind.

Chapter Text

Haigha was right about the children's father. He'd been questioned under Veritaserum and proved not only innocent but utterly devastated at the loss of his children. He hadn't seen anything that could help them find the real killer, and he couldn't sit still for more than ten minutes without fighting back a spontaneous rush of sobs. Despite all that was happening, Mr. White and his predicament wove in and out of her thoughts--she watched him squirm in her mind's eye, trapped in an endless tea party with a madwoman. The image of Draco Malfoy haunted her, too, for he was either part of Mr. White or the other way around. If it was true that he'd been trying to remove his Dark Mark when all this happened, she couldn't help but wonder about his motives. It could have been anything from vanity to a complete change of heart, although the former struck her more likely.

Finally, there was the problem of her hand: just as Arley warned, it was getting worse. The black stain covered her first two fingers entirely, and she'd never quite gotten over the fact that no one else could see it. Her first instinct was still to hide it self-consciously, even though there wasn't any point.

The gut-wrenching sight of a father's grief, along with the fact that they were fresh out of leads, had already made for a disheartening day at work when she received the worst news of all: there had been another murder. Another set of identical twin girls, age eight this time. They'd been out with their parents in Diagon Alley, waiting with their mother while their father shopped for ties, and then they disappeared. Their mother had searched frantically until they were found only a few hours later, on a bed of dead grass and rotting leaves at the outskirts of a nearby park. Their heads had been placed in their hands.

At the end of the day, she remained in her office paralyzed by hopelessness. The first autopsy folder lingered in the centre of her desk, teasing her with its terrible images and truths, and soon it would be joined by a second. There were two sets of parents cycling through the stages of grief, being helped along by liars who said there were only five. Someday, though, they would all find the sixth one buried deep in the coldest part of the mind: remembering. The final stage that never ended.

There was only one thing she could possibly do to help any of them, and she'd known it ever since the morning's interrogation had confirmed the Seer's prediction: she needed to go back to Haigha.

Once the rest of her coworkers had cleared out at half past five, she took to the empty corridors. She continued walking longer than usual, until she passed Cassandra's office for the second time and stopped in her tracks. She began walking again, more quickly this time, down and down and down the same corridor. When she passed the same office a third time, she stopped again to look at her watch: 5:31. As someone with little experience in the field of time hiccoughs, she had no way of knowing whether it would help to keep walking or only tire her out. The minute hand on her watch jerked back and forth between 5:31 and 5:32, but it would go no farther, until it did. The corridor blended into a nauseating whirl of colour around her wrist as the hands spun around to 7:13.

The sensation was nothing like using a Time-Turner. It wasn't a quick jump like she might have expected. She really existed in the world for all the time she lost, processing information and making decisions, and she remembered everything that happened; it simply went by impossibly quickly. After she'd left the Ministry, she had made herself a snack at home and then Apparated to Haigha's, this time envisioning a spot a metre to the right of the doorstep. It had dropped her just in the right place, and now she sat on the sofa with Mr. White, waiting for Haigha to prepare the tea.

"How are you holding up?" she asked, even though the answer was obvious. His scowl hadn't lifted since she'd seen him.

"How do you think?"

"Doesn't she leave you alone most of the time? She's always talking about how busy she is."

"That's the problem--apparently, she needs a lot of help. Also, she's not pleased about having me here at all. You wouldn't believe what she's got me doing." He laughed joylessly and shook his head. "Polishing her crystals, plotting the stars every night, grooming her cat... It's been a nightmare."

He may not have been Draco Malfoy, but he was the next best thing, and it should have satisfied her to see him reduced to cleaning and feline maintenance. It didn't, though. "Has she been helping you figure out how to get back to wherever you came from?"

He shook his head. "She says it'll work itself out when 'certain events transpire.'" She could tell he'd spent a lot of time with Haigha, for his impression of her was both accurate and quite funny. She lifted her hand to hide a smile as the Seer entered the room.

"It's good to see you humbled, princess," she said, so casually vindictive. At least Hermione didn't have to live with her.

"Of course," she said. "A serial killer's still on the loose, but the most important thing is that you were right."

"That isn't my fault, and you know it." She sat quietly for several minutes, sipping her tea while Hermione resisted the urge to check her watch. A time hiccough would have been nice just then, so she could skip to the end without having to wait at Haigha's leisure while a killer roamed the streets. "I could have told you at the beginning that you sought the wrong man, but you wouldn't have believed me. I could have told you a lot of things, and I still can, but I'm not going to."

"Why not? We've already established that I believe you now. You've converted a skeptic, all right? Now, can we please catch a murderer?" There would be more and more lost children until they found the perpetrator, and still Haigha looked upon her with smug disinterest. As usual, her tea was growing cold on the table.

"Officer Granger, I know that you believe yourself to be quite clever, but you can't see the rabbit for the fur." Hermione scoffed at the made-up expression as much as the insult, but Haigha didn't react. "I know you spoke with Blanche about coincidences, but she has a personal bone to pick with them. Just because Blanche and coincidences don't get along doesn't mean they can't play well with others." She paused, then pressed a hand to her chest and added: "Don't tell her I defended them. I'm just trying not to choose sides."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"In any case, I doubt they're terribly fond of you at the moment. You're ignoring them entirely, and it's most disrespectful."

"Disrespectful," she repeated blandly. "To the coincidences."

"If you don't clean up your act, they'll pile on until you can't tell one from the other up, down, or edgewise."

"I see." She didn't.

"However, if you'd like me to mediate your dispute, it won't count as a service to your Department. You'll have to pay my regular hourly rate."

"Which is?"

"Fifty Galleons."

Steep, to be sure, but she'd already admitted she was out of her depth--so much so that she was considering paying someone to "mediate" between herself and an abstract concept--but she was willing to try anything at that point. "Fine," she said, after a moment.

"Hurts, doesn't it?" Mr. White taunted. Beside her, he grinned with the glee of watching Haigha torment someone else.

"Not as bad as a beheading," she said. "I haven't lost sight of that, and I won't."

"That's not a bad start," Haigha said. "At the beginning--always a classic, often quite effective."

"I must confess that I'm not sure how, exactly, this is going to work."

"It's simple: I'll help you understand where coincidences are coming from, and together we'll try to reach a compromise."

She sorted words in her mind, trying to think of a way to phrase such a stupid question. "But I don't see how they'll... respond. The coincidences, that is."

"If you're lucky, they won't." Haigha gave her a moment to speak, but she'd run out of language entirely. "Back to the beginning: what was the first coincidence that you encountered?"

She picked up her cold tea and pulled out her wand to warm it up. "Before we get to that, which way is east again?" Haigha pointed, and Hermione moved her wand tip about an arm's length away from the cup in the opposite direction before casting the spell. She'd hit her target, and steam rose from the surface. When she looked back up, Haigha's expression showed an emotion she'd never seen before: approval.

"Look at you, adapting," she said. "Don't forget: you can bend so much farther than you think before you break."

Coming from Haigha, the near-compliment was rather touching. The aroma of the tea helped her mind relax, and she scrolled back through her jumbled memories of the past few weeks. "Well," she said, "I guess the first coincidence was when I ran into Arley at the hospital."

"No," Haigha said. "That was merely a notable event. A coincidence can only occur after such an event, distinguished by its similarity therewith. Also, it isn't a coincidence until you know it's a coincidence: in other words, that would count if you had known that I knew Blanche, but you didn't."

"I see." She did. "So, the first coincidence was when I ran into Arley the second time."

Haigha nodded. "That's right. And the next?"

"When I found Mr. White."

"And then?"

"When I learned about his dreams."

"Yes, and?"

"When I found out you and Arley knew each other."

"Wrong again." She set down her tea and waved her hands encouragingly. "There's your problem--you missed one in between those two."

"I did?"

"The most important one of all."

She paused to think about it and realised something unsettling. "Hang on, how do you know all this?"

"Blanche told me what you said. We tell each other everything." Once again, she pressed her hand fearfully to her chest. "Except as it relates to coincidences, of course. She can't know about this."

Hermione didn't want to badmouth Arley to her best friend, but she had no intention of speaking to her again unless she absolutely had to. "I promise I won't tell," she said.

"Good. Now, think back carefully. There was a coincidence at the apex of all the others--the capstone coincidence, as you've probably heard it called."

She hadn't heard any such thing, but she did as she was told, thinking aloud this time. "Before Arley looked at my hand, she and I talked about this. I brought it up, and she scolded me--Mr. White arrived at the same time Draco fell ill, which I remember thinking was at the same time as something else. I read about it in the Prophet the day those children were killed."

"Precisely," Haigha said. "You've found the root of it."

For a second, it felt like she had truly unraveled a mystery, but then she realised that she was no closer to the heart of the matter. "All right," she said. "Can we get back to the case now?"

Haigha's approval vanished. "I honestly don't understand it," she said. "How can you people go through life sorting everything into meaningless categories? You insist on separating your lives into piles of nonsense!"

"You're one to talk about nonsense. And what do you mean by 'you people'?"

"Exactly that," she snapped. "People like you. In case you haven't noticed, Blanche and I are not like you."

