The lift shuddered to a halt, creaking open at Level Four. Hermione bustled out, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. A simple task, since most of Level Four's employees didn't show until half-past nine. She unlocked the suite of offices with a skeleton key the Minister entrusted to her when she could no longer use her wand. The key rattled in the lock and the door swung open. That was odd. It was already unlocked.
She peered into the suite, a collection of three inner offices with a vacant reception desk in the middle. Someone had left the lamps on. Maybe it had been the cleaning witches from the night before. Hermione closed the door and heaved a sigh of relief that no one stopped to ask how she was doing. Today was possibly the worst day for idle prattle, and on principle, she hated to lie.
Her boss's office was dark, and she glanced at the calendar on her assistant's desk with a red circle over Tuesday, marked "Prep". The green circle over Wednesday glowed with the word "Meeting" inside it.
Well, she had missed the preparation day, but she was here now.
She peeked inside the open middle office and found all four chairs empty and the small table wiped clean. This was where they held department meetings and met with clients (Hermione's boss used more colorful, inappropriate phrases when they weren't around). Change was a foreign concept for old school wizards like Gringus Alabastor.
The Minister had created Hermione's job, and promoted Gringus Alabastor from Magical Games as her senior counterpart. Broader representation, the Minister had explained to the old school wizard, would give their society fewer reasons to create devils out of each other.
For all his older-generation faults, he excelled at choosing sides. Early in their partnership, she'd learned that if she convinced her boss within these walls that her proposals were just and necessary, he would spearhead the motion and push it through the Wizengamot with little resistance. If Alabastor Gringus believed in the cause, the governing body of the Wizarding World accepted his judgment.
Confirming that she was alone, Hermione sank into one of the empty chairs. In an hour, she was supposed to address a room full of people. That was going to be difficult when she wasn't sure she could open her mouth without getting sick.
"You can do this," she told herself. "Get through the presentation first." She had at least that hour and no one was here to witness her falling apart. She headed to her own office when a quiet rustle stopped her movement.
"Miss Granger?"
Hermione nearly tripped over her own feet as a stringy bloke with sandy hair stood up from behind the reception desk and looked at her curiously. His standard-issue Ministry robes clung to his shoulders, and his tie rode too high on his neck, as if his uniform expected more out of him than his current job as her personal assistant.
"Merlin, Henry. You scared me!"
"Sorry, I dropped my quill." He settled at his desk and regarded her as she tried to come up with an excuse for sneaking around her own office.
"Thought I'd make an early morning of it. Looks like you did the same," she said, opting for 'professional and timely'. She eased herself around the reception desk, which was for show, so the rest of the world believed he worked in a bona fide position, instead of performing the menial magical tasks required for Hermione to function as a Ministry employee. A little over a year ago, Henry thought he would soon be getting a promotion, and she thought she was experiencing a temporary setback. They had both been wrong.
"You look quite pale," he observed. "Do you want me to bring you something? Water, perhaps?"
"Yes, please."
As Henry left for the hall, the skeleton key made a satisfying click in her lock. Her office, like her flat, was a tidy, ultra organized room. Bookshelves lined the walls behind a desk set in the middle of the room. Potted plants on a pedestal stood against a wall spelled to display a calming lakeside view.
She gingerly lowered herself into the chair behind her desk, waiting for the nausea to roll through her. Another notion of checking into St. Mungo's crossed her mind and dashed out the door. The Healers would fixate once again on her nonexistent magic.
Flipping through the stack of prepared files, Hermione went over what she was going to say in front of the Wizengamot in… she checked her watch—the crack skewed the hour hand, but the minute hand clearly showed that she had another half hour. Henry put a glass of water on her desk and she nodded.
She'd given up Ron, and she'd given up living close to magical people. But Henry was the one person she couldn't give up without giving up her job. Only three years younger, he had just as much ambition as Hermione remembered having herself. Before her life took a wild turn and blew up her future in a cloud of smoke.
After a few minutes of review, she gathered the files back together. "Better get on with it. Henry?"
Henry appeared at her open door. She shifted the files and her arm knocked against something hard and cold. Before she knew it, the files were soaked.
"Oh!" she cried, trying to save the files while the glass crashed and splintered to bits on the marble floor.
"Reparo," Henry said casually from the doorway and made a flick with his wand that dried the spill.
"Thanks," Hermione said. She didn't like the way he hovered, waiting to fix something else.
"Maybe you shouldn't be alone today."
"Good thing we're both headed to the Wizengamot. Meeting starts in fifteen." She stood up. "I think I'm ready. Where's the boss?"
Henry shook his head and looked at their boss's dark office. "We're not going. Boss left before you got here."
"But the files are still here!"
Henry leaned harder into the doorframe. "I'm supposed to keep you away if you showed up."
Hermione's body started shaking, and she wasn't sure it was from anger or her persistent symptoms. Double Henrys floated in front of her, and she sat back down. "He didn't even take the files. What does he think he's doing?"
Henry's guilt hid a hint of disappointment behind it. He muttered about their boss under his breath, something about getting sacked if she showed up at the Wizengamot, and a thousand apologies for needing this job.
