The front door of the apartment opened into Quinto Square, as Bones had deduced. Rows of muggle-style building fronts lined both sides of the street; flat and lifeless as much contemporary muggle design seemed. Muggles, Bones often thought, were visual Dementors; sucking the soul out of anything that could be beautiful. Even the most twisted and rambling magical buildings had a kind of grace that muggle structures lacked.
Were Hermione here she would tell Bones that she was being too cynical. "You don't want to see beauty," she had said once. "And that's why you never do. You're so determined to see the world as a cruel, dark place that you convince yourself it is."
She hadn't been being cruel. Bones had never known Hermione to be deliberately cruel. But she'd been tired and frustrated and Bones hadn't been helping matters. Harry had gone missing in action days ago and none of them had slept.
Chin resting on arms folded across the table, Hermione yawned and asked. "Don't you remember how you used to be in the DA? You used to smile."
"I smile," said Bones, drawing up grids across a map of Britain on the wall as the Weasley twins handed out coffee. They'd run dry on jokes after fifty-eight hours without sleep; they were nearly at sixty-three hours now.
"When people around you get hurt." Hermione lifted her chin to glare at Bones. "You used to be nice."
"This isn't helping get Harry back," said Bones. "You're wasting my time; you're wasting your energy. If you can't be productive, get some sleep and let the rest of us work."
"What happened to you?"
Bones raised a shoulder and let it drop. She thought about this occasionally. It bothered her that she couldn't figure it out though, so mostly she tried to pretend that she'd always been this way.
"Do you even care about helping Harry, or are you only worried about the prophesy?" asked Hermione.
"Harry will die," said Bones. "Or he will live. It doesn't matter either way. I have a contingency plan for both."
The room, quiet before, dropped into silence. Studying the map, Bones sipped her coffee. It scalded her tongue, which was probably a good thing. At this point pain might keep her awake better than caffeine.
"You-Know-Who is a creature of habit and pattern," she said eventually. "Harry is not. We've checked You-Know-Who's logical options and come up empty so we may need to make the assumption that Harry is where he has chosen to be."
When no one replied, she turned to her team.
"You have a contingency plan for Harry dying?" Hermione's voice was cold as ice and twice as hard.
Bones could read the warning in it. She was a Hufflepuff, so she also understood enough to know what Hermione was angry about, though she could no longer empathise. "We don't have time to discuss this," she said.
"The hell we don't. You don't get to make contingency plans for the death of one of my best friends!"
"When it's the Boy Who Lived, I do."
"To everyone who knows him, he's just Harry! Did you even stop to wonder how he would feel; knowing that people he trusts, people he has fought by are calculating his death?"
"It annoyed him," said Bones.
"Oh God." Hermione stared at her, looking as though she was having trouble breathing. "You spoke to him about…You told him that you had anticipated him dying?"
Bones stretched her spine, not taking her gaze from the map. Her back had cramped from sitting too long in one position. "I want him back alive too. It will be easier to win this war with him than without. So just focus." She knew that she sounded cold. Sometimes, Hannah had told her, she didn't seem human. She didn't feel it either most of the time. People fell to this war, and Bones watched. The deaths barely affected her; she would tally up whether each death would give her an advantage or a disadvantage and she would add the results to her mental database. Other than that, it didn't matter.
The war was all but over now. Voldemort was dead, and all that was left was to round up the remaining Death Eaters who were proving as elusive as smoke. During the war, Bones had thought that when the war had ended she would be the same again; people would matter to her again. It hadn't turned out that way; she still didn't care about the people around her, and it was safe to do so now.
Throwing her cloak about her shoulders, she twisted into a Disapparation. The foyer she Apparated to was warm and smelt faintly of lemon from the furniture polish. Hermione looked up from her spot at the reception desk, hand going automatically for her wand before she saw that it was Bones and relaxed.
Walking across the hardwood floors, Bones took in the papers strewn about Hermione. "Anniversary of the fall of You-Know-Who means a two-day holiday, you know?" she asked.
Shrugging her shoulders expressively, Hermione reached up to pull a quill from her hair. She'd taken to shoving several nib first into a messy bun after the twins had started casting joke hexes on the ones lying around the office in moments of boredom. "I've moved from my office to reception; that's practically a holiday," she said, then looked up at Bones. "What's your excuse?"
Bones yawned, rubbing sleep from her eye with the palm of her hand. It was probably a sign of insanity that she had slept better in a stranger's bed the night before than she had probably slept in years. Then she decided to stop counting signs of insanity in herself. It was only depressing. "Am hung-over. That's almost as good as a holiday."
