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“It was you.”
The sound snapped her neck, her eyes - her eyes - betraying her in the one second it took Hermione Granger to resettle herself. A quick hand skimmed the edge of her clipboard, and Draco felt seen, not observed.
“Can you remember what happened?” she asked.
“Yes. Aren’t you going to ask me how I feel?”
“I expect you’re feeling awful, which doesn’t tell me anything. I would like you to answer my question, please.”
“I’ve been admitted to St Mungo’s.”
A flick at the edge of her lips. A marvel. “Great effort so far, but not exactly difficult to hypothesise.”
“I’m good at coming up with hypotheses, but I’m struggling to understand why you, of all people, would be working Emergency Response for the DMLE. I saw you enter that building.”
Her voice didnt’t stutter, but it snagged. “That’s the type of shift us lowly registrars have to pick up, I’m afraid, while we hope to finish our thesis. Are you going to make me ask again?”
“That hurt, you could have given me fair warning,” he complained as the needle drew off his skin with a small amount of blood.
Hermione cleaned it and sealed the wound with a spell. “Trust me, it wouldn’t have hurt any less if I had.”
“Even if I didn’t remember tonight, I have already come up with five different ways to explain away my injuries.”
“Only five?”
“I would have more if you hadn’t been so generous with the good opioids. I was too late to the crime scene.”
Hermione stopped her note taking. “How did you know a crime was under progress?”
“One of my little suspicions. It was confirmed when I was hit with the backwash of a frankly nasty Curse. As I said, too late - though not by much.”
“Is that how you collar your miscreants? Get there before the crimes are committed?”
He had no idea what he looked like at that moment. A trainwreck, he suspected, all askew in a too short hospital bed.
“Does my reputation precede me? Don’t look so worried, I’m unbothered by what others make of me. I sit at the graveyard desk, where the unsolvables go to moulder.” He grinned. “Not so much of a laugh once I solve them, of course.”
“And have you solved them all?” her eyes softened when she caught him trying desperately to fix his hair.
“Some. There are always more.”
“You should be well enough to pursue your suspicions in forty-eight hours or so.”
“That’s fortunate. I’m not sure I know how to stop.”
Before Hermione could answer, another Healer in the same bright green scrub robes came to find her.
Hand finally stilling over the notes, Hermione gave a gentle nod and left him to recover in the soft, drug-induced sky blue haze.
●・○・●・○・●
It was a fortnight later when Hermione saw Draco Malfoy again. He scarcely contributed to the dinner party atmosphere, his remarks polite but vague. Rehearsed, Hermione thought, as if he’d memorised a script of polished, socially acceptable platitudes.
With every small pull of wine from his glass, her own throat grew still more parched. This wasn’t her. She didn’t wear a dress or high heeled shoes with straps that chafed friction burns onto her ankles. This version, this thread of fate, had unspooled off to the side of how her life was meant to unfold.
His mouth - his mouth - was still set in that alluring edge between mockery and sin when, late into the night, he motioned her to follow him to a room Hermione was pretty sure was off limits to guests.
“I can’t stand the effort of being dull,” was his only answer when she pointed this out, then proceeded to set up a board game.
It was Go. Hermione chose white, so went second. “You seem to have recovered well.”
“You know I have, you oversaw my recovery yourself. Ta, and so on.”
“Any more seemingly impossible puzzles land on your desk of late?”
“Some. Beyond the dead man - the one the Curse was meant for, the night I was delivered to your attentive care - I’m looking into that vile series of murdered women. I wouldn’t call it impossible, but there are a lot more pieces still to fit.”
She should have left, or better yet, find a way to have never been there. Her tights were somehow both rolling down and digging into her waist, and Hermione felt ridiculous. “Can you see the edges yet?”
He met her eyes and set a stone down with a snap. “It’s a developing pattern. I’ve grown bored of the irony of being pulled into pointless meetings telling me how I need to work faster.”
“Not all is quiet at the graveyard.”
“Not when the dead man comes from an influential family, no, so my desk has turned into a rest stop. I’ve taken the case materials home.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Gods, no.”
She stared at his mouth, longing as one would for a vial of poison. “Why does it have to be you?”
“I’m an obsessive. Show me a complex system or artefact, and I have to understand how it works. In fact, I wanted to ask about your doctoral thesis.”
She wanted to sip some of that poison. From his mouth, for preference. “It might be dead. I’ve been told to think of something new.”
“But you won’t. You have something.”
If she was any judge, so did he. “Perhaps another developing pattern.”
He gestured at their board. “So much more interesting than the whole thing, isn’t it? It sounded promising, what little I could understand of it. Neuromagibiology isn’t my forte.”
He was good at the game, and of course she was, and she rebelled against the thought of letting him win with every fibre of her being. Too clever by half, too clever even to be risk averse. Hermione silently placed her next stone. “If you could convince the Ministry, that would be great. They’ve pulled my funding.”
“That won’t stop you, not a fellow obsessive. Just a theory,” he admitted with a curve of that plump mouth, “but one I’m quite confident in. Ah, you’re not going easy on me. Perfect. I’ll return the favour.”
