Chapter 7: The Care Package
The rain tapped a steady, lazy rhythm against the window of Hermione’s flat. It was a comforting sound, one that usually helped her think. Tonight, it was just background noise to the chaos.
Her coffee table was a monument to diligent panic. Scrolls of parchment unfurled like accusing tongues, covered in her frantic script outlining the loopholes in the 1715 Centaur Land Accords. A half-eaten slice of burnt toast sat on a plate like a fossil. An empty wine glass held the last purple stain of a Merlot she barely remembered drinking.
The silver locket lay where she’d tossed it last night, catching the lamplight. She hadn’t opened it. She didn’t need to. The feel of it against her skin, the weight of it in her palm—it was enough. A stupid, sentimental impulse purchase from a wizard street vendor in Paris. The engraving inside, DM, had felt like reclaiming something, turning a monogram into a mere pattern. Now it just felt like a thing on a messy table.
A sharp knock at the door broke her concentration.
“It’s open, it’s probably haunted!” Luna’s voice floated through the wood, dreamy but decisive.
The door swung open to reveal Ginny, soaked and laughing, holding a large, ornately carved wooden box above her head like a prize. Luna followed, her radish earrings dripping, a serene smile on her face.
“Salvation,” Ginny announced, kicking the door shut with her foot. She shook her head like a wet Kneazle, spraying droplets across Hermione’s notes. “Merlin’s pants, it’s coming down out there. We come bearing gifts to combat…” She gestured at the table with her free hand. “…all this.”
“Gin, I’m in the middle of a legislative nightmare,” Hermione said, but she was already smiling, pushing her hair back from her face. “And my wards are set to ask a security question.”
“It was ‘What is the foundational flaw in Wand-Import Regulation 12-C?’” Luna said, floating past to perch on the arm of the sofa. “I said ‘The presumption of sentient wood,’ which seemed to satisfy it.”
Hermione blinked. “That’s… actually correct.”
“Of course it is,” Luna said, as if stating the sky was blue. “Now, Ginny, the box. Before Hermione combusts from legislative fatigue. You can see the sparks around her temples, they’re quite a worried orange colour.”
Ginny placed the box on the table with a deliberate thud, right on top of a clause about grazing rights. “From the both of us. A little birdie—well, a very straightforward Weasley—told us you’ve been existing on caffeine, righteous indignation, and the ghost of a social life.”
“I have a social life,” Hermione protested weakly.
“Reading historical ledgers in the Ministry archive until midnight doesn’t count,” Ginny said, flipping the box’s brass latch. “Even if you are looking for dirt on Draco Malfoy’s ancestors. Which, brilliant, by the way. I hope you find something truly vile.”
Hermione’s smile tightened. “It’s not about him. It’s about precedent.”
“Sure,” Ginny said, not listening. She opened the lid.
Inside, nestled on deep blue velvet, was a sleek, obsidian-black device, about the length of her hand. It shimmered with a subtle, internal light, like a captured starfield. It was beautifully, undeniably specific in its purpose.
Hermione felt a heat rush up her neck to her cheeks. “What… what is that?”
“It’s a stress-relief instrument,” Luna said pleasantly. “Infused with Nargle-calming energies. They get terribly agitated around unfulfilled potential, you know. All that buzzing.”
“It’s a vibrator, Hermione,” Ginny said, rolling her eyes at Luna. “A really, really fancy one. Enchanted. Responds to whispered spells for intensity, pattern, that sort of thing. No hands. Useful for a witch with a lot on her mind.” She winked. “And nothing else.”
Hermione’s mouth opened, then closed. She couldn’t look away from the thing. It was both absurd and terribly, intimately elegant. “I… you can’t just give someone this.”
“Why not?” Ginny shrugged, pulling two more bottles of wine from her magically expanded pockets. “You’re a grown witch. You work eighty-hour weeks. You’re fighting the entire Wizengamot. Your last date was with a sentient draft bill. This…” She pointed at the object. “…is basic maintenance.”
“The whispering is important,” Luna added, examining a dusty bookshelf. “It requires a clear and focused intent. Very good for the mental corridors.”
Hermione stared at her friends, one grinning, one serenely earnest, and then back at the sleek black form on the velvet. A laugh bubbled up, breaking through her embarrassment. It was shocked, genuine. “You’re both ridiculous.”
“We’re your friends,” Ginny said, uncorking a bottle with a pop. “Now, are we getting pissed and you’re telling us about the centaur thing, or are we going to pretend this box isn’t here?”
Hours later, the rain had softened to a murmur. Empty bottles stood sentinel on the floor. Ginny was snoring softly, curled under a blanket on the rug. Luna had departed with a wave, claiming she needed to check on a colony of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks she’d heard had taken up residence in a pothole on Charing Cross Road.
