Chapter 3: Home Visit
Prudence Hackett arrived at five to ten in a grey mackintosh that was trying very hard to be Muggle and failing in ways Hermione could have listed. It buttoned on the wrong side. It had a pocket square. She carried a clipboard with the Ministry crest turned inward, and she looked at the flat the way Hermione had looked at the bathroom on the first day, hunting for the thing that was wrong.
"Mr. Malfoy," she said.
"Officer Hackett." He took her coat. He hung it on the hook in the hall, which he had put up himself on Monday with a hammer and a profound sense of personal achievement. "Tea?"
"Please."
Hermione had made herself scarce at the kitchen table with a file, which was a lie. She had read the same paragraph about Kneazle import licences four times. She watched him fill the kettle at the tap and set it on its base and flick the switch, all with the unhurried competence of someone who'd been doing it for years instead of nine days. He warmed the pot. He had insisted on a pot. He'd said that a teabag dropped into a mug was a crime against civilisation, and she'd said that civilisation was hers, actually, and he was a tourist in it, and he'd said that tourists often had the best manners.
Hackett wrote something on her clipboard.
The assessment took an hour. She made him use the telephone, which he did, ringing the speaking clock and holding the receiver a little away from his ear like it might bite. She made him find BBC Two on the television remote, which he did on the second try. She asked to see his Oyster card and his library card and a utility bill in his name and the inside of the fridge, where every item had a label in green ink, including, Hermione noticed for the first time, her butter. Hers, in his writing. HG: do not touch unless she says.
"And the cooker?"
He lit the hob with a match. It caught first time. He blew the match out and dropped it in the jar of dead matches he kept for the purpose, because he was Draco Malfoy and had made a system of it.
Hackett wrote for a long time. Then she looked up, over her glasses, at Hermione.
"Miss Granger. Would you give us the room?"
Hermione went into the hall and shut the kitchen door behind her. The flat had been built in 1890, as far as she could tell, by a builder who had a deep personal grudge against privacy. She could hear the clock ticking on the kitchen wall. She could hear Hackett's pen.
"I'll be frank, Mr. Malfoy. Your file's in order. You can make toast. That's not what I'm here to find out."
"Then what is?"
"Whether this is real." A pause. "A former Death Eater, sharing a flat with a decorated war heroine. A Muggle-born one. The papers would love it. It looks very good. Rehabilitated. Reformed. If I were cynical, I'd say it looked like exactly what you'd arrange if you wanted the Wizengamot to go easy on you. Hide behind her."
Hermione's hands curled at her sides.
There was a long silence. Long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer, and her heart sank in a way that surprised her.
Then he laughed. Not his old laugh, the cruel one from the back of the Great Hall. This one was low, tired and real.
"Officer, if I'd arranged it, I'd have arranged a flatmate who didn't correct my grammar on the shopping list. She annotates. Did you see the fridge? She uses footnotes on the fridge." Another pause. "Hide behind her? You could no more hide behind Granger than you could hide behind a bonfire. She'd have you out in the open in a day, arguing with you about the correct way to stack a dishwasher we don't even own."
The pen had stopped.
"She taught me all of it," he said, more quietly. "The money. The trains. That machine in Sainsbury's that hates me. She never once made me feel like an idiot, and I gave her every chance. I know exactly what I'd have done if it were the other way round, when I was younger. I'd have made her pay for every mistake." The chair creaked. "She makes tea badly and stays up too late and argues with the radio, and she has never in her life lost an argument, and she's going to get a flat of her own sooner or later because she deserves one, and I'll be stuck here with a toaster I can finally work and nobody to show." A breath. "So, no. I'm not hiding behind her. If anything, I'd like to be standing next to her. I'd settle for that."
Hermione realised she had put her hand flat against the door.
She took it away. She went into the bathroom and ran the cold tap and stood there looking at her own face in the mirror until she heard the kitchen door open and Hackett's voice in the hall, brisk again.
"You'll have my report by Monday, Mr. Malfoy. You may tell Miss Granger she can come out of the bathroom."
He passed. She knew it before the owl came, from the way Hackett shook his hand at the door, and from the way he stood afterwards in the empty hall with his hands in his pockets, looking at the coat hook he had put up.
