Chapter Text
The rain had been falling for so long that London seemed to have stopped resisting it.
It ran down the tall windows of the Ministry in thin, trembling threads, blurred the glass, gathered in dark tracks along the sills, and somewhere far above, beyond layers of stone, soil, and magic, beat against the real city: bus roofs, wet umbrellas, the faces of Muggles hurrying home. Down here, it could barely be heard. Only sometimes, when the corridors finally emptied, Hermione thought she could sense another world still existing beyond the walls — a world where people knew how to end a working day, return to warm flats, eat dinner somewhere other than over parchment, and not drink coffee gone cold enough to taste like old bitterness.
She lifted her eyes from the report.
The clock read eleven seventeen.
The hand moved slowly, almost mockingly, as if time itself had a separate protocol for wearing her down.
Hermione rubbed the bridge of her nose and lowered her gaze to the parchment again. The last line blurred. The cup had been standing too close, and the coffee had left a pale brown half-ring near the edge, like a trace of carelessness for which, back at Hogwarts, she would have scolded herself with real irritation. By morning, the document had to be on the Deputy Minister’s desk, which meant it had no right to look as though it had been written somewhere between exhaustion and a migraine.
She picked up her wand and cast a short cleaning charm.
The stain vanished, but the smell remained — sour, stale, with an unpleasant metallic note, like everything else in this office after ten in the evening.
Three stacks of cases lay on her desk.
The first concerned the return of confiscated property to families whose charges had been dropped or revised after the war. The second involved archives handed over to the Ministry as part of post-war inspections. The third belonged to what official language called “residual legal consequences of the period of emergency magical governance.”
Hermione hated that phrase.
It sounded neat. Almost sterile. As if they were talking about an unfortunate amendment to a law, not houses where cursed objects were still being found under floorboards; not people who, seven years later, suddenly remembered signing papers under the Imperius Curse; not families where portraits of the dead stayed silent because the living no longer knew how to ask them for forgiveness.
The war was over.
That sentence had been repeated so often that it had nearly lost all meaning. It was spoken at hearings, printed in newspapers, woven into memorial speeches by people who knew exactly when to arrange their faces into grief. It could be engraved in marble, placed at the beginning of a report, said in front of a crowd, and met with solemn nods.
But with every passing year, Hermione felt it more clearly: the war had not ended. It had only changed its clothes. It had taken off the black robes, put on a grey suit, learned to speak in legal language, and begun walking the same corridors a little more quietly.
She reached for the next file and grimaced when she noticed the ink on her fingers. Dark streaks had settled into the skin around her nails. Once, at school, that had seemed almost romantic to her — proof of work, study, stubbornness. Now ink more often reminded her of dirt that could not be washed off at once, no matter how hard she scrubbed.
The office was cold.
Not cold enough to make her shiver, but enough for her shoulders to pull instinctively toward her robes. The kind of cold that lived in old government buildings, where fireplaces burned as they should, but the stone kept its own opinion and refused to share warmth with anyone who stayed past midnight.
She pulled her robes around her shoulders and returned to the text.
“…in light of the absence of sufficient evidentiary basis, it is recommended that the Avery family library holdings be transferred into restricted custody of the heirs, subject to annual inspection…”
Hermione stopped and read the line again.
Then once more.
The dry phrasing trembled before her eyes, and there was something particularly irritating about it.
Absence of sufficient evidentiary basis.
Evidence was usually absent exactly where folders in offices changed hands too quickly, signatures disappeared, and people with good surnames suddenly became remarkably forgetful.
She took up her quill and wrote in the margin:
“Request additional expert assessment. Do not transfer until the origin of third-level charms on the books has been verified.”
The quill scratched across the parchment, and almost immediately something thudded dully behind the door.
Hermione raised her head.
At night, the Ministry corridors sounded different. By day, they were full of footsteps, voices, the pops of inter-office fireplaces, the rustle of robes, irritated owls, and paper aeroplanes diving under the ceiling. At night, everything became too large and too empty. Even the familiar walls seemed higher, the light of the magical lamps paler.
The knock came again, clearer this time.
“Granger? Are you still here?”
Hermione closed her eyes for a second.
Not out of irritation. More out of the kind of exhaustion that no longer had the strength to pretend surprise.
“Come in, Mr Robards.”
The door opened.
Gawain Robards looked as though he, too, had long since stopped believing in the existence of home beyond the Ministry. His robes were unfastened, his shirt collar slightly crushed, and in his hands he held a thin folder made of dark-grey card. His face was tired, but his eyes were far too focused for a casual visit.
Hermione noticed that at once.
