Chapter 6: The Floating Feather Fiasco
Hermione woke to a soft, tickling sensation on her cheek. She brushed at it sleepily, her fingers encountering something impossibly light and faintly shimmering. Blinking into the morning sun, she sat up.
Her entire flat was filled with them.
Thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of iridescent feathers drifted in a slow, coordinated current. They were the color of opals, shifting from pearl to rose-gold to the faintest blue as they caught the light. They didn’t fall. They swirled, danced, and finally assembled themselves with impossible precision in the space between her sofa and the bookshelves. They spelled out words in elegant, floating script:
GOOD MORNING, GRANGER.
A laugh burst from her, bright and startled in the quiet room. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but the delight was already bubbling in her chest. It was absurd. It was lavish. It was, undeniably, a declaration of war.
She swung her legs out of bed, the feathers parting around her ankles like a respectful court. She marched straight to the window, her cotton nightdress whispering around her calves.
His windows were open, the sheer curtains fluttering. He was there, of course. Leaning against his kitchen counter, cradling a mug of coffee. He wore grey joggers and nothing else, his hair still damp from a shower. He looked utterly at ease, but his eyes were fixed on her flat, waiting.
Hermione didn’t wave. She didn’t smile. She met his gaze, raised her wand, and with a broad, deliberate swish, vanished every single feather from her flat. The space felt suddenly, starkly empty.
Then she got to work.
Her spell was complex, a blend of precise transfiguration and reflective charmwork she’d once used to confuse a mountain troll of a prosecutor during a trial. She aimed not at him, but at the surfaces of his flat.
Across the alley, Draco took a sip of his coffee. And then choked.
Every reflective surface in his line of sight—the glass front of his expensive oven, the black screen of his dormant Floo, the polished marble of his countertops, even the surface of his coffee—suddenly shimmered and resolved into an image. His own face, captured in that exact moment of choking, smirk perfectly intact, stared back at him from a dozen angles. He turned his head. The image in the oven turned. He set his mug down. The face in the coffee glared up.
A slow grin spread across Hermione’s face. She saw his shoulders shake. He wasn’t annoyed. He was laughing.
He turned towards his window, raised his hands in a ‘you got me’ gesture, and then pointed at her, a promise in the gesture.
The reflection-prank lasted an hour before he dismantled it, but not before Pansy Parkinson, sipping espresso at a café table in the square below, noticed the strange, repetitive glinting from Draco’s flat and laughed so hard she snorted into her cup.
“He’s losing his touch,” she remarked to no one in particular, shaking her head.
Theo Nott, trying to review a distribution ledger in his flat directly below Draco’s, was less amused. A cascade of silvery, mirror-like light had leaked through the ceiling, making his parchment glare. “Draco!” he yelled up at the ceiling. “Some of us are trying to run a business that isn’t based on hormonal theatrics!”
There was no reply from upstairs, only the sound of faint, manic scribbling.
Draco’s retaliation arrived just after noon. Hermione was making tea, trying to focus on a draft proposal for regulating love potions, when a soft tapping came at her window. Not one tap. A flurry.
A flock of origami swans, crafted from what looked like priceless, shimmery manuscript parchment, hovered outside. Each bore a tiny, precise number on its wing. Sighing, she opened the window.
They streamed in, arranging themselves in a neat line on her dining table. The first one unfolded itself with a whisper.
“Compare her face with some that I shall show, And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.” —A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act I, Scene II)
P.S. A blatant lie. But the sentiment felt classic.
She rolled her eyes. The second swan unfolded.
“For where is she so fair whose uneared womb, Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?” —Sonnet 3
P.S. Too much? Probably.
“Merlin, he’s insufferable,” she muttered, but she was reaching for the third swan.
“I would not wish any companion in the world but you.” —The Tempest (Act III, Scene I)
P.S. Genuine. For the moment.
Her throat felt tight. The casual audacity of it, mixed with that one startling line of honesty, disarmed her completely. She spent the next twenty minutes reading them all, her tea going cold. The quotes ranged from the profoundly romantic to the ludicrously carnal, each annotated with his dry, self-deprecating commentary. It was a history of literature weaponized for flirtation.
She couldn’t let it stand.
Her next move was silent. While he was apparently brewing something that smoked a peculiar violet color in his lab area, she performed a intricate, wordless charm. The next time he opened his sleek, modern refrigerator, a cascade of neon-pink, gelatinous globules shaped like tiny hearts oozed out, covering his floor with a suspiciously affectionate plop-plop-plop. They were completely harmless, smelled faintly of strawberries, and were enchantedly resistant to scouring charms.
Theo, hearing the resultant stream of inventive curses from above, put his head in his hands.
The pranks escalated through the afternoon. He charmed all her quills to sing bawdy sea shanties. She hexed his wireless to play nothing but Celestina Warbeck’s greatest hits on a loop. He transfigured her favourite armchair into a giant, sulky looking squash for ten minutes. She made the taps in his bathroom run a vibrant, persistent puce.
It was ridiculous. It was juvenile. And with every exchange, the space between their windows felt less like a no-man’s-land and more like a vibrant, pulsating bridge.
As evening drew in, the energy shifted. The playful artillery fell silent. Hermione stood by her window, bathed in the deep blue light of dusk. She was tired, her mind buzzing not with legal theory but with the day’s strange, joyful combat. Across the way, his flat was dark for a long time.
Then a single lamp clicked on.
He walked to the window, holding two glasses. He wasn’t smirking. He looked thoughtful, almost serious. He placed one glass on his own sill, then levitated the other across the alley with careful, deliberate slowness. It navigated through her open window and came to rest gently beside the crystal vase holding his strange, glowing flower.
It was a measure of fine, oak-aged mead, golden and deep.
He picked up his own glass and waited.
Hermione looked at the offered glass, then at him. This wasn’t a prank. It was a parley. She picked it up. The glass was cool. She raised it.
He mirrored her. They drank, simultaneously, their eyes locked over the rims. The mead was sweet, sharp, and warm as it slid down her throat.
He gave that same, slight nod. Then he turned, picked up a parcel wrapped in plain brown paper from a table behind him, and levitated it across in the same careful manner. It landed lightly at her feet.
He simply shut off his lamp, disappearing into the shadows of his flat.
Hermione set down her glass. She picked up the parcel. It was soft. Unwrapping it, the sapphire blue wool spilled into her hands. It was the robe from his wardrobe, the one she’d admired days ago. There was no note this time.
She held it up. The fabric was sumptuous, heavy in the best way. On an impulse, she shrugged off her cardigan and slid her arms into the sleeves. It fit as if it had been made for her, falling to her knees, the collar framing her face. She felt enveloped in a scent that was unmistakably him—cedar, frost, and something darker beneath.
She walked to the window, the robe wrapped around her, and looked at the dark glass across the way. She saw only her own reflection now: a witch in a borrowed blue robe, a ghost of a smile on her lips, a glowing flower at her back.
The game had paused. The silence now was not a challenge, but a shared, breathless thing. And for the first time, she was eager for tomorrow’s move.