Always Something - Dramione

Chapter 4

Draco looked awful. He had spent the night on the too-short sofa in the salon, tense and full of excuses to offer the children if either of them found him there, all the while unable to stop his mind from going through decades of research and experimentation, his own hard-won expertise in memory sciences, desperate to find something to fix his wife. Even in the moments he'd slept, he dreamed his way through impossible problems, mad calculations barely connected to anything that could help in reality. He got up in the morning exhausted.

Before Hermione had gone to bed, he had tidied and scourgified their room, stripping the mattress of its bed linens, giving it something more like the feel of a generic hotel suite rather than a marriage bed. She had only hummed vaguely when he asked her how she'd slept, and if she'd noticed the deepening of the heavy shadows around his eyes after two difficult nights, she hadn't mentioned it. She might have just assumed that this was how people in their late thirties were supposed to look.

The entire family was at the institute now, in the quiet of a Sunday afternoon. Hermione had walked through everything, touching all of it, opening and closing notebooks that read to her now like ancient hieroglyphics. She sat at a desk she was told belonged to her, reading the first of the books she and Draco had written, working at a near frenzied pace to reload her mind.

Draco and Paul were in the workshop, re-enacting the accident.

"So Tavishton is flailing around and he shoves me," Paul said, "and I'm not expecting it, so I'm knocked off balance, and I go tripping this way, and my arm smashes down on the thing — "

"Where? Where did you hit it, and with which arm? Is there a bruise? Show me exactly..."

They went over it and over it, marking the room with flags and pins, taking measurements and jotting notes. There was no solution in sight, but the first step in any kind of critical examination is to properly define the problem. It kept them busy, at any rate.

"When are they coming?" Cassie asked from where she was folded into an armchair in her mother's office. Whoever had written the book she had chosen on famous wizard amnesiacs was a resounding success at making an interesting topic dead boring.

"Soon. Excited, are you?" Hermione asked her. "Meeting Harry Potter, that's pretty cool."

She shrugged. "I already met him. When I was a baby. That's what you say every time I ask."

Hermione's face flushed. "Yes, that's right. But this time you'll be able to talk to him."

"Why are they coming here? The institute is boring and no one's allowed to touch anything."

"It was Mal- your father's idea. He likes his privacy, I reckon, so no house guests today."

"Yeah," Cassie said, uncoiling in her chair. "He does like his privacy. Which is why I found it so odd that he was sleeping out in the open in the salon last night."

Isn't she Daddy's Little Malfoy, Hermione thought to herself. Look at her lisping away like an infant for days and then coming up with a cutting observation like that, as if out of nowhere. But all she said out loud was, "Did you not sleep well last night, Cassie darling?"

Cassie blinked. "It was fine. I just got up for the toilet, like I often do, when I thought I heard something downstairs. So I went to check and it was Dad, twisted up like a knot of the sofa."

Hermione answered with a curt nod. "Yes, well, I was still feeling poorly yesterday. And he very kindly went where he wouldn't disturb me while I got some badly needed rest, just like he would have if I was still in the hospital."

Cassie gave a particularly slow and deep blink as she asked, "Where is he going to sleep tonight?"

"He's a grown man," Hermione nearly snapped. "I'm sure he'll sleep wherever he likes. No need to worry, Castora."