There was at least one good thing Hermione could say about the Ministry, which was that since the fall of Voldemort, they'd required paper trails for nearly everything. They had tightened up security for access to archives and records and required properly filled out forms specifying who was looking, and for what.

While she was slightly reassured that the next wannabe megalomaniac wouldn't be able to waltz in off the street and compile a list of muggleborns in the country without someone noticing, she certainly cursed the thoroughness of the new Ministry every time that her work brought her down to the archives, which could sometimes be upwards of three times a week.

Fortunately, Harry's office had a very plush armchair in the corner hidden under a well-placed disillusionment spell. He liked to have most visitors in his office sit in the uncomfortable wooden chairs directly across from his desk, as most of them were too uncouth to do something as overt as cast a cushioning charm on the highbacked, wood chairs. But Hermione got priority seating on a couch rescued from Grimmauld, and she was grateful for it as she filled out the five pages of paperwork detailing her name, purpose, and mission in the archives.

"You said Evelyn Hall?" Harry asked, for what felt like the tenth time.

"Yes, Harry," she replied as she tried to gather the willpower to repeat the relevant information across three identical sets of paperwork.

Harry leaned back in his desk chair, spinning in a slow circle while he steepled his fingers. "I've never heard of any Evelyn Halls."

She tried to fight back a sigh, but from the look he shot her, she wasn't entirely successful. "Neither had either of us, which is why I'm in the archives today. Malfoy said that he'd check with Nott and Zabini, but I think if she were a society wife one of us would've recognized her name."

"Do you think it could be a pseudonym?"

"Ugh," she sighed, taking a quick break from the paperwork to scrape her hands down her face. "I sure fucking hope not. I'm going to have a hard enough time trying to get into Narcissa Malfoy's headspace. How on earth am I supposed to try to work backwards to figure out who might have concocted a name like Evelyn Hall if she isn't a real person? I'm just hoping that this trip downstairs pans out into something useful."

"What if she's not magical at all?" he asked, taking a sip of his tea and watching her attack the paperwork with a vengeance.

"That's not something I'm ready to even consider yet."

"But surely-" he started to say.

"No, Harry. I need to break this into more manageable pieces. If I start by assuming she's magical, despite the pen and printer paper, it's going to dramatically narrow down my search parameters. Evelyn isn't exactly an uncommon name now, and it used to be far more popular than it is today. It'll take me far less time to rule her out as magical or muggle than it will to start sorting through muggle women named Evelyn. Honestly, we don't even have any idea how old this woman is. I could be looking at anyone from our age to a crone."

Hermione was just standing to hand Harry the paperwork for him to check over and approve when his office door flew open.

A panting, red faced Ron stood in the doorway, pausing to grab at the threshold while he caught his breath.

"Hermione… she's…"

"She's right here, Ron," she said as she dropped the forms into Harry's waiting hand and sat back down on the couch.

"McLaggen said he saw you and Malfoy whispering and laughing together in a muggle cafe yesterday. Have you had anything unusual to eat or drink lately?" He said with a light smile.

"Please tell me you didn't run up here to confront her about Malfoy," Harry pled, trying to stave off an explosion.

Ron shook his head, and dropped down onto the couch beside her. "No, of course not. It was a joke. Besides, the lifts are still out so I took the stairs. Forgot how bloody far your office is from the atrium. Did he offer you a case, Hermione?"

"His mum's gone missing," Harry said as he signed his name to the multiple signature lines on the paperwork.

"Blimey, that's horrible. She dead then?"

"Ron!" Hermione gasped, sending him an aghast look. "What a horrible thing to say! We don't know for sure yet. If she's still alive, we haven't been able to find her. She's not anywhere obvious. But I might have a lead, I'm working on figuring it out now."

Ron nodded, looking almost chastised. "Do you think the Honorable Lord Malfoy had anything to do with it?"

