The Silver Envelope

Master's bond

It's not what you think.
Draco half expected to wake up from a dream.
Hermione was here. She was ushering him into her flat. She was not angry with him, not ignoring him.
Until moments ago, he'd scarcely let himself believe she was helping him for any reason besides that she cared for Ignoma. But then she said those quiet, monumental words
It's not what you think.
He could barely stop himself from drowning her in questions.
She pulled off her hair scarf while flicking her wand at a lamp in the corner. Her sitting room filled with warm light, shadows appearing to shift along the many bookshelves on the wall. There was a stack of files on the table in front of her sofa. Clearly, she had been bringing her work home with
her for some time now.
Draco went to go look through it, pausing to read here and there. Hermione didn't join him.
Instead, she went straight to her kitchen.
"Are you hungry?" she asked. "I'm going to make some sandwiches, if you want one."
Draco thought back, trying to remember when he'd last eaten. Without Ignoma to force him to eat on occasion, he wasn't sure how long it had been.
"Sure, I'll have one," he said.
Her files, he realized, were organized remarkably similar to his, though the subject was different.
Draco was suddenly overwhelmed as he looked through it all. The majority of the material in the file was written by Hermione herself rather than compiled from news clippings and photographs.
Only a few copies of half-page Ministry reports showed that she had any outside support for her search. She had done quite a lot with the remarkably little she had to work with.
"I only have turkey. Hope that's okay," she said as she walked back into the sitting room, balancing two plates of sandwiches and two bottles of pumpkin juice.
Draco took the sandwich gratefully, suddenly extremely hungry. She must have been too. He'd noticed she hadn't eaten much of the takeaway that she'd vanished from her desk.
The food she had been eating with Weasley.
With a jolt of some, terrible, unidentified feeling, Draco found his eyes gravitating to Hermione's ring finger again.
Only the ring was no longer there.
He might have exploded with unanswered questions if Hermione hadn't caught where he was looking, and finally addressed the elephant in the room.
"It's fake," she said through a bite of turkey sandwich. "The ring. So we can claim that Johanna's just saying this stuff because she's jealous of Ron."
Draco couldn't describe the feeling that rushed through him at his words. Relief, misery, joy, shock
-they were all intermixed, making him dizzy. He put his sandwich down, fearing he might drop it.
"So, you didn't get back together?" he asked, terrified of what the answer might be.
Hermione grimaced.
"Of course not. Just because I'm not interested in publicly dragging him through the mud, that doesn't mean I want to date him again," Hermione scoffed. "He's still a prat."
Draco thought he might be levitating. He reached for his drink, taking a swig to ground himself.
Hermione was looking at him with a strange expression.
"I thought you might have called," she said quietly.

That brought him back to earth.
"I was waiting for you to call," he snapped. "Didn't you get my letter?"
Hermione looked suddenly shy.
"Er, well, yes," she said at the floor. "But I didn't open it. I thought you were going to tell me to sod off or something."
Draco barked out a humorless laugh. She looked up in surprise at his reaction. He smirked and shook his head.
"When you get a moment, Granger, you should read it," he said.
Hermione looked down at the remnants of her food with a strange expression.
"I will," she said, then quickly changed the subject. "So. Ignoma."
"Right. Ignoma."
The subject of his house elf brought him crashing down to his bitter reality once more. Draco missed the elf more than he had a right to. She had become a tether for him, as well as a friend.
Without her, he felt somewhat lost.
"What we have to ask ourselves is who benefits? What purpose would someone have for kidnapping elves?" she asked.
"That's not the issue I see," Draco said. "Trained house elves are useful for too many things. The list is never ending. What I want to know is how they're keeping the elves from going straight
попе
Hermione raised her eyebrows.
"You're right," she said. "Elfish magic is different. The usual anti-disapperation charms wouldn't work on them."
Hermione summoned a book from the farthest shelf on the wall. It zoomed into her hand and opened to the middle.