“If this is urgent,” she said, setting down her quill, “then I am officially beginning to hate the word urgent.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.”
“Worse than the Avery library report?”
Robards glanced at the piles of papers and gave a weak snort.
“Depends how much you like old pure-blood archives.”
Hermione said nothing.
He stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and placed the folder on the free edge of her desk. He did not sit down.
That was a bad sign. People sat when they wanted to discuss something. They stayed standing when they intended to hand over a problem and leave before it exploded in their hands.
There was no name on the cover.
Only a number: 18/74-A.
Below it — the red seal of the Department of Post-War Legal Oversight.
“What is this?” she asked.
“A new assignment.”
“I already have six new assignments.”
“Now you have seven.”
Hermione slowly lifted her eyes to him.
Robards withstood her look almost decently, though he had the expression of a man already apologising for someone else’s decision.
“I wouldn’t have brought it to you at night if it could wait until morning.”
“Of course,” Hermione said. “Night is the perfect time for sensible administrative decisions.”
He dragged a tired hand over his face.
“An unregistered archive has been found in the old estate of a certain family. Some of the documents may date back to the First Wizarding War. Some may be tied to even older practices. There are preliminary signs of a connection to missing artefacts that never passed through official confiscation after trial.”
Hermione felt something inside her go still.
Not fear. Not alarm, not even tension yet. More like the attentive immobility with which the body reacts to the faint crack of a branch in the dark.
“Which family?”
Robards looked, too briefly, toward the window, where rain glimmered dully on the enchanted glass.
“Nott.”
The name fell between them without a sound.
Still, the air changed.
Hermione did not take the folder at once. Her hand remained on the desk, fingers tightening slightly, and for some reason it was not the elderly Tiberius Nott, whose name had appeared in old Death Eater files, that came to mind. It was the Great Hall at Hogwarts: the long Slytherin table, silver and green, Malfoy too loud even in silence, Crabbe and Goyle heavy as furniture, Pansy Parkinson with her sharp, clipped laugh.
And near them — not quite with them, but a little to the side — a boy who had almost always stood apart.
Theodore Nott.
Quiet, thin, observant. He rarely got involved in arguments, did not throw words around the way Malfoy did, did not rush into fights, and did not turn cruelty into theatre. That, for some reason, Hermione remembered better than many of the insults from school. At Hogwarts, silence had sometimes been safety. Sometimes it had been a choice. She still was not sure which one Nott’s silence had been.
“Hermione,” Robards said quietly.
She blinked and returned to the office, to the cold coffee, the grey folder, and the red seal.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s a sensitive case.”
“All pure-blood archive cases are sensitive.”
“This is different.”
“That is what people say every time they want me to work faster and ask fewer questions.”
This time Robards did not smile.
“The heir has returned to Britain.”
Hermione’s fingers finally settled on the folder.
The card was cool and faintly rough.
“Theodore Nott?”
“Yes.”
“Where has he been?”
“Italy. Then Austria. Several years in France. Officially, he worked with private collections, translated old magical texts, and provided legal support for inherited trusts.”
“Officially?”
“Exactly.”
Hermione opened the folder.
The first page was brief: property information, inheritance status, a list of discovered rooms, a preliminary assessment of protective charms. All of it dry, precise, written with that particular bureaucratic indifference that had always irritated her more than an outright lie.
Her eyes moved quickly over the lines.
“Nott Manor, Wiltshire…”
“Archive wing not previously listed in inventory records…”
“Access restricted by multi-layered protections…”
“Traces of blood magic…”
“Probable presence of materials not declared during post-war inspection…”
“Why wasn’t this found earlier?”
Robards remained silent, and that silence tightened the skin unpleasantly between her shoulder blades.
“Do not tell me Nott Manor was inspected superficially after the war.”
“I’m not going to tell you something you won’t believe anyway.”
“Then tell me the truth.”
He exhaled, looking not at her, but somewhere near the edge of the desk.
“After Tiberius Nott’s trial, the house was partially sealed. The main areas were inspected: cellars, laboratory, first-level library. Nothing substantial enough for further investigation was found.”
“Nothing substantial enough,” Hermione repeated, and the words tasted bland, like a badly prepared excuse.
“There were dozens of houses like that at the time. Not enough people. A great deal of political pressure. Some families cooperated, some pretended to cooperate. Some officials wanted the matter closed as quickly as possible.”
“And now someone just happened to find an archive?”
“Not happened. Nott declared it himself.”
That was unexpected.
Hermione slowly leaned back in her chair without taking her eyes off Robards.
“Himself?”
“Through his solicitor. Formally, as part of the procedure for legalising inherited property.”