"If you're so enlightened, by all means, explain it to me. I'm here to stop a killer before any more children lose their heads." Her breaths came hard and fast, and her hand clenched so hard around her teacup that it threatened to shatter. "If you can help, then you'd damn well better."

Haigha pulled out a gold pocket watch and noted the time. "In that case, your personal session is over. Normally, you'd owe me fifty Galleons, but I don't think that will be sufficient in this case." She fixed her gaze on Mr. White and tightened her lips in disgust. "As payment, you'll take him with you when you leave."

"What? We had an agreement!"

"And now it's changed. I'm sick of looking at him, and Martin doesn't care for him, either." Martin, she could reasonably assume, was Haigha's cat. "Adapt, Officer Granger. Flex your mind for once in your life."

If Haigha knew her at all, she would know that Hermione was more than capable of flexibility. She'd moved into an entirely different world at the age of eleven, severed all ties with her parents to fight in a war at seventeen, brought them back and delicately regrew as much of their memory as she could salvage at nineteen, and now faced the daily challenges of an incredibly difficult job. She was the poster child for adaptability; she was water over rock. "I'll take Mr. White," she said, as if to prove all this and more. "But you need to tell me everything you know about this case, or I'll be forced to terminate your involvement with the Department. We aren't paying you to play mind games."

"Believe me, Officer, I'd hate to be involved with your Department any longer than I have to." Hermione could tell she was angry, too, and she paused to finish her tea and collect herself. "But it eases my mind that you'll take care of Mr. White. He's caused more problems for us than you could possibly understand."

"You keep telling me what I will and will not understand," she said, with forced composure. "But you won't even give me a chance."

Haigha considered her, then nodded. "I see the problem. You think I'm insulting you, when in fact I'm only stating the truth: you won't understand because it would be far too complicated for me to explain. I would need to start at the beginning, as we discussed, and it would take approximately three days if none of us slept."

If processing nonsense were a marketable skill, Hermione would soon be able to add it to her resume. "Let's be flexible, then," she mocked. "Start at the end."

"If you insist." Haigha shrugged her bony shoulders and surveyed her surroundings. "You and Mr. White and I were drinking tea, and before that we argued, and you agreed to take him off my hands, which I appreciated--"

"Skip ahead," she interrupted. "Er, backwards, that is, to before I was involved."

Haigha closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as though she were truly moving back through time in her mind. At last, she spoke without opening her eyes. "Draco Malfoy was in his home, working on cleansing potions. As far as we can guess, he was trying to remove some powerful and evil magic that had previously been embedded in his arm. His solutions weren't working, and so he attempted to break apart the magic and release it. Unfortunately for all of us, he succeeded. His Dark Mark contained a great many years' worth of time, enough for it to ebb and flow for the rest of Mr. Malfoy's life, with each moment written into the fabric of the spell. When it shattered, it caused something much greater than a time hiccough--more like a time seizure.

"All that extra time had to go somewhere, and some of it fell to us. Blanche and I took on eight years between us to mitigate the damage, and we gave as much as we could to Mr. White. Someone else took the rest, even though she already had far more time than she should've. She's using it now, minute by minute, and that's why we can't find her--she has a great deal more time than we do. We can't help but arrive a few seconds after she's left. That is also why I can't stand to look at Mr. White."

Hermione took a moment to swallow all the new information. She was silent for a long time, working it out and formulating questions until her mind overloaded and went blank.

"This is why I didn't want to tell you everything at once," Haigha said.

"So, that's who I am?" Mr. White asked. "I'm the man who tore a hole in the universe?"

"Not exactly. You're a physical manifestation of a portion of his conscious mind."

"Oh." Mr. White ran his hands through his hair and exhaled heavily. He opened his mouth to speak again, then closed it and shook his head.

"Who is this person who took all the extra time?" Hermione asked, when she found her voice. "Is she the one who killed the children?"

"We believe so. She's done it before."

If Hermione thought she'd felt hopeless earlier that day, it was nothing compared to this. She'd officially graduated to despair. "How can we catch her?"

"It isn't your job anymore," Haigha said. "I must admit that several of your coincidences were actually planned events--since you were overseeing the search for an innocent man, we had to get ahold of you somehow. Now that we've ironed all this out, you can help by taking care of Mr. White and minding your own business."

"This is my business, and it's still my job," she argued. "We clearly need to work together--our people are the ones getting killed." Now she was doing it, too--drawing a line between her world and Haigha's. The others may as well have come from a parallel universe, but Haigha had been telling fortunes in this house for as far back as anyone could remember. Either she traveled at will between dimensions or Hermione had no idea what was going on, and neither of those options seemed especially unlikely.

"And we're the ones who have to clean up his mess." Haigha gestured to Mr. White, then hesitated. "Well, not his, really, but you know what I mean."

"In that case," Mr. White said, "it's only fair if we help you." His offer surprised Hermione greatly, and he must've seen it on her face. "What? Wouldn't my real self want to pitch in? I doubt he did this on purpose."

"He couldn't have," Haigha said.

"But I doubt he'd try to help," Hermione added.

Mr. White looked disappointed--perhaps he'd been hoping his real self was a good person. Who wouldn't hope for that? "Well, I will," he said.

"That's quite noble of both of you," Haigha said, sarcasm evident. "But you haven't the faintest clue what you're doing."

All things considered, her statement was accurate, and Hermione conceded defeat. "Will you at least keep me updated?" she asked. "I have to tell them something at work."

"If it'll get you out of my house," Haigha said. She stood and began to gather the tea tray.

"Our pleasure," Mr. White muttered after she left. She could be heard knocking things around in the kitchen and ranting to herself, which seemed like a decent cue to leave. Hermione stood, and then she was sitting again as Haigha left the room.

"Our pleasure," Mr. White muttered. Hermione stared at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand spin this way and that. Part of her wanted to scream with frustration as she listened to the same cups rattle against the same sink, over and over again, but she hadn't screamed in that moment and couldn't change it now.

It passed soon enough, and time sped up briefly to make up for the hiccough just as it had before.

When the world slowed back down to normal speed, it didn't feel as normal as it used to--it only took a few time hiccoughs to make a person wonder if the whole thing was altogether "linear." Hermione was setting up a makeshift bed on her couch for Mr. White, who was shuffling his feet awkwardly near her coffee table. Draco would never have shown this kind of vulnerability, and it fascinated her to watch his duplicate reveal everything he'd always tried to hide. He'd thanked her no less than three times for letting him stay, offered to help with chores, and apologised for imposing. When she told him it wouldn't be a problem, she wasn't lying: she hadn't wanted to take him in because she'd feared that he would act mostly like Draco, but the sad fact was that Draco's Malfoy-ness must have stemmed solely from his life experiences. At the core of his being, also known as Mr. White, he was more or less a decent fellow; a bit sharp around the edges, a tad quick to judge, but generally okay company. Also, he didn't know a single other person or own any personal possessions, so he wasn't likely to throw any large parties or leave his clutter around the common areas.

When she finished setting up the bed, he sat on it experimentally and fluffed the pillow. "Thanks," he said, bringing the tally to four.

"Don't worry about it." It was still much too early to sleep, and so she sat in an armchair and studied his face--it would take some time to get used to seeing him with a neutral expression--while an awkward silence elbowed its way between them. She would have normally offered tea at a time like this, but she reckoned they'd both had more than enough of it lately. "So," she said.

"So," he repeated. "How well do you know my real self?"

"Well enough," she said. "We went to school together, but we didn't get along."

"Why not?"

"It's a long story."

Mr. White cracked a smile, which was even stranger than neutrality. "Did you turn him down for a date?" When she got over the surprise, she laughed until her lungs hurt. "What's so funny? Did he cry?"

He was flirting with her. Oddly enough, she'd been less taken aback by the time hiccoughs. "I--you--" She cut herself off, grasping for words. "If you'd ever met your real self, you'd understand why this is funny."

His face turned serious then, and he leaned forward to inspect her expression. "No, I understand now. You hate me," he said. "Or him, I suppose."

"Mostly him," she admitted. "I didn't want to, but--don't take this the wrong way--he made it difficult not to. He hated me first."

"Why?" Mr. White didn't seem overly worried about it--more curious than anything, which was reasonable. If Hermione were a fragment of someone else, she'd want to know all about them, too.

"Because my parents are Muggles," she said. "And I got better marks than he did in school."

She'd been trying her best to sugarcoat things when it came to Draco, but apparently she'd failed. She could tell from the look on his face that Mr. White was taking it pretty hard. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," he said, although he hadn't existed long enough to hear a great many things. "Is there anything good about him?"

"Oh, of course. No one's all bad," she said, stalling. "He's very, er, well-dressed."

"I see." He narrowed his eyes and stared into the middle distance.

"He's rather clever as well," she added after a moment. Mr. White only nodded. "And he wasn't bad at Quidditch." She'd never spoken so highly of Draco before, but it made her uncomfortable to see Mr. White so distraught.

"No wonder you didn't want me staying here," he said. "Although Haigha probably hates my real self even more than you do."

He had a lot in common with Draco when it came to the self-pity routine, the difference being that Mr. White actually had a good reason to pity himself. He was reacting the same way anyone would upon learning that everyone he knew--all three of them, counting Arley--couldn't stand him.

