Chapter 3: Doorways
She let Harry in, in the end.
The three of them ate the noodles at the workbench at a quarter to midnight, in a silence so polite it squeaked. Draco asked about Auror training. Harry asked about wyverns. Draco's bandaged hand lay on the bench between them like a fourth guest nobody had invited. Afterwards Harry walked her home through the wet, and on her step he said, "Night, Hermione," and nothing else at all, which was worse than anything he could have said.
By Sunday Pip Okafor's arm was her own again. Draco had drawn the last of the silver out on Friday morning and then sat down on the floor of the side room with his back to the wall and his eyes shut, while Pip cried and thanked him and Healer Carvalho tried to take his pulse. Dennis was at his mother's with his arm in a sling. The christening cup was still out there somewhere. On Friday the Daily Prophet had run MALFOY SILVER CURSES MUGGLE-BORNS across its front page, with AMNESTY BILL IN CHAOS underneath and a photograph of Hermione leaving St Mungo's looking, she thought, exactly like a woman who'd been sleeping in her office, which she had. Bertram Ogilvy was quoted four times. The vote was in thirteen days.
"Polyjuice," Hermione said over the roast.
Sunday lunch at Grimmauld Place had been happening, on and off, since the first autumn after the war. Harry sat at the head of the long kitchen table because Kreacher refused to serve anyone else first. Ron, who had been her boyfriend for eighteen months after the war and was now her friend again in a way that fitted them both far better, passed her the gravy without being asked. Ginny was back from an away match in Wigtown with a cut on her chin and a mood. She and Harry had split two years ago, so amicably that Molly still hadn't quite forgiven them for giving her nothing to be upset about.
"It has to be," Hermione went on. "The door reads faces, and mine's one of four. Whoever's been in and out of that vault has been doing it wearing me, and signing my initials, and the door's been holding itself open for them like a footman."
"So they need your hair," said Ron, through a potato.
"Then stop leaving it everywhere," said Ginny. "I've been pulling it out of Harry's sofa since 1998."
Harry went pink to the ears. Hermione decided not to notice, and noticed anyway.
She laid out the rest between the roast and the treacle tart. A decoy: a real Malfoy comb from the back of Narcissa's old dressing table, carrying, Draco said, the signature of the Argent without its bite, and a tracking charm worked into the third tine. She would mention it in her own office on Monday and nowhere else. It would go down to the vault on Wednesday. If it vanished, it would be because somebody on Level Two had heard her say so. Robards had signed off on Friday, with the air of a man who'd rather be signing almost anything else.
"And Malfoy's in on it," said Ron.
"It's his family's silver," said Harry. "He's the only one who can tell a real piece from a fake. And he's pulled that curse into his own hand four times this week, Ron. You saw Dennis's arm."
Ron stared at him. "Are you defending Malfoy?"
"I'm stating facts."
"He's defending Malfoy," said Ginny, to the treacle tart.
Hermione looked down the table at Harry. Harry looked at his plate.
Afterwards, when Ron had gone back to the shop and Ginny had Disapparated to training with a kiss on both their cheeks and a look at Harry that Hermione couldn't read, the two of them sat on the front step of number twelve with their coats on and watched the square. Muggles went by with shopping and umbrellas. None of them glanced at the step, which as far as they were concerned was the gap between eleven and thirteen and always had been.
Hermione leaned her head on Harry's shoulder. She had done it a thousand times: in the tent, in the common room, in the back of a Ministry car on the way home from too many funerals. It was the most ordinary thing she knew how to do.
This time she felt him go still under her cheek, the way you go still when a bird lands near you and you don't want it to fly.
And she noticed. That was the trouble. She noticed the cold on the wool of his coat, and the smell of him, soap and broom polish, which hadn't changed since they were eleven. She noticed that she'd noticed. She was fairly sure he knew.
"Hermione," he said.
"Mm."
A long pause. A bus went by on the far side of the square.
"Wednesday," he said. "Be careful. I mean it. If anything goes wrong down there, you get out and you let me deal with it."
"Harry." She lifted her head. He was looking at the square, not at her, and his jaw was tight. "Are you—"
"Don't," he said, very gently. "Not now. Someone's sending cursed silver to a list of people with your name on it. Ask me after."
"After what?"
He looked at her then. Fourteen years of that face, she thought, and she had never once seen it frightened of her.
