Chapter 3: Joint Authorship
I didn't go in. I went back down the stairs, all the way to the basement. I sat at my bench and put the green notebook back on hers, exactly squared to the edge, and waited.
She came back at five past five. She saw the notebook at once. She saw me. She took her coat off slowly and hung it on its peg, and I watched her hand go, without her meaning it to, to the inside pocket.
"Thursday," I said.
She closed her eyes briefly. "I knew I'd slipped. I thought I'd got away with it."
"You wrote it in plain English, Draconia. Between two lines of asphodel ratios."
"I was tired." She came over and sat down. Not at her bench; at mine, on the stool opposite, so that only my cauldron was between us, ticking quietly over a low flame. "Go on, then. Ask."
"How long?"
"Four years. Since I qualified." She looked at the bandage on her hand. "I wrote to Neville first. I didn't think he'd answer. He came to see me instead, at my flat, and he stood on the doormat for twenty minutes and didn't come in, and then he said, *She likes being read to*, and left. I've been reading to her every Thursday since. Mostly Lockhart, Merlin help me. She likes the pictures."
"And the wrappers?"
"She gives them to people she likes. Neville has hundreds." Her mouth turned at one corner. "I have nine. Ten as of today. I keep them in a tin."
I said nothing. I couldn't trust myself to.
"I know what you're thinking," she said. "I know how it looks. The Malfoy girl, trying to scrub the family name off with a cure for the thing her aunt did. A grand public penance. That's what the panel will think. That's what the *Prophet* will think, if I get it." She looked at me directly. "Perhaps that's what it is. But I sit with her every week, and she's in there, Hermione. She's still in there. She looks at my hand when I turn the pages. I just need something that'll stop her shaking long enough to hold the book herself."
"That's why your tincture is all about calming," I said slowly. "You're not trying to regrow the nerves. You're trying to quiet them."
"And you're trying to rebuild them, and yours can't do anything while they're still screaming, and mine can't do anything once they've stopped." She laughed, very tiredly. "I worked that out in week two. Why do you think I fixed your stabiliser?"
I stared at her.
"I thought," I said, "you were showing off."
"I was *also* showing off." She leaned forward, elbows on my bench, the lamp catching the silver in her eyes. "Granger. We've each got half. You know we have. It was obvious from the moment the two of us walked into this room. They put us in here to fight over a cure that neither of us can make alone."
We had a week.
I don't remember sleeping much. I remember the lab at three in the morning, the two of us at the same bench for the first time, her moonlit silver tincture and my clear gold restorative in two flasks between us, and the long argument about the order. Hers first, to quiet the nerve. Then mine, to rebuild it. But that meant two potions, and a patient like Alice couldn't manage two. It had to be one. And the moment they touched, they curdled.
"Moonstone," Draconia said, at four in the morning on the fourth night, staring at a ruined flask. "We need something to keep them apart in the same draught."
"A suspension."
"A layering." She was on her feet. "Like oil on water, but in time instead of space. Mine acts first and dissolves, and when it's gone, yours wakes up."
"That's not possible."
"Belby found it," she said, "and threw it away. Do you know why sugar ruins Wolfsbane? It binds the aconite, so it doesn't release until..."
"...until the rest of the draught has already been absorbed." I was on my feet too. "Everyone thinks that's a flaw. It's a *timer*. Draconia, you're a genius."
"I know," she said, and kissed me.
It was very quick. It was probably the four in the morning and the fumes. She drew back almost at once, with an expression of total horror, as if she'd just added the wrong ingredient to something that had been simmering for weeks.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That was... I didn't..."
"Sugar," I said. My voice wasn't working properly. "We need sugar. A slow-release binding. Do you have any?"
She looked at me. I looked at her. Somewhere behind us, my cauldron ticked over.
"There's honey," she said faintly, "in my hamper."