"I don't know that he didn't," she replied. "Without knowing where she is and without a body, it's hard to tell if there's any foul play. Harry said the scene looked pretty convincingly like suicide, but Malfoy doesn't want to give up hope until she's been found-ideally alive."

"A suicide without a body? Maybe Sirius wasn't the only Black with dog-like tendencies."

Harry and Hermione both stared blankly at Ron, who flushed lightly upon realizing that his attempts to be clever hadn't been quite as clear as he'd hoped.

"You know..." he said. "Dogs run off to die when they're old or injured. Sirius was a dog, Narcissa was a Black, she was dying and she run off, and- you know what, forget it. It wasn't that good to begin with."

Hermione sighed and took her signed paperwork back from Harry to send to the appropriate offices.

"You know they don't actually do that, don't you, Ronald?" she asked as she folded the airplanes and addressed them to the proper offices.

"Alright then, I'm sure you're just dying to tell me the truth of it before you go off to your research in the archives."

"Dogs don't actually run away to die when they get old. Old dogs often can't see or hear very well anymore, and might forget where they are or how to get home. It's not some millennia old instinct to spare us the sight of death- it's just got dementia. Honestly."

Ron rolled his eyes, but leaned down to give her a hand standing back up from the soft sofa.

"Do you mind if I walk you down to the archives?" he asked, releasing her hand and opening the door to Harry's office.

"That's fine," she said, turning briefly to Harry. "I'll see you later, yeah?"

He nodded, shooting her a mock salute. "Good luck with Evelyn."

Ron fell into step beside her as they walked through the halls of the Ministry. It always felt weird to be alone with him now. Their friendship had survived miraculously well after their more-or-less amicable break up two years earlier, but their lives had been so intertwined for so long that it felt bizarre to take a step backward from that- almost as if they had sanitized the way that they interacted with each other.

Nevertheless, Ron's broad, lanky form beside her as she walked through the hallway was a comfort. She hadn't realized quite how daunting the task before her was until she was explaining her 'finds' to Harry- and what were they, really? A thick sheath of letters, obviously the result of multiple years of correspondence, but signed with a name that no one recognized. She was becoming increasingly nervous of the possibility that there wouldn't be anything in the archives to help her.

"Is she alive still, d'you reckon?"

Hermione looked up at Ron, trying not to sigh. "I don't know. I hope so, but I'm not sure. Malfoy said she was intensely private, so he's not really aware of where she would possibly be. I still need to go to St Mungo's and ask about belladonna poisonings, but it doesn't seem as if she would have had able time to get anywhere she wasn't already familiar with if she did escape. We found this stack of letters from a woman named Evelyn Hall, and I'm hoping that she's someone that's been in touch with her lately. None of the letters were dated though, so I'm not too certain."

Ron shook his head, and opened the door to the archives for her. "If there's anything to be found, I'm sure you'd be the one to find it. Best of luck. Will you... just... tell him I'm sorry, yeah? I really don't know if we could've done it at the end without her, even if she did do it for her own personal sake rather than ours. But I'm sure he's hurting."

Hermione turned to him in surprise. Although he'd matured greatly since the war, and upon recognizing that fame really wasn't all it cracked up to be, she had been continuously surprised by his ever-growing sense of empathy and compassion.

"Thank you, Ron. And I will. Tell him, that is. I'm sure that he'd appreciate it."

Ron nodded tightly and gave her a small wave before walking back down the hallway toward the hopefully functioning lift and jamming the button to return to level seven and the Department of Magical Games and Sports.

She stood for a long moment, holding open the archive door and watching as he entered and the doors closed behind him. Although she'd heard nothing but support so far, from Harry, from Ron, even a bit from Malfoy himself, part of her desperately feared what would happen if she was unable to find anything useful on Narcissa's whereabouts.

She didn't move until a stout wizard-in clothes that would make Dumbledore look conservative in comparison- hit her hard from the side as he tried to enter the room. He turned to make some undoubtedly vitriolic comment, but upon recognizing her immediately began some sycophantic posturing that made her turn and enter the archives, his voice fading behind her.