"I didn't want Draco staying here, and I thought you'd be like him, but you aren't. All right?"

"I guess," he said. Suddenly, he turned to her with wide eyes. "What time is it?"

She checked her watch. "Five past eight."

His shoulders slumped with relief. "Oh, good. That was just a really long time hiccough, then."

"Do you have them a lot?"

"Yes," he said. "I think I've had every conversation at least three times since I landed here."

In light of that information, she couldn't imagine how painful his time with Haigha must have been. "That sounds exhausting."

"That's true, but it's also rather useful. After I've had the conversation once, I can spend the next few times observing the other person--that's how I knew you hated me."

"I have a problem with him, not you," she corrected.

"Same difference."

She usually hated that expression, but for once it was strangely appropriate. "Haigha said they gave you as much time as they could, whatever that means. I wonder if that has something to do with the extra hiccoughing."

"Probably," he said. "Not that it matters. I reckon I'm getting used to it." She couldn't imagine herself ever getting used to something like that, but Mr. White had never experienced anything else. "What were you thinking about just now?" he asked, out of nowhere. "Not to be forward, but I've watched you think it six or seven times now. It looked interesting."

"Oh," she said. "I was just thinking you were adapting better than I would have."

"Thanks." Five and counting--the world had truly gone mad.

***

The next day was Saturday, but she didn't realise it until she arrived at a barren Ministry Headquarters. It had become increasingly difficult to put names to the days now that she knew their dirty little secret: they weren't days at all, just arbitrary handfuls of time sorted into meaningless categories by people whose time always moved in straight lines. Nevertheless, Saturday still meant that she hadn't needed to force herself awake so early. She went home and slept a while longer, but it didn't make her any less tired.

She shuffled into her living room and found Mr. White already awake, grinning excitedly at the clock on the wall. He didn't notice her, so she watched him for a moment. "What are you so happy about?" she asked.

It startled him, and he blinked rapidly before he looked at her. "There wasn't much to do while you were asleep, so I was trying a few things--I'm getting better acquainted with time."

"How so?"

"When it starts to hiccough, I can sort of diffuse the situation." She could tell he was quite pleased with himself, but she hadn't the foggiest idea what he was talking about. "Sorry," he added. "I don't think I can explain it any better than that."

On some level, she could relate. Explaining things was getting even harder than naming the days. "It's all right. Good for you."

"We've only had this conversation once," he continued enthusiastically. "I like it better this way."

"I'm not surprised."

"Where did you go this morning?" he asked. "You weren't out for long."

"I tried to go to work, but then I remembered it's Saturday."

He nodded, thinking it over. "Aren't days odd? Nobody talked about them when I lived with Arley. It took a while to catch on when Haigha tried to explain the process."

"I was just noticing that this morning," she said. "I've had days my whole life, but even the words for them are beginning to sound absurd."

"Haigha said they're named after gods that never even existed."

The more they discussed it, the sillier it all seemed. For the sake of her own sanity, she changed the subject. "So, you can control the hiccoughs now?"

"I'm not quite that far, but I can strike a compromise."

Immediately, she began angling for ways to make use of his new ability. If what Haigha said was correct, Mr. White had quite a bit of time, and she really had no intention of "minding her own business" when it came to a child murderer. For someone as old and supposedly wise as the Seer, she should've known better than to try and take a scrappy young detective off a case. "Maybe you should keep working on it," she said. "There might still be something we can do to help them catch the real killer."

"That'd be nice. I'd feel better about whatever my real self did to make this mess, and it'd knock Haigha down a few pegs. I wouldn't mind that, either." A few days of cat box cleaning had made him bitter. He may have had to clean the same cat box ten times in a row, for all she knew--that would've gotten on her nerves, too.

"Good," she said. "Let me know if you get better at it."

"I'll keep you updated. Also, I've been meaning to ask you: does my real self have a daughter?"

"No, he doesn't have any children."

"A younger sister, maybe?" he asked, with growing concern.

"No, he's an only child. Why?"

"A little girl keeps visiting me in my dreams. I assumed she knew my real self somehow."

Hermione didn't know much about Draco Malfoy's personal life, but she couldn't think of any children who'd be visiting him alone. "What does she look like?"

"She's pale, almost as light as I am, but with black hair and black eyes. Probably about five or six years old." He paused and clenched his jaw. "I'm glad she's not my real self's daughter--I don't like it when she visits. All she does is stand beside my bed, always at night, and stare with this awful blank gaze."

"She visits at night?" Mr. White nodded, as though this were an everyday sort of thing, and she remembered how little he knew about the rules of his real self's world. "The hospital must not know she's there, then. They don't let visitors enter in the middle of the night, especially not unattended children." Especially not when a child killer was on the loose.

"They don't? I didn't know that. And you can't think of any relatives who match the description?"

"No," she said. "I mean, I'm not exactly an authority on Draco's life, but that doesn't sound normal."

He was silent for a moment, thinking it over. "So, in other words, a five-year-old girl keeps sneaking into a hospital to visit a strange adult man in a coma."

"Yes, I think that sums it up."

"How extremely odd," he said.

"Even more so than the other things." She reconsidered that as soon as she said it. "Or less, or perhaps about the same. I can't decide."

"Either way, are you hungry?" he asked abruptly. "Not to change the subject, but I haven't had anything all day."

She hadn't, either, but she didn't notice it until he said something. "Now that you mention it, I could go for a late brunch."

She blinked, and they were finished eating. She had cracked eggs, scrambled them, served tea, and made conversation over breakfast. Time was moving at its formerly consistent speed once more, and she began to think about what Mr. White had told her earlier. "You said you'd tried a few things with time," she said. "How did you do that?"

He surprised her by getting up to clear their plates, without even being asked. "Well, first I realised that I don't pay time nearly enough attention," he said, as he rinsed the dishes like it was the most natural thing in the world. "I tried to ignore everything except time, and I stopped attaching numbers to it. Once I was free of that, it became clear that I've been putting far too much pressure on time, and that's why it's gotten so self-conscious."

"You're talking about time like it's a person."

"You've been treating me like a person."

Fair point. "All right. The time's been hiccoughing out of self-consciousness?"

"Only the backward ones. Those happen when it's trying to make sure it got everything just right."

"What about the forward ones?"

"From what I can tell so far, I think those happen when it's feeling under-appreciated."

"Oh." Hermione's hiccoughs were nearly always forward, and she felt the strangest pang of guilt for neglecting the time. "Then how do you reach a compromise?"

"If I feel like I'm about to go backward, I concentrate on my memories of whatever just happened. If they're clear enough, time starts flowing again at the usual speed. Forward's simpler, since all you have to do is stop and think about time, but I usually go back."

"You do? That's odd," she said, although that word was in danger of overuse.

"Why?"

"I'm the opposite."

Mr. White refilled their teacups and returned to his seat at the table. "That is odd," he said, "now that I think about it--our respective timelines have the inverse of our own problems."

If she'd known he was scrutinising her every word half a dozen times, she'd have taken care to reveal a bit less about herself.

Chapter Text

On Sunday, after thinking about opposites all night, she had come up with an idea for an experiment of her own. In her mind, she imagined herself snubbing time; disregarding it, overlooking it, forgetting it. She thought as quickly as she could about things that hadn't happened yet. Fixated on the future, she cast the present aside, and it worked. A visible motion blur appeared between her mouth and her teacup's position on the table: not much else was moving in her kitchen as time flowed in hyper-speed, so there was only the repetitive arch of her hand and arm where they rose and fell, reached and retracted. Mr. White was talking about something else when time slowed back down, but she interrupted him.

"I just skipped forward on purpose," she announced proudly.

He cocked his head to the side. "Why?"

She hadn't bothered asking herself that question. "I don't know. Just to see if I could."

"Then good job, I guess." He rested his chin on his hands, elbows on the table. "I doubt many people would think to do that," he said. "I feel like it would be more common to try going back. I wish I knew more people so I could say for certain."

"Either way, I think we should try to work with the time hiccoughs as much as we can."

"If nothing else, it'll be something to do. I'm sick of doing nothing." He folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. "It wouldn't be very entertaining, though. How about we play a game instead?"

"I guess we could, if you want," she said. "I think I've got Exploding Snap somewhere."

"Actually, I was thinking we could play Queens." He pulled a wooden box the size of a Muggle card deck from his pocket and placed it on the table. "That's what everyone plays in the Warren." Apparently, Arley's underground maze had an official name. Hermione found it fitting. "I forgot I still had it until I got here, but now I'm glad I brought it."

"Are they going to be angry when they find out you took it?"

He shrugged. "Probably, but everyone down there has at least two decks--a lot of people collect them. I'll give it back to Arley whenever I see her."

Evidently, there was no love lost between the two of them. "All right," she said. "How do you play?"