"He's killing the proposal," she said, answering her own question.
Henry's head bobbed slowly, and then more enthusiastically, as if his indignation suddenly kicked in and ramped up speed like an abandoned thestral carriage rolling downhill. "Those pixies don't have a chance. He's not even going to read the proposal, he's wiping it off the schedule. He said that it wasn't even our department to care about…"
He gulped and swiped at his neck as if swatting away his heated words. One thing about Henry was that he believed in their cause. They both looked at the title of their department in clean, gold lettering above the door to the hallway, "Liaison for Magical Creatures to International Cooperation Transfer Division". Considering Hermione's first case was granting house-elves the same rights as witches and wizards, it had been appropriate. The point of it all was that the wizarding world clung to labels—human, wizard, witch, squib, Muggle—and Hermione made it her mission to reclassify and expand on those labels wherever she found inconsistencies or unfair treatment. And even though he hadn't signed on to cast simple spells all day long, Henry was always her biggest supporter.
Never mind that Hermione no longer fit any of the prescribed Ministry labels herself. She refused to make her condition public. It would be too hard a sell to cross those lines. If her boss felt so strongly that the Wizengamot wasn't ready to deal with pixies as autonomous entities, then no one was ready to deal with anomalies like Hermione.
"He says he's taking the department in a new direction," Henry finished, red in the face.
"A new direction. As in refusing to 'pander to the unavoidable injustices in the system'?" Hermione read directly from an interdepartmental memo she'd found laying on her desk, dated yesterday. Tuesday, the day she woke up on the concrete floor of that warehouse without her memory.
"Over my dead body," Hermione said.
"That was the idea," Henry said, followed quickly with, "oh, but not your actual body. When you failed to show yesterday, he thought you had gone Muggle with that new side job. That you weren't coming back."
"I'm here now," Hermione said evenly.
"Yes, and he said that if you came back, I should give you this." His hands trembled, holding out an envelope. When she took it, his eyes slid to the floor. "To be fair, everyone in the department got one."
'Everyone' included only herself and Henry. Hermione tore open the envelope, reading it from top to bottom and then over again. And then once more before she allowed herself to react.
"This… what in the name of Merlin is this?"
"An ultimatum," Henry mumbled. "He wants us to move files to the closed bin. Clean house. So he can apply his new agenda when he gets back from the Wizengamot." Bitterness laced his tone as he stared a hole into the floor.
Hermione felt the lump of lead settle in her already protesting stomach. "Where he's killing the pixie proposal."
She'd worked hard for the Wizengamot to even put that proposal on the docket. She knew it was a long shot, and she had been prepared to push the limits of their patience, if only to prepare them for the next time she needed to push hard against outdated precepts written in stone because 'why change now?'.
"I saw the support it received from the Prophet. The public is already backing it. If he pushes against broader representation with the werewolf ruling coming up so close, he's going to kill his career."
Henry sighed. "There's already press releases waiting to be released as soon as he gets the motion to change the department name."
"The department name…" It needed to change, but if her boss was the one changing it, it would serve none of Hermione's underrepresented clients. Her tireless lobbying had made possible the transfer of house-elf regulation from the Beast, Being, and Spirit Division into mainstream Wizarding rule. At least she'd gotten werewolf rights re-examined before this… debacle.
Realistically, the pixie proposal was a long shot, but it broached the idea that non-humanoid entities may have grounds for certain protections. If they considered this proposal, it opened doors for so many other issues that no one had been willing to talk about. Without it, there would be no precedent, and future cases of this type would be twice as hard to address.
"So I'm supposed to just sit back and watch everything we've worked for fall to pieces? Three days' notice to close stagnant files from the war trial, or get sacked. Those cases have gone cold for a reason."
"Mine's a bit of parchment work and filing," Henry offered. "Yours might not be so bad."
"Fine. Accio file." She prepared the files for storage while waiting for the new ones to appear... "Well, damn it all!" she muttered.
Henry gave her a sidelong glance and walked back to the reception area, muttering, "Accio," under his breath. Files flew into his hands… from the stack on his own desk, of all places.
"Thanks, Henry." She ignored the flush that crept up her neck, picturing him, or a hundred other wizards, taking her place in this office at a moment's notice. Hermione resolutely opened the folder and stared at a handful of unfinished reports. "What's this?" She leafed through the slim stack. "Where's the rest of it?"
"That's all there is," Henry said. "He'd already signed off the other files yesterday."
'When you weren't here,' hung unspoken in the air. Hermione eyed the file on Henry's desk. "Is that one of them?" she asked, barely keeping her temper in check.
"Yeah. He said I could pick whichever ones I wanted. I thought, you know, it'd be a good way for me to show what I was worth."
She couldn't argue. Henry's skills far exceeded the qualifications needed to be her assistant.
"So, three days to close this case," she said, squashing the rolling nausea down.
"Technically, two days for you. The clock started ticking yesterday."