“How convenient.”
“Yes.”
They were silent for a moment.
Beyond the wall, a paper aeroplane rustled, struck the door, and, finding no gap, dropped helplessly to the floor. A bead of moisture trembled on its folded wing — someone had probably sent the message through a fireplace that was too damp. At night, the Ministry did not look grand or powerful. It looked almost pitiful: a huge mechanism that creaked even in its sleep.
“Why me?” Hermione asked.
Robards finally sat down, slowly, as if he had allowed himself to be tired.
“Because you know the post-war archives better than most. Because you aren’t afraid of surnames. And because if I give this to someone else, within two days the case will either be closed or in the Prophet.”
“Wonderful. So I’m being handed a politically dangerous archive belonging to the family of a former Death Eater because I’m inconvenient enough not to be bought in time.”
“I would have phrased that more gently.”
“I wouldn’t.”
Robards looked at her closely, almost with regret.
“There’s another reason.”
Hermione immediately knew she was not going to like it.
“What reason?”
“Nott asked for you to lead the inspection.”
The silence grew dense, the sort in which one could hear cooling magic clicking somewhere inside an old pipe.
Hermione closed the folder.
“No.”
“Hermione…”
“No, if that is a condition. No, if this is an attempt to choose a convenient inspector. And especially no if Mr Nott has decided that my name will give his voluntary disclosure a pretty shade of public trust.”
“He didn’t explain why.”
“All the more reason.”
“He has the right to request a specific representative of the department when hereditary materials and private property protections are involved.”
“And the Ministry has the right to refuse if there is a risk of manipulation.”
“And you can refuse.”
She looked at him and only then fully understood why he had come at night.
Not to order her. Not to persuade her. Not to confront her with a fact already decided. He had come to offer her a choice that, in truth, had nearly been made for her.
Hermione hated choices like that. There was always something dishonest about them. Formally, you were free, but every circumstance had been arranged to push you in one direction, and then, as a final kindness, you were allowed to feel responsible for the step you took.
She opened the folder again.
“What exactly needs to be done?”
Robards did not hide his relief. His shoulders merely dropped a little.
“A preliminary assessment of the archive. Determine whether it is subject to full confiscation, partial seizure, or return to the heir under supervision. Check for illegal artefacts, banned ritual records, traces of memory interference, oath-structures, and unregistered Portkeys.”
“The usual set of family valuables,” Hermione said dryly.
“For some families, yes.”
She turned the page.
There was a copy of an old floor plan of the manor. The ink had faded in places; the lines of the corridors spread across the parchment like vessels under skin. The archive wing was marked separately, a narrow rectangle in the northern part of the house. Beside it stood a symbol resembling a crossed-out circle.
“What is this?” Hermione leaned closer.
“The experts don’t know.”
“Convenient.”
“One of them suggested it isn’t an architectural mark.”
“What kind, then?”
“Ritual.”
The exhaustion inside her receded, giving way to an unpleasant alertness.
Ritual signs in family archives rarely meant anything innocent, especially when the family was old enough, wealthy enough, and certain enough that the law was something made for people without good solicitors.
She remembered Theodore Nott again.
Not even his face, but the way he held himself: as if he always stood half a step outside the conversation and still heard every word. At sixteen, that could have been mistaken for arrogance. At twenty-five, Hermione already knew that sometimes this was what survival looked like.
She shut her eyes in irritation.
No.
She was not going to invent excuses for him before she had seen the documents. She was not going to think of him as a person at all.
For now, he was the heir to the Nott estate, the applicant in the case, the potential owner of an unregistered archive, and a possible source of problems.
That was enough.
“When is the first meeting?”
“Tomorrow at ten. Here. Third conference room on Level Seven.”
“Fast.”
“He’s already in London.”
“Of course he is.”
Hermione leafed through several more pages: protocols, signatures, old seals. The further she read, the stronger the feeling became that the case was too delicate for a folder of this size. Too clean. Too neatly prepared, as though someone had removed everything unnecessary in advance and left only what they wanted shown.
“I need the complete materials from Tiberius Nott’s trial,” she said. “Not the shortened version, not the public version, not whatever is convenient for internal briefings. Everything. Interrogations, inventory of seized items, witness statements, the list of dropped charges. Separately, I want to know who signed off on the initial inspection of the manor after the war.”
“That will take time.”
“Then start now.”
Robards looked at the clock.
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m efficient.”
“Sometimes that is the same thing.”
He stood and lingered by the desk for a second, as if he wanted to add something else, then thought better of it.
Hermione noticed.
“What?”
“Be careful.”
She almost smiled.
