Her mind was a scattered mess the morning after. She tried to Occlude, to push everything back into place and tidy her shelves. Instead she ended up crying on the floor next to her bed, curling into herself at the memories of the strange sound of Ginny's voice and the heat of Draco's hand on her back. She allowed herself a day of rest and recovery before she tried again.

She started with Ginny and flipped through the crinkled and dog-eared pages of her book. She bound the new pages in like an addendum, a slice at the end for the reader. Ginny's book wedged itself on a high shelf, disappearing.

Then the volumes on Draco Malfoy closed under her fingertips. Thick pages with crisp edges and elegant typefaces. I've missed you, folded into the pages like a bookmark, and the millions of could-have-beens slipped between the chapters. She closed the book with a lock and key, and shoved it onto a shelf at eye-level, unable to lose it in case she needed it again.

It was eight in the evening on January 2nd when she was finally done. Her head pounded and her eyes squeezed closed every time they landed on the fire in the hearth. But her shelves were sturdy, and the heaviness in her stomach lessened. She ate a slice of bread that had appeared with her dinner and tucked herself into her sheets after taking a Dreamless Sleep potion.

When she woke the next morning, she felt nothing but cold determination. After a half-hour of meditation, she packed up all her books on tattoos and moved them back down to the library.

Pansy had given her invaluable clues into the creation of these tattoos. An ingested potion changed things dramatically. A potion had an antidote. She'd been chasing a counterspell.

Her test with the mouse had failed for numerous reasons, the first of which had to do with the use of a potion. The second had to do with blood magic. But thanks to Pansy, Hermione now knew the potion came first.

She started by cross-referencing all of the library's resources on magical tattoos with potions. She tried hundreds of search terms — so many, in fact, that she had to list them down. She tried searching in half a dozen other languages. She'd even tried skimming books by hand. But after several weeks, she'd found nothing that related magical tattoos to an ingested potion.

Frustrated with her lack of progress, she spent the last week of January on the second piece of the puzzle: blood magic. She found plenty on its uses in protective wards, including those surrounding magical estates. But here she was overwhelmed with too much information. And it was useless to zero in on any particular spell until she could locate the correct potion.

Once again, it felt like she was working blind. The Scourers hadn't used a potion — there was no precedent and no apparent shortcuts to find the information she needed. She wished she had Draco to help her see whether she'd missed something, but she was out of ideas. So she started from scratch, searching One Thousand Magical Potions and Their Uses by hand. Hoping that something would catch her eye and spark an idea in her exhausted mind.