Hermione snorted with laughter. "Yeah? I heard something about you going home with Malfoy. What's happening there?"
Scratching her cheek, Bones grimaced. She should have expected that Harry would talk to Hermione; or would talk to Ron who would talk to Hermione. "Well, my memory was a little absent last night, but pretty sure he asked me home, and pretty sure I was too spiflicated to say no."
Hermione studied her papers a little too intensely. It was the kind of intense that made Bones brace herself, though she wasn't entirely sure what she was bracing herself for. "So," said Hermione eventually. "Is that the end of it? Or are you going to let yourself be fooled again?"
Bones had never had an opinion on Draco Malfoy at Hogwarts so she hadn't considered that he'd fooled her when he killed Dumbledore; but Harry, Ron and Hermione had always been so sure of his ill intentions that they probably thought anyone who wasn't sure was stupid. She shrugged. "We're different than when we were in Hogwarts," she said.
Glancing up at her before going back to her papers, Hermione said, "Well, you are." She wasn't bitter about it any longer; had settled into being resigned.
"Yes," agreed Bones slowly. "I am."
Hermione looked up sharply. "That wasn't an insult," she said. "It was a statement."
Bones shrugged. Statement or insult, it amounted to the same thing. She wasn't the same as she had been; and she had always liked who she had been. "How is your potion coming along?" she asked.
Hermione let out an annoyed breath. "I like how you are now," she said. "You would die for any one of us; and you would let any one of us die to save the innocent. What's not to like? It's not as though you're pleasant to be around but I sometimes think that I can trust you more than I can trust anyone in the world."
Tilting her head to the side, she furrowed her brow and added, "You've always been so sure. For you I doubt there was ever a moment where you decided you were willing to die for this war. You would have always known."
It was different for her. She'd been born in a world where war was a thing of the past; only wisps of memory and never very close. She would have never had to sit in the alcove of a darkened stairwell, listening to her father sob in the next room on her late uncle's birthday. Years that he would never turn passed by so surely; and the pain was always so palpably there. "You're muggle-born," said Bones. "You don't understand."
Hermione shrugged, because she didn't understand. She had passed through a war and had come out the other side largely unscathed. She had lost friends, of course; they all had. But she had never grown up under the darkness of a war half-over and the threat of a new one looming. "I think you should steer well clear of Malfoy. You can't expect any good to come of it," she opined finally. The advice she gave was no longer a demand, but a suggestion. Most of her advice was sound and Bones trusted it innately.
And yet. "I promised that I would go to lunch with him."
Hermione gave her a long, searching look. "You want a relationship with him." It wasn't a question.
Had Bones been leaning against something, she probably would have fallen. "What? Where did that come from?" she choked instead.
Hermione's look became harder. "You know," she said coolly. "He's done quite well for himself now that his parents are dead and there's some doubt as to which side he was on in the war; he'd do better if he found himself a wife who stood firmly against Voldemort."
Bones laughed. "Hermione, honestly. He'd be better off choosing Cho Chang or Hannah…"
"Cho Chang is not the face of Hottie," said Hermione shortly. "Cho Chang did not lose a blood uncle and two blood grandparents to the first war before losing a blood aunt to the second." Her eyes narrowed in a way that Bones recognised. She was about to say something cruel. Bones didn't bother bracing herself; it was almost impossible to hurt her these days. Hermione knew it too, because she didn't soften the blow. "Malfoy would not consider Cho Chang a sure thing."
That was true enough. Bones knew that she didn't have the same grace and allure that Cho had. People would never stop to watch her walk by. When she laughed it didn't make those around her want to move closer just to bask in the warmth of it. Cho could have so many people that if someone did want to salvage their reputation they'd be better off going for someone less admired.
Biting down on her lower lip, Bones tried to put the previous night and that morning into perspective. Instincts told her that Hermione was wrong. There had been a time when she had been able to trust her instincts; but those instincts were no longer reliable. So it was down to deduction. Malfoy had treated her as though she was precious. He'd been subtle about it, but he'd watched her as though he could not bear to look away, he'd let her speak badly of his parents without as much as a rebuke.
Aside from that, she couldn't remember enough to form a conclusion. "I think you're wrong," she told Hermione. "But duly noted. I'll watch him when we go to lunch." The prospect made her happier at once. Trying to work out the suspicious actions of others was always entertaining.