"Draco, I think this is the book Voldemort read — look." Hermione pulled out the library card tucked into the back of *The Secrets of Cutting-Edge Dark Magic* and pointed to a name. "Tom Riddle."
"I didn't think that would work. I was only being thorough." He looked at the card, and then at her. "How do you grow such a quick and thorough mind? Especially when you're also—" He stopped, and the faint colour in his face made him look about twelve.
"Don't fish for ways to compliment me," she said, pleased despite herself.
She settled comfortably on his lap — his arms loosely around her waist — and opened the book again.
"There really isn't much here that's new," she said, after a while. Her mouth was a little dry. "We've worked out the principles of creation and destruction. I don't understand why someone would hide it."
"Neither do I." He handed her a fresh cup of ginger tea, warm but not scalding. "That's what makes it interesting."
She drank it without looking up from the page.
Only her childhood home had produced that particular kind of unremarked, perfectly-timed care — the glass of water appearing before she knew she was thirsty, the jumper left at the end of the bed before the weather turned. She hadn't expected to encounter it here.
She remembered the platform at King's Cross before her first year. Her mother kneeling down to meet her eye. *Peanut, even without us, you can take care of everything, right?* And her own earnest *Yes!*, fists clenched, chin up, hiding the anxiety she'd already decided she wasn't allowed to show.
*You've always been an independent girl. We believe you'll take care of yourself.*
She had taken care of herself, and she'd been proud of it.
She was still proud of it.
But it was very different, she was finding, to be taken care of by someone who wasn't obligated to, who had decided to — gradually, quietly, for reasons that had apparently predated anything she'd been aware of — without making a production of it.
She lowered the book and looked at him.
"You planned this," she said. "You've been doing this for a long time, haven't you?"
He was putting the cup down. He turned and gave her a look of perfect blankness. "Deliberately doing what?"
"Taking care of me." The memory was settling into place. "It started on the muddy path, didn't it? When you grabbed my collar so I wouldn't fall." She thought back further. "And the schoolbag. You used to carry my schoolbag and call it a favour between acquaintances."
"Oh," he said, without any particular guilt. "You worked that out."
"I should have worked it out years ago," she said. "I must be the most oblivious person alive."
"You were focused on other things."
She wanted to be annoyed, but she was too — she searched for the word, and found it: suffused. She felt suffused with it, the warmth of the realisation spreading through her the same way the ginger tea had.
She hugged him around the neck without quite meaning to.
"Draco," she said, into his shoulder. "I'm so happy."
He went still for a second — she'd surprised him. She could feel the slight tension and then the release of it as his arms came around her.
"What brought this on?" he asked.
"I figured something out," she said. "That's all."
"What did you figure out?"
She didn't answer. She sat back and held up the library card instead, redirecting before the feeling became more than she knew how to say out loud.
"His handwriting is very neat, isn't it? I'd imagine he was a favourite with his teachers — beautiful essays, impeccable presentation—"
"Twelve OWLs," Draco said. "Outwardly polite, academically impeccable. Headmaster Dippet adored him. Most of the staff did, from what Dumbledore told me."
"That's the problem," she said. "The book tells us about Horcruxes. It doesn't say anything about making *more than one*. This was the only book available to him here — so where did he learn that multiple were possible?"
Draco understood. She watched the realisation move through him.
"Someone told him," he said. "In person. A teacher who knew the theory."
"And that teacher could tell us the number," Hermione said. "How many Horcruxes he actually intended to make. Which would tell us whether we've destroyed them all." She looked at the annotations in the margin — neat, precise, Klein blue. "These are his marks. We're almost certain of it — the ink matches the signature. His thoughts are in here somewhere."
"Then we need the other books he borrowed." Draco was already thinking through it. "All of them. There could be a pattern — a progression."
"Which is why we need to go through the library's old catalogue records," she said. "Every dark magic book in the Restricted Section. Every card he ever signed." She paused. "That will require Dumbledore's permission."
Draco's expression shifted, very slightly.
"I'll speak to him," he said.
"We'll go together," she said. "I'll argue our case. We'll convince him."
He looked at her for a moment — the slight reluctance still there, something unresolved between him and Dumbledore that he hadn't explained to her — and then nodded.
"Together," he agreed.
She leaned back against him, comfortable again.
"I promised you something," he said, after a moment.
"The library." She remembered immediately. "Your family's library."
"It's extensive." He sounded, she noticed, slightly self-conscious about the word. "I think you'd find it — well. It's very big."
"You have to keep that promise," she said. "I will hold you to it with absolute seriousness. Don't underestimate my feelings about books."
"I would never dare to underestimate you." He kissed her cheek — just that, light and brief — and she laughed.
---
The rest of the Easter holiday arranged itself around two activities: mountains of homework, and the systematic examination of library cards.
The homework she dispatched with her usual efficiency, or tried to. During the first few days of the holiday she was still lethargic, and Draco — with no visible embarrassment whatsoever — continued to treat this as a logistics problem he intended to solve.
"This is becoming a problem," she told him, sitting slightly sideways with her lower back against his arm, a Divination chart in her hands and very little progress on it. "You're going to be behind on your own work."
"I've finished the collaborative assignments. Check them when you wake up."
"You can't do my homework for me."
"I summarised the discussions we've already had in class. I didn't invent anything." He pushed her empty milk glass to one side. "Do the next one yourself. That evens it out."
She opened her mouth.
He looked at her.
