"Thank you, Narcissa." She stood there for a moment before she spun on her heel and ran back to the potions lab.

Her veins pumped with magic and adrenaline as she set the cauldron to boil and summoned the ingredients from the shelves. An hour later, as she watched it simmer, her mind drifted to her theory that the Malfoys had purchased her as insurance, should the Order win the war.

The explanation still fit, of course. But perhaps his wife was more inclined toward rebellion than Lucius Malfoy thought.

~*~

Hermione worked tirelessly over the next week to recreate the original tattoo potion used on the Lots. Every morning she would wake up and have breakfast with Narcissa before asking to borrow her wand. She'd be in the potions lab by nine o'clock to brew a new potion, altered slightly from the day before. By the late afternoon, when the potion had finished brewing, she'd transfigure a mouse from a teacup and test the potion on it. She'd signed a scroll in her own blood, just as the Death Eaters had, and a scribbled line would appear on the mouse's left leg.

Utilizing blood magic, she dropped her own blood into the circular ring she drew on the laboratory floor. Every day she'd numb the mouse and monitor its vitals as it dashed out of the blood boundary, huffing in frustration as it barely registered a twitch. But on the tenth day, the vital graph spiked.

She gasped at the angry red spikes, whipping her head to watch the numbed mouse creep further and further out of the blood boundary line.

She blinked, holding her breath. When she had jumped past the Manor's boundary and rolled down the hill, the shocks had continued sizzling her nervous system until Lucius brought her back.

The mouse's path grew jagged, stumbling as if it were drunk. She quickly summoned it back into the blood boundary circle. Her head was spinning as she watched the flaring red lines on the mouse's vitals ebb, slowly returning to a healthy green.

Her fingers twitched with nervous energy, and her pulse pounded. This might be it. She might have successfully recreated the tattoo. Forcing herself not to celebrate just yet, she set to work on an antidote, focusing on counteracting the primary ingredients in the first potion.

A few hours later and her antidote was simmering in the cauldron, but it wouldn't be ready until the smoke was rising in perfect spirals, indicating the poison in the bloodroot was neutralized. She tested her tattoo potion three more times on different mice as she waited, perfectly replicating the results of her first trial.

As the hours stretched on, she took small bites of the dinner Narcissa sent to the laboratory, and fed the mice from a hunk of cheese she'd requested from the elves. It was four in the morning when the smoke rose in perfect spirals, and fifteen past when all four mice ran through the blood boundary with no change in their vitals.