Yet his touch was a whisper as he brushed his fingers over hers on the board, so gentle she almost missed it when he captured a string of her pieces. “I’m not much of a challenge.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment.”
He was worse than poison. To Hermione, he was the sweet whispered call of the void, and she wanted to dance on that edge.
●・○・●・○・●
Before the week was out, Draco waited until her shift was done, luring her out of St Mungo’s and under the shelter of a pub awning. They were two of a set: her in a pearl white mac, him in a raven wool coat.
“Why are you here?”
He went along with it. “I was at the morgue. Another murdered woman.”
Hermione never asked for details about his cases. Not once. “Is it the same murderer as the others?”
“A lot of the evidence points towards it.”
Early morning rain pelted the London streets, clean from the skies to drag, muddy grey, down the gutter. The city itself rushed in to fill the silence with its rattling pulse of people in motion.
“That was hours ago,” Hermione pointed out.
“Then I decided to ask you to dinner.”
“That’s hours away.”
“So we have time for you to come over to mine. I have a Go board. We could play together.”
Even to his own ears, he hadn’t managed to make those last two sentences connect.
Her fingers stretched over his coat to squeeze his forearm. “Let’s go to mine, instead.”
Hermione never stopped surprising him. For a man that lived to map out possibilities, she hit his veins like sizzling oil. The feel thrummed through him when, barely on the right side of her front door, he allowed just enough space between their bodies to undo the belt of her mac, his face lost in the wildflower scented valley of her neck.
“Shall we play?” His voice had gone to little more than gravel.
“Yes.”
“Do you have a board?”
“I have a bedroom. But we don’t have-”
“Much better.” He kissed her with every ounce of frustrated want that had burbled inside him until oxygen was a distant, derivative dependency compared to her.
●・○・●・○・●
It was dusky evening by the time Draco retraced his steps, following their discarded garments and shoes to find Hermione sitting in front of a mug of something cold.
Her wand was in full view on the other end of the table. It had been laid out neatly next to her bag and scarf.
“It was you. You figured it out, and it was you, that night," he whispered, rolling up the sleeves of his button down.
“How long have you known?”
“Since I woke up at St Mungo’s. I told you then, too.”
“I guess you did.”
“How did you find him? I know it’s something to do with your thesis. Do you have a working spell?”
“If it had worked as it was meant to, it would allow me to collect memories from the recently deceased.”
Only the holy grail of criminal investigation, born out of a mind as intricate and exciting as hers. Draco wanted to sit inside it, spend time there. “And it did work.”
The shake of her head was almost a tremble. “No. I- made a mistake. I thought I had the culprit.”
Draco had no difficulty imagining Hermione in the cold, vaulted morgue, standing over the murdered woman’s corpse, burdened with the certain knowledge of the identity of her killer, and that of half a dozen others. With no power to act on any of it. “You couldn’t let it go, and you couldn’t go to the DMLE. They slashed your funding and told you- what? That it wasn’t legal?”
"Non verifiable, and it didn’t allow for cross-examination.”
“Bollocks. His mother is a Seated Member of the Wizengamot. Her fingerprints are all over this.”
“But they were right, Draco. They were,” Hermione insisted in the face of his humourless laugh. “You said it yourself, the real murderer is still out there hurting women. I got it wrong, and I stalked and killed an innocent-”
“You did nothing of the sort. I know it for a fact. I was pursuing him long before you did, but I didn’t have enough evidence to throw him in Azkaban, and now I know why. I know why some of the murders clashed with unimpeachable alibis, the subtle differences in how the women were taken and killed.”
Draco barely had time to will her to understand. Lightning quick, she was there already. “An accomplice.”
“And we have another victim that can point us right to them.” This, he felt, was the most salient detail.
“Us? What happens after I show you the spell?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“No, don’t do that.”
“Tell me what I should do, then.”
She released a big breath, sitting back in the chair. “Arrest me. Take me in.”
“Whatever for?”
Draco thought her intimidating stare was rather cute. “You can trace my magic to the Curse used at the dead man’s flat.”
“Dead murdered bastard’s flat.”
“It’s still murder. You’re still an Auror.”
“I am. I told you I have all the pertinent evidence at mine and invited you over. All you had to do was accept and any attempts to use it against you would get thrown out on the grounds of contamination. Why didn’t you?”
“You know why.” She'd worried her bottom lip between her teeth almost to the point of bleeding.
“I would like you to answer my question, please.”
“Because that wouldn’t have been about killing a murderer, but becoming one myself, in the truest sense. It would have tainted everything. You, me. Us.”
"You can help me. I still need to find the accomplice, and the spell worked."
“I don’t want to compromise you.”
Compromised, he thought. That was accurate, wasn't it? "If either of us cared about keeping our hands clean, we wouldn't be here. We can stop murderers, instead. That's quite the trade off."
"Am I suppose to believe that you're fine with my having killed someone?"
Standing, Draco went around the table, drawing her face up with the tip of his fingers. "Did you think I would balk at the concept of dispensing justice in the face of a system rigged against it? No. I should hope to be as brave as you are. So tell me - will you help me, or not?"
And her eyes betrayed the answer before she had a chance to give it.