He reached up, with his thumb, and wiped the small smear of milk foam from the corner of her mouth with precise, unselfconscious care, the same way he did everything.
She forgot, entirely, what she had been about to say.
He waited, watching her with mild patience.
"All right," she said. "Wake me up after."
He laughed softly above her head and began to read to her.
---
"Once upon a time, there was a handsome and wealthy wizard. But he was proud, and he looked at his friends who fell in love and thought them foolish. He swore to remain alone. And so that no one could move him, he used dark magic to remove his heart and locked it in a casket in the cellar of his castle.
"Many years passed. He grew colder and colder. Even the deaths of his parents brought him no grief. He was very comfortable.
"One day he overheard his servants laughing at him — no matter how rich and powerful he was, they said, no one would ever love him. This enraged him. He decided he would find the most beautiful and wealthy woman alive and marry her.
"He found such a woman the very next day. He pursued her. She was drawn to his looks and his wealth, but her instinct told her that his heart was dark and cold. So at a ball, she said to him: show me your heart. If it is smooth and bright, I will marry you.
"He took her to the cellar. When he opened the casket, she screamed.
"His heart, having been locked away from music and family and warmth for so long, had become shrunken and covered all over in long black hair.
"She wept, and begged him to put it back. He did. She said, I want your heart to feel love again, and she held him.
"But his heart had become entirely wild. It had grown more powerful than the wizard himself. It dominated him.
"When he felt her warmth, he did something terrible. He took out a dagger and cut out her heart — smooth and red and living — and tried to replace his own hairy one with it. But his heart, which had ruled him for so long, would not be separated. He could not do it.
"He cut open his chest and tore it out. And then he died.
"When the guests found the two young people, they were heartbroken at the terrible sight."
---
The voice above her was very clear. She could feel it in the chest she was lying against — the resonance of it.
The story was horrible, the way old stories sometimes were when they told the truth. But his voice made it feel distant, the way bad things in books always felt, and the warmth of the library and his hands and the soft wool blanket made the world feel very small and very safe.
She was already half asleep.
*His heart had been in the dark cellar for a long time,* she thought, not quite following the boundary between the story and her own thoughts. *But someone came and got it back. That's how the other version ends. Someone comes and gets it back.*
She slept.
---
After her period ended, Hermione recovered her full energy and returned to the library research with renewed purpose.
"What have you two been doing in here all holiday?" Ron asked her, with genuine bewilderment, when she reappeared in the Gryffindor common room one evening. "You're out earlier than us and back later. You're working harder than Harry is for the Tournament."
"Extracurricular reading," Hermione said, which was technically accurate.
"She's *dating*," Ginny said, with the calm directness of someone reporting the weather. "Look at her. Does she look like someone who's been straining her eyes over books for two weeks?"
Hermione waved goodbye to them and climbed through the portrait hole before further questions could be asked.
Outside the library windows, April was conducting itself beautifully — clear blue sky, the Black Lake catching the light, the grounds smelling of something that wasn't quite winter and wasn't quite spring. She would have liked to walk by the lake, and under other circumstances she would have made him take her.
But they had work to do.
"This section is disgusting," she announced, upon opening a book that screamed at her. She shut it quickly.
"Be careful — some of these are actively dangerous." Draco took it out of her hands with speed. "I'd rather you didn't go through this section at all."
"Draco, there are thousands of books and hundreds of shelves and I am standing right here," she said. "I will be useful. Absolutely."
He gave her a look that suggested he found this declaration more charming than convincing, and went back to his own shelf.
Madam Pince, it must be said, was remarkably cooperative.
"Something is wrong with her," Hermione muttered, watching their librarian agree, for the third time that week, to let them into a deeper part of the Restricted Section without the usual interrogation.
Draco shrugged without looking up from his catalogue.
*(Madam Pince's private position, never stated aloud: She had eyes. This couple was not reading dark magic books with any serious intent. One would open a book, show the other something, and within ten minutes they would be sitting together on the rolling-ladder steps in the stacks, not reading anything. She had thirty years of experience with students sneaking into the Restricted Section for no academic purpose whatsoever, and she saw no compelling reason to interrupt this particular pair.)*
Two days before the end of the holidays, Draco reached a dead end.
"He barely borrowed anything," he said, with a frustration that had been building all week. "For a student with no other access to magical knowledge, the list is almost empty. Why?"
"I know," Hermione said. "It's what's been bothering me too."
They stood in the aisle together, and Draco looked at the stacks, and had a thought.
"Hermione." He turned to her. "We've been looking at the active catalogue. Books currently shelved."
She stared at him.
"Old library cards," she said. "The ones that were retired when the books were replaced or damaged. Those would be kept separately — in the archives. Not the current system."
"He borrowed those books fifty years ago."
They looked at each other.
"Madam Pince," Draco said.
"She won't just give them over," Hermione said. "This is different from browsing the stacks. She'll say the school board authority doesn't cover historical catalogue records."
"She'll be right." He pushed away from the shelf and straightened his robes. "We need Dumbledore."
A flicker of something crossed his face — there was unfinished business there, some conversation before the holidays that he hadn't described to her and that she hadn't pressed him on.
"I'll come with you," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'll make the case," she said. "I'll argue it if I need to. Between the two of us, we'll convince him." She met his eyes steadily. "You won't have to do it alone."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then, softly: "All right."
He held out his hand. She took it, and they walked out of the Restricted Section together, toward whatever came next.