"All right then, Professor Quirrell would've kidnapped this Flamel guy. It's what an evil person or a good person or just a selfish person would do if they had any sense. The Defense Professor knows a lot of secrets and he wouldn't miss that one." Harry sighed and looked up; she followed his gaze, but he was apparently just looking at the larger library, the rows and rows and rows of bookcases. "I don't mean to mess with your project," said Harry, "and I certainly don't mean to discourage you, but... Honestly, Hermione, I'm not sure you're going to find any good ideas for making money in a book like this. Like the old joke about how if an economist sees a twenty-pound note lying in the street, they won't bother picking it up, because if it were real, someone else would've picked it up already. Any way of making lots of money that everyone knows about to the point where it's in books like this... you see what I'm saying? It can't be possible for everyone to make a thousand Galleons a month in three easy steps, or everyone would be doing it."
"So? That wouldn't stop you," Hermione said, her voice now roughening again. "You do impossible things all the time, I bet you've done something impossible in the last week and you didn't bother telling anyone."
(There was a slight pause, which, if Miss Granger had known, was exactly the length of pause you'd make if you'd fought Mad-Eye Moody and won exactly eight days earlier.)
"Not in the last seven days, no," Harry said. "Look... part of the trick of doing the impossible is being selective about which impossibilities you challenge, and only trying when you have a special advantage. If there's a money-making method in this book that sounds difficult for a wizard, but it's easy if we can use Dad's old Mac Plus, then we'd have a plan."
"I know that, Harry," Hermione said, her voice wavering only slightly. "I was looking to see if there was anything here I could figure out how to do. I thought, maybe the difficult part about making a Philosopher's Stone was that the alchemical circle had to be super precise, and I could get it right by using a Muggle microscope -"
"That's brilliant, Hermione!" The boy rapidly drew his wand, said "Quietus," and then continued after the small noises of the rowdier books had died down. "Even if the Philosopher's Stone is just a myth, the same trick might work for other difficult alchemies -"
"Well, it can't work," Hermione said. She'd flown across the library to look up the only book on alchemy that wasn't in the Restricted Section. And then - she remembered the crushing letdown, all the sudden hope dissipating like mist. "Because all alchemical circles have to be drawn 'to the fineness of a child's hair', it isn't any finer for some alchemies than others. And wizards have Omnioculars, and I haven't heard of any spells where you use Omnioculars to magnify things and do them exactly. I should've realized that!"
"Hermione," Harry said seriously, as he started to dig down into the red-velvet pouch again, "don't punish yourself when a bright idea doesn't work out. You've got to go through a lot of flawed ideas to find one that might work. And if you send your brain negative feedback by frowning when you think of a flawed idea, instead of realizing that idea-suggesting is good behavior by your brain to be encouraged, pretty soon you won't think of any ideas at all." Harry put down two heart-shaped chocolates beside the book. "Here, have another chocolate. Besides the one from earlier, I mean. This one is to reinforce your brain for generating a good candidate strategy."
"I suppose you're right," Hermione said in a small voice, but she didn't touch the chocolate. She started to turn the pages back to 167, where she'd been reading before Harry had come in.
(Hermione Granger did not require bookmarks, of course.)
Harry was leaning over slightly, his head almost touching her shoulder, watching the pages as she turned them, as though he might be able to glean valuable information from glimpsing the page for only a quarter-second. Breakfast hadn't been long ago, and she could clearly identify, from the faint scent of his breath, that Harry'd eaten banana pudding for dessert.
Harry spoke again. "So with all that said... and please take this as a positive reinforcement... did you really try to invent a way to mass-produce immortality so that I could pay off my debt to Lucius Malfoy?"
"Yes," she said in an even smaller voice. Even when she tried to think like Harry, it seemed she hadn't yet got the knack of it. "So what've you been doing this whole time, Harry?"
Harry made a disgusted face. "Trying to collect evidence on the whole 'Who Framed Hermione Granger' mystery."
"I..." Hermione looked up at Harry. "Shouldn't I... be trying to solve my own mystery, though?" It hadn't been her first thought, her first priority, but now that Harry mentioned it...
"That wouldn't work in this case," Harry said soberly. "There's too many people who'll talk to me and not you... and I'm also sorry to say that some of them made me promise not to talk to anyone else. Sorry, I don't think you can help much on this one."
"Okay, I guess," Hermione said leadenly. "Fine. You do everything. You gather all the clues and talk to all the suspects while I just sit here in the library. Let me know after it turns out that it was Professor Quirrell who did it."
"Hermione..." Harry said. "Why is it so important who does what? Shouldn't it be more important to get everything solved, than who solves it?"
"I guess you're right," Hermione said. She lifted her hands to press up at her eyes. "I guess it doesn't matter any more. Everyone's going to think - I know it's not your fault, Harry, you were - you were being Good, you were a perfect gentleman - but no matter what I do now, they'll all think that I'm just - someone for you to rescue." She paused, and said, with her voice quivering, "And maybe they're right, Harry."
"Whoa, whoa, hold on there a second -"
"I can't scare Dementors. I can get Outstandings in Charms class, but I can't scare Dementors."
"I've got a mysterious dark side!" Harry hissed, after his head turned around to scan the library. (There was one boy in a distant corner, who did look in their direction occasionally, but he would've been too far away to hear anything even without the Quieting Barrier.) "I've got a dark side that definitely isn't a child, and who knows what other crazy magical stuff going on in my head - Professor Quirrell claimed that I become whoever I believe I am - that's all cheating, don't you see, Hermione? There's an arrangement that the school administration made that I'm not supposed to talk about, so that the Boy-Who-Lived could have more time to study every day, I'm cheating and you're still beating me in Charms class. I'm - I'm probably not - the Boy-Who-Lived probably isn't even something that you could properly call a child - and you're still competing with that. Don't you realize, if it wasn't for people paying attention to me, you'd look like the most powerful witch to come along in a century? When you can fight three older bullies by yourself, and win?"
"I don't know," she said, pressing her hands again over her eyes, with her voice wavering. "All I know is - even if that's all true - nobody's ever going to see me for myself anymore, ever."
"All right," Harry said after a while. "I see what you mean. Instead of the famous Potter-and-Granger research team, there'll be Harry Potter and his lab assistant. Um... here's an idea. How about if I don't focus on making money for a while? I mean, the debt doesn't come due until I graduate Hogwarts. So you can do it yourself and show the world you've still got it. And if you coincidentally crack the secret of immortality along the way, we'll just call it a bonus."