Hermione Jane Granger

So. I know we haven't actually seen much of each other, these last few days. Between your working on the boxes and my work with Mr Snape on the Sleeper research, it's really surprising how time goes. Are you going to spend much time at Grimmauld in the next day or two? I was thinking of giving Bea one more tea party before Tonks has her baby, just to take a bit of a break from it all.

I was also thinking...you told your father you'd visit. And you haven't yet. It's not the most pleasant way to spend time, I know, but...if you wanted me to go with you, and wait on the ground floor or something, I'd make time for that.

Unless you'd rather go with Sarah. Or maybe you were lying, I mean, just telling him that to keep him complacent, and you don't want to see him at all. Which makes sense, if it's too painful. I mean, I don't ever want to see

But if you wanted someone to go with you, for moral support, I could do that.

I have sort of a favour to ask. And ordinarily I would ask Sally-Anne but something happened earlier tonight and--well, it's not a good time to tell her something like this.

I've been working on a project. Harry and Draco were given a set of boxes for Christmas (your mother gave them, actually) and then Draco discovered an older set of the same kind of box. They have a translocative spell on them so if you put something in one box it teleports to the other box in the set. We've been trying to connect them all so that you can send from any one box to any of the other three.

Since just after Christmas I've made sure that the boxes your mother gave them don't have any tracking spells or anything, so they're safe and no one knows when they're being used or what's being sent through them. And then, the set that Draco and Harry already had? Well, they belonged to Sirius and his brother, which is where Draco got them (Regulus gave them to Harry and Draco), and it turned out that they carved their initials on the bottoms of the cubes. It's really interesting because that carving effectively made that box unlike any other, it made it unique instead of just half of a matched pair. We carved new initials in the other boxes and there's a charm I found, it's really, really complicated but it gives the box its own magical signature, sort of, and I thought if we cast it on each one of the boxes, it would link the magical signature to the individual 'address' or 'name' of the box.

Well. The reason I'm telling you all this is because Draco wanted to work with me tonight so I had to keep my wand hidden. And he was having trouble executing the wand motion in the right way and also timing the incantation (it's a really, really complicated spell). And I...well, I'm upset about the same thing Sally-Anne's upset about, I mean, I'm fine, we're both okay but I was a bit frustrated and Draco just wasn't getting the knack of it. And I--reached out and tried to put my hand around his hand to show him the movement.

I can't believe I actually tried to touch him. It was just that he was really very close to getting it right and he only needed a fraction of the motion to be different and I just knew it would have worked.

But anyway, the point is that I forgot and I touched him and he--he jerked his hand away really fast. And he snapped at me and told me off and stomped away.

And I feel bad that he was so disgusted but I suppose it's no worse than the time you jumped away, remember? Probably for the same reasons. But I was just as glad he left, to be honest, because it meant I could pull out my own wand and do the spell properly.

Which I did. And it worked.

But sooner or later, Draco's going to want to come back and work on this again, and since he might already suspect that I've been practising wand movement, I have to have a reason the boxes have been put under the spell. It's complicated but it's too bad. So if he asks, would it be all right if I tell him that you were the one who cast the charm?

The spell's positus peculiaris and I can show you how to do it if you like.