I Beg Your Pardon, Potter?

Chapter 60

"I think I've solved it," Hermione said triumphantly, slapping a piece of parchment down on the table between Draco and Blaise during one of their evening homework sessions in the library. They had taken to working together at a large table towards the back of the library as it was one of the few house neutral places in the castle that wasn't just a disused classroom.

"Solved what?" Draco snapped. He was irritated because he had been distracted partway through the arithmancy equation he was trying to work through. It was difficult and fiddly and this was the fourth time he had attempted to check through it.

"The vanishing cabinet."

"What? How?" Draco turned, the arithmancy instantly forgotten. Hermione gestured to the paper. Draco glared at her for a moment before turning to it. Hermione rolled her eyes.

"So it's only the cabinet that's in the Room of Requirement that's broken," she explained. "As that's the one that was dropped. Which means that we can add the part of the spell that's broken on top of the pieces that are still there and then deprecate the broken bits. That will mitigate having to cancel it entirely and re-cast it, and it means that we can do all of the repairs from here."

"And," Draco said softly. "It means we can use the broken pieces as a template. Of course." Hermione nodded.

"I've actually done all the diagnostic spells already," she continued. "And I've written down the component pieces here." She pointed at a place on the parchment. "These are the places where it's out of alignment." She pointed to another place. "And here is how we can re-cast the spells to fix them before deprecating the old ones."

"Merlin, Hermione," Draco said. "You really are the brightest witch in our year." Hermione blushed and shrugged off the compliment. "No, really. You are. This would have taken me months to figure out. And you did it in what? Three weeks?"

"Something like that," she said even though it had been more like two.

...

"I don't think we should fix the cabinet just yet," Ron said at their next "Remedial Defense Against the Dark Arts" meeting. It was the meeting that Harry still ran just for the six of them, ostensibly so that they could get extra practice, though they spent most of the time refining their plan to defeat Voldemort. Ron even had diagrams of his ideas now.

"Why not?" Hermione asked.

"We don't want any Death Eaters going to check on the repairs and coming through the cabinet before we have a chance to put our plans into action. It's going to have to be fixed on the night of."

"The night of Dumbledore's death you mean?" Pansy asked.

"Merlin, no need to be so morbid," Ron said. "But yes."

"How do we go about bringing that up with him?" Pansy asked. The other five stared at her. "What? It's an honest question. How are we supposed to plan something if we don't know the day it's going to happen?"

"I hate to say it," Hermione said. "But she has a point."

"Perhaps we can ask him subtly if he has all his affairs in order yet," Draco suggested.

"It still seems weird," Harry said. "But I think we'll have to."

"It would be even more helpful if he just volunteered the information without us having to ask," Blaise groused.

"Yes, well," Harry said. "It's Dumbledore. He only seems to tell us things when it suits him, rather than when we might need it."

...