5

A/N: This was written for the first ever LM/HG exchange for Shiv5468. My undying thanks to betas of dreams DreamyDragon and Persevero for some extremely spectacular work under the duress of constant hunger from food porn. Kudos as well to BlueParis for advice on hand-to-hand combat. Prompts will be listed after the last chapter.

Disclaimer: Characters and world are the property of J.K. Rowling. No money made here.

Hermione twirled a quill between her fingers. The downside of yesterday's marathon interview session was that she'd exhausted all of her questions for Lucius and still had no formidable leads as to their abductor's identity. She supposed she could quiz Lucius on his relationships with Order members and assorted Ministry officials sometime after he awoke. Normally, one was lucky to have a victim who could withstand a two-hour interview in one sitting. That left an interviewer with ample time to analyse information and plan follow-up questions. Two four-hour sessions in one day were entirely unheard of.

Now she had a stack of parchments, five inches thick and crammed margin-to-margin with notes, and hardly knew where to begin to sort critical information from spurious detail. She sighed. Reading through them would be a good place to start, but that could well take hours. Not that she wasn't used to sifting through piles of notes while her co-workers tackled the excitement. But she felt a bit nauseous at the thought of shuffling papers when their kidnapper, or kidnappers, could burst in at any moment. Though, the way they'd been treated thus far, she half expected their captors to waltz in at dinnertime, offering to crack Lucius's lobster or butter their bread.

Ah, well, the notes wouldn't organise themselves. She began sorting them quietly, trying not to disturb the slumbering Lucius and willing herself not to turn and look at him. She'd already watched the candlelight flickering across his features much longer than she thought acceptable.

She returned to staring at the stack of parchments. Sometimes, this kind of analysis was exhilarating. A pattern jumped out and grabbed you immediately, glistening against the drab flotsam and jetsam. You ran with the pattern until you were out of breath, and it delivered all of the answers you needed. But more often, you slogged through drivel, word upon word of utter shit. Hoped against hope that there would be something...anything...that would make the boredom end. To make matters worse, usually the cases were mind-numbingly pedestrian. She supposed she should relish the brief spot of mystery that had been dumped into her lap.

At least Lucius's interview had been interesting and should prove entertaining enough in the retelling. With any luck, she'd find a credible lead sooner rather than later. She yawned. The shock of Lucius shaking her awake and her morning shower had worn off entirely. She whispered to the room, requesting a cup of coffee. It delivered Lucius's blend, which was guaranteed to keep her awake well into the afternoon. She lined up her three quills and grabbed a fresh sheet of parchment from the seemingly endless stash in the cubbyhole on the right side of the desk. She rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck before grabbing the top page of notes.

As usual, once she picked up the top piece of parchment and began the task, Hermione lost herself in the reading. Three pages in, and any traces of boredom had withered. It was fascinating to read back through Lucius's accounts of his fellow Death Eaters. She'd read through Death Eater interviews before, but always when the individual was under suspicion for a crime.

Lucius had less to lose and more to gain by offering as unbiased an account as he could muster. She knew with certainty that he was no innocent, but his views and demeanour seemed night and day from his public persona during the war. Oh, he was likely playing to his audience, but the account was clearly well-reasoned and showed a depth of understanding that belied Lucius's pretty exterior. The man had a shrewd intellect that was clearly as sharp as the image he portrayed. His accounts had left her with an insight into several individuals who she'd always written off with the label of 'mentally unstable'.

By the time the sun had risen, she'd written a dozen follow-up questions and had outlined a strategy for compiling the information she'd collected from Lucius. And by the time Lucius awoke, she had narrowed down a list of likely suspects from the Ministry and the Order to include in the day's questioning. This was fortunate as the coffee nearly had her vibrating out of her chair.

'For the love of Merlin, stop that infernal tapping,' Lucius groused as he sat up.

Confused, Hermione looked at her left hand. Her fingernails cantered against the desktop.

'Sorry,' she mumbled. 'Too much coffee on an empty stomach.'

Lucius grumbled and sauntered into the bathroom. Hermione tried to ignore his sleep-tousled hair and the line of flesh that had been revealed when he stretched. She called for breakfast.