Hermione came out of the bathroom.
"Well," he said. "That's that." He didn't turn round. "You heard."
"The walls are very thin."
"They are." He did turn then, his face giving away nothing, which was how she knew. "I meant it. About the flat. You should have one of your own. Somewhere with a fireplace. Somewhere that isn't above a launderette, with a man who reads you facts about voltage."
She took the letter out of her cardigan pocket. She had been carrying it around for twenty-six hours. It was soft at the folds now. She held it out.
He read it. She watched his face do nothing, again, very hard.
"Above Flourish and Blotts," he said.
"Yes."
"With a Floo."
"Yes."
"Ten minutes from the Ministry."
"Eight, if I cut through Knockturn."
"You'd never cut through Knockturn." He handed it back. "Reply by noon. It's twenty past eleven." He took a breath. "Take it."
"You're supposed to argue with me."
"Why would I argue? It's a better flat. It's closer to work. You'd have your books downstairs, and quiet, and you'd never have to watch me try to work the washing machine again. It's the sensible choice. You're the most sensible person I know."
"That's not..." She stopped. She tried again. "The Tube's very convenient here."
"You hate the Tube."
"Camden has character."
"Camden has a man who sells incense outside the station and calls you Princess."
"The trombone..."
"Granger." He was very close now. She had not noticed him move. "Are you arguing in favour of the trombone?"
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it. Every point she had was a bad point, and he had answered all of them, and the clock on the kitchen wall said twenty-two minutes past eleven, and for the first time in her entire life Hermione Granger had absolutely nothing to say.
"Oh," said Draco Malfoy, softly. Something moved across his face, wonder, or the start of a grin. "You've lost."
"I haven't lost. I just haven't finished."
"You've lost an argument. To me. In a hallway in Camden." He looked delighted. He looked like a man who'd made perfect toast. Then the delight went out of his face and something more frightened came into it, and he said, in a different voice, "Don't take it."
"You just said..."
"I know what I said. I was being sensible. One of us has to be. I'm done." He swallowed. "Stay. Please. Not because of the assessment, that's finished. Not because I can't work the boiler, although I can't. Stay because I'd like to come home and find you asleep on the sofa under a pile of house-elf grievances. Stay because I like it when you say my name like it's a name." His hand came up, hesitated, and tucked a loose curl back behind her ear, where the pencil was. "Stay because I don't want to stand in the room while you leave. I've done that before. I'd rather not do it again."
Hermione looked at him for a long moment. At the grey eyes. At the faded cuff he still kept buttoned. At the plaster dust that was still, after nine days, in the seam of his good shoes.
"Draco," she said. Like a name.
Then she reached up, took hold of his collar, and kissed him.
It was not graceful. She was on her toes and he had to bend, and her elbow hit the coat hook and he made a small, outraged noise against her mouth on its behalf. But then his hands came up into her hair, slow and careful, as if he were learning how something worked and didn't want to get it wrong. He kissed her back the way he did everything in the flat now, attentively, with complete concentration, and she forgot the hook and the letter and the clock entirely.
When they came apart, his forehead was against hers and he was breathing like he'd run the stairs.
"Is that a yes," he said, "or is that an argument?"
"It's a counter-argument."
"I'll need to hear it again. I'm not sure I followed."
She laughed into his shirt.
At eleven fifty-eight she sent the owl. Miss Granger thanks the Housing Restoration Office and must decline. She has a flat.
Afterwards they stood in the kitchen and he made toast, at three, and buttered hers without asking, and handed it to her with the same small bow she'd teased him about on Parkway. Upstairs, the trombonist launched into something triumphant.
At eight o'clock the next morning, there was a Ministry owl at the kitchen window.
Hermione let it in. Draco untied the letter, still half asleep, his hair standing up on one side, and read it aloud.
"Dear Mr. Malfoy and Miss Granger. We are pleased to inform you that, following an internal review, the clerical error regarding your joint allocation has been identified and corrected. Mr. Malfoy has been reassigned to a studio flat in Tooting. Please vacate by the first of next month." He lowered the letter. He looked at her. He looked at the toaster.
"Granger," he said. "Tell me you know where we keep the matches."