The office was off-the-grid. There had been years when it could have been considered off-the-reality even. A magical dead-zone, there were permanent spells five hundred metres away in all directions, surrounding the room like an invisible shield that sucked away all the magic. It wasn't connected to any Muggle utilities. Any technology had to be battery-operated and the 'bathroom' was shockingly medieval. It was a secret bunker in the basements of the illustrious Ministry of Magic. And of course, the Ministry being the Ministry, they had designated it Office 623 and assigned it to the Department of Extraneous Papers.
When she got her marching orders, Hermione being Hermione, she had tried to soothe her anger by researching the hell out of her crazy new office. A week and dozens of books later, her fury was still scorching hot, but now she knew all there was to know about Office 623. Its origins were unknown, but the Ministry's best guess was that it was a side project by a paranoid ministry worker from the 1800s. Over the years it had been used as a broom closet, a storage space for dark objects and an enhanced interrogation room. In the 1950s it was opened as a day care. The records had been sealed, so the poor parents had been oblivious to the fact that their darling children were playing in a room with hidden bloodstains and lingering hexes. When the truth came out with a bang, the place was sanitized from top to bottom, memories were erased, files were destroyed and the room was shut down for decades.
Two months after the war, a surprised Percy Weasley had been doing a routine audit of the building when he had discovered a man hiding out in the room. The man was a half-blood, and the room had been littered with opened cans of mushroom soup and baked beans hoarded from the Muggle world. The diet, the isolation and the constant fear of discovery had sent him half out of his mind. Percy had some interesting bite marks on his neck to prove it. The poor man had been sent off to counselling, but Percy, ever looking for efficiency and productivity savings, had seen a simple way to free up some office space in more desirable locations. The Department of Extraneous Papers became the proud owner of a unique and historical office.
Hermione might be on her way to purgatory, but at least she was well-prepared for the horrors that awaited. She would fill out pointless forms and file away meaningless documents that nobody wanted until either she went mad or Percy did. She wasn't going to use her war hero celebrity connections to go over his head. That would make her look weak. She was going to call his bluff. The Department of Magical Creatures would fall apart without her, and then he would be forced to come begging for her help.
But in the meantime, she had a job to do. As she put her hand on the doorknob, she imagined the most barren and lifeless hole in the ground that she could, so that her reaction to the real thing could only go up. It was a lesson she had learnt from the endless mushroom dinners she had endured while camping. She wondered if the little mind trick had worked for the office's previous occupant. His complete and total mental breakdown would suggest otherwise.
When she opened the door, she found only black and more black. Right, no windows. She was proud of her brain, but every now and again there was a blip in the system. The simple logic of light and shadow had not even occurred to her. Her hand twitched for her wand and then towards the wall for a light switch. Both completely useless gestures under the circumstances. Then her brain switched back on, and she reasoned that there must be a light source near the door somewhere. Human laziness and fear of tripping over things in the dark almost guaranteed it. She fumbled her way around in the dark until she ran into a table, and then managed to find an object with a switch on it. She pressed the switch, hoping she wasn't triggering some kind of explosive device. It turned out to be a very strong lamp, and it flooded the room with light.
Light that revealed a human form, stretched across a ratty plaid couch. A blonde, pointy-nosed human form that was unfortunately very familiar to her. Percival Ignatius Weasley was going down. He had only mentioned her office-mate in vague and generic terms. His tone had been bland while he had droned on and on about her colleague, saying meaningless nonsense but providing no information of substance. She hadn't suspected a thing. Who knew Percy Weasley had such impressive acting skills?
After holding back a shriek of surprise, she considered her options carefully. She could leave. She could kick him until he woke up. Or she could take this as a golden opportunity for sleuthing. She tiptoed around the sleeping form, quite literally, as she couldn't perform any silencing spells and her new shoes were squeaky. She started shuffling through the papers on the thin and unstable pine desk. She left no stone unturned even in the face of splinters. Whenever her conscience piped up, she would just think 'Buckbeak' or 'teeth' and it would shut up. Childhood grudges could be useful sometimes, whatever Harry might try to preach about forgiveness. The adult and almost-adult stuff was too messy and grey, but she felt perfectly free to stay mad at Draco Malfoy for hexing her teeth when he was fourteen. On the surface, her findings were rather boring. No secret diaries or love poems, just beaurecratic forms and memos. But the almost calligraphic handwriting, combined with the napping, told her that Malfoy had way too much time on his hands. And the painstakingly polite note to Percy in a cheerful purple ink was belied by the matching quill lying next to it, violently snapped in half. It seemed she and Malfoy had a common enemy.