Hermione was awake. The wine hummed pleasantly in her veins, muting the sharp edges of her anxiety. The box sat on her bedside table now, lid closed.
The flat was quiet. Deeply quiet. She looked at the box. It seemed to pulse, just slightly, with its own soft light.
“Oh, for Godric’s sake,” she whispered to the empty room.
She opened the lid. The obsidian surface seemed to drink in the low light from her lamp. Hesitantly, she picked it up. It was cool, perfectly smooth, heavier than it looked. There was a slight, magical vibration against her palm, a dormant purr.
A strange curiosity washed over her, quieting the last of her embarrassment. It was just magic. Clever, personal magic. She held it closer to her lips, her heart beating a little faster.
“Levicorpus,” she whispered, the first spell that came to mind.
The device gave a feeble, disoriented wobble in her hand and went still. A faint, smokeless heat emanated from it for a second.
Hermione snorted a laugh. “Okay, not that one.” She thought for a moment, then tried a gentler, more foundational charm. “Aguamenti.”
A warm, gentle ripple flowed through the device, a soft, wave-like pulsation. It was… pleasant. Soothing, even. She experimented, her voice a bare murmur in the dark. “Incendio.” The pulse became sharper, more focused, a low, insistent thrum. “Petrificus Totalus.” It stopped completely, then burst back to life with a intense, sudden vibration that made her gasp before settling into a steady, locked rhythm.
She lay back on her pillows, letting the enchanted waves roll through her, unknotting the tension in her shoulders, her lower back. Her mind, so fiercely occupied for weeks, finally began to quiet. The legal arguments, the watchful eyes of the Wizengamot, the lonely weight of the locket… it all faded into a warm, humming background static. Her eyelids grew heavy. For the first time in months, she wasn't thinking. She was just feeling.
In the cold silence of the Malfoy study, Draco watched.
The quicksilver mirror showed her bedroom in perfect, intimate detail. The curve of her neck against the pillow. The way her free hand clenched the duvet. The sheen of sweat on her brow. The soft, whispered spells he couldn't quite hear, but whose effects were devastatingly clear.
His own body was a rod of tension, bolted to the leather chair. His fingers, pale and long, were clenched around the armrests so tightly the dragonhide groaned. The heat in his face was a sickly mixture of lust and a rage so profound it stole his breath.
He saw the obsidian object in her hand. Saw its magical light echo against her skin. Saw her lips move, speaking to it, for it.
This was his view. His alone. This private, unguarded Hermione. The one who laughed with her friends, who drank wine, who sought this. He had charted her political ambitions, her intellectual passions, her daily routines. But this… this was a different category of knowledge. It was a violation so complete it felt like ownership.
And it was being given to a thing. A silent, stupid, enchanted object.
His grey eyes were frozen, unblinking. The haunted look in them had sharpened into something vicious. His other hand lay flat on the desk, and beneath it was the letter he’d spent the evening crafting. Polite. Reserved. Offering access to the private Malfoy family archives concerning ‘Wizarding-Beings contract law, 1600-1800,’ for the ‘furtherance of her important work.’
It was a masterpiece of plausible, distant civility.
Now, watching her, that distance incinerated. The civility curdled.
Her whispered spell—Petrificus Totalus—made the device still, then erupt. Her back arched slightly off the bed, a faint gasp escaping her parted lips.
Draco’s wand was in his hand in an instant, pointed not at the mirror, but at nothing. At the air. A vicious, silent spell formed in his mind, wanting to shatter the glass, to tear through the space between them, to banish the very idea of that object from her hand.
He didn’t cast it. He held the agony of it inside, letting it twist his insides.
This was the consequence of his cage. Others could give her gifts. Others could make her sigh into the dark. McLaggen could touch her arm. A piece of charmed wood could bring her release.
He was just a pair of eyes in the shadows.
Her movements slowed. The device’s light dimmed to a soft glow. Her breathing evened out into the rhythms of sleep, the sleek black form still held loosely in her hand.
Slowly, Draco lowered his wand. The violent urge drained away, leaving something colder, harder, and infinitely more determined.
He looked down at the letter. It was no longer just a tactical move. It was a claim.
With a sharp, precise movement, he picked up his finest quill. He didn’t change a word of the text. Instead, he dripped a single drop of sealing wax—not the standard Malfoy silver, but a deep, arterial red—onto the flap. Before it cooled, he pressed his signet ring into it, leaving the serpentine ‘M’ sharp and clear.
He would not watch from the shadows anymore.
The path was set. The archives were the key. He would give her the past she needed. And in return, he would become the future she couldn’t avoid.
In the mirror, Hermione slept, utterly unaware of the eyes upon her, of the red seal drying in the darkness miles away, of the terrible, patient hunger she had just fed.
Tomorrow, the owl would come.