Chapter 1: Clerical Error
The flat was on the second floor of a terrace off Camden Road, above a launderette and below a man who played the trombone, and when Hermione Granger shouldered the door open with a box of books on her hip, the first thing she saw was smoke.
The second thing was Draco Malfoy, standing on a kitchen chair, hitting the smoke alarm with a broom.
"Stop that," she said.
He didn't stop. The alarm shrieked. He hit it again, bristles first, which achieved nothing except a shower of plaster dust over a shirt that had certainly cost more than her first month's rent. "It has been screaming for four minutes," he said, without looking down. "I've tried reasoning with it."
"It's a smoke alarm. It screams when there's smoke." She set the box down on the hall floor. "Why is there smoke?"
He pointed the broom at the counter. A chrome toaster sat in a grey haze, two black slabs standing up out of it like headstones.
Hermione crossed the kitchen in four steps, shoved the window up, grabbed a tea towel off the oven door and flapped it under the alarm until it gave one last offended chirp and went quiet. In the silence, the trombone upstairs started on something that might have been "Moon River."
She turned around. Malfoy was still on the chair. From up there he looked like a heron that had taken a wrong turn.
"What," Hermione said, "are you doing in my flat?"
"Your flat." He climbed down with great dignity and plucked a folded letter from his back pocket. The Ministry crest was stamped on the corner. "Housing Restoration Office. Flat B, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, gas. Allocated to D. Malfoy, effective the first."
She had the same letter in her coat. She took it out anyway and held it next to his, as if the words might rearrange themselves out of shame. Same address. Same flat. Same signature at the bottom, a looping I. Pye, Allocations Clerk, with an ink blot where his quill had rested while he thought about lunch.
"This is a mistake," she said.
"Obviously."
"I'll Floo the office."
"There's no fireplace." He gestured at the wall where a fireplace should have been, and where instead there was an electric heater with a frayed cord and a sticker that said DO NOT USE. "I sent an owl at nine. Their reply came at eleven." He unfolded a second, smaller note and read in a flat voice: "Dear Mr. Malfoy, we regret any inconvenience. Corrections to joint allocations require form HR-Nine, signed by both parties, and take six to eight weeks to process. Should either party wish to surrender the allocation in the meantime, they will be returned to the waiting list in the usual order." He looked up. "The usual order, apparently, is the bottom."
Hermione did the arithmetic she had been doing since July. Five months in the box room at Grimmauld Place, which was lovely of Harry and Ginny and also smelled faintly of Kreacher's grievances. Fourteen months on the list before that, while the Ministry rebuilt the shops first and the flats above them never. If she walked out of this door, she would be back on the sofa by tonight and on the list until she was thirty.
"Then you surrender it," she said.
"I can't."
"Can't or won't?"
"Both, but mostly can't." He rolled back his left cuff an inch, not far enough to show anything, just far enough to show the thin silver band around his wrist, like a watch with no face. "Terms of my sentence. Eighteen months living at a Muggle address the Ministry chooses. If I leave it, I'm in breach. If I'm in breach, I go back in front of the Wizengamot, and they've been very clear about how much they'd enjoy that." He let the cuff fall. "And this thing reports every spell I cast inside these walls. Three unauthorised charms in a month and I'm reviewed. I've used two."
"It's the fourth."
"I'm aware of the date, Granger."
She looked at the toaster. She looked at the broom. "You used a spell on the bathroom."
"Have you seen the bathroom?"
She had not seen the bathroom. She went and looked at the bathroom. It was small and green and very clean, the kind of clean that came from a Scouring Charm and a man with standards.
"And the second?"
He didn't answer. She glanced at the hob, which had a scorch mark the shape of a startled starfish across the front two rings.
"Right," Hermione said.
They argued about the bedrooms for forty minutes.
He had put his trunk in the larger one, the room at the front with the bay window and a view of the bus stop. She pointed out that she had lived in a cupboard of a room for five months. He pointed out that he had lived in a cell for three, before the trials, and that the cell had at least been quiet. She said that was a cheap shot. He said it was the only kind he could afford.
"We're not going to agree," she said finally.
"You've never lost an argument in your life."
"That's because I've never been wrong."
"Then let's not argue." He dug in his pocket and came up with a pound coin, which he held up to the light like a jeweller. "The Muggles toss these to decide things. I read it in a newspaper. Somebody's head on one side, and on the other side..." He turned it over and frowned. "A lion. With a crown. It looks like it's been told something upsetting."
