Roman Holiday

Chapter Sixty-Three

The inquest was tomorrow morning, and Hermione couldn’t sleep.

She had a lot on her mind. Ever since her conversation with Dumbledore a week ago, she’d been reading everything she could find on the subject of wizard trials, and not everything she found was reassuring.

Quite the contrary, actually.

From what she could tell, the magical community wasn’t disposed to settling its differences in the courtroom. The most well-publicized trials by far were those Death Eater witch-hunts Crouch Sr. had spearheaded, after Voldemort’s first defeat. And while they might have been a telling product of the dark times which produced them, and inevitable in a way - even therapeutic, if you wanted to go there - they were, Hermione realised, less a codified part of peacetime wizarding society, and more like a hastily-assembled Muggle war tribunal.

What she could expect tomorrow from this inquest, she suspected, was exactly that: an official inquiry, less cumbersome than a full-fledged trial and also much more flexible, in terms of what testimony could be allowed and what methods of extracting it permitted. Fudge would be there, of course, with a small panel of officials - Hermione suspected that Dumbledore would sit on the panel, too, but she wasn’t at all sure. They’d hear an accounting of the events from the plaintiff (her), and the defendant (Malfoy), question any eyewitnesses or persons with firsthand knowledge of the case, determine among themselves whether there was evidence of wrongdoing, and sentence accordingly.

Fine and good, as far as it went. But even apart from her suspicions about the Ministry of Magic’s impartiality where Malfoy was concerned (“Remember Buckbeak?”, she’d said gloomily, just yesterday, to Harry and Ron), Hermione had one other, far more major, concern.

Before either she or Malfoy opened their mouths to speak, it was likely that they’d be dosed with Veritaserum. And while that was good, in one sense - he’d be compelled to admit his dastardly dealings with Voldemort and come clean about the motivation behind the Polyjuice caper - it posed some problems for her as well.

One illegal Imperius Curse, for starters - the maximum penalty for which was Azkaban and the snapping of her wand. And Inlaqueo, which was a little fuzzier. Sal had said it was illegal, but to the best of her knowledge, Fudge and his cronies wouldn’t even know what it was … and after all, it wasn’t listed as an Unforgivable, now, was it?

One could hope.

Still, Hermione shuddered to think about what might happen to her scholarship and her magical patent, should Fudge find out just how the formerly-missing Initiates had gone missing.

Troubled, she massaged her temples. Worrywart. Try not to think about it, okay?

But then - then - forget the Pursuit of Justice, forget giving Lucius Malfoy his just deserts, for a moment - if she simply managed, through some miraculous alignment of the planets, to get through tomorrow without being thrown out of Hogwarts and the magical community at large, there was still her upcoming interview with Areli Ben-Nadir to worry about.

It was to be an interview-by-Floo - not just the talking-heads variety, either; oh no, the Headmaster, together with Professor McGonagall, had arranged for her to miss one entire Friday’s worth of classes, so she could actually visit the University and see - with Areli as her tour guide - the members of the Consortium at work. It really did seem as if she was being courted, Hermione thought with a twisting stomach; as if that glorious, unbelievable offer really was hers for the taking.

All the more reason not to fuck things up at the inquest. Christ.

She almost wanted to call it off, and yet the prospect of letting Skeeter and Malfoy walk despite their misdeeds, of Letting Evil Remain Unaccountable Yet Again, gave her a facial tic of epic proportions.

She had to go through with it - had to.

And she wanted, rather desperately actually, to talk to Draco first.

**

It had been a month and a half since their breakup - long enough, surely, for life to return to some semblance of normality - and indeed it had, in some respects at least. And yet - even with all her regret and self-recrimination shoved into the farthest corner of her subconscious that she could manage, even with April slipping away from the calendar like a shy girl from a dance - it felt strange not to be talking to him.

After all, for most of the school year he’d been the first one to know, the minute anything happened to her.

Was it always going to be like this? Hermione wondered. With every lover that came and went, would she lose, in his leaving, the shared history inherent to the two of them?