"It takes some getting used to, but basically you lead one side in a war between the suits. The queens are the leaders, and the object of the game is to have one of your queens control the whole table." He opened the box, and it folded out like a book. As soon as it lay flat, the hinges and seam disappeared. He unfolded it again and again until it covered the whole table. There was a small knob like a radio tuner in the centre of the board, but instead of turning it, he held it between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it up. Another box appeared from nothing, with a sliding door on one side. "When the queens come out, they get to choose which player to side with. Everyone always tries to play with their own decks, because the queens'll choose either whoever they like best--people are so competitive about it in the Warren that they'll try to trick people into using the wrong deck by sneaking into each other's rooms at night and switching them around. If the other person doesn't notice before the queens come out, they have to either play or forfeit, which counts as a loss in the tallies. They have tournaments and everything, but they play those with a special deck that's locked up the rest of the time."

"Doesn't that mean they'll all pick you? They've never met me."

"They will the first time, but they don't know me that well, either. It should even out once they get used to you. The Queen of Hearts chooses first, and Diamonds and Clubs traditionally follow her unless they have a history with one of the players. We'll both get at least one suit, though, since Hearts and Spades never take the same side."

From the sound of things, the game pieces had just as much control as the players. Even in the wizarding world, she'd never heard of a game like this.

"It can be a liability to have too many queens, though," he continued. "Even if they beat the other player, you can't win until one of them manages to take control of all the remaining cards. They try to get each other killed a lot, and you have to make sure at least one makes it out alive."

"Are there kings, too?"

"Yes, but they're second in command. If a queen gets offed, her king still has to join the other suit."

"So, one queen doesn't win until the others are dead?"

"Not always: they can also capture another queen and make her surrender her crown. If that happens, she has to either fight for the other queen's suit or face execution." His excitement was palpable as he explained the game, and she could tell he was just as hooked as the rest of Arley's people. "The rest of her cards have to join the other queen's army, too, but any card except a captured queen can switch sides if it doesn't want to play for a certain suit. They can even quit the game entirely, but they'll only do that if both players are doing so poorly that it's an insult to their whole tradition." He reached for the tiny door, then stopped short. "Oh, that reminds me--they take their game really seriously, and they're quite sensitive. When I let them out, you'll notice that they're funny-looking, but don't say anything about it."

She could tell from the tone of his voice that he knew this from experience. "Is that what you did?"

He pulled a face at the memory. "Arley’s bollocks at explaining how things work, so I didn't even know they could hear me," he said. "They almost didn't let me play at all. Spades tried to side with Hearts just so she wouldn't have to be with me, and Arley said she'd never seen that happen in her life. I had to apologise a lot."

She pictured it in her mind, and the image of Draco Malfoy's clone apologising profusely to playing cards delighted her. "All right," she said. "I'll make sure not to offend them."

He opened the little door, and out they came: indeed, her first thought was how ugly and strange the little creatures were. All four queens pranced onto the game board with evident self-importance, walking on tiny paper feet with their paper hands perched where their hips would be if they weren't perfectly rectangular. The card parts of them looked exactly like any Muggle deck, with the suit symbols and oddly-proportioned faces drawn on. They formed a line in the centre of the game board, and the Queen of Hearts stepped forward first. She walked toward Mr. White, showing Hermione the patterned back of her card.

"Good day, Queen Hearts," he said. His voice was artificially saccharine. "I humbly request that you join my cause." He glanced up from the card to Hermione. "That's how you're supposed to start."

Hearts turned around and walked to Hermione next, narrowing her painted eyes as she scrutinized her other option: she looked Hermione up and down and wrinkled her tiny, two-dimensional nose. "Good day, Queen Hearts," she repeated. "I humbly request that you join my cause."

The first queen shook her head without moving--the action appeared as an animation on the surface of her card. "I'd rather not do this, but I make it a personal rule not to play with a stranger," she squeaked after a few more seconds' deliberation. "Mr. White, I hope you've improved since our last game." She trotted across the board and stood in front of him.

"I'll do better this time," he assured her, with the easy manner of a person who was used to interacting with playing cards. If she wanted a chance at winning, Hermione would have to do the same--clearly, it wouldn't do to ignore one's queens.

Without a word, Queen Diamonds and Queen Clubs walked over to take their positions beside Queen Hearts. Queen Spades inspected Hermione, rolled her eyes, and came forward with a measure of reluctance. "Good day, Queen Spades," she said, pushing down the awkwardness. "I know I haven't played before, but I promise I'll catch on quickly."

Queen Spades was surprisingly accommodating after Hermione acknowledged her. "You're already better than this one was," she said, indicating Mr. White with one paper hand. "Do you know what he called us, the first time he saw us?"

"No, what?"

"Flimsy. Can you even imagine the nerve?"

She tightened her jaw to keep from smiling at the tiny queen's self-righteousness. Now that she'd gotten used to them, she found them rather adorable. "I certainly cannot," she said.

"I said I was sorry," Mr. White interrupted from across the table.

"No one was talking to you," Queen Spades called back, without looking at him. She tapped the side of her nose and winked at Hermione.

Once the queens had chosen sides, the rest of the deck marched out of the box in an orderly fashion, until all four suits were lined up behind their respective queens. Two jokers emerged last, one red and one black, and took their posts at either side of the board. "This is where it gets interesting," Mr. White said. He used the centre knob to push the empty box back down, where it melded seamlessly into the rest of the board. "You can set the difficulty of the game with the scenery. I'll make it pretty easy to start." He turned the knob two notches to the left, and she saw what he meant by "scenery": a two-dimensional forest folded itself up from the board, all made of what appeared to be translucent plastic. It featured a miniature mountain range in each corner, several clusters of see-through green pine trees as tall as her forearm, and even a flat blue river down the middle--four little bridges led across, evenly spaced along the board, alternating in colour between red and black. Sunlight from the window dodged the paper-thin edges of the pieces and caught on the tiny petals of flowers half the size of her smallest fingernail, scattered throughout clearings between the trees. The cardinal directions were labeled at each edge of the map: Mr. White's side was north, and Hermione's was south. "The cards can't see through everything like we can," he said. "That's just to help the players get a better view. On higher difficulty levels, it'd be opaque to us, too."

It didn't look like a very good scene for a battle; more like a picnic, perhaps, or a walk to grandma's house. "It's beautiful," she said.

Queen Spades dipped her head graciously. "I'm glad you appreciate it."

When Hermione looked up at Mr. White, she saw that he was scowling the same way Draco used to do--probably jealous that the cards already liked her better than him. His Malfoy-ness must have been innate when it came to his competitive spirit, but she could deal with that. She didn't enjoy playing games with people who didn't care about winning, because it made her self-conscious about her own tendency to care too much.

"When does it start?" she asked.

"In a minute," said Mr. White. "They do a little ritual first."

Each of the jokers produced a two-dimensional trumpet, seemingly out of thin air, and held it at the ready. Hermione's cards arranged themselves in a triangular formation, with the king and queen standing together at the southern edge of the board. She watched with fascination as each one pulled out a miniature weapon--except the king and queen, who held sceptres. The weapons increased in power along with the cards: on the lowest end, Two held a tiny slingshot, while Jack and Ace took out a sword and crossbow, respectively.

"The jokers are like referees," Mr. White said, "for both the cards and the players. For example, you can ask for a time-out if you want to talk to your queens, but the jokers can deny your request if they think you've already had too many. Their other job is to keep the lower cards from attempting to usurp their queens. None of them ever actually try, but I guess they would if they thought they could get away with it."

"We would not, sir," one of his cards chirped. Hermione couldn't tell which one.

"Lower cards?" called another.

"I'm just explaining the game," Mr. White said. "Don't take it so personally."

Several of his cards huffed and muttered to each other in distaste, and Hermione felt less disadvantaged. Mr. White wouldn't get far treating his cards like tiny little Crabbes and Goyles. She smiled down at Queen Spades, who lifted her sceptre in response. The jokers nodded to each other from across the table and played a few short, discordant notes on their trumpets. As soon as the sound faded, Mr. White lowered his head and whispered to his three queens. Queen Diamonds turned around and addressed her troops, while Queen Hearts and Queen Clubs turned to one another and immediately began to argue. She watched Mr. White's attempts to mediate until Queen Spades cleared her throat.

"My lady, we are heavily outnumbered," she said. "What would you recommend in terms of strategy?"

She lowered her head to whisper as Mr. White had. "Well, I've fought in similar circumstances," she said. "Clubs and Hearts are already fighting with each other, so I think we should try to use that against them." The queen nodded. "We'll want to keep an evasive strategy overall. Send some of the ones with range weapons out as snipers, wherever they can take cover--look for high ground."

Queen Spades called forward Two, Five, Six, Seven, Ten, and Ace, but Hermione stopped her. "Keep Ace, Jack, and King with you," she said. "Is there a safe place for you four to take cover?"

The queen gazed off into the distance and frowned. "I've been sent to the mountains before, but only as a last resort."

Hermione glanced across the table, where Mr. White was still occupied with his queens' dispute. He restrained Queen Hearts and Queen Clubs with his fingertips while the rest of their armies wandered aimlessly nearby, but Queen Diamonds and her troops were on the move along the eastern edge. "It looks like Diamonds will be our first target," she said. "They're marching in a linear formation on the east side--can your snipers get to them without being seen?"

Queen Spades addressed the group she'd selected before and motioned for Two to step aside. "Most of them can," she said meaningfully, while Two hung his head in shame.