"That's the royal arms."
"Call it, Granger."
"Heads."
It was the lion. He pocketed the coin without gloating, which was somehow worse, and carried her box of books into the small room at the back for her before she could stop him. The small room looked onto the yard, where the launderette's extractor fan breathed out warm, soapy air all day.
"For the record," Hermione said from the doorway, "that wasn't an argument. That was chance. I still haven't lost one."
"For the record," said Malfoy, "you're unbearable."
By seven o'clock there was a list on the fridge. She had written it on a sheet of lined paper in black biro and pinned it under a magnet shaped like a pineapple that had come with the flat.
HOUSE RULES
1. Quiet after eleven.
2. Label your food.
3. Twenty minutes in the bathroom in the morning, maximum.
4. We do not talk about the war.
5. Do not say my name as if it's an insult.
By eight o'clock the list had been annotated, in green ink, in handwriting so elegant it made her teeth hurt.
1. The trombonist has not agreed to this.
2. I have no food. See toaster.
3. Twenty minutes is barely enough for the hair. Negotiable?
4. Agreed.
5. It is your name. What would you prefer I do with it?
She read it twice, standing in the kitchen in her socks. She read number four a third time. Then she picked up the biro and wrote, under five: Say it like a name.
She heard him come out of his room and stop behind her. She didn't turn around.
"Fine," he said, after a moment. Then: "Granger."
It sounded exactly the same as it always had. She had no idea why it made her ears go warm.
"You haven't eaten," she said.
"I had an apple."
"When?"
He considered. "Recently, in the grand scheme."
She looked at the toaster. He looked at the toaster. The toaster, scraped clean of its headstones, gleamed at them both.
"Come here," said Hermione.
It turned out that he had put the bread in, pushed the lever down, and then turned the dial all the way to the right on the reasonable grounds that more was better. When it hadn't popped fast enough he'd pushed the lever down again. And again.
"It's a dial," she said. "One is barely warm. Six is cremation. Most people live around three."
"Three what?"
"Three... toast."
"That's not a unit."
"It is in this kitchen." She took two slices from the loaf she'd brought, because of course she had brought a loaf, and dropped them in and set the dial to three and pressed the lever. "Now we wait."
They waited. The toaster ticked. Malfoy leaned down until his face was level with the slots, peering in at the orange glow with an expression she had last seen on him in a Potions classroom, watching a cauldron that was about to do something interesting.
When it popped he jerked back so hard he hit the cupboard.
Hermione laughed. She didn't mean to. It came out of her before she could stop it, a real laugh, the kind she hadn't done in a while, and he stood there rubbing the back of his head and glaring at her and then, as the toast sat golden and perfect in the slots, his mouth did something reluctant at the corner.
"Butter's in my bag," she said. "Second shelf of the fridge, when you've labelled it."
He ate both slices standing at the window, looking out at the bus stop in the dark, as if he'd won something.
The owl came at half ten, a Ministry barn owl with a brass ring on its leg, tapping at the kitchen window until Hermione let it in. It ignored her completely and went to Malfoy, who was sitting at the table reading the instructions for the washing machine with the focus of a man defusing a curse.
He untied the letter. She watched him read it. She watched his face do nothing at all, which was, she was beginning to suspect, what his face did when something was wrong.
He folded the letter in half and put it face down on the table under the washing machine instructions. "Goodnight, Granger," he said, and went to his room.
She did not read it. She would like that noted. She did not read it, even though it was right there, and even though the Ministry seal was a probation seal and the first line, the only one visible through the thin paper where the light came through, said Home Assessment.
She went to bed. The trombonist stopped at eleven, give or take. The launderette fan breathed out its soapy warmth under her window.
At twenty past midnight there was a knock on her door.
She opened it. Malfoy stood in the hall in a grey jumper, his hair flattened on one side, holding the letter.
"They're sending someone in a fortnight," he said. "To assess whether I'm, and I quote, successfully integrated into Muggle domestic life." His jaw worked. "If I fail, my case goes back to the Wizengamot."
"And?"
"And I nearly burned the flat down making toast." He looked at a point somewhere over her left shoulder. Then, with visible effort, at her. "How much do you charge for lessons?"