Her fingers continued to click on the tabletop, and she was just beginning to wonder how long one man needed in the loo when Lucius finally approached the table, still grumbling about sleep deprivation and dreams filled with staccato rhythms. She restrained herself another fifteen seconds before grabbing the raspberry and violet jam, smearing it across her toast, and relishing the first bite. Along with her trouser size, her grocery bill would also take a hit. This breakfast was divine.

She was quite proud of her restraint, given her excitement over today's investigative plans.

Lucius had finished his meal and was folding his napkin before she laid out the morning schedule.

'I'd like to ask you some more questions, Lucius.'

'I'm all astonishment, Hermione.'

Hermione's enthusiasm dimmed. She rather missed their easy camaraderie from the day before.

'My apologies, Hermione. I did not sleep well last night, but that is no excuse for rudeness. Please, go ahead.'

'I'll try to make this brief,' she said, wincing. The session lasted three hours and twenty-three minutes.

At the end of her questioning, Lucius called for lunch and then levelled a weary gaze at her. 'Whatever it was I said yesterday about you not bludgering me with questions ... I take it back. Please tell me you're done.'

Hermione sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. 'I think so. Once I've manipulated this information and transferred it to the matrix I've devised, I think I should be able to determine your attacker's identity.'

'Matrix?' Lucius asked, slicing into the medallions of whatever meat graced his plate.

'Just a bit of Arithmancy,' she mumbled, stuffing a forkful of salad into her mouth.

Lucius laughed. 'I highly doubt it's just a bit of Arithmancy. Tell me, is it common for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to employ Arithmancy in their methods? I rather thought they usually went for brute force.'

Hermione snorted. 'Yes, brawn over brains. That's certainly their typical modus operandi.' The salad of crisp baby greens seemed to wilt before her eyes.

'And yet not, perhaps, your style.'

'They are resistant to change in all forms, including "high-brow number crunching". Why, there's never been a case solved at a desk. It's all footwork, crack investigations, and slamming back beers in dingy pubs in the hopes of catching a lead.'

Lucius looked sympathetic and offered her one of the steaming rolls he'd requested. The honey butter melted on contact.

Hermione ripped off a Knut-sized piece of roll and popped it into her mouth. 'And apparently, being the slightest bit bookish renders you entirely incapable of field service. Because, of course, I've never had to wield my wand in self-defence or, heaven forbid, cast on offensive hex.'

Lucius attempted to hide a smile behind his napkin.

'What?' she demanded.

She followed his eyes to the decimated pieces of roll scattered across her plate.

'Oh.'

'I thought Potter and Weasley were Aurors. Do the three of you not succeed in securing missions together?'

She laughed dryly. 'The boys use the situation to their advantage. They don't like for me to go on dangerous missions. When I do get called into the field, it's usually just to investigate after the fact. This is the first spot of danger I've had in four years.'

'You almost sound as if you miss it,' Lucius observed.

'What I miss is being valued for my strengths and not having weaknesses assumed because of my personality or gender,' she replied, her voice as frosty as August in Antarctica.

'Hermione, I wasn't intending to tease you.' He sliced the remaining medallions of meat. 'So, if you're not out catching evil wizards, what do you usually do?'

Hermione pushed a piece of arugula around the lip of her plate. 'If I'm very lucky, I get to interview a victim. Usually, I'm parked at my desk reading field reports to weed out the important evidence collected by the brawny Aurors. I keep them from scratching their heads too hard.'

Bloody hell, she thought, it's become just like Hogwarts only, instead of doing just Ron and Harry's homework for them, I write papers for all their friends too. Also, the boys restrained themselves from farting "Merlin Save the Minister" in my presence.

Lucius seemed to notice that her salad had lost its appeal. 'Perhaps your appetite doesn't agree with what I ordered for you eighteen hours ago. Would you like my grilled vegetables?'

Thanking him, she made room on her plate and then tucked in with gusto. Lucius was right. The salad had seemed like a good idea the night before when Lucius had written it on the parchment, but it no longer suited her. Heavens, the man knew how to order food. The grilled potatoes, parsnips, and carrots with garlic and rosemary were better than anything she'd ever cobbled together in her own kitchen.

