Turn 28 of 36

Stay awake, unable to sleep, and hear Draco moving in the flat after midnight

Sleep does not come. Hermione lies on her side in the narrow bed in the back bedroom, facing the wall, one hand pressed flat against her sternum where the binding magic pulses slow and warm like a second heartbeat. The flat is quiet. The kitchen is clean. The evidence of their shared meal sits on the drying rack — two plates, two glasses, two sets of cutlery — and somewhere in the Ministry a file is waiting for a photograph of it. She has been awake for an hour. The ceiling is a pale, featureless cream and she has counted the cracks in it twice.

The inspection is in nine hours. She has memorised the documentation: the inspector will check the bedroom for signs of shared habitation, the kitchen for evidence of meals, the wardrobe for intermingled clothing, the bathroom for two toothbrushes. She has prepared for every line on the checklist. She has not prepared for the feeling in her chest — the one that started when he rolled his sleeves and reached for the onion and has not settled since.

The floorboards creak in the hall. Hermione goes still. The sound is soft, deliberate — not the stumble of someone half-asleep but the measured step of someone who is awake and choosing to move. She hears him pass her door. The creak pauses, holds, and she holds her breath and the binding magic flares warm against her palm and then the step moves on, toward the kitchen, and she hears the click of the light switch and the dull hum of the old icebox compressor starting up.

She should not get up. She knows she should not. The sensible thing is to lie here and breathe and wait for morning and walk into the inspection prepared and rested and composed. She has never in her life done the sensible thing when someone is in pain in the next room.

She opens her door. The hallway is dim — the streetlight through the front window casts a bar of amber light across the floor — and the kitchen light is a warm yellow spill under the door. She stands in the hallway in her pyjamas and bare feet and listens. He is not cooking. He is not moving. There is only the sound of the icebox and the faint tick of the oven cooling and, once, the sound of a chair being pulled out from the table and someone sitting down heavily, the way a person sits when they have been standing for a long time and can no longer hold themselves up.

She pushes the kitchen door open. He is sitting at the table with a glass of water and his hands flat on the surface, fingers spread, and the mask is gone. Not partially gone, not cracked, not held in reserve — gone, the way a thing is gone when someone is too tired to hold it. His face in the yellow light is pale and sharp and young and she can see the shadows under his eyes and the tight line of his jaw and the way his shoulders have dropped from their rigid posture into something that looks, from here, like defeat.

He looks up. His grey eyes find hers and for a moment neither of them speaks and the binding magic pulls so hard she feels it in her teeth.

"Go back to bed, Granger," he says. His voice is rough and low and it does not sound like an insult. It sounds like a man who has been sitting alone in a kitchen at one in the morning and does not know what to do with the fact that someone has come to find him.

"No," she says. She crosses to the table and sits in the other chair. The chair she sat in for dinner. The warmth from the stove is gone and the kitchen is cool and the window is dark and she can see his reflection in it, faint and doubled, sitting across from her.

"You are not sleeping either," she says.

"I do not sleep well in unfamiliar rooms." He picks up the glass of water and puts it down without drinking.

"I have not slept well in any room since Azkaban."

He says it without weight, without performance, the way someone states a fact they have lived with so long it has lost the ability to shock them. Hermione hears it and the binding magic shifts — not warmer, not colder, but deeper, a pull that has moved from behind her ribs to somewhere lower, somewhere she does not have a name for. He has never said the word to her before. Azkaban. She knew, of course — everyone knows — but knowing and hearing are different things and hearing it from him, in this kitchen, at one in the morning, with the mask gone and his hands flat on the table, is something else entirely.

"The inspection," he says. "The bedroom. Your jumper is in my drawer and your photographs are on the dresser and it will pass. It will pass because we made it pass. Because that is what we do. We make things pass."

"Draco." She says his name and he stops. He looks at her and the binding magic is so warm she can feel it in her fingertips where they rest on the table and she knows — she knows with a certainty that sits beneath thought — that the magic is not the contract. The magic is responding to something the contract did not create and cannot account for. She does not say this. She is not ready to say this. But she lets the silence hold it, and she thinks he hears it there.

"I know," he says. He does not specify what he knows. He does not need to.