Chapter 4
Hermione has lunch at 12:30 and finishes at 5. The hours before 12 drag, but also seem to go too fast. She doesn't want to speak to Draco, doesn't even want to go to his floor and walk down the barely lit hall. It's eerie down there, and it always feels like she's being watched.
She's thinking too much.
Hermione writes letters to complaints and compiles cases for Auror Shaklen to receive, hardly seeing anything but the tail of a snake going down its own throat.
She's thinking too much.
Hermione takes her lunch at her desk, leaning back in her chair and staring at the fluttering lights above her. A book lies unopened in front of her, something she borrowed from a Muggle library, on the history of Australia. She has an hour, and most of the girls usually take longer, leaning on each other's desks and sharing the little treats they baked on the weekend.
Her lunch is a sandwich with a little canister of soup. The preservation charm on her lunch bag holds the food well and prevents spoilage for 12 hours, but it leaves a taste. She can't explain it, and the few times she had asked Ron about it, he was always left confused. Harry couldn't taste much of anything anymore, so she never bothered him about it.
There's always a taste though, like something that was burnt and then covered with icing, or rotten and severed from the mold. It never tastes right.
‘Will you be there, Hermione? At the Halloween party?’ Hermione blinks, and suddenly the world comes back into focus. Her eyes water slightly, and a tear trails down her cheek. It's warm down here; her sweater is a little suffocating. May Lokay is leaning on her desk, a little uncomfortable now that it's taken Hermione so long to reply to her.
May is nice to everyone, and so she probably wasn't actually expecting an answer, but now that Hermione was waving a hand as she quickly chewed, the other had to wait. The sandwich had ham and spinach in it, and now Hermione was worried some had gotten into her teeth.
‘Yes, actually, are you?’ This shouldn't come as a shock, as Hermione had gone to every Halloween party for as long as she had worked on this floor, but May still looked somewhat surprised. Of course, Hermione never could seem to talk to anyone except Auror Shaklen, so nervous to make an embarrassment of herself in her workplace.
May nods and smiles kindly, looking off to the side. Hermione blushes and continues eating her sandwich, thanking God when the other witch wanders away.
It took a while for Hermione to first get used to this job because all she seemed to do was write dates in booklets and make sure Auror Shaklen remembered to write his follow-ups to cases he had completed. She was always so used to getting her work completed as soon as possible, always looked forward to the instant gratification that it brought. She received none of that here, but the pay was good, and she was helping the Ministry. She wasn't too sure what she wanted to do here, and never had the gall to mention it to Harry or Ron, but she had wanted to be a professor or maybe an explorer. Write the things she learned and help generations in the future learn more about not only the magical world but also its counterpart.
She still pretended this work was satisfying.
Of course, it was better than the other lineups she had, back then. But the only job she consistently thought back on with regret was the teaching assistant Headmistress McGonagall had offered. But this job had paid better, and so Hermione had sold her soul, for which three years later, she was still working in the same position. Oh, sure, sometimes her Auror dies and she is placed with a new one, and sometimes men snap, and she doesn't see her colleagues anymore, sometimes some of them disappear, but all these years, nothing changes. She counts every second, every minute. She hears the tick-ticking of her watch every waking hour. Yet still, she comes down to this floor, and works, and drowns in it.
But she doesn't quit, because then that would mean she would be admitting something.
Hermione just doesn't know what.
The lights buzz, but every now and then, the buzzing drops a notch. The hours fall by like snow, and soon the girls leave as well, down the hall with their overcoats and mittens and hats with little felt flowers.
Hermione stays, though, still doing the tiny little things that take hours to do instead of minutes, when writing a letter takes 30 minutes. She's pushing it off, putting it at the bottom of the list of things she needs to do until there's nothing left but to face it. At that point, it's 9:30 pm, even the Aurors have left, though Hermione wouldn't know because they have floos in their offices, and Hermione has finally done all her paperwork.
She doesn't want to, would push it off further if she could, but Luna will most likely be in her apartment the next time if Draco doesn't send an owl back and RSVP the lunch with Luna and Rolf.
Still though, she dallies with her papers, and the in and out trays on her desk. She manually puts ink into her typewriter and checks all her stamps, making sure the ink is still charmed to stay wet. When she finally packs her saddlebag and stands up from her desk, it is 10:15.
Usually, Hermione doesn't need much sleep, the most she does now being five or six hours. But she didn't sleep well last night, and so the hours pull at her and tell her to go home, to lay underneath cool covers in an old t-shirt with a record playing until she falls asleep. The flash of grey eyes in her mind pulls her away from those thoughts though, and an angry Luna is like an angry parent. Not actually angry, but disappointed. Which was always worse.
Hermione closes the door behind her and walks into the stairwell. The stairwell is a bit dark, and the odd portraits and paints are all dark and still. A sheep sleeps beneath a starry sky, alone on a hill surrounded by water.
The walk is long, but Hermione has worked here long enough to be able to block it out, like one does a bus route or a routine cleaning. 20 minutes later, and she is slightly puffed, and deeper beneath the earth. It's a bit warmer down here. The door to the hall that holds the unwanted of the Ministry is a bit harder to bypass, but Hermione has clearance, so the magic gives when she opens the door.
It's a bit earlier than last night, so more lights are on, and the fireflies in the singular lights buzz and twitch. Instead of one long hall, this floor branches off here and there, but Hermione stays down the larger hall. There are worst creatures than Draco Malfoy, supposedly, and so they're cursed to work in a maze deeper into this floor, so you might need a map to get out.
It's a bit of a walk, but not as long as the one down the stairwell, though it feels longer to Hermione. She brushes her hair out of her face and pulls her bag closer to her body. It is eerie down here
, and she hates coming down, but always seems to look forward to it without her wanting to. Something new to explore, she supposes as she looks here and there, doors closed and still, but the faint sound of scribbling and typewriters and pages.
Her feet tap softly on the hall runner, she pretends she will only walk to Draco's door and then turn back. She already knows it's too late, and if she doesn't knock now, she never will.
There's a slight bend in the hall, and when Hermione turns it, she reaches her destination—Draco's door, all like the rest but with a small silver plate in the door, stamped into it, a D.M printed inside of the plate.
She walks up to it, increasingly feeling sick. Why on earth did she ever agree to help Luna Lovegood?
Hermione stands in front of the door, level with the plate. She stares at it, makes out the curves in it. The way the light catches on the edges. ‘I'm a Gryffindor,’ she chides. ‘I will not be scared by mere little garden snakes.’ And then it's like a movie is being played; she takes a back seat in her mind. Her hand raises and forms into a fist; she knocks on the solid wood of the door. The sound seems to ring out like the crashing of a wave. She waits, and she prays, and yet like always, God fails her.
The door opens, and for the first time in what has felt like eternity, those cold blue eyes stare into hers. And then they widen in surprise, blonde eyelashes fluttering.
‘Granger?’ She smiles because yes. She always will be just Granger.