Fortified by her lunch and the information gleaned from the morning's session, Hermione settled in for an afternoon of data crunching. She worked steadily until three, rereading the notes from the morning and occasionally reaching for those from the day before. She distilled and condensed the evidence. She scribbled and scratched out. She mentally cheered and swore. She developed a knot in her back the size of a bludger.

Wondering why Lucius hadn't fussed about the rustling parchments, she turned around, ostensibly to pop her back, and glanced at him. Lucius reclined on his bed, sipping a cup of tea and reading a French novel in, of course, its native tongue. He treated their entrapment as if he were on extended holiday. She half expected him to strip off his socks and demand a pedicure at any moment. She rubbed the back of her neck. Maybe after this was all over, she'd spring for a weekend mini-break at that spa in Cheltenham that her aunt was always raving about.

She wasn't sure which was worse, being trapped in the stale, thankless environment at the Ministry or working tirelessly while the primary target wallowed in luxury. She chewed on the end of her quill. The food here was infinitely better than the Ministry canteen. And Lucius was markedly better company than her office mate Clarence, who considered it a crime against wizardkind to miss the Wednesday afternoon broadcast of Quidditch Weekly on the Wireless.

Facing the now towering stacks of parchment, Hermione's shoulders slumped. She was stuck. Flipping back through all the interviews had yielded nothing substantial, only a parchment-cut and a serious concern for anyone who named their child Evan...seven of them, scattered amongst major and minor Death Eaters. Twisting the quill between her fingers, she wondered if the coincidence might be explained by genealogy or whether the name itself was cursed. Thinking back to a brat with whom she'd attended Muggle Primary School, she briefly considered that it might be the latter.

She mentally ran through the list of rituals she normally indulged in to break her mental deadlock. Wandering down to the canteen and casting age-detecting spells on their notoriously foul sticky toffee pudding. Winding Clarence up by asking him about the Wasps versus Harpies match from 1952 and enquiring, for the fiftieth time, what the point was in continuing a match when all the Chasers were unconscious and the Snitch had been swallowed by a five-year-old in the crowd. Oh, Merlin, none of her usual tricks were going to be available. She felt trapped...well, of course she felt trapped they had, after all, been kidnapped. No pacing. No trips to Fortescue's. No nicking out early for a bit of alone time in her flat.

Hermione resisted the urge to bang her head on the desk and instead settled for the slightly less juvenile option of a strangled yelp of frustration. 'I'm at a complete stand still. I've no more questions to ask. My notes are perfectly organised. And I really, really thought my new method would help me figure it out.' She bit back a curse and glared at the parchments in front of her.

'Hermione?' Lucius asked tentatively.

'What?' she demanded, exasperation seething from every letter of her short retort.

Lucius pointed at the Amazon box that they'd stowed next to the desk. 'Perhaps we should open it.'

Hermione stared at the box. She'd considered kicking the damned thing under her bed just so she wouldn't have to look at the instrument of their abduction. She'd been too busy hating the box to consider looking inside.

'Fine,' she sighed. 'Open the bloody thing.'

Lucius asked the room for a knife and grumbled when it delivered a butter knife. Crouching on the ground, he slit the tape along the sides and top, then lifted the edges of the lid. 'Well that's odd,' he said, looking inside.

He made to remove an object from the box but flinched at Hermione's admonition.

'Don't touch it! I didn't get to cast all my spells on it.' She stood from her chair and looked over Lucius's shoulder, leaning on him for balance. 'The Gardener's Guide to Growing Fritillaries?'

'Yes, whoever sent this is familiar with my greenhouses.'

'I wonder,' Hermione said before pushing against Lucius to stand up straight. She grabbed her quill and returned to her parchment, mumbling to herself as she wrote two columns of numbers down the right-hand side of the page. Shuffling through the papers, she searched frantically for...ah, there it was. She hurriedly added a row to the matrix.

She tossed the quill on the desk and ran her fingers across the row of numbers. She gasped. 'Oh my god. I think I've figured out who's keeping us here.'

A/N: Fritillaries are an endangered wild flower native to Britain. The Gardener's Guide to Growing Fritillaries is available for purchase at Amazon. Hopefully its author doesn't mind the plug. :)