Chapter 2: The Ministry Eats Time
Hermione did not sleep, which was nobody's business, and at six in the morning she was back in the Ministry Atrium with her hair still damp, walking past the fountain they had rebuilt after the war. It was plain marble now, a single basin with no statues at all. Everyone had agreed that was best, the way everyone had agreed to a great many things.
The lift was empty. She rode it down to Level Nine with her notebook open against her chest, reading the list she had made at two in the morning.
What she knew about 21 November 2001: it had been a Wednesday. It had rained. She had been working on the Werewolf Employment Protection Act, third draft, the one Kingsley had finally passed in 2003 after she'd rewritten it four times. Ron had been on an Auror stakeout in Wales. Harry had been at Grimmauld Place with Ginny. She had eaten dinner at her desk.
What she knew about Draco Malfoy on 21 November 2001: nothing. She had not known what he was doing with his life, then. She had made a point of not knowing.
The circular room at the bottom of the corridor was as unpleasant as ever. A ring of identical black doors, a floor like dark water, and the moment the entrance shut behind her the whole room spun, the doors blurring past in a smear of blue candlelight. She had worked here four months and still had to stop herself reaching for her wand to mark the door she wanted with a burning X, the way she had the first time she had come down here, in the middle of a war. These days the room knew her and stopped with the Time Room door in front of her, but it always took its time about it, like a cat deciding whether to come when called.
Malfoy was already at his desk.
He looked as though he hadn't been to bed either. He was wearing yesterday's shirt under fresh robes, which she only knew because she had noticed yesterday's shirt, which was also nobody's business. He had a stack of Ministry personnel ledgers in front of him, the heavy green ones from Records, and he had violated rule one by a full six inches: one ledger sat squarely on her desk, open, with a strip of parchment marking a page.
"Probation register," he said without looking up. "Autumn 2001. Page forty."
She sat down and read it.
Malfoy, D. L. Community reparation, 400 hours. Assigned: Level Nine maintenance, nights. Supervisor: A. Filch-Pringle (deceased 2004). Notes: Reliable. Does not speak to anyone.
Hermione read the last line twice.
"I mopped this corridor," Malfoy said. "Four nights a week, for a year. That was the Wizengamot's idea of a joke, I think. Put the Death Eater on the floor outside the room where they sent the Death Eaters in 1996. Let him scrub out the scorch marks." He turned a page in his own ledger, unhurried. "So that's where I was. Now you."
"I don't know why I was down here."
"You were at Law Enforcement. Level Two."
"Yes."
"And at nine o'clock on a Wednesday night in the rain, you took the lift seven floors down to a corridor you had every reason to hate."
"Yes," she said tightly. "Apparently."
He did look up then. His eyes were the grey of the Thames in winter and they were too steady.
"That's a question about the war, isn't it," he said. "Why you'd come down here. Who you'd come looking for."
"It was 2001. The war was over."
"Was it?"
She did not answer that. She did not have to. They both knew what the rule was really for.
Croaker gave them the rest of the day and a bottle of Unspeakable-grade Muffliato, which he handed over without a word, as though dispensing a sacrament. Hermione spent the morning in the vault with the skimming charm, tracing it back to its source, while Malfoy went up to Records to pull every Ministry log for the night of 21 November 2001.
The charm was beautiful. That was the worst part. She could see Rookwood's hand in it the way you could see a forger's hand in a painting, if you knew where to look. It ran out of the vault in fine threads through the walls of the Department, and up the lift shafts, and into every floor of the Ministry, like the roots of something enormous. And at the bottom of it, at the very back of the vault, behind the last aisle, was a second door.
This one was locked, and there was no handle, and when she pressed her palm to it she felt it ticking.
She sat back on her heels and wrote in her notebook, Something still running? and underlined it twice, and did not like how her hand looked when she did it.
Malfoy came back at four with a cardboard box and a face like a closed door.
"Lift logs," he said, and dropped the box on the floor of the vault between them. "The twenty-first of November. Lift four stopped between Levels Eight and Nine at eight minutes past nine and didn't restart until ten past ten. Maintenance report blames a power surge in the Department. Two passengers." He took out a sheet and handed it to her. "Guess."
She read their names. Then she read them again.
"We were stuck in a lift," she said. "For an hour. Together."
"Apparently."
"And then something took the hour."
"Apparently," he said again, and sat down on the floor across from her, folding his long legs, and for a while neither of them spoke.