"After," said Harry.
He gave her the Cloak on Wednesday evening, in the corridor outside the Auror Office, without a word. Then, as she turned to go: "It was my dad's." As if she didn't know. As if she hadn't been under it with him a hundred times. "Bring it back."
"Harry, I'm not going to lose your—"
"Bring you back," he said. "That's what I meant."
The plan was simple, which was what she liked about it. At six she had Flooed home from the Atrium in front of half the Ministry. At seven she had come back in through the Auror entrance. Harry would sit in the Atrium with Proudfoot and Savage and a glass dish holding the tracker's needle; if the comb moved, they would follow it wherever it went. Hermione and Draco would wait inside the vault under the Cloak and see who came. In her pocket was a coin, one of the old DA galleons, its Protean Charm reworked so that a press of her thumb would make its twin burn in Harry's pocket. She'd invented that charm at fifteen. She'd been absurdly pleased to learn he'd kept his.
The Cloak was not made for two adults, one of them over six foot. They stood pressed into the back corner of the vault behind the shelf of wand boxes, his chest to her shoulder blades and his breath in her hair, while the lamps faded around them and the dark came down so thick she couldn't see her own hand. Draco had tried to keep an inch between them. The inch had lasted about twenty minutes.
"You're humming," he murmured, an hour in.
"I'm not."
"You're humming Wizengamot procedure. Section nine. I didn't know it had a tune."
"Everything has a tune if you have to learn it by Friday."
She felt him laugh more than heard it, a small movement at her back. Then he went still, and she heard what he had heard: the grille, clearing its throat.
The lamps came up one by one, and Hermione watched herself walk into the vault.
It was her exact face. Her hair was coming out of its clip the way it always did by evening, and she wore grey work robes with the ink stain on the left cuff that no charm had ever shifted. It was the strangest thing Hermione had ever seen, and she had seen a great many strange things. She'd always thought she walked faster.
The other Hermione went straight to the Malfoy shelf. She drew on gloves, picked up the comb, held it to the light, and smiled with Hermione's mouth. Hermione had never once in her life smiled like that.
Then she turned her head, quite slowly, towards the corner.
"Homenum revelio," she said, in Hermione's voice.
The spell went through Hermione like a cold draught. She saw the thief's eyes settle on the place where they stood. There was no time to do anything. The thief's free hand went into her robes and came out holding a small silver cup, and she threw it, underarm and hard, at Hermione's face.
The Cloak slid. Hermione flung up her hand, too slow.
Draco's hand got there first. He caught the christening cup an inch from her cheek, bare-fingered, and held it, and nothing happened to him at all.
"It's only rude to the rest of you," he said, and the thief's next curse hit the shelf above their heads, and the world came down.
When the noise stopped, the only light was the one at the end of her wand.
She didn't remember casting it. She didn't remember the Shield Charm either, though there must have been one, because she was alive. She remembered Draco's weight knocking her flat, a shelf going over like a felled tree, the grille clanging and a flash of grey robes going through it. Her robes. Her face. And somewhere in all of it she must have found the coin, because it was in her fist now, and still warm.
Wand boxes lay split open down the length of the aisle. The bleeding tapestry had come down across it and was soaking quietly into the flagstones. Under a fallen shelf the goblin spoons were screaming, high and thin, like a row of kettles. The christening cup sat upright on the floor where Draco had dropped it, as if waiting to be filled.
Draco was sitting against the far wall, holding his left forearm in his right hand, with blood running between his fingers.
"Let me see."
"It's a Severing Charm, Granger, it's not—"
"Let me see."
He took his hand away. The hex had opened his sleeve and the arm under it from wrist almost to elbow, clean and deep, straight across the faded Mark. She was already in her beaded bag. She had sworn in 1998 that she'd retire it and she never had, and she found the dittany by touch and pulled the cork with her teeth.
"You caught it," she said. Her voice was doing something she didn't like. "You caught a cursed object with your bare hand, an inch from my face, in the dark—"
"It's my family's. It likes me. That's the whole trouble with it." He hissed as the first drop hit. Green smoke curled up from the wound and its edges began to draw together. "Would you rather I'd let it hit you? Silver's a dreadful colour on you. I'd have had to look at it for a week."