"Don't attack until we're blocking them from the north," Hermione said. "Their queen's with them, and I think that's where she'll run." She was about to send her four top cards off together, but it occurred to her that she'd have to be especially crafty with the odds stacked against her. "You and Jack go to the southwest mountains--he should face north while you face south, so Mr. White can see his face but not yours. King and Ace, you do the same thing on the southeast side."

"That's clever," said the queen. "There's a chance it could work. What about the rest of them?"

"Have them meet Diamonds head-on once the snipers are in place, to distract them. Place the, er--I'm sorry, I know 'lower cards' is offensive, but I'm not quite sure what to call the, er..." She trailed off and made a vague motion with her hand, but none of the cards seemed upset. A few of them laughed.

"Foot soldiers," Two said, "if not by name."

"All right," she said. "Place the foot soldiers in numerical order."

The queen confirmed her orders, and all the cards scurried off as instructed. They moved quickly and quietly, except Two, who didn't pay much attention to where he was going. He trampled a few two-dimensional roots, and Three kept elbowing where his ribs would've been and telling him to be quiet. She watched her snipers take cover behind trees and rocks as the Diamonds army approached one of the bridges. Her foot soldiers fanned out as she'd instructed, waiting in a clearing. Something was wrong, though: the Diamonds army stopped short of the bridge and began to march west along the river.Their face cards diverged from the group at the last minute and headed back north.

"Fall back," she called immediately. "It's a trap!"

Her snipers heard her in time and retreated along the eastern wall, but the rest were caught unawares when the Diamonds army crossed the next bridge and came at them from the west. Meanwhile, Hearts and Clubs forces were approaching her snipers at an alarming rate. Hermione looked across the table, where Mr. White surveyed her with cool determination. All three of his queens stood in front of him with two guards apiece and their kings: somehow, Mr. White had managed to unite them, at least for the time being.

"Pick them off and then head east," he told his cards. They did so, although her foot soldiers put up a good fight. Poor, noisy Two Spades caught one of them with a lucky shot but lost his own life in the process, and he wasn't the only one to land an attack. When the cards died, they fell on their backs and lost ink until they turned white: her cards bled black, while the Diamonds bled bright red. After a few seconds of dramatic, pained wriggling, they melted into the surface of the board and disappeared.

None of the Spades survived the first battle. Three Diamonds remained, although one was injured--he dripped splotches of red ink as they limped along toward the east wall, where her four snipers had taken cover. Seven Spades finished off the wounded card with a well-aimed arrow. Behind a nearby tree, Five weighed a knife in each hand and threw both at once, felling the remaining targets. She'd have expected such a low card to be weaker, but his dexterity was impeccable. That took care of Diamonds' foot soldiers, but there were two more armies closing in. She decided to leave her king and queen where they were for the time being, although their future looked bleak. As she'd instructed, her snipers sought high ground and waited for the Hearts and Clubs armies to cross the bridges.

"Stay along the wall," she said, as the Hearts and Clubs began to fan out, hoping to surround them. They were prepared to strike when Two Hearts caught sight of the blood trail from the injured Diamonds soldier and began to panic: he dropped his slingshot, turned, and ran.

"No! What's the matter with you?" Mr. White asked, but it was two late.

"I'm sorry," Two Hearts cried as he fled. "I'm sorry! I'm--" Seven Spades's arrow caught him from behind, and he fell on his face in a pool of red ink. Ten Spades took out a few more Hearts with his bow during the commotion, but they'd given away their position. The remaining Hearts and Clubs took cover while their throwers and archers faced off with the Spades. After a grueling stand-off, her cards were overcome. Only five foot soldiers survived, two Hearts and three Clubs, and they turned to face Mr. White for further orders. He looked back and forth between the two mountain ranges where her face cards waited, then up at Hermione. She kept her face blank and stared him down.

After a tense moment, he addressed his cards: "Hearts, scale the mountains in the southwest. Clubs, take the southeast."

It might not change anything, but she took comfort in the fact that he'd chosen wrong--his stronger force of Clubs was headed for her king, and Ace would probably pick them off easily as they climbed. On the other hand, Jack wouldn't be as effective when it came to guarding her queen. She held her breath as the Clubs reached the foot of the southeast mountains. Ace made short work of two of the three, but he left himself open for a second too long while he readjusted his stance. Ten Clubs put an arrow where his heart would have been, and he tumbled down the mountain with black ink spilling out. Ten Clubs aimed next for the king, but apparently the sceptres weren't just for show: King Spades spun around and used his to cast a shielding spell not a second too soon.

Mr. White reacted as soon as he saw the card's face: "The west," he told his remaining forces. "She's in the west!"

Four and Five Hearts were just reaching the southwest mountains, and they paused to salute Mr. White before scaling the foothills. Jack Spades held his shield aloft and fended off two of Five's knives with impressive agility while the queen hung back behind a rock. Meanwhile, in the east, Ten Clubs had run out of arrows--he cast aside his bow and engaged the king in hand-to-hand combat. Two playing cards wrestling was a delightfully bizarre sight to behold: they couldn't bend anything except their paper arms and legs, so all they could do was grab their opponent by the edges and try to push him off the mountain.

In the west, Five Hearts was down to his last knife and didn't seem keen to throw it. He and Four cautiously approached Jack Spades, giving a wide berth, both of them visibly afraid. Jack readied his sword and turned side to side, looking between them. Without warning, he covered his left with the shield and lunged right. Five tried to dodge, but the blade grazed him across the middle--he lost his balance and fell backwards off a cliff. Four tried to seize what he thought was an opening, but it was only a feint: Jack anticipated the move and blocked Four's rapier with his shield as he lunged again with his sword. Red ink spilled from Four's mouth as he looked down at the wound in shock, until Jack pulled out the blade and kicked him to the ground.

"Head east," Hermione said, "and hurry! You can still save the king!"

Jack picked up Four's discarded rapier and presented it to the queen. She transferred her sceptre to her off-hand and took the weapon in her right, and they both moved quickly across the southern wall. King Spades and Ten Clubs were still locked together at the arms, turning in slow circles and dodging each other's pathetic paper kicks. She'd expected Jack to step in, but Queen Spades had a surprise in store: from the foot of the mountain, she used her sceptre to conjure a flaming spade symbol. It lodged itself in Ten's back, and the fire spread until it consumed him completely. The king brushed himself off indignantly as his queen leaned forward to catch her breath.

"You can cast attack spells?" Hermione asked.

"Yes," she said, "but it takes a lot of energy."

"Traditionally," Jack added, "it's the queen's responsibility to protect her husband whenever possible. I'd have stepped in otherwise." He sliced his sword through the air in an intricate pattern, showing off, presumably to prevent Hermione from doubting his warrior's strength.

"I understand," Hermione said. Watching her queen survive had felt like a major victory, but it faded fast when she remembered that they were even more outnumbered than they'd been at the beginning.

"What now, Granger?" Mr. White taunted.

In all honesty, she didn't know. Her three remaining cards waited in the southeast mountains, comforting each other in hushed voices over the loss of nearly their entire kingdom, and listening to them brought on a different kind of time hiccough. In her mind, she heard their words in other voices--Ginny, McGonagall, and always Harry in that tent in the forest--trying to convince her that all was not lost. This was just a game, though. Thick dread seeped heavy down the back of her throat, and her confused brain pumped her full of unnecessary adrenaline, more energy for more panic. She reminded herself again and again that it was only a game.

She must have phased out for longer than she'd realised, because Mr. White sounded worried when he spoke again. "Granger?" he asked. "Are you in there?"

She shook herself and forced her lips to smile, like she always did when this happened. Her hands were shaking, but the worst of it was over. "Of course," she said. "Sorry. I was just thinking about what to do next."

"We could take a time-out if you want," he said, and she could tell he didn't buy her excuse. She wondered how many times he had gone back in time and watched her panic. How many times had he looked upon her face, with her jaw so tight and eyes wide open, staring hard at nothing, and pitied her?

"My lady, you needn't bother yourself over our fate," Queen Spades said. "No matter what tragedy befalls us, we can always start anew."

In that moment, she loved her tiny queen fiercely. She wanted to pick her up and keep her in her pocket, safe and ready for every time she needed to hear those words. "You're right," she said, even though her pulse still raced. "We might as well finish playing. We're about to lose anyway."

"You can't ever take that for granted in this game," said Mr. White. "But I'm in the mood for a break anyway. Why don't we have a cup of tea before we go on?"

The way he said it--so clearly for her benefit--made her feel both naked and grateful. He saw through her in a way that most people could not, probably because not many people had an instant-replay option for the subtleties of body language. "If you insist," she said. She anchored one hand on the table and pushed herself up.

"We'll be right here when you get back," Queen Spades called, with a cheerful paper wave. Hermione lifted a hand in recognition and went to the stove, regulating her breathing as she walked. It was getting easier.

"If it makes you feel better," Mr. White said to her back, "you're better at hiding things than most of the people I've met."

She turned around to face him. "And yet you still know it bothers me that you can read me."

"That's just human nature," he said. "For instance, it bothers me that you know so much about my real self, while I know almost nothing."

