His throat bobbed, and he looked away. "Possibly. I'll have to see."

She nodded and retired to her room, spending the rest of her night Occluding and saying thanks for Draco's assistance while it had lasted.

The next morning, she was just settling into a Scourer journal when the library doors burst open. Draco flew in, his hair still wet from a shower.

Her mouth fell open.

"I was thinking this morning," he said, pacing back and forth as she tried not to stare. "What if it's not a Germanic root? What if it's Arabic?" He disappeared into the stacks as she blinked after him, before returning with a book of Arabic runes.

It turned out that Draco was partially right. Some of the characters matched those of ancient Arabic runes, but others were distinct. They'd also identified matches with ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Sanskrit, and Aramaic runes.

They continued much like this for the next several days. With Lucius and Narcissa gone, there was nothing to interrupt them. Hermione didn't know what part of her argument had convinced him to help her, but she didn't dare question it, too content to have his company and help.

She learned that they worked well together, just as she'd expected. It was nothing like working on a project with Ron and Harry. No need to nag him or cross-check his work. Draco was usually at his brightest in the mornings, so he would scribble furious notes until noon, letting his tea go cold while he devoured the textbooks and journals. Hermione hit her stride in the afternoons just as he settled into a chair and flipped idly, staring off and thinking.

More often than not, she would look up to him with an idea or a question, and find that he would already be watching her — staring at her finger trailing over a page, gazing at her mouth as she sucked on the end of a quill, watching as she stood and stretched. That was another difference from her other study partners. How attentive he was.

She ran over to him one afternoon when she thought she'd narrowed one of the symbols down to a Sumerian rune for captivity. Her hair fell over his shoulder as she leaned over him, pointing to the rune to compare.

Draco stood and moved away under the guise of reaching for other books, and she realized with a wave of embarrassment that her breasts had been brushing his shoulder, her arm pressed against his. His cheeks were spotted pink when he came back to her, and she suspected hers with the same.

She was tucked into the couch on Thursday evening, flipping through a text on ancient Latin, looking for any symbols in the pages that looked like the ones in Jeremiah Jones's journal. About a quarter through, she found a match. She sighed, rubbing her temples. It seemed the Scourers had borrowed from every ancient language of runes in existence. They'd already identified over a thousand unique characters. At this rate, it might take years to decipher.