Her hands were shaking. She put on a third drop, then a fourth, though the third had been plenty, and he let her. When the skin had closed to a raw pink line she didn't let go of his arm. She found she couldn't. Her thumb rested on the Mark. It was cut through now, the old grey lines broken by the new pink one, and neither of them said a word about it.
"Hermione," he said.
He had never once said it, not in all the years since they were eleven. It came out low and careful, as though he'd been keeping it somewhere safe and wasn't sure it still worked.
She looked up. In the wand light his face was all angles and shadow, and he was looking at her as if she were the only thing in the room that wasn't broken. She understood then, with the clarity that came to her only in exams and emergencies, that she was going to kiss him. If she was honest, she'd known since a hospital room nine days ago, and one at a time, Granger.
So she did.
She had meant to be careful about it, and she wasn't. His good hand came up to her jaw and slid into her hair, scattering whatever pins were left, and he kissed her back as though he'd been thinking about it for a good deal longer than nine days: slowly, and then not slowly at all, her name again against her mouth. She had her fist in his ruined sleeve. Somewhere a long way off the spoons were still screaming. She had never in her life cared less about anything.
The grille clanked.
She pulled back, though not far. Not far enough, she would think later. Her hand was still on Draco's face when three wand-lights swept the vault and Harry came through the door first, the way he always came through doors, his wand pointed straight at her heart.
For one long second he didn't know which of her she was.
"What did I make you do," he said, very quietly, "in the tent, after Ron left?"
Her throat had closed. She had to try twice. "You made me dance."
Harry lowered his wand.
He looked at her, kneeling in the wreck of her vault with somebody else's blood on her hands. He looked at Draco, and at her palm against Draco's cheek, and at Draco's hair, which was a mess in a way no Severing Charm had made it. Something went out of his face, quickly, like a lamp turned down. When he spoke, his voice was perfectly steady, and that was how she knew.
"The comb's moving," he said. "Proudfoot's on it. It's gone up to Two." He turned back towards the door. "Malfoy. Can you walk?"
"Yes."
"Then walk," said Harry, and went.
Harry came to her flat at ten past two in the morning.
She'd been home an hour. She had washed Draco's blood off her hands at the kitchen sink and watched the water run pink and then clear, and then gone on standing at the sink for a while after there was nothing left to wash. Draco had gone to St Mungo's under protest, escorted by an Auror who called him "sir" in a way that made it an insult. At the lift he'd caught her wrist, briefly, and said, "Lock your door," and nothing else.
She'd locked it. She unlocked it for Harry and put the kettle on, because that was what you did, because her mother had always done it, because it gave her hands something to do.
He didn't sit. He stood in the doorway of her little kitchen the way he'd stood in the doorway of her office nine days ago, with rain on his shoulders again and his glasses fogging in the warm.
"It stopped in your office," he said. "The tracker. Your desk, bottom drawer, under the spare quills. Proudfoot found it."
"In my desk?"
"They put it there on purpose. Whoever it was went up from Ten wearing your face, walked down your own corridor, left the comb in your drawer, and walked out of the building with their own face on. We never saw them do it." He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. "Robards has a list of everyone signed in on Level Two after eight. Eleven names. Tobias Merrow's one of them."
"Tobias drinks eight cups of tea a day and cries at the obituaries."
"I know."
"Dawlish will want me suspended."
"Dawlish can want." He said it plainly, the way he said most things, and something in her chest turned over and wouldn't turn back.
The kettle began to tick as it heated.
"Harry," she said. "I kissed him."
"I know." He didn't look away from her. "I was there. Well. Nearly."
"I'm not—I don't know what it—" She stopped. She, who had never in her life run out of words, couldn't find the end of the sentence. "I don't know what I'm doing."
"I know that too," Harry said. "That's all right. You don't have to know yet." He took a breath. She watched him take it, and watched him decide, and watched him step off the edge of something he'd been standing on for far longer than she had understood. "I said ask me after. I meant it. I was going to wait till this was over and you were safe and there was a good time. Then I walked into that vault and I couldn't tell which one of you was you. For a whole second, Hermione. And then I could, and you had your hand on his face." His voice was still steady. Only his hands weren't. "There isn't going to be a good time. So."
The kettle was rattling on the hob.
"I'm in love with you," Harry said. "I have been for ages. I'm not asking you for anything. I just couldn't stand in another doorway and not say it."
The kettle began to scream. Neither of them moved to take it off.