When he put it like that, she didn't feel so vulnerable. "I know," she said. "But there are things you're better off not knowing. There are things about myself that I wish I could erase from my mind."

"You'd rather be dumped into a field without a name?"

He didn't seem to appreciate the way she'd trivialised his plight, but she reckoned he'd know if she tried to lie. "Some days, yes."

"Maybe that's your problem," he said. "With time, I mean. You hate the past so much that you're pushing yourself forward. Subconsciously, or something." She turned toward the tea kettle again and used her wand to boil the water.

"Maybe," she said. She trusted her own mind enough to believe that if her brain was hiding things from itself, it probably had a good reason. And if she could wave her wand and give Mr. White all of Draco's memories, she had a feeling at least some part of him would long for those nameless days.

The game took up the whole table, so she took their tea into the next room and sat on the sofa. Mr. White took a seat beside her and put his feet up on the coffee table. "I like it here," he said. "It's nice to be somewhere I'm wanted." She looked at him askance, and he showed her a gloating smile. "What, I'm supposed to go back to pretending I haven't noticed these things? I haven't got any other skills or hobbies. All I do is notice."

Honesty could be refreshing in the right context, and the more she thought about it, contexts didn't get much safer than this: Mr. White was in no position to go round telling people what he'd learned about her, and also he wasn't even a person himself. "Fine," she said. "You're right. It isn't bad having you around. You're polite, and I like the game you brought."

"And you like the company. Have you been sending your friends away because I'm here, or do you usually spend most of your time alone?" His tone, free of judgment, made it hard to be offended.

"The latter," she said. "By my own choice, but I suppose it bothers me from time to time."

"I bet that's how my real self is, too," he said. "It's hard to think with too many people around all the time. That's how it was at the Warren--everyone constantly going wherever they pleased, with no concept of privacy or peace. Haigha's house would've been better, but she can't stand me."

Hermione tried to decide whether Draco would have agreed with his clone, but she didn't know him well enough. He'd always been with other people in school, but so had she. Ironically, Mr. White was more of a whole person in her mind than his real self had ever been. "He might be," she said. "I haven't talked to him in years, though."

"Why would you?" Mr. White asked dryly. "He sounds awful. The more I think about it, the less I want to go back to being him."

Here she was again, defending Draco Malfoy to himself. "He was awful, to be honest, but you're not. His life made him the way he was, same as any of us."

"But even if I got back into that body and started changing things, people might never change their minds," he said. "It sounds like a lot of people hate my real self, and I just keep thinking about it. I can't get over it."

"I don't think 'hate' is the right word, even for me. I think it's more of a distrust, and you can overcome that. You can prove them wrong."

He shook his head with a bitter sort of laugh. "This is ridiculous," he said. "I don't even know what he did."

She looked down at her tea and considered her options. She'd already told Mr. White so much already, and Arley hadn't seemed concerned about it--unless she took him to the hospital to visit Draco, she probably wasn't going to open any major time rifts by telling him stories about an old schoolmate who made a lot of mistakes. "Do you want me to tell you?" she asked.

"No," he said immediately. "Well, yes. I don't know." He paused and sipped his tea, considering. "Just tell me the worst thing he ever did."

The question threw her off-balance. She didn't know how to judge it: her first instinct was the attempts on Dumbledore, or letting the Death Eaters into the school, but some vindictive part of her wanted to make it about herself. If she told Mr. White what Draco had done to her--years of bullying and blood prejudice, chipping away at her self-esteem and trying his best to make her hate herself, sometimes briefly even succeeding--there was a chance he'd apologise. Draco never would, but his other self might, and there was a chance it would bring her some peace. At length, she gave the choice to him. "The worst thing he did in general, or the worst thing he did to me?"

Mr. White looked at her for a long time, probably much longer than it felt to her, with a gaze so searching and needy that she had to look away. "Tell me what he did to you," he said. "It's more relevant."

She let out the breath she'd been holding, so great was her relief. "It was never just one thing," she said. "It was all the time, over and over--little things he said every day. He made me feel like I didn't deserve to be a witch. He made me feel like I was ugly and unwanted and wrong."

"He did that to you?" Mr. White's pain was obvious as he processed the information, and it felt like he'd turned a key and unlocked something inside her. School bullies were something that adults were just supposed to get over, something they kept safe and covered in a tiny corner of their minds, but she'd been given the rare opportunity to set hers free. To let it go. "That's absurd. You're--I mean--I don't know a lot of people, but you're easily my favourite person that I've ever met. You've been nicer to me than all the others combined. You're wonderful."

She couldn't speak. Her throat had gone dry and numb; with shaking hands, she raised the teacup to her lips and forced herself to drink. She knew he noticed the shine of not-quite-tears in her eyes. He noticed everything.

He set his teacup on the table and moved closer toward her across the sofa. "And ugly? Really?" He smiled, as though she'd told him a joke so bad that it was almost funny just for that. "How did he say that with a straight face?" She blushed and turned away, as though it were some great compliment, but it was more about the way he said it and who he was. He touched her face with two cold fingers and nudged it back in place to meet his eyes. "He must have been hopelessly in love with you. There's no other plausible explanation."

He wasn't joking, but she laughed anyway. "I can't think of anything less likely."

"You should ask him someday, if he wakes up." Mr. White still held her chin, with his body less than an arm's length away. He was making her flustered. "He won't admit it, if he's still the sort of person you're describing, but you'll see it on his face."

"Not possible," she whispered.

Mr. White licked his lips, staring at her, and all of a sudden she knew that he was going to kiss her. Not right that second, but soon. She would've had time to remove his hand and reinforce the distance between them, but she found the idea less off-putting than she might've expected. On the contrary, it made her whole body fill up with a million microscopic bubbles of electric anticipation. It made her cheeks pink, eyes bright, and pulse quick. Without looking away from him, she set her teacup down on the table.

"You can't hide something like that," he said. "Not even you could."

He leaned forward, just as she knew that he would. His lips touched hers, cold like his hands, but the contact warmed him up quickly. She put her hand in his paper-white hair, so fine and so soft, and let her weight sink into him until their bodies melted together. She could feel his strange heartbeat, a muffled echo of his real heart far away in a lonely hospital bed, and the tightening of muscles in his arms as they encircled her, and the soft chill of his breath against her cheek.

He started to pull away, but then she went back, tugged through the spent minutes to the first brush of lips meeting. Again and again, she relived and relived it, and she did not mind. When the hiccoughs went away, they looked at each other in the waning light of her living room. The sun was setting outside the window, with the last shocks of gold laid across his face, and she did not want this to end yet. She kissed him again, pushing her body forward until his back was flat against the cushions.

Chapter Text

When the sun rose on Monday, Hermione and Mr. White were in the same condition as when it last set. They had slept on and off, kissing and having meaningless little almost-conversations, while she tried to forget what the morning would bring. Far too soon for her liking, she removed herself from Mr. White's embrace. He stirred and asked her to come back, voice heavy with sleep, but she could only brush back his hair with her fingertips and bid him goodbye. When she did so, she noticed that her entire right hand was black.

She went to the kitchen and laid out some food for Mr. White, to tide him over during the day. As she finished getting ready for work, she thought of all the lies she would need to tell to get through the day. No one would believe her if she explained what was really going on or what she actually planned to do about it. She'd come up with more and more tricks in the past few weeks to avoid unnecessary social interaction at the Ministry, and they were coming in handy: she went in early that day and walked quickly to her office, head down, avoiding eye contact with the few people she passed. She closed her door, drew her blinds shut, and made herself look as busy as possible by spreading papers all across her desk. Once everything was in place, she could begin the secret work of bending the limits of time. If Mr. White was correct about the aversion to moving forward, it could become a useful tool. Haigha had told her that they couldn't catch the killer because she always left just before they arrived--would it change anything if they could move more quickly?

With her eyes fixed on the clock on the wall, she made it her mission to launch herself as far forward as possible, using the same process that had worked before but intensified. The minute hand sped up almost immediately and soon blurred away entirely, whipping around in maddening circles, so fast that she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop it. Perhaps she would grow old like this, with nothing to show for her life but spinning clock hands and a wave of dizzy colours that would only stop when her heart did. But, no, it ended. She'd only skipped to an hour past lunch. The taste of what she'd eaten still lingered on her tongue.

She had sent her teams back out to investigate the crime scenes, although she knew it wouldn't help, and she was almost ready to try another time experiment when there was a knock at her door. "Officer Granger?" her assistant called. "I know you're busy, but you have a visitor. She says she needs to see you right away."

"Who is it?"

"Blanche Arley."

The name sent a jolt along her spine, composed of surprise and a little trepidation. "Send her in," she said.

Her assistant opened the door, and Arley side-stepped her quickly. Before anyone could react, she'd already seated herself opposite Hermione's desk. The secretary blinked a few times and left without another word.

"I gather you weren't expecting to see me again," Arley said.

"No, I wasn't."

"Well, I believe that misunderstanding has a lot to do with Haigha." Arley crossed her legs and bounced her top foot repeatedly against the side of the desk. "She'd rather that we take care of things on our own, but I believe that Mr. White is more important than we realised."

"More important to catching the killer?"