The vault was very quiet. You could hear the hourglasses, if you listened, a sort of faint whisper of other people's lives. Hermione thought of the Hermione who had been twenty-two and furious and lonely, writing laws at midnight for a world that wanted the war tidied away. She thought of the Malfoy who had been twenty-one, on his knees on the floor of Level Nine with a bucket, not speaking to anyone. She tried to imagine putting those two people in a metal box for an hour and could only imagine one of them hexing the other.
"Can I break a rule?" she said.
Malfoy went still.
"Not three," she said. "Not exactly. Just. Adjacent."
He considered that with a seriousness she had not expected. Then he reached into his robes, took out a quill, uncapped his green ink, leaned over and wrote very small on the hem of her notebook page, Permitted. Initialled. D.M.
She almost laughed.
"Why did you take this job?" she asked.
He looked at the shelves for a long time. She thought he wasn't going to answer.
"Because it's the one room in the building where nobody asks what you did," he said finally. "Everyone else in the Ministry, I walk into a room and they're thinking about it. The trial. My father. The Manor. Whatever they've heard. In here, everyone's thinking about what might have happened instead. Every clock in this place is about the other way it could have gone." He turned the green quill over in his fingers. "I found that restful. That's pathetic, isn't it."
"No," she said. "I left Law Enforcement because I'd written forty-one pieces of legislation and every one of them was a way of saying sorry on someone else's behalf. And the Wizengamot kept passing them, and thanking me, and going home. And nothing changed. I wanted to work somewhere the questions didn't have political answers." She swallowed. "I wanted to work somewhere nobody would ask me how I was."
"I've never asked you how you are."
"I know. It's been lovely."
That got a real laugh out of him, short and startled, as if it had escaped. She had never heard it before. It made him look his own age, twenty-seven and tired and not unkind.
"There," he said. "Rule three's still standing. We got all the way round it without touching it."
"We're very good at our jobs."
"We're appalling," said Malfoy. "We're two people sitting on a floor pretending we're not about to ask each other the same question."
The hourglasses whispered.
"Which question?" she said.
He looked at her, and for a moment she could see it on his face, plain as a label pasted to the bottom of a glass: What did I say to you, in that lift? What did you say to me? Was it bad?
"Not tonight," he said, and stood, and held out his hand for the second time in two days.
She went home at seven, because Croaker made her. She fed Crookshanks, who was very old now and spent most of his life on the radiator, judging. She ran a bath and did not get into it. At nine o'clock she was standing in her kitchen with her coat on, thinking about the second door at the back of the vault, and about the way it had ticked under her palm, and about the slanting hand of a dead man whose seal had broken three weeks ago.
If the skimming charm was asleep, nothing behind that door should be ticking.
She Apparated to the visitors' entrance and took the lift down without letting herself think. Level Nine at night was dim and blue, and the circular room spun her round twice before it relented. The Time Room was dark except for the bell jar, where the hummingbird still hung half-hatched in its glittering current, one wing free.
The vault door was standing open.
She had locked it. She knew she had locked it. She lit her wand and went in, down the long aisles, past Arthur and Percy and the Gringotts liaison named Trimble, all the way to the back, where the second door now stood ajar by perhaps an inch, spilling a thin line of gold light onto the floor.
On the other side was a small round room with a single shelf. On the shelf stood a single hourglass.
Its sand was running.
It was falling in a fine, steady, glittering stream from the top bulb to the bottom, and the bottom bulb was more than half full. Hermione did not want to read the label. She read it anyway.
H. J. Granger. D. L. Malfoy. 9 July 2007. 21:00 to 22:00. Level Nine, Time Room vault.
She looked at her watch. It was twenty-two minutes to ten.
It was taking tonight. It was taking this hour, now, from her. And it had put his name on the glass too.
"Granger?"
His voice came from the vault behind her, low and urgent, and then he was in the doorway, his wand lit, his coat thrown on over yesterday's shirt. He had come back for the same reason she had. He looked at the hourglass, and at the label, and at her.
"I was in the corridor," he said. "Sitting outside the door. I couldn't sleep, I thought I'd..." He stopped. "Since nine?"
"Since nine," she said. "Everything we've done tonight. Everything we're about to do. In about twenty minutes it's going to be gone, and neither of us will remember we came back."
"Again," said Malfoy.
"Again," she agreed.
The sand fell. Neither of them moved to stop it, because neither of them yet knew how, and she watched him realise the same thing she had. Whatever happened in the next twenty-two minutes, they could say anything at all, and in the morning it would be as if they never had.