Hermione unfastened the loose clip, and a handful of papers landed on her desk. The first report was barely filled out properly, but it wasn't as cold as it first appeared. Names and dates as recently as a few weeks ago were listed and… she turned over the page. The missing people were Muggles, which wouldn't have made it into the file except their loved ones, wizards and witches had come forward and declared them. Of course, the Ministry would bury these reports since the missing people weren't like them. A new platform started building itself inside her head, protections from the Ministry for non-magical people associated with wizards and witches. Hermione filed that thought away and made quick work of scanning the rest of the information in front of her.
The last thing she found was an address for an informant who had been meeting with Ministry representatives, trading names for money. Specifically, he sold information about illegal substances and the unregistered beings who dealt with them. The Ministry was interested in keeping underground commerce scarce, and the war had ruined his family—draining their coffers with fines, payoffs, donations and retributions. As she flipped the pages, she noted the date of the last meetup over six months ago. The last handler labeled the subject "difficult to work with" and the location "unsavory and dangerous". The last entry contained a note about a rogue group allegedly responsible for a string of disappearances. All the evidence was circumstantial, but whoever worked the file before believed that the informant held the answers.
Taking stock of the situation, Hermione started a fresh page in her notebook and began a task list. One, compose a list of the missing persons. Two, arrange a meeting with this contact for information that could link the missing persons with this alleged rogue group. Three, find the location of the rogue group and deliver them to the Ministry on a silver platter.
In two days. Right.
She flipped the file over and read the name of the contact she was supposed to meet.
"Of course, Malfoy. Just great."
She hadn't seen him since the mandatory Ministry formalities after the Final Battle, which included a painful series of inquiries and a lot of funerals. Afterwards, while the rest of the wizarding world came together to rebuild after the war, he and his mother had slunk off to some unknown corner of London to lick their wounds and await his father's trial. Even the wizarding aristocracy rejected him in the end. She almost felt sorry for the bloke who'd been born into the wrong bloodline and gotten caught up in his father's misdeeds… if he hadn't been such a rat-faced, spoiled brat whose sense of nobility began and ended with his family name.
Hermione steeled herself against her past prejudices and gave herself a mental rundown of the proceedings. Set up the meeting, offer the right bribes. Or that's how it sounded when the other departments talked about it in the break room.
She addressed the meeting request to the contact from the file and folded it into a crisp paper airplane. Before she could talk herself out of doing something more sensible, she placed the paper airplane carefully on the edge of her desk next to the potted plant. Henry's genius memo charm allowed her to send messages from the privacy of her own office. The spell responded to a mundane action, requiring no magic from the one who activated it. It was a fresh approach to charms work, and she appreciated his ingenuity. Henry was far more talented than an office assistant. The thing was, she couldn't have the job without the assistant. Hermione tapped the desk three times, and the airplane rose on its own accord and took off down the hall.
Then the world became a dizzying carnival ride. Hermione grasped the arms of her chair and squeezed her eyes shut until the spinning stopped. Whatever was happening to her wasn't going away despite how hard she was trying to ignore it. But look, she'd been through a war, she'd survived a curse that had taken her arm and her magic. She wasn't about to let whatever this was take her down. The pixies were unlucky today, but reasonably, Hermione conceded that today she should not try to be around people.
In her current state, she wouldn't have lasted ten seconds on the Wizengamot floor. They'd have carted her straight off to St. Mungo's and put her up in a padded room for observation. Her boss would have sacked her on the spot. She regarded her office, imagining for a second not being here, doing this job. She couldn't. Not even if her boss changed the department name and had her filing lost Ministry uniform reports all day. She needed this place, needed to be around magic, even if it didn't run through her veins anymore. She needed this like she needed to breathe. And then the surrounding air became thin again.
She would never make it to any meeting if she couldn't get herself together.
"I can't just sit here." She felt like death warmed over, and her vision swam, but she was determined not to go down this way. Her job, her career, her entire reason for getting out of bed in the morning was at stake. Maybe a cup of tea might settle things. She braced her hands on her desk and rose to her feet, knocking a few papers onto the floor.
"Henry?"
He popped his head into her doorway again, looking genuinely worried. Then his hand shot out and caught a piece of parchment gliding away from her desk.
"Here, you dropped…" He squinted at it and placed it warily back on the corner of her desk. "Good thing you didn't lead with this. Pixies have a better chance than they ever would."
Hermione leaned over and snatched up the list of reference tomes she'd compiled from last night. Vampires would have to wait. She looked up where Henry was waiting.
He smelled of sweat and nerves. She could almost taste his perspiration in the air.
He was standing so still…
He was waiting for… what exactly was he waiting for?
Hermione shook herself out of her head. "Did you need something, Henry?"
"Uh… you called me."
"Oh."
Her scrambled mess of a mind tried to refocus on the room around her. What had she called him into her office for?
No, wait. She was relying on Henry too much. If she wanted to save her job, it would have to be on her own terms. The room swayed as Hermione forced herself to step away from the desk, but then righted herself as she made it on her own legs to the doorway. She passed her worried assistant who followed her through the reception area and waved him off as she went into the hall. This was the one thing she could do without help, Muggle or otherwise.
"If anyone asks, I'm getting tea."