"Yes, perhaps. To be perfectly honest, our investigation isn't doing much better than yours." Arley's foot moved faster and faster, causing her chair to squeak as well, and Hermione tried to think of a polite way to ask her to stop.

"But Haigha still doesn't want us to help?"

Arley shook her head. "Don't take it personally--she just doesn't like you because you work for the government."

"Why should that matter?"

"She used to work for our government a long time ago, and it didn't end well. I've tried to explain that it's different here--believe me, I've tried--but she's afraid of what you lot can do to her if the right person says the word."

Hermione couldn't help but notice the gaping hole in Haigha's strategy. If someone were afraid of Ministry workers, that person should avoid being so surly with them. "What happened to her before?"

"She was banished by our former queen." At last, Arley's legs stopped moving. She placed both feet flat on the floor, leaned forward, and began to drum her fingers on Hermione's desk. "That's why she has to tell fortunes in your world for Galleons, which hasn't been easy on her pride. She used to hold one of the highest-ranking positions in our kingdom."

"She was banished from your world to ours?" She hoped she'd misunderstood, because it wouldn't be the least bit safe or fair to use someone else's perfectly good universe as a makeshift prison.

"No," Arley said. Her hands went still on the wood, and Hermione breathed easier. "Normally those banished go to Over There."

"Over where?"

"Over There. That's the name of the place--well, more accurately, it doesn't have a name, so that's what everyone calls it. It's a deserted land at the outskirts of our world." She saw Hermione's relief and touched her arm reassuringly. "Don't worry--we wouldn't just dump our criminals off on you. It's only the ones who don't deserve banishment that find their way here, because they have friends to help them. People who deserve to be banished usually have no friends at all."

"I suppose that makes sense," she said. "Back to the situation at hand, how can Mr. White and I aid in your investigation?"

Arley folded her hands in her lap and rocked back and forth in her chair, and Hermione wondered if it would cause her physical pain to sit still. "We have reason to believe that our suspect has been visiting Draco Malfoy at St. Mungo's," she said. "Therefore, she must be looking for something that she thinks he has. Our working theory is that she wants the time we gave to Mr. White--I doubt she knows he exists at all, so she's trying to understand where the extra years went."

The pieces fell into place, resulting in a complete yet lopsided and entirely bizarre puzzle. "What does the suspect look like?" she asked, just to be sure.

Arley lifted her hand and held it just over a metre off the ground. "About this tall," she said, "with white skin and black hair."

Hermione's suspicions were correct, but she wished they weren't. "Is she... a child?"

"Good heavens, no," Arley said. "She's much, much older than she looks. She used to be our queen, back when we still had queens. In those days, time was passed down through the royal families--whenever there was a court-ordered execution, they'd divide the rest of the prisoner's life between their children. Sabine was an only child, and her mother was an especially violent ruler: she executed more than five hundred men in the first three years after her husband's death. I can't say for certain, but I think Sabine holds more time than any single person ever has before."

"If she already had so much time, why did she take more?"

Arley frowned, sad and grey. "That's just how she is. If she hadn't taken it, someone else would've gotten it, and she hates it when other people have things. I doubt she'd be satisfied unless she had all of everything, and nobody else had any at all."

"And she used to be your queen?"

"Only for a few years, until we banished her, which was no small feat. She was demanding peasants' babies for sacrifices and taking the rest of their lives. That's what she's doing here as well, with the twins." Arley leaned forward conspiratorially, as though she were about to reveal some juicy gossip. "She's always had a special obsession with those: rumour has it that she got her first taste of stolen time when she ate her own twin in the womb. But there's no way to confirm it, for obvious reasons."

"How did she escape from Over There?"

"If we knew that, we would have put her back by now. Haigha's convinced that it had something to do with Draco Malfoy's accident, but that may have just been a coincidence." She wrinkled her nose in distaste. "You never know when those little buggers are going to pop up and confuse everyone."

"Of course," she said. It was best to just agree. "Well, how did you banish her in the first place?"

"Since we couldn't take her time away, we used it against her." Arley tilted her head this way and that, probably trying to think of a good way to explain whatever they had done. "I'm not sure if you'll be able to understand this, but I'll try. Given: time is just another way to measure a change." She waited for a response, and Hermione nodded. "Which means minutes aren't really so different from metres, if you can get past a few nasty little preconceptions. We don't experience them the same way, but that's our limitation, not time's--it was only because of that ingrained idea that Sabine was able to store her time in a way that didn't hold her back. She was keeping it all in the future, which is a place that doesn't actually exist. It was the equivalent of someone stealing several thousand metres' worth of empty space, winding it around itself, and putting it on a shelf like an invisible spool of thread. Do you understand?"

"Mostly," she said, which was mostly a lie.

"To sum it up, there was nowhere for her to keep her time. She only thought there was."

"So, how did she keep it in the first place? How did the royal families pass it down?"

"This is where it gets confusing," Arley said. "They were only able to keep their stolen time because they believed in the future."

"But if the future was never a real place, then they never really had the time at all."

"Yes, they did. They had it when there was a place for it in their minds."

"That doesn't make sense," she said, as though that were unusual.

"I know," Arley said sympathetically. "I know, but that's what happened. Anyway, the hardest part of banishing Sabine was figuring all this out. Once we did, all we had to do was go to the palace and tell her that there wasn't a future."

"What?"

"I told her exactly what I just told you," she said, "and it paralyzed her, and she surrendered. Ever since then, she's been looking for a place to keep her time. She still has it, you see, but she hasn't anywhere to put it."

"How can she still have it, then?"

Arley pressed her lips together. "I suppose that's a subjective question: if a person owns something, but it's so vast and fragile that there's nowhere big enough or safe enough to keep it, do they have it or not?"

"I don't know," Hermione said quietly, but that was an understatement. It was a not-knowing so powerful that it ate her whole mind.

"I don't know, either. No one does. That's why it worked." Arley paused, tapping her fingers together. "We think that when Sabine entered your world, she was able to convince herself that the future existed here. If we could catch her, we might be able to prove her wrong again, but we can't. She has too much time."

There were too many contradictions to process all at once. "Haigha said you two took several years between you," she said, beginning with the first one that came to mind. "Where do you keep that?"

"Away from Sabine," she said. "Unlike the future, that is a place--it's anywhere that Sabine isn't."

"Where does Mr. White keep his?"

"It doesn't matter, since he doesn't care that he has it."

Hermione tried to think and failed. All she had left were questions. "What do we do now?"

Arley shrugged. "That's the extent of our progress. Haigha doubts this greatly, but I think Mr. White will have an idea. He's the most flexible person in the world, because he isn't a person."

Hermione checked the clock, and its function seemed so foreign and arbitrary that she almost couldn't bear it. Time was time, anyway. Time was time was time. It did not matter whether she stayed at work or left. "He isn't doing anything at my flat," she said. "Do you want to go talk to him now?"

"Yes," Arley said. "But we aren't going to tell him any of the things I just told you."

"Why not?"

"He'll stay fresh that way. Currently, the greatest strength of his mind comes from his not knowing." Hermione opened her mouth to speak and thought better of it. She could only stare at Arley from across the desk, wishing she could still believe in the future. "Don't worry about it, dear. Just let me do the talking."

She looked at the paperwork on her desk, the complex illusion of doing something important, and decided to leave it all exactly where it was. With Arley behind her, she left her office and took the Floo back to her flat.

Mr. White was at the kitchen table when she entered, playing Queens by himself. It was probably more fun with two people, but it made sense that a person could play alone, what with the sentient cards and all. "You're home early," he said. Then, when Arley popped in beside her, his face went cold and dark. "What's she doing here?"

"She needs our help," Hermione said. All the cards had frozen in place on the table, waiting for Mr. White's next move, and several of them offered her a greeting.

"Don't worry, my lady," Queen Spades called, cupping her tiny hands around her mouth to project her voice. "We've remembered our places from your previous game. You may continue it at your leisure."

Arley stepped forward and smiled widely at the cards. "I was looking for that deck," she said.

"Sorry," Mr. White said, although he didn't sound at all like he meant it. "I was going to give it back."

"No, keep it. I have others." She studied the game board fondly and then turned to Hermione. "This is a historical game, you know. It's about the beginning of our kingdom--how we went from four factions down to one."

"Interesting," she said. She wondered which came first, Muggle decks in her world or Queens in theirs, and if it mattered. Perhaps their similarities were only a coincidence.

Mr. White left his chair and stood beside the table. "What do you need help with, Arley?"

"We need to find the little girl from your dreams," she said. She shifted her weight back and forth, always in motion.

"Why?" he asked. "Who is she?"

Arley rolled her eyes. "He really is one of yours," she said to Hermione, like they were suddenly on the same side. "Mr. White, you ask entirely too many questions. Let's keep things simple this time."

"Of course," he lamented. "We'll keep it nice and vague, just how you like it."

"Good," she said, deliberately ignoring his sarcasm. "All we have to do is find that girl so that we can talk to her."

"What do you need to talk to her about?" He cut himself off and lifted his hands in desperation. "Oh, wait--I'm not allowed to know."

"Don't take it personally," Arley said. "There's something important that we need to tell her, and it's none of your business."