She had work to do.

Unfortunately, despite spending the majority of her morning among the tall, dusty shelves of files and record-books, she found nothing that seemed even slightly promising.

Hall was not a common name among wizarding folk, but nevertheless she'd chosen to use her knowledge about Narcissa to begin her search in the pureblooded archives in the hopes of getting lucky. The last Hall that had been recorded there was a man who had died nearly 300 years previously.

The halfblood and muggleborn sections proved equally unhelpful, and while the name Hall popped up there with slightly more frequency, none of them were women named Evelyn- or with names even beginning with an 'E'. No Eves, Lyns, Evies, Lins, Eveliens, Evelinas, or Evalyns, either. She found a single Evelyne, but she had died in 1648. She had figured that it would be a stretch, but she had hoped beyond hope that her search could begin and in within the halls of the Ministry that morning, and that she would be drinking tea with some dusty crone named Evelyn by the end of the week with a list of possible whereabouts of the Malfoy matriarch.

At one of the long wooden tables, illuminated in soft green lamplight, Hermione stared at the pieces of A4 in her hands, willing some piece of information to leap from the pages to give her insight into who this Evelyn Hall woman might be. There were no addressed envelopes with them that would reveal whether they had been sent via owl or Royal Mail. Did the Malfoys even have a post box that they could receive standard, stamped mail at?

Her head spun at the possibility of combing through telephone directories and electoral rolls to try to find the woman in question. A preliminary glance at a baby names book in a bookshop near her flat had revealed that while the usage of the name had declined between the 1920s and the 90s, it hadn't exactly gone out of style completely. Assuming that the woman in question was within 20 years of Narcisssa on either side, especially given the camaraderie in their letters, would doubtless leave her with a trove of women to comb through.

Considering the morning to be a bust overall, she returned home after making a duplicate copy of Narcissa's own record. Unfortunately, given the extent of the Fallen House of Black's once all-encompassing wealth, the list of properties that had ties to the family was quite extensive, and would require coming over in its own right.

And there was still the question of Evelyn. There were five hundred and thirty three constituencies in the whole of the UK, with something like 80,000 names on each. The thought of combing through them to find what she was looking for was immense, even with her ability to pop across the country almost instantaneously. Even if she broke it down into the 12 regions, and was able to use magic to accelerate the search through the archive, it would still take her nearly a fortnight to comb through all of the names. And she didn't know that she had that kind of time.

She needed to see Malfoy. Now.

Fortunately, Malfoy had been close to one of the many fires in the home and had answered her floo call the moment her face had appeared in the fire. He eagerly welcomed her through and unlocked the floo, willing to do anything to help her in her search. She normally would have been wary about his accommodating nature, but no one who knew him would ever be able to genuinely doubt his devotion to his mother.

They made their way back to the lady's library, each of them with the entirety of Narcissa's correspondence. While keeping Evelyn in the back of her mind, Hermione and Malfoy set to work reading for any mention of location. Even the slightest mention of anything that might point to a possible location for either woman could be useful, and could then be cross-referenced with electorate records and Black family properties.

She was aware of the day passing as the angle of the light slanting in through the tall windows steadily changed, beams of light inching across the room with the progression of the sun. Eyes smarting as she set aside yet another unfruitful letter, she took a moment to look around the room, resting her eyes on different points in the room to provide much needed relief to her depth of field. Across from her, Malfoy was on one of the cream colored settees, his tension evident in his posture as he read through another letter.

While she had only really ever seen him tense, this particular tension seemed so at odds with the way that he appeared now that it made her uneasy. He was a man who was clearly dedicated, and the bags under his eyes made it clear that he wouldn't rest until his mother's disappearance was solved.

Uncomfortable at the thought of watching him while he was unaware of it, she tried to turn her attention back to a letter, this one from Posy Parkinson, before a sharp gasp came from across from her. Her eyes shot back up to him, finding him staring back at her.