And where had it gone, exactly, that sweetly sloping handful of emotional topography, that first foothill of romance that now lay scraped and barren as slag, an eyesore only she, seemingly, could see?

Had he taken it with him? Or was he still as raw and wounded as she?

Hermione picked up the charm bracelet on her nightstand and studied it thoughtfully. All the charms were still attached, minus the sapphire: wand, hat, cauldron, cat … and of course, the Book and the Key.

She thumbed idly through the Keyhole and froze when the little book fell naturally open to page thirty-five.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Then again - nothing ventured, nothing gained.

She hesitated, undecided, on the edge of her bed, the Keyhole open in her palm.

**

Ten p.m. - time for the changing of the watch. Severus sauntered past Morgan and down toward Sal’s chambers, feeling oddly and most disconcertingly free of angst. That pleasant sensation of Nothing In Particular gave way to the edgier delights of evil satisfaction, as he neared Malfoy’s holding cell and heard the sound of helpless retching.

Sal certainly was inventive, he thought, and drew up next to a seemingly blank wall which melted away at his touch and then reassembled itself behind him as he swept through.

He was in a small stone room, torch-lit and provided with a satisfactory-if-impermanent Portable Hearth, the sort one might take on a camping expedition if rain was in the forecast. The floor had been laid with a thickly padded Turkish carpet to ward off the chill inherent to the subdungeons, a pair of overstuffed chairs - similar to the ones in Sal’s study - flanked a small-but-mighty bookshelf, and against one wall stood a state-of-the-art digital stereo system that Sal had conjured after a model he’d seen in one of Hermione’s Sharper Image catalogs (her father sent them to her periodically, with the more outlandish offerings circled in red; he held them up as an example of all that was simultaneously wrong and right with the Yanks). Presently the set was Perlucioed, and humming with the lively counterpoint of the Brandenburg Concertos.

A cozy little retreat, all told. Until you looked through the easternmost wall, enchanted to behave like a two-way mirror, and saw the prisoner in the next room - a functional-but-bare cell furnished only with a cot, a privy, and a rickety desk and chair.

How the mighty are fallen, Severus thought, picturing the luxuries of Malfoy Manor, and felt his lips curve in spite of themselves. Dumbledore was, even in anger, a humane jailer - the stone floor of Malfoy’s cell had been treated with a Warming Charm, and the room was suffused with dim magical light, so as not to leave its captive in darkness.

Still. No doors, no windows, no human contact, no wand. Not that the last mattered - no curse could penetrate through the enchanted wall. On the other hand, he and Sal could fire at will - to deliver food, to empty the privy, to change the linens.

Or for other reasons, which had nothing to do with bodily functions or the necessities of life, and had everything to do with petty vengeance.

Vengeance - the Slytherin way.

It ought to be on a T-shirt.

Presently, Sal was sipping tea and skimming Leaves of Grass for the racier bits. He didn’t appear to hear the gargling and choking coming from the next room; Severus, however, saw Malfoy on his knees on the bare floor, clutching his abdomen with both hands, and raised an eyebrow as he dropped into the other chair.

“Unforgivables, Sal?”

Sal’s moustache bristled. “Of course not,” he said, somewhat indignantly. “It’s a Tickling Charm, man - any infant could see that!”

Snape studied the heaving figure on the other side of the transparent wall, looking thoroughly miserable and giving new meaning to the words laughed himself sick. “A Tickling Charm,” he repeated slowly. “Ingenious.”

“Yes, he was quite amusing for the first half hour or so,” Sal mused. “After that, I fear he began to find the whole process a bit … laborious.” He carefully bookmarked the ghostly volume of Whitman with a silken ribbon, laid it gently aside on the lamp table, and picked up his wand.

“Finite Incantatem,” he said, and they watched Malfoy shudder to a halt, his half-hysterical hiccups subsiding to slightly ragged breathing as he pulled himself up on the narrow cot and collapsed.

“Poor bugger, he’s got no sense of humour really,” Sal said, deadpan. “Fellow can’t enjoy a bit of a laugh, there’s something wrong. Got to feel sorry for him, don’t you?”