"Is it a secret, then?" he asked.

"No, not really."

"Then why do you have to say it in person? She comes back every night. Write her a note and pin it to my real self's blankets."

Hermione could tell right away that he only meant to be dismissive, but that sort of cynicism must have belonged firmly in their world. Arley's jaw went lax, and for the first time all day, her body was stiff as a board. "Mr. White," she said after a moment, "I take back everything I've ever said about your questions. They're brilliant."

Hermione was considerably less impressed. "Honestly? You didn't think of leaving a note until now?"

For once, Arley was cowed--embarrassed, even. It was a terrific sight, although Haigha would've been better. "That's why I knew you two could assist us," she said. "We couldn't ask things like you do even if we wanted to. We don't think that way."

A truth clicked into place just then, something that should have been as obvious as leaving a note: their two worlds were fundamentally incapable of mutually satisfying communication. They all kept trying, all kept failing, and all it did was make them angry at each other. It wasn't anyone's fault. The languages they spoke sounded identical, but they were as different as Draco Malfoy and Mr. White.

"We're happy to help," Hermione said.

"I appreciate it," Arley replied. She looked at Mr. White and opened her palms in front of her. "And we know this wasn't really your other self's fault. It would be entirely impossible for one of your people to cause this sort of problem intentionally."

"Well, good," Mr. White said, gradually deflating. "I'm glad you understand that."

Arley closed her hands and crossed them over her chest. "Do you have something to write with?"

Hermione went to a drawer in her kitchen and rummaged until she found a quill and parchment. She placed the supplies on the counter, and Arley hurried over. She picked up the quill, pressed the tip to her lips as she thought, and then began to write in large block letters: THE FUTURE DOES NOT EXIST HERE, EITHER. And then, in small print below: (there will never be anywhere to keep your time)

"That should do it," she said when she was finished.

"I hope so," Hermione said.

Arley rolled up the parchment, stowed it in a pocket of her robes, and walked back to the Floo. "Thank you," she said, before leaving. "For the parchment, I mean."

"You're welcome," Hermione said.

She called out her destination and stepped into the fireplace, leaving Hermione alone with Mr. White. "She's really not so bad," she said.

He smiled at her in a dazed sort of way that made her knees feel weak. "You think that about everyone."

Shyly, she placed her ink-soaked hand over her face. "More often than not, it's true."

"Whatever you say. Would you like to finish our game?"

They had to, she realised, because Mr. White might not be with her much longer. If all went right, he'd melt back into Draco Malfoy's body and forget her forever. The children would be safe, and Hermione would be lonely, and she knew that it was a fair trade. "All right," she said.

The cards must've overheard their conversation, because they'd already returned to their former positions by the time their players reached the table. "Welcome back," said Queen Spades.

"Thanks.” She lowered her head close to the table. "If I ask you a question, will you answer it honestly?"

"Of course, my lady."

"If we lose, will you be disappointed?"

"No," she said. "I've played this game thousands of times, and I always either win or lose. After a while, they don't feel so different anymore."

"That's good, because we're going to lose." She looked up at Mr. White's fortified royal families and confirmed what she had known all along: there were no tricks left. The situation was every bit as hopeless as it had first appeared. "Head north," she said to her cards. "When you're close enough, try to get to the queens."

"That's our strategy?" Jack Spades asked incredulously.

"No," Hermione said. "We don't have a strategy."

Her cards shrugged off their bewilderment and climbed down from the mountains in a triangular formation, Jack in front. They marched proudly across the fields and flowers, past the trees and across the river. As soon as they were in range, Mr. White's aces lifted their bows in unison and struck. In an instant, all of Hermione's cards were dead, and she made sure not to watch as her tiny queen sank into that pool of black ink.

The game wasn't finished, of course. As soon as all of the Spades were gone, Mr. White's three suits attacked each other. "Wait," he said. "One of you has to live!"

They weren't paying any attention. When the dust settled, Queen Diamonds was dead, and Queen Hearts and Queen Clubs were both on their knees with swords waiting against their throats. Queen Clubs had a larger army, since one of her soldiers had killed Queen Diamonds, but it didn't help her. Hermione and Mr. White watched the standoff for a moment, but it quickly became clear that nothing was going to happen. Neither queen was willing to negotiate.

"What now?" Hermione asked.

"They wait like that until one of the cards makes a move or gets bored and surrenders," Mr. White said. "I've seen it take hours."

"Do we have to keep watching?"

"Probably not," he said. Then, to his cards: "Work this out amongst yourselves, and let us know when you're finished."

The cards agreed, which was a relief: she didn't want to sit around staring at them and waste the rest of her time with Mr. White. She left the table and checked her refrigerator, looking for something nice to cook--the least she could do was send him off with a good meal. "Do you have any requests for dinner?" she asked.

"No," he said. "Whatever you want is fine."

He watched her from the table while she selected her ingredients and set them out on the counter along with pots and pans. She kept her hands busy and her mind on the present--a forward time hiccough was the last thing she needed. As she chopped, boiled, and stirred, she talked herself through the situation: it was unreasonable to be so upset about losing Mr. White. He wasn't even real, and she hadn't known him long at all. It only felt longer because the time hadn't been as predictable as usual. In the future, which didn't exist, she would take better care to enforce a logical basis for her emotions. Eventually, he broke the silence to ask about the little girl from his dreams, since Arley had never bothered to tell him what was going on. Hermione filled him in as best she could, but it wasn't easy to explain. After a while, he claimed that he understood, even though she could tell he didn't. Neither did she.

They ate on the living room couch, since the cards hadn't made any progress, and Mr. White complimented her cooking. She enjoyed every second, every word he said in that voice she had once so hated, every fleeting expression on the face that used to only show hatred for her. It was like wiping clean one pain from her past, and such opportunities were so rare that they had to be savoured. Such a chance would never come to her again. Even better, her companion was entirely oblivious--despite her attempts at explanation, he didn't believe that Arley's note would work. He had every confidence that he would see her the next morning, just the same, again and again. It saved her the trouble of goodbye.

He helped her clean the dishes after the meal, and she offered him a class of sweet white wine. With his arm around her, she rested her cheek on his chest, and they watched the night sky through the window.

"Do you really think I'll be gone tomorrow?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I mean, I have to hope so--if this doesn't work, we'll still need to figure out how to stop her. They're already out of ideas in the Warren."

"Well, if I do go back, I hope my real self remembers this," he said.

"I hope he doesn't."

"Why not?"

"He'd be horrified. I'd be so embarrassed." She pictured Draco Malfoy waking up screaming in his hospital bed, praying it had all been a dream. It made her very sad.

"If I'm as identical to him as everyone keeps telling me, he won't be horrified."

"Either way," she said, "I hope he never finds out."

"I guess we'll see what happens."

When the wine was gone, he kissed her like he meant it, exactly the way that Draco Malfoy never would. The couch was too small, and she took him back to her bed, where wonderfully unlikely things happened until she couldn't make sense of anything at all.

***

Sometime later, Mr. White shook her awake. In the darkness, his eyes were wide with fear.

"Granger," he said, "she saw it. She's panicking."

"Who what?" she asked, not awake enough to form real sentences.

"The little girl saw the note," he said, as though it were some great disaster. "I think it's going to work."

"Oh," she said. "Good. But I'll miss you."

She was too tired even to pick up her head, and Mr. White pressed his body against her. "I'll miss you, too," he said. "I'll have my real self come find you."

"No, no, no," she whispered. "Bad idea."

He stopped speaking, and she drifted away. Later, in the cold reality of morning, she found herself alone. The stain on her hand was gone.

***

Draco Malfoy awoke from his coma that same night, but it wasn't until two days later that the Prophet covered it. When the newspaper showed up with Draco's face on it, she stopped and stared: without colour, he was indistinguishable from Mr. White. It drew her mind back to unpleasant places.

In the interim, Hermione had spent most of her energy cleaning up the mess at work--she couldn't very well call off the search, but there was nothing left to find. The families would never be able to make sense of their tragedies. All she could do was go with the flow, collect evidence, and reassure them that she was trying as hard as she could. In a way, it was true: she was trying her best to think of something to tell them that would help, some way to close the case without solving it, but she hadn't found a way yet to explain it.

The cards had finished their game, which Clubs had won, and she had packed them up and stored them safely in her nightstand drawer. They waited sadly to collect dust, because she couldn't bring herself to play alone.

Later that night, though, there was a knock at her door. She looked through the peephole and, in a flurry of misplaced hope, mistook the visitor for Mr. White. In fact, it was his real self. She opened the door cautiously and looked into Draco Malfoy's eyes for the first time in years. For reasons that she hoped he didn't know, she blushed. She expected him to speak, but he only stared.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, after an awkward silence.

He looked all around, as though the answer were written on the walls, and then shrugged. "No one else knows how to play Queens," he said.

With a sharp intake of breath, her worst fears and highest hopes were confirmed. "But you do."

"Yes," he said, because he remembered. "Are you going to invite me in or not?"

She let him wait for a moment, so he wouldn't take her acceptance for granted. When she turned away to retrieve the game, she allowed herself the most secret and lovely of smiles.