The Reluctant Detectives

Thanks for reading! Please review!!!

***

Chapter Eight


In the end it was decided that they wouldn’t leave the castle. Hermione had been correct in her assertion that Hogwarts was the safest place that they could be. They ended up relocating to a part of the castle that hadn’t been used in years. Centuries, Hermione discovered as she went about cleaning the rooms of dust, dead mummified things she couldn’t identify, and setting the rooms to her liking.


Severus found her in what could only be called a lab looking at something with a magnifying glass. He went to her, looking over her shoulder at what she was studying so intently.


“Severus, if you’re curious, why didn’t you ask?” she inquired without looking away from what she was scrutinizing.


“Very well,” he said, lowering his mouth so that it was very close to her ear. “What are you looking at, Hermione?”


She paused, flicking him a look. “Severus, for being a Slytherin, you are being painfully obvious at the moment.”


“Why do you say that?” he asked, moving even closer to her.


“I hate to sound cliché, but is that a large vial in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” she drawled.


“Feel that do you?” he asked, pulling out a plugged vial filled with a potion she had no idea what it was. “This is yours.”


Taking it from him and nearly laughing at herself, as it turned out that it was just what she said it was. She looked at it asking, “What is it?”


“Birth control potion,” he told her.


Sighing heavily, she pulled the plug and drank it all. “Now go away until I have made some sort of logic of this massive puzzle we have been given.”


“What are you doing?” he repeated, moving slightly away from her as he studied the piece of wall in her hands.


“They said that these were on the walls of the locations that the bombs went off, correct?” she asked him.


“Yes,” he murmured, taking up the other one to look at it closer.


“I know we were very well occupied at the time, but did you see anything on the walls of the room the third bomb was in like this?” she asked him.


“No,” he murmured. “Nothing.”


“Just standard wall decorations,” she told him.


“Its too small,” he stated.


“That’s what I was thinking as well,” she replied. “All the dark marks I’ve ever seen were grand and oversized as if they were trying to be bigger than life itself. Its as if they were trying to prove themselves god like.”


Severus nodded.


“It was like a man driving a sports car to prove he has a big cock and knows how to use it,” she muttered mostly to herself.


Frowning he asked, “What was that?”


Her head popped up. “Nothing.” Hermione looked back over to the dark mark in front of her. “Were they even correctly made?”


He silently beckoned her to hand over the magnifying glass to him. Severus was studying it for a time before he pulled back and said, “Whoever made this, did it wrong.”


“How so?” she asked, trying to see the imperfection for herself.


“There’s color here,” he pointed out to her. “With the exception of that gods awful green color that the Dark Lord loved, the dark mark was totally devoid of color other than black.” He pointed. “There are at least twelve different colors here by my count alone.”


“So you don’t think its death eaters?”


He sighed. “I hope it isn’t.”


She didn’t speak for a time before asking, “What if it’s something worse?”


“Worse than death eaters?” he asked her, sounding doubtful.


“So far as we know seventeen people are dead and well over seventy people were gravely injured in the Diagon Alley bombing. A girl of sixteen years of age committed suicide, for what reasons we do not know, but it strongly points towards an unwillingness to speak to us.” She sighed heavily looking at all the unexamined evidence. “The Ministry of Magic has received no notifications, no warnings, and they haven’t transmitted any sort of list of demands or agenda to the media. The Death Eaters always took credit for their terrorism. Always. From everything I’ve seen so far, whoever is doing this wants to remain anonymous.”


“I see what you mean,” he murmured, feeling the gravity of her words. “Perhaps they might be worse.”


***


The next time Severus saw Hermione was just after dinner. He hadn’t seen her there and had half expected her to be eating when he went over to the offices that she had set up for herself. Sitting and scribbling notes, Hermione didn’t notice him watching her. Her hair was in a messy bun that was held up from the looks of it with her wand and something else he couldn’t identify, her fingers were covered in ink, and it looked like she had been gnawing on her poor lower lip for too long. Her warm brown eyes were concentrating on the paper in front of her, making him wonder not for the first time if she had the ability to be so focused on a lover.


“The elves sent dinner,” he told her.


“Mmm, good,” she muttered, but kept going with her notes. “Uh, what did they bring?”


“Shepherd’s pie and hot tea,” he answered. “It’s a very simple meal.”


“Good,” she said, standing up and setting her notes aside. “Have you eaten already?”


“Yes, but I am not apposed to keeping you company,” he said as he walked with her over to the dining area they had both agreed to. “What were you working so hard on?”


“I got an idea,” she told him. “About a way we could study the bombing as if we were in different locations than where we were.” He pulled out her chair for her and she thanked him absently, going on to say, “I was thinking that we take the collective of the different memories and join them up, making it a large cohesive memory. So we would see what the collective saw. But we would also have the memories of the shop keepers that way we know what their different shops should look like…”


“And we would know any and all changes?” he asked, thinking it over. “That might be plausible. It will be a lot of work.”


She nodded. “I know. I think we should have a staff to help us out. People we trust without a shadow of a doubt.”


He snorted. “I don’t trust anyone that much.”


“Given the people you know that isn’t a shock,” she muttered, taking a bite of her food.


“You really must desist speaking under your breath like that,” he told her.


“True,” she said, looking straight at him as she repeated what she had said the first time.


He nodded. “True, but at least my so called good friends didn’t abandon me when all was said and done.”


***

Reviews! Reviews! Where forth art thou, Reviews? LOL! Thanks for reading and please review!