The Light in the File Room
The Ministry corridor shimmered faintly with early spring light, filtered through high arched windows and softened by dust that refused to be charmed away. Footsteps echoed, too brisk and too many, each one adding to the collective hum that passed for order in this part of the building.
Hermione’s shoes clicked a half beat out of rhythm. She registered it but didn’t correct it. Her fingers were ink-smudged from a morning of cross-referencing birth registries, her notes still clipped to the inside of her robe, half-alphabetized. When the message came—gliding toward her mid-step on pale parchment and hovering with all the tact of a trained memo—she read it without pausing.
Senior Undersecretary Clearwater’s office. Immediately.
She rerouted herself up two flights of stairs, through a door with a worn brass handle, and into the cool, high-ceilinged silence of a woman whose voice rarely rose above measured diplomacy.
“Granger,” Patricia Clearwater said without looking up. She was flipping through a bound folder. “Sit.”
Hermione sat.
The office smelled faintly of antiseptic and memory—some combination of conjured lemon polish and floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets that hadn’t been opened since the First Goblin Reconciliation.
“I’m pulling you off the Muggle integration report.”
Hermione blinked once. “Excuse me?”
“It’s been reassigned. Strategic realignment.” A clipped smile, all bones. “You’re being redirected to Magical Heritage Preservation.”
“That’s not my department.”
“It is now.”
Hermione’s spine straightened almost imperceptibly. Her hands folded tightly in her lap.
“The integration report was halfway to vote,” she said evenly. “We’ve already met with the deputy commissioner, and my team—”
“Will continue without you.”
A pause. Long enough to be felt. Not long enough to challenge.
Clearwater closed the file. “You’re being partnered with someone from Historical Compliance. It’s a cross-departmental initiative. Sensitive. Politically valuable.”
Hermione narrowed her eyes. “Who?”
Clearwater picked up a second file—thinner, less cracked—and handed it across the desk with two fingers.
Hermione opened it.
Malfoy, Draco.
For a full five seconds, she said nothing.
“Is this permanent?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. This one hers.
“Is this punitive?”
“No,” Clearwater said. “It’s tactical.”
Hermione didn’t answer. She stared at the folder. The name. The clean, impersonal Ministry seal. The sharp loop of his initial in the corner margin, as though he’d signed the paperwork out of obligation rather than agreement.
She hadn’t spoken to him in eight years—not since the war tribunal. He’d walked out without looking back.
Clearwater’s voice was already moving on. “You’ll find a shared workroom has been arranged on Level Seven. Records Room C. You’ll receive the first batch of documents this afternoon. The project runs six months.”
“Understood,” Hermione said.
But she didn’t stand.
Clearwater looked up, finally. “Is there an issue?”
Hermione smiled the kind of smile that had won her a dozen committee chairs and no small number of internal enemies.
“No,” she said, rising smoothly. “Just curious.”
She closed the file, tucked it under her arm, and left the room without another word.
Her steps echoed back at her through the corridor—still a half beat off, but now she didn’t bother pretending otherwise.
The café was tucked into a side street off Diagon Alley, quiet in the way most places were when the lunch crowd had thinned and the fireplaces had stopped roaring every other minute. Sunlight glinted off the window panes in fractured squares. A single enchanted candle hovered over each table, flickering low enough to suggest privacy without promising it.
Hermione slid into the booth across from Harry, shrugging off her outer robe. Her sleeves were still rumpled. She left them that way. She sat with the file tucked under her arm like something radioactive.
Harry looked up from the menu and raised an eyebrow. “You look like someone reassigned you to diplomatic duty in Azkaban.”
Hermione exhaled sharply. “They pulled me from the Muggle integration report.”
Harry winced. “That’s a loss. You were getting traction.”
“It was supposed to reach committee next month.” She set the folder on the table without opening it. “Apparently I’m needed elsewhere.”
Harry didn’t ask where. Just waited. She let him.
Finally, “They’ve partnered me with someone from Historical Compliance. For a six-month heritage initiative.”
A pause.
Then, dryly: “You’re not serious. Malfoy?”
Hermione gave him a look.
Harry set down his spoon, leaned back, and rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Huh.”
“That’s all you’ve got?” she asked. “Huh?”
“I mean—it’s surprising. But not… completely absurd.”
She raised an eyebrow.
Harry held up both hands. “Look, I’m not saying he’s the obvious choice. But I’ve run into him a few times over the last few years. Quiet. Professional. Keeps to himself. Mostly preservation work, from what I’ve heard.”
“He’s not who he was?” she said, the skepticism plain.
Harry met her eyes. “Neither are we.”
That gave her pause. Not because it was wrong. But because it was too easy to forget.
She looked down at the teacup between her hands. The steam curled gently upward. She hadn’t added sugar. She never did. Still, she stirred it, slow circles that made no real change to anything.
“Do you trust him?” she asked, without looking up.
Harry didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was low, even.
“I trust the work he’s done. Which is more than I can say for half the people upstairs.”
Hermione kept stirring.
Harry let the silence stretch for a few seconds, then—mercifully—changed the subject.
“How’s Ginny’s campaign to rename the Quidditch Youth League?”
Hermione blinked. “Still in the threats-and-flyers stage, last I heard.”
Harry grinned. “That tracks.”
