Chapter 3: Ask Me Again
Finite Incantatem did nothing. Neither did the counter-charm for a Stasis hex, or the general unbinding that took the doors off Gringotts vaults, or the thing Hermione had invented in her second month as an Unspeakable for persuading a stuck clock to start again. The sand fell through all of them as though they were weather.
Malfoy tried a cutting curse on the shelf. It bounced off and took a chip out of the doorframe an inch from his ear.
"Well, that's one way to save the hour," she said, "if you're dead it can't have it," and he gave her a look so purely, ordinarily annoyed that she nearly laughed, which was absurd, because there were nineteen minutes left.
"It's a closed loop." She crouched by the shelf, wand lit, tracing the threads of the skimming charm where they ran out of the base of the glass and into the floor. "It doesn't care what we cast at it. It's not listening. It's just counting."
"Counting what?"
"Debt." She frowned. "Look at the weave. It's a ledger. Every hour it takes is written down as owed. It's balancing something." She looked up at him. "Rookwood didn't steal these for himself, he'd have been caught. He was banking them. And whatever's in the account, the account keeps itself open until somebody settles it."
Malfoy had gone very quiet.
"I've seen this," he said.
She waited.
"At Christmas in 1997, Rookwood came to my house and laid wards on my mother's rooms." He said it flatly, quickly, as though reading a label off the bottom of a glass. "My father was in Azkaban. The Dark Lord was living in our dining room. My mother asked Rookwood for something that would keep her rooms closed to everyone but her and me, and he did it, and he charged her for it, and the price was that the wards would hold until the debt was paid back. I stood in the corridor and watched him do it. He used this weave." He touched the threads in the air with the tip of his wand, not quite making contact. "He told her that was the elegant thing about it. You could never break it. You could only pay it off."
The sand fell. Hermione heard her own heartbeat in her ears.
"That's rule three," she said.
"I know it's rule three."
"You just told me."
"In eighteen minutes," said Malfoy, "you won't remember I did."
He was right. That was what made it so terrible and so easy. Whatever they said in this room was already gone. They were speaking into a glass.
"How did your mother pay it off?" she asked.
"She didn't. The wards came down when the Manor was searched after the war, and the Aurors made a mess of it, and she was ill for a month." He was looking at the hourglass, not at her. "Pay it off properly and you give back what was taken. The ledger closes. Anything it's holding goes home."
"Anything it's holding." She sat back. Her hand went into her coat pocket. She had logged her own 2001 hourglass yesterday, tagged it, and then, against every protocol in the Department, put it in her pocket to take home, because she could not stand to leave it on a shelf. It was still there. Small and cool and full of a rainy night she had lost.
She looked up. Malfoy had his hand in his own coat pocket.
"You took yours too," she said.
"Obviously I took mine."
"That's a breach of protocol."
"Report me," said Malfoy, and took it out.
They held them side by side in the gold light. D. L. Malfoy. H. J. Granger. The twenty-first of November 2001. Level Nine, corridor. Two halves of the same hour.
"If we break them in here," she said, "we pay back the oldest debt in the room. That should close the loop. And then whatever it's taking tonight comes back too."
"And we'll remember the lift."
"Yes."
"All of it."
"Yes."
He turned the glass over in his long fingers. "What if I said something unforgivable?"
"Then I'll be very angry," said Hermione, "and I'll remember it, and I'll have to decide what to do about it, like a grown-up. Instead of letting a dead man decide for me." She held out her hourglass. "Not much more than a quarter of an hour, Malfoy."
He looked at her for one moment longer, the way he had looked at her across the Time Room on her first day, before he had pulled the parchment towards him and written the rules in silence.
Then he knocked his glass against hers, hard, like a toast, and both of them shattered.
It was raining. That was the first thing. The lift had a little brass grille for a window and rain was sliding down the shaft outside it, and the lights had gone the colour of weak tea, and she was standing in the corner with her briefcase held across her chest like a shield.
He was in the other corner. He was twenty-one and he had a mop. He was thinner than she had ever seen him, and his hair was too long, and there was a grey Ministry tabard over his clothes with REPARATION stitched on the back in yellow thread, and she had come down to Level Nine at nine o'clock on a Wednesday night because she had written a bill to abolish the reparation-labour scheme and someone at a meeting had laughed and said, Well, Granger, go and see the Malfoy boy scrubbing floors and tell me it isn't justice. So she had come to see.