Severus, studying the wretched huddle of robes on the bed, grimaced as another image slid unwillingly into his brain; another body reduced to a black-silk crumple, with a dark auburn tangle of waves tossed like a funeral shroud across her once-pretty face.

Wilhelmina, that was her name. Wilhelmina Jacobsen. He’d gone to school with her.

Gone to school, yes - every Thursday afternoon, double Charms with the Ravenclaws, and she just in front of him, tossing back that glorious hair as she nibbled her quill, such jaw-dropping sexy-librarian fantasies she’d given him unwittingly, back in their fifth-year - and then stood, and watched, and betrayed by silence.

Mina Jacobsen, broken on a bed very like this one - broken, and bloody too, though that was hidden by her hair and the robe tossed over her body, like dirt on a carcass.

Malfoy, laughing, stepping back while he rearranged his robes - taking out that wicked little blade he liked so much and used so readily, to snip an auburn curl - for my collection, he’d said with a smirk. Severus had thought of that lighthearted Muggle epic, The Rape of the Lock, and shuddered.

Somehow, the theft of Mina Jacobsen’s hair had seemed a million times worse than anything else Malfoy had just done to her. Remembering, Severus gritted his teeth against age-old guilt and narrowed his eyes at the man on the bed.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t feel sorry for him at all.”

**

There was someone in the room with him.

Draco sat up and fumbled for his wand. “Lumos,” he said unsteadily, and wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or further unsettled, when he saw Hermione. He sat up in bed and tugged the comforter a little farther up to his shoulders.

“Hi,” he said, his voice guarded. She blinked.

“Hi.”

Silence unfurled between them, like a silk scarf dropped off a cliff on a still day.

“How’ve you been?” Hermione said finally, and Draco shrugged.

“Okay. You?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Silence again, slightly more strained this time.

Don’t ask, don’t ask, Draco told himself, but finally couldn’t help it. “What’s up?” he said, as casually as possible, and was surprised when she looked straight at him, her face white and pinched.

“Scared about tomorrow,” she said tightly. “Scared of what they’ll ask - of what I’ll have to say.”

“You?” Draco looked incredulous. “You’re not afraid of anything,” he said, and Hermione snorted.

“You’d be surprised.”

Her self-mockery was new, something he hadn’t seen in her before. To his surprise, Draco found that he didn’t like it.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, feeling a bit of his carefully-hoarded bitterness reach out from its hiding place to sting him. “Ron and Harry hex each other’s ears off? Or are Gryffindors really the bad listeners we all suspected them to be?”

She didn’t say anything, and he persisted, feeling the wicked little animal inside him stretch and luxuriate in the power of its sarcasm, the flash of hurt on her white scared face.

“The Unsinkable Hermione Granger meets her iceberg,” he said, smirking. “All those little white lies catching up with you? Hogwarts’ quintessential Good Girl, shaking like a leaf over the Bottle of Truth. That’s a good one. And running to me for comfort - better yet.”

At that, she flushed. “My mistake,” she said in that same tight little voice. “Sorry I bothered you.”

She turned to go, her eyes wet with humiliation but her shoulders square. Draco studied the resolute line of her jaw and felt regret rip at him.

“Hermione,” he said from behind her. “Hermione, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, yes, you did,” she said, pausing but not turning around. “Every word of it. You hate that I’m strong, that I do things on my own; you’ve made it perfectly clear that you wanted me to be someone I’m not.”

“No,” he said, horrified. “God, no.”

Something in his voice must have reached her - she turned around to face him, eyes glittering with mingled hurt and challenge. “What, then?” she demanded. “What was it that made you end it?”

There were a million things he could have said, but only one truth. “I wanted you to need me,” he said flatly. “And you didn’t.”

She faced him down, a small tousle-haired vengeance goddess in a white Muggle bathrobe. For the blaze in her eyes, her voice was surprisingly soft.

“Had that been the truth,” she said, “I never would have let you into Giulia’s apartment. Much less my life.”

Before he could react to that, she’d turned and slipped away.

**