They moved to lighter topics: the latest wand regulation overreach, Teddy’s ill-fated attempt to transfigure his homework into a chocolate bar, the way Crookshanks had taken to stealing socks from the laundry basket again.
But even as the conversation lightened, Hermione felt the earlier moment sitting between them—Malfoy, and everything that name once meant. She didn’t name the weight of it aloud. She didn’t need to.
What struck her more was this: for the first time since she’d read the file, she wasn’t angry. She was… curious.
When they stood to leave, Harry gave her a brief, one-armed hug.
“Just see what the work is,” he said into her hair. “Not who it’s with.”
She didn’t promise anything.
But she didn’t disagree, either.
Records Room C smelled like dust and old ink—the kind of archival scent that clung to skin and robes hours after you left it. The enchanted sconces along the walls flickered unevenly, throwing long shadows over the floor and making the air feel thick with something unspoken. Hermione arrived early, not out of eagerness but habit. The scrolls had already been delivered—stacked in precisely measured bundles at the center of the long stone table, rune-sealed and still faintly humming with containment charms.
She unwrapped the first bundle and began sorting the ledgers by classification marker. She preferred to get her bearings before being watched.
The door opened behind her. She didn’t turn.
His footsteps were quiet, deliberate.
“Granger,” he said.
She turned then. “Malfoy.”
It was formal. Stiff. Nothing warm. Nothing aggressive either.
He set a folder on the opposite end of the table and took the seat directly across from her, unfastening his cloak without comment. His sleeves were rolled, his movements methodical. She watched the way he laid out his quill and parchment—left to right, wand tucked just above the ink pot. Deliberate, but not for show.
His voice, when he finally spoke, was lower than she remembered. Steady. Unhurried.
“The first set focuses on regional inheritance conflicts in post-registry families—Scotland, mostly. Mid-nineteenth century onward. There are four overlapping cases with disputed bloodline claims. I’ve highlighted them for comparative review.”
She reached for the top scroll. “The Ministry standard uses direct-line valuation. Why not start there?”
He didn’t bristle. “Because the context’s been revised twice since that protocol. Once after the Gringotts summit. Again last winter.”
She opened the scroll. Her eyes skimmed. “You’re assuming the inheritance maps were drawn ethically.”
“I’m assuming we’ll find out either way.”
She glanced up.
He didn’t meet her with challenge. Just presence.
Their exchange settled into a rhythm after that—academic, clipped, efficient. When she reworded one of his project headers to streamline the syntax, he didn’t correct her. He just nodded and adjusted the phrasing to match. When she flagged a redundancy in the reference ledger, he was already crossing it out.
They didn’t talk about the war. Or the tribunal. Or why this room felt both too small and too quiet.
They just worked.
At some point, she dropped her quill. It clattered against the floor and rolled under the edge of the table. She reached for it at the same time he did.
His fingers brushed against hers.
They both stilled.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment. Just a brief one. But time seemed to narrow to the point of contact—his skin cool, her hand curled instinctively inward.
She looked up.
He had already withdrawn. No apology. No shift in posture. Just a flicker of something unreadable before he resumed flipping through the scroll.
She picked up the quill herself and said nothing.
The silence resumed, but it wasn’t quite the same. It held shape now.
She watched him work for a moment—his focus, the way he marked notes in the margins with a near-surgical kind of neatness. He didn’t look at her the way most men did. Not performative. Not avoidant. Just aware.
And that, she realized, was almost more unsettling.
Hermione returned to her office just before five, the corridors thinned of footsteps, the Ministry beginning its slow exhale into evening. The outer windows cast long, amber streaks through the narrow slats of her blinds. Dust floated through the angled light in slow suspension. Nothing had been moved on her desk. Nothing ever was.
She closed the door behind her, quietly.
Her to-do stack sat exactly where she’d left it—charm-bound memos, flagged folios, a handwritten note from Clarissa in Records reminding her about next Thursday’s ethics briefing. She slipped the new project file—the one with Malfoy, Draco stamped cleanly on the cover—on top of the stack. She didn’t open it.
She sank into her chair and placed both hands on the desk. One settled on the still-warm mug of tea she’d left earlier that morning. The other drifted toward the spine of the book nearest to her—a volume on lineage mapping she’d reread a dozen times but never once liked. She traced it anyway, fingertips catching on the worn lettering.
The office was quiet, insulated by years of charm-reinforced silence, but something about it now felt less like sanctuary and more like pause. A threshold.
She leaned back slightly, let her gaze drift toward the blinds. The light had shifted—not entirely warm, not entirely cold. Just a different color than before.
She thought about the brush of his hand when they both reached for the quill.
About the fact that he hadn’t apologized. And that she hadn’t wanted him to.
She thought about how he’d listened. Not to be polite. But to hear. And how that, perhaps, was the most disarming thing of all.
Her hand moved to her tea again. She sipped. It had cooled, but not entirely. She closed her eyes for a moment—not to rest, but to hold still. Let the shift inside her register fully. Not resistance. Not acceptance. Something in between. Like a breath at the edge of speech.
The blinds swayed slightly in the current of the old vent overhead.
She didn’t know what would come next. But for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t trying to force certainty from it.
She opened her eyes. Let the silence return.
Awareness, she thought, is how undoings begin.