Malfoy's snoozing gave her ample time to absorb the full horror of Office 623. The single lamp was the only source of light in the room, so if the battery died they would be in total darkness. Which was unfortunate, because the overwhelmingly orange glare it projected made her want to throw it at the wall and watch it smash into tiny pieces. The wall was solid concrete, giving the room its bunker vibe. One tiny patch of wall had a Slytherin green scrap of fabric attached to it with sticky-tape, but the flag or artwork or whatever it was had half fallen down and curled up at the edges. The floor had been carpeted at least, but it was a repulsive brown colour that seemed to be designed to hide the fact that it had never met a vacuum. The twin pine desks with standard rolling office chairs and the plaid couch were the only real furniture in the room. There were also crates of soup and bottled water stacked up in the corner. It was all mildly depressing. It made her wonder how sane Malfoy would be when he woke up.
She hadn't seen him up close for about a year. They had been sitting for their N.E.W.T exams at the Ministry, six months after the war. Kingsley and Professor McGonagall had asked very politely if she would mind if Draco Malfoy was put in her exam session, and expressed their confidence that she would set a good example for the other students in keeping the peace. She had never felt so emotionally blackmailed in her life. Harry had taken what she thought of as an overly sentimental view of Malfoy, comparing him to Severus Snape and Regulus Black, a redeemed man that had overcome a dark destiny. She was more sceptical. Sure, he wasn't evil, but he hadn't performed any shining good deeds either. His stammered confusion over Harry's identity at Malfoy Manor didn't exactly resonate with her, considering he had stood right by while she was being tortured on the drawing room floor. He wasn't brave or heroic. She wasn't even sure if he was sorry for any of it. In his six months of imprisonment, had it kept him up at night? From what she had heard, the place was more like a small cottage than a jail cell, and there had been no dementors to weary his soul. But there must have been some regret, some tiny shred of remorse. She did admit some similarities to the previous generation. There was a cycle here, one that needed to be broken. So she had plastered on a fake smile and approached Malfoy's desk after the exam, ready to offer amends or forgiveness. And if it was only fake amends and fake forgiveness, at least it would be a start. A gesture. But when she had spoken some inane rehearsed greeting, he had just lifted his head slowly, and given her such a blank look that she had backed away without saying another word. In the days after the incident, she had worked herself up to resentment that he had dared to ignore her gesture of goodwill. She had projected all kinds of negative emotions on him, from condescension to disgust. But in the moment she had only been afraid, afraid at the emptiness in his eyes. Really, there had been nothing there at all.
Now she looked for any hint of madness in his sleeping form. She had never seen him sleeping, all vulnerable and unguarded. Mostly he just looked like himself, the way she remembered him. He was perhaps a shade paler, from lack of sunlight. His hair was longer and a little scruffy, like he hadn't had a haircut in a while. He looked boyish in a way that reminded her of her boys. She had seen Harry and Ron sleep often, while she sat up researching in the library or the common room or a tent in the middle of nowhere. Malfoy slept in the same way that they did, like gravity was working double time and pulling his limbs in ten different directions. She couldn't say why, exactly, but she thought he was having a pleasant dream. She knew enough of nightmares to rule them out, and his features were more relaxed than she had ever seen them awake. She caught herself reaching to adjust his blanket and pinched her arm to snap herself out of it. He wasn't a lost little lamb. He was Draco Malfoy. One of the first things her father had taught her when he took her camping was to let sleeping snakes lie. He might look innocent now, but this one had sharp fangs, and he was quick to strike. It was with that thought in mind that she retreated to her own flimsy desk and waited for him to wake up.
About three hours after her arrival, there was movement from the other side of the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Malfoy tumble off the couch and land in an undignified heap, his blanket over his head like a child's ghost costume. When his head emerged to stare at her, she looked up briefly from her pen and paper to give him a wry smile. 'Good afternoon Malfoy. Looks like we'll be working together.'
Then she went back to her doodle of a ferret falling from a broomstick. Her investigation hadn't uncovered any actual work to do, so she had decided to nurture her creativity. Her drawings were at kindergarten level, so there was a lot of room to grow. Her plan was to be wide-eyed and innocent when Malfoy murdered Percy in a fit of rage. She was already planning her alibi. An impromptu visit to Professor McGonagall at Hogwarts, in front of witnesses. She almost felt like cackling to herself.
'Great,' Malfoy said through a yawn. 'I could use the company.'
She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to find the elusive sarcasm. But he was just picking himself up off the floor, smiling like a ray of sunshine, and even humming a little tune as he walked over to his desk. He spun around in his chair a few times, before picking up a quill and scribbling away on what she knew to be a receipt for flowers. The two desks were facing each other, but even if they weren't she wouldn't have been able to tear her eyes away. Malfoy had clearly descended into complete and utter insanity. How long would it take before she joined him?