“Is that an official warning or a human one?”
“Tonight? A human one.”
For some reason, that made it worse.
Robards left, taking with him the smell of wet wool, tobacco, and fatigue. The door closed quietly — too quietly for the Ministry, where even furniture usually had an opinion.
Hermione remained alone.
She did not return to the folder at once. First, she stood, walked to the window, and touched the cold glass with her fingers. Beyond it lay the Ministry’s artificial night, enchanted to look real. Rain ran down the other side, though technically there could be no rain here, and there was something very Ministry-like in that: to create the illusion of weather underground so that everyone could find it easier to endure.
Her reflection stared back from the glass.
Pale. Composed. Tired.
Her hair was pinned up carelessly; several strands had escaped near her temples and curled from the damp. Shadows lay beneath her eyes, a stubborn crease marked the collar of her robes, and on her thumb sat a dark ink stain that the cleaning charm, for some reason, had not taken.
Twenty-five years old.
Sometimes Hermione felt as though she were both twenty-five and a hundred. At twenty-five, one was probably meant to build a life: go away for weekends, laugh without the feeling that it had to be earned, buy wine not to fall asleep after a hearing, and stop checking every unfamiliar room for a hidden exit.
But she knew how to live differently.
She knew how to read between lines, find the weak point in a contract, keep steady when people spoke the names of men whose houses smelled of old silver and fear. She knew how to look at seals, signatures, ritual marks and understand: someone had once again decided that memory could be folded into an archive, sealed with blood, and called inheritance.
Hermione returned to the desk.
The coffee had gone completely cold; a thin cloudy film floated on its surface. She pushed the cup aside and opened the Nott file from the beginning. This time, she read slowly: every line, every footnote, every signature.
The Nott family was one of the oldest pure-blood lines in Britain.
Not the loudest. Not as public as the Malfoys, not as eccentric as the Blacks, not as theatrically cruel as the Lestranges. The Notts were different: drier, quieter, more cautious. Their names appeared less often in newspapers and more often in sealed registries, marriage contracts, boards of trustees, and old banking documents.
Hermione knew that type of power.
Power that did not shout or threaten.
It simply arrived in the room before you did.
Tiberius Nott had received a prison sentence after the war, but not a life sentence. That still raised questions among those who remembered the closed hearings. Four years after the verdict, he had died in Azkaban. Officially, of heart failure. Unofficially, of age, Dementors, and that particular stubbornness with which some people lived too long, as though death were an administrative error.
Theodore Nott appeared in the materials sparingly.
“Only heir.”
“Minor at the time of the principal events.”
“No active involvement in the activities of prohibited organisations established.”
“Left the territory of Great Britain after the end of the war.”
“Currently returned to enter into inheritance rights.”
And that was all.
Too little.
Hermione did not like it when there was too little about a person. Empty places in documents often spoke louder than confessions. She leaned back in her chair and tried to remember his voice, but could not. She remembered Malfoy down to his intonation: drawn-out vowels, mockery, performative laziness. Pansy came back sharp and bright, like a thin glass. Even Zabini returned to memory with velvet indifference, as if everything around him sat slightly below his personal standard.
But Nott?
Silence.
She remembered his eyes — dark, attentive, unpleasantly calm — but not his voice, and that made her uneasy.
Hermione reached for the final section of the folder: “Access Restrictions.” The sheet was heavier than the others, old, clearly not Ministry parchment. It had been copied from an original, but the magical seal still bled through the surface like a bruise beneath skin. The letters were written in an old-fashioned hand — narrow, almost beautiful.
She began to read.
“The archive wing of the northern sector of the Nott residence contains materials subject to hereditary protection. Access by outside parties is restricted in accordance with the provisions…”
Legal husk.
Hermione’s gaze slid lower.
“An attempt at unauthorised opening may result in the loss of integrity of certain documents…”
Of course.
She moved further down and saw the note that made her fingers go cold before she even understood why. The phrase was short, almost harmless, if one did not know that in old families the most dangerous things were always phrased politely.
Certain materials are protected by a blood seal. Access is possible only in the presence of the heir.
Hermione read it once.
Then again.
A blood seal was not merely a family charm, nor an ordinary protection on property that could be lifted through a court order if one tried hard enough. A blood seal meant connection to the line of inheritance, to the body, to the name. Sometimes to memory as well, if the charm was old enough and unpleasant enough.
She slowly moved her finger beside the line without touching the letters.
Even from a distance, the paper seemed cold.
In the presence of the heir.
So tomorrow at ten in the morning, Theodore Nott would enter a Ministry conference room, and Hermione would have to look not at a surname in a file, not at a schoolboy shadow by the Slytherin table, not at the neat line “no active involvement established,” but at a person.