It worked on the seventh night. Not perfectly, and not on anyone yet. Healer Pye ran it through the full Gamp assay on cultured nerve tissue from the hospital's own stores, a thing that took twelve hours and that we sat through on two stools in the corridor outside his office, not touching, not speaking, sharing a single flask of tea. At nine in the morning he came out in yesterday's robes, with his pink face gone even pinker, and said, "Well. Well. *Well*," and had to sit down.
The presentation to the panel was that afternoon. We had agreed, in the corridor, at roughly six in the morning, how we would do it. That is to say, we hadn't agreed at all. We had had a short, vicious, whispered argument about it, which ended when she said, "Fine, Granger, have it your way, you always do," and I said, "I'll take that as a yes."
So I stood up first, in front of the seven members of the Belby panel and a portrait of Damocles Belby himself, who looked exactly as sour as I'd imagined, and said:
"I'd like to withdraw my application."
There was a murmur. Draconia, beside me, didn't move a muscle.
"And so would I," she said. "Withdraw mine."
"In favour," I went on, "of a joint one. The work in front of you has two authors. Neither half works without the other. If the Fellowship can only fund one researcher, then I'm afraid it can't fund this. You'll have to find someone else. We're not splitting it."
Belby's portrait made a noise that might have been a laugh.
It took them an hour. We sat in the corridor again. At one point, Draconia's bandaged hand ended up on the bench between us, and so did mine, and neither of us moved them. Then Healer Pye came out and told us that the panel had been unable to find any rule against a joint Fellowship, largely because nobody had ever thought to write one, and that Professor Neville Longbottom, who sat on the board in an advisory capacity and had come down from Scotland that morning on purpose, had said that if the hospital wouldn't fund both of us, he'd pay for the second post himself.
"He said," Healer Pye added, looking a little puzzled, "that it was the least he could do, given the tin."
Draconia made a very small sound and turned her face away.
The lab was quiet that night. The new window had been fitted, finally, and moonlight came through it onto her bench, which was now, by the panel's decision, *our* bench, though we had not yet discussed who'd get the end under the window.
I'd brought lunch. At eleven o'clock at night it was technically dinner, but I'd brought it in a paper bag anyway, out of habit. Two cheese and pickle sandwiches, cut into triangles, on brown bread, with a great deal of butter.
She opened her hamper. There were two saffron tarts in it. Two pots of crème fraîche. Two silver spoons.
We looked at each other across the bench.
"I made two," she said. "That is, Tilly made two. On my instructions. In case."
"In case of what?"
"In case you stole one, Granger. Obviously." She took a sandwich out of my bag without asking and bit into it. "You know, I've decided I like the pickle."
"You said it was a crime against cheese."
"I've revised my findings." She set the sandwich down. Then, without any of the fluency she brought to everything else, she reached across the bench and took my hand, the one with ink stains in the shape of a substitution table that hadn't worked, and held it. "About the other night. In the lab. When I..."
"When you kissed me and then talked about honey."
"*You* talked about honey."
"I did," I admitted. "I'm sorry. I panicked. It's been a very long time since anyone kissed me in the middle of a breakthrough."
"Has anyone ever kissed you in the middle of a breakthrough?"
"No," I said. "That was the first."
She looked at me for a long moment, in the moonlight, with silver dust on her cheekbone that she still didn't know about and that I was still not going to tell her about.
"We should test the result," she said gravely. "One trial is anecdotal."
"Draconia Malfoy. Is that a scientific argument?"
"It's an excellent scientific argument," she said, and leaned across the bench, over the sandwiches and the saffron tarts and the six weeks, and I met her halfway.
It was slow this time. She tasted of pickle, which shouldn't have been romantic, and was. Her bandaged hand came up to my jaw, very carefully. I put mine in her impossible hair and pulled out all three pins. Behind us, on the burner, a flask of the new draught sat gold and silver in the lamplight and did not curdle.
When we broke apart she rested her forehead against mine, and after a moment, very quietly, without seeming to realise she was doing it, she began to hum.
I didn't ask her to stop. I think I'd have stolen it, if I could.