LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Thirteen

The air had been humid and close when she'd gone to bed, even as late as it had been, even with the bedroom window open. Hermione had considered a Cooling Charm, but decided against it, mostly because she'd left her wand in the other room on the sideboard next to her key, and couldn't be bothered to go and get it.

But sometime during the early morning hours, the wind must have shifted; it was still damp, but cooler now and smelling of the Seine, that loamy, vaguely-fishy river smell of earth and sluggishly flowing water. And it was raining – not hard, but steadily. A spatter of water glittered on the floor under the open window.

Hermione sighed and swung her feet out of bed.

It wasn't a bad bed, she supposed, skirting the puddle on the floor cautiously and reaching up to pull the sash closed. She'd certainly slept more soundly last night than she had at any point during her recent stay at Hogwarts; smoggy and polluted as it was, maybe there really was something to be said for Parisian air.

She'd had the dream again, of course. Fidelius Charm or no Fidelius Charm, this particular phantasm had trailed her faithfully from Cairo to Gryffindor Tower, like some malodorous stray, and seemed determined to take up residence in the City of Lights as well. By this time, Hermione had despaired of ever getting rid of it; a month of bad dreams, psychically speaking, is worth about a year of anything else, and in those wide-eyed metallic-tasting moments just following, when her heart still pounded Cask-of-Amontillado-like at the prison of her chest and the shadows of her surroundings flapped menacingly at her subconscious, it seemed as if she'd never slept the whole night through in her life.

The dream never varied, nor did its accoutrements. There was always a long hallway – rather like a hotel corridor – studded with doors. An unsettling shuffle of footsteps trailing her passage, but with nothing to show for them when she turned to look back. And her own scared barefoot self, naturally – panicky and nauseous – clutching her borrowed dressing-gown closed and racing frantically from door to door, wrenching each open in turn and calling, Bill, Bill!, in tones of rapidly rising hysteria ... until there was only one door left, at the very end of the hall.

She always knew she shouldn't open it, and she always did anyway. Behind it was his face at last, beloved and sorrowful and accusing: You're too late; why did it take you so long? Why didn't you warn me?

And then the explosion – hot, vengeful, devouring – that rocked her into sweaty, sobbing wakefulness.

Awful. And inevitable.

Except that it had changed halfway through, this time – in the middle of her desperate race from one door to the next, there'd been a most unexpected hand sliding into hers, and she'd caught and tugged it and it hadn't let go.

Jarringly familiar, that hand. And a whisper to go with it, gently reproving: I can hear you screaming a continent away.Your grief is deafening me.

Sorry, she'd wanted to say, immediately contrite – wasn’t it bad enough that he was dead, after all, without her tears tugging at him from beyond the grave?

But she hadn't said sorry, she hadn't, because even if he shouldn't be there, he was ... and it was too good, too tempting and weak and bittersweet to fall back into the old routine: one arm wrapped around her waist, warm breath ruffling the fine hairs at the back of her neck, complaints about his cold hands that really weren't complaints at all, given the number of times those cool knowing fingers had gone sliding down her body over the years to spin her into half-drowsy, half-dizzy delight.

For a second or two she'd wanted that, had ached for his touch like a raw nerve. It had been so long ...

But he didn't stir, and she didn't press the issue – after all, this cuddling was nice; she'd missed this, too, nearly as much or maybe more. And then, too, he'd held her so sweetly, so safely, so like Bill and yet so not that even in sleep, even in the absence of the nightmare, she was still grieving for him.

Hermione wasn't sure which was worse: to wake up screaming with good reason, or to wake up happy... and then remember.

Luckily, it was now a moot point for the next sixteen hours.

She stepped back from the window, leaned over to retrieve her toothbrush from the satchel on the nightstand, then bit down hard on her lower lip as her gaze came to rest on the rumpled sheets of the unmade bed she'd just left.

That’s funny.

It was the far side of the bed that had caught her eye – the unslept-in side, that should have looked untouched. But the sheets were disordered there, too, and the pillow still held a clear, unmistakable dent.

That she could explain away, odd as it was; after all, she had been a restless sleeper as of late. It wasn't so impossible to believe that she'd rolled from one side of the bed to the other, during the course of the night. What was less explicable was the presence of the quilted red comforter, now lying like an untidy bloodstain against the white sheets. Hermione rubbed her eyes and sank slowly to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, trying to corral her racing thoughts.

