Turn 6 of 36

Leave the office and find Draco

Hermione finds Thicknesse still gathering his papers, his movements slow and distracted, and she rises before he can dismiss her. The corridor outside is empty. She walks past the enchanted candles guttering in their sconces, past the clerk who pretends not to watch her go, and the binding magic pulls gently behind her ribs with each step — a direction, faint but insistent, like a compass needle settling north. She follows it.

The Ministry atrium is quiet at this hour. A few late clerks pass through, heads down, trailing memos that flutter behind them like obedient birds. Hermione takes the stairs to the ground floor landing and sees them — Narcissa's pale hair catching the torchlight near the Floo bank, her hand on Draco's arm. Mother and son stand close together but do not touch beyond that single point of contact. Narcissa is speaking, her voice too low to carry. Draco listens with his jaw set and his eyes on the floor.

Then Narcissa steps back. She says something final — a word, maybe two — and turns toward the Floo. Green flame engulfs her and she is gone. Draco stands alone in the emptying atrium, his back to Hermione, his hands at his sides. She watches the line of tension in his shoulders, the way he does not move for a long moment, as though he is waiting for something else to be taken from him.

He must hear her footsteps, because he turns. The mask is back — the aristocratic blankness, the careful nothing — but his eyes are red-rimmed. He has been crying, or he has been very close to it, and he does not try to hide this so much as fail to notice it. They look at each other across ten feet of polished Ministry stone. The binding magic hums between them, invisible and patient.

"Granger," he says.

"Malfoy," she says.

Neither moves. A janitor pushes a mop past them, whistling something tuneless, and the mundane sound lands like a stone in a still pond. Draco's gaze flicks past her toward the office, then back. His expression shifts — not softens, shifts — and what surfaces is something that looks almost like exhaustion. Not the performative kind. The real kind, the kind that lives in the bones.

"You followed me," he says. Not an accusation. An observation.