"I might have found something. I don't know that it's helpful, though."

Excitement rekindled, she sat up and tossed aside the letter. "Go on, then."

He looked back at the letter in his hands, and began to read. "This is another from Evelyn. Listen to this. 'We're still at the house on the coast. We haven't moved since it's so close to the Royal Infirmary. We drove the full hour out there last week, only to find out that they couldn't do much for Richard. Apparently the doctor we're meant to see is at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. Fortunately it's not much farther to drive into Edinburgh, but I know the time in the car is hard on him. I can hardly wish death on the man, but anything would be better for him than this."

Hermione wanted to smile, as it was their first actual break. Not that it was much to go on, but it was better than nothing.

"Can you duplicate that for me? That sounds incredibly helpful. Good work, Malfoy. Looks like there was a point to all of this after all. Anything we can find to give us more information will help to narrow it down."

He looked at her in surprise. "But we know her husband's name, and the name of... a hospital, yes? It shouldn't be hard to find her now."

She shook her head, wishing for the thousandth time in her life that Muggle Studies had been a) required, and b) not so much of a farce.

"It's a start, certainly. But Richard is an extremely common Muggle name. Hell, it is-was- my own father's name. And the Royal Infirmary isn't a hospital. There's got to be... dozens of them. At least. Scores, possibly. And we live on an island. While knowing that she's on the coast will certainly help narrow things down, it's not decisive. I'll take anything else we find today, coupled with that, and set to work on a map tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to narrow down enough to give us fewer leads than 'Every Woman Named Evelyn Hall in the Nation'. Which is why more information is so important."

He sighed, and sat back heavily. "I just... I want to find her."

"I know you do," she said soothingly, holding herself back from reaching across the table between them to touch his hand where it lay on the couch. "I want to find her, too. Which is why we need to get as specific as we can with what we have. Otherwise, we'll be wasting time running across the country without a good idea of where to look."

He nodded, leaning back in his chair. "I need a drink. Mipsy?"

With a soft pop, a house elf in a soft green shift materialized beside him.

"Master Draco calls Mipsy?"

"Could you bring my whisky and two glasses."

"Oh, I don't-" Hermione started to say.

"Yes Miss!" the small elf said as she popped out of the room.

"Before you say anything," he started in an approximation of his former drawl that sounded more tired than anything else, "she's paid. Gets holiday when she wants it, and even has a little princess bed in the attic."

"I wasn't going to say anything!" she said, almost affronted until she realized that, yes, she probably would have said something.

He looked at her in silence for a long few moments before he raised one eyebrow at her in incredulity which made her laugh, despite the circumstance. A slight smile formed on his lips, which fell when the elf returned.

"Whisky and one glass for the young Master. Mipsy brings something else for young missy who doesn't drink whisky."

"Thank you, Mipsy," Malfoy said as he poured himself a few fingers of the surprisingly muggle whisky.

"Yes, er, thank you, Mipsy," Hermione said as she took a fine crystal wineglass full of a slightly shimmering liquid from the elf, who left with another quiet pop.

"It's elven wine. She didn't give you much, but you'll want to conjure an ice cube, just in case. It's potent."

"Thank you. And I do drink whisky. I just didn't know if you wanted me to stay."

He took a long slow sip of his drink before setting in down on the velvet inlay of the coffee table.

"Why ever would I want you to leave? I thought we had narrowing down to do?" he said with that same small smile. It was unbelievable how at odds his appearance in this moment was with the image of him that lived in her head.

"Then narrow away," she said, sliding another stack of letters toward him and trying to focus on the crabbed scrawl on the page before her.

A/N Sorry for being a little late this week! I hope you enjoy this. Let me know what you think.

I used to be really anti-Ron and I have a bad habit of writing him as an absolute idiot, so this chapter featured my attempt at a sympathetic Ron Weasley.