And the lift had stopped.
He had tried to apologise in the first five minutes. She had said, "You don't get to. You don't get to apologise to me in a lift because you're stuck in it."
"Fine," he had said. "I'll wait until it moves."
It hadn't moved. They had stood in silence for a quarter of an hour, and then she had asked him, sharply, how many hours he had left, and he had told her, and she had said that was obscene, and he had said it was fair, and she had said it was obscene precisely because he thought it was fair, and somehow, she would never know how, they had ended up sitting on the floor of the lift with their backs against opposite walls, arguing about it.
He had told her about the drawing room. Not much. Just that he had stood there and said he couldn't be sure it was them, and that he had known it was her the moment he saw her face, and that he thought about it every single day.
"So do I," she had said.
He had nodded and not looked away. That was what she remembered most. He had not looked away once.
At the end, when the lights flickered and the cables groaned and it was clear the lift was about to move, she had stood up and picked up her briefcase. And he had said, very quietly, "Granger. Is there anything I could ever say to you that would be the right thing?"
She had thought about it. She had been twenty-two and so angry, and so tired of being angry.
"Not yet," she had said. "I'm not ready. Ask me again in a few years."
"Ask you what?"
"Anything," she had said, and the doors had opened onto Level Nine, and she had walked out into the blue corridor and never looked back. And at ten o'clock exactly something in the walls had reached out and taken the whole hour from both of them, quietly, the way it took an hour from Percy every time he stayed late. Her bill had passed the following spring. She had never known why she had been so certain it was right.
The room came back gold.
The hourglass on the shelf was emptying. Not falling. Rising, the pale sand climbing back up through the narrow waist of the glass as though someone had turned the whole night upside down. She felt it arrive in her. The last forty minutes slid back into place behind her eyes: Crookshanks on the radiator, her coat, the lift, Malfoy's voice in the vault. Out in the Time Room every clock on the north wall began to tick again at once, and the sound came through the open doors of the vault like a long-held breath let go.
She found she was holding on to his sleeve. She did not remember taking hold of it, but she supposed she would have to live with remembering that now.
"Granger," he said. His voice was not steady. "Hermione."
"You said every day."
"I meant every day."
"It's been six years."
"I know how long it's been." He was looking at her the way he had in the lift, not looking away. "I've sat across from you every morning for four months. You wrote rule three yourself. I thought it meant you'd decided. I thought you'd looked at me and decided you never wanted to hear it."
"I wrote it," she said, "because I didn't remember I'd told you to wait. I just knew I wasn't supposed to ask yet." Her eyes were stinging and she was furious about it. "Some part of me must have known. I think I was protecting the answer."
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"It's been a few years," he said.
"It has."
"Then I'm asking." He swallowed. She watched his throat move. "How are you?"
Of all the things. Of all the things he could have asked. Hermione laughed, wetly, and it turned into something else halfway through, and she did not answer him in words. She took him by the lapels of his coat, over yesterday's shirt, and kissed him.
He made a sound against her mouth like a man who had been waiting six years and four months and had stopped expecting the lift to move. His hand came up to her jaw, careful, cold fingers warming fast. He kissed her back slowly, then not slowly at all, and somewhere in the Time Room behind them, in a crystal jar full of glittering current, a hummingbird finished breaking out of its shell and rose.
In the morning, rule three had a line through it. Two initials sat in the margin beside it, one in green ink and one in black.
Croaker read it, said nothing, and set a fresh ledger on the neutral corner of Hermione's desk.
"Ten thousand, four hundred and six hours," he said. "Ministry staff, past and present, most of them living. They'll want them back. You'll be returning them. Partners." He turned to go, then paused, which meant he was about to spend something. "And the Gringotts liaison. Trimble."
"What about him?" asked Malfoy.
Croaker set one last hourglass down on the desk between them. It was full. The label was not in Rookwood's sharp, slanting hand. It was round and neat and quite new, and the date on it was last Tuesday.
"He's been dead since 1994," said Croaker, and left.