It had been far too hot last night for blankets; she'd gone to sleep covered in nothing but a sheet, at which point that particular comforter hadn't even been on the bed, but folded neatly on top of the window seat on the other side of the room. And while she was prepared to believe a bit of tossing about, the thought that she might have made an unconscious trip across an unfamiliar room and back for a blanket without waking up in the process was a bit more of a stretch. At the very least, she'd have trod through the water on the floor.

She laid a shaking hand on the far pillow.

It was still warm.

The immediate supposition to be drawn from the circumstantial evidence -- he was here; he came back to me -- swept over her like vertigo. She fought the dizziness grimly back and scrubbed at her eyes with both hands.

Impossible. No ghost could have moved that blanket. You got cold in the night and went sleepwalking, that's all.

But the pillow is warm—

Because you've been lying on it, stupid. Don't get hysterical.

But he was here! I heard him. I – I felt him.

Wishful thinking. That's all. She curled her hands into fists and glared speculatively at Cleo, who was lying on the window seat right where the folded comforter had been, one paw over her eyes in blissful feline slumber. "Did you see anything?" she demanded, and got only a slow, contemptuous blink in answer; even if she could speak, Cleo seemed to say, wild horses couldn’t make her.

Cats. It figured.

Make the damn bed, Hermione, she told herself. And get out of this room before you drive yourself insane. You've got work to do today.

Slowly, uncertainly, but with immense determination, she began to refold the comforter.

**

The Latin Quartier in the rain was wet and grey and shrouded in mist, like a Brassaï photograph. Hermione ducked into a café for a cup of tea and – after a moment of guilty indecision – a croissant, then consulted her shiny laminated map of the subway and walked the few blocks over to the Luxembourg station to catch the train to Gare du Nord.

The Métro was surprisingly uncrowded, probably due to the season. Hermione took a seat in front of some tousle-haired college students with backpacks and listened to them chatter in casual, companionable Finnish until they exited at Les Halles. From there, the train went express to Gare du Nord. Hermione gathered her bag a little more closely to her side – she’d heard more than one warning about the proliferation of pickpockets in this part of town – and dug in the pocket for the written directions to Itmana's clinic as she trudged up the steps into the open air of the Arabic Quarter.

Here, she noticed as she turned to walk west toward the Boulevard des Barbés, there was less of that sense of a city on vacation – probably because the residents of this neighbourhood couldn't afford eight weeks in Provence or Nice or at the Riviera. Despite the rain, the tiny shops lining the street were all open and bustling, and the quarter’s population seemed to be out in full force. Hermione dodged a runaway ball kicked by one of a group of ragged-looking children in the middle of a game of street soccer, edged her way around some indolent-looking young men lounging in the awning-covered doorway of a tenement building, and nodded a greeting to the two women dressed as domestics, their black hair uncovered but severely tied back, who were about to cross the street to the Métro station.

"Excuse me," she said in Arabic, and bit back a smile at their twin expressions of shock that this milk-pale Englishwoman should speak the language of the neighbourhood. "I'm looking for Yasmine Fayed's clinic. Can you direct me?"

At the sound of the name, their faces cleared. "Doctor Fayed?" one of them said. "Straight ahead, two blocks down on the left."

Closer than she'd thought. Hermione nodded her thanks and paused in a doorway out of the rain to fumble in her bag for the letter Dumbledore had given her.

It was in this letter of recommendation from Farouk that she'd first become Dr. Kate Billings, and ceased to be Hermione Granger Weasley. Knowing that Itmana wouldn't recognise her dulled most of the prospective excitement she might have felt regarding their reunion; nevertheless, Dumbledore assured her, Farouk had laid enough groundwork with his great-niece to assure Kate Billings not only a job at the clinic, but also sufficient credentials to land her a research facility at the nearby British Hospital.

Of course, that was assuming she even wanted to try to recreate the ruined research project. Ironic, Hermione thought, that a process intended to extend and improve life had become so closely tied in her own mind to destruction and death.

But that was terrorism for you.

She found the letter, took just one more second to breathe in the familiar Cairene aromas of mint tea and roasting lamb that carried over from the little restaurant across the street, and strode resolutely on toward the clinic.

Even if you've lost your direction, she reasoned, you can still keep going forward. At least it gives your feet something to do.

As philosophies went, it was a pretty shallow one -- she'd be the first to admit it.

On the other hand, it was all she had left.

**