At the only key to an archive his family had, for some reason, kept hidden for seven years after the war.
She closed the folder.
The office had grown very quiet. Even the rain beyond the window seemed to have receded somewhere further away — behind glass, behind stone, behind all the layers of protection with which the Ministry shielded itself from the real world.
Hermione took a clean sheet and wrote at the top:
Case No. 18/74-A. Nott. Preliminary Questions.
Her quill hovered above the parchment before she added the first point.
1. Why did the heir declare the archive himself?
The ink settled evenly, almost black.
The second point came more slowly.
2. Why did he request me specifically?
She stopped and looked at the words for some time.
There was something personal in them, and Hermione did not like the personal in work documents. The personal made people imprecise. She crossed the phrase out, thought, and wrote beneath it more carefully:
2. Possible motive for choice of inspector.
That was better.
Not more honest, but better.
Behind the door, a paper aeroplane rustled again. This time, it squeezed through the gap, flew across the office, and dropped onto the edge of her desk. Hermione unfolded it. Inside was a single line from Robards:
Trial materials requested. Go home.
She looked at the note, then at the folder, then at the clock.
Eleven fifty-four.
Home.
The word seemed strange, almost foreign. Her flat would be dark now, neat and empty. On the kitchen counter, there was a cup she had not put away that morning; on the armchair, a book lay open to the page she had been trying to finish for the third evening in a row; on the windowsill stood the plant Ron had once called her only normal neighbour, because at least it kept quiet.
Ron.
She winced at the suddenness of the memory.
They had not been together for almost a year, and they had parted without beautiful phrases, without a loud argument, without a final scene in the rain. One day it had simply become clear: they had spent too long trying to love not the people they had become, but the people they had been at seventeen.
Sometimes he still wrote to her.
Sometimes she answered.
Sometimes they even laughed, and that was the worst part, because in those moments it seemed that everything could have been easier if both of them had agreed to remain unchanged.
But no one had remained unchanged.
Hermione folded Robards’s note and put it into the drawer.
She placed the Nott folder in the enchanted safe, but before closing the door, she let her gaze rest once more on the grey cover.
Tomorrow.
At ten.
She extinguished the desk lamp, and the office immediately sank into half-darkness; only the window remained dimly bright with rain. In the corridor, her footsteps sounded too loud.
The Ministry slept badly.
Portraits of former officials stirred quietly on the walls. One of them opened an eye, followed Hermione with a disapproving look, and then pretended to doze again. Somewhere in the distance, a lift grated as it rose empty. The air smelled of parchment, stone dust, and old wax.
At the fountain, she stopped.
After the war, it had been remade. The old, vile composition had been removed — the one where Muggles and house-elves looked up at wizards with gratitude no one had asked them for. The new fountain was simpler: a round bowl of dark stone, above which a thin stream of water rose and broke apart into silver mist. The names of Ministry employees who had died were engraved along the edge of the basin.
Hermione did not go closer.
She knew some of those names by heart.
She also knew the ones that were not there.
The water fell softly, almost soundlessly, and there was something both soothing and false in its movement. As if it were enough to install a new fountain, engrave names, give speeches — and the stone would stop remembering how people with armbands had walked these corridors, how someone had screamed behind closed doors, how seals had been stamped on sentences faster than the charges were read.
Hermione tightened her fingers in the pocket of her robes.
Inside lay the small key to her office — warm from her hand, real. And suddenly she felt, very clearly, that the Nott case would not be ordinary.
Not because of the blood seal. Not because of the old archive. Not even because of the surname.
Because someone had opened, far too neatly, a door that had remained closed for seven years, and invited her to enter first.
The lift arrived with a metallic sigh.
The grille slid open. No one was inside — only dim light and the faint scent of real rain, carried down from the street by someone’s wet robes.
Hermione stepped in.
“Atrium,” she said, though she was already in the Atrium.
The lift jerked, as though offended, and took her upward anyway — toward the exit, the telephone box, and night-time London, where at least the rain did not pretend.
She leaned her shoulder against the cold wall and closed her eyes.
The line rose again before her inner sight:
Access is possible only in the presence of the heir.
Theodore Nott.
The quiet boy at the Slytherin table.
A man who had returned to Britain and handed the Ministry the key to his family crypt himself.
Hermione opened her eyes.
The lift rose slowly, too slowly, and somewhere deep beneath her exhaustion and irritation, beneath her familiar determination to see any case through to the end, stirred the very feeling that had once saved her life more often than spells.
Not fear.
A premonition.