The Bolthole

Chapter 2

It hadn't been difficult for Hermione to convince Draco to go to Harry's. Everything had been breaking apart in his head like pack ice in a thaw. Pinkie hadn't been family or a partner or anything important that he could prove on paper, and so his initial grief leave was three saved-up vacation days. He locked up Pinkie's shop. He cleaned Pinkie's room from top to bottom and stripped the bed and closed the door and sat alone in the kitchen, his hands throbbing. The cleaning chemicals cracking his skin.

He was constantly misplacing his keys. At one point he tried to put a foot into a sleeve, thinking it a trouser leg. He found himself in rooms he had no recollection walking into.

He went back into work a day early just for something to do. And then he continued going into work, walking into other people's offices, drinking from other people's mugs. Standing in one place for too long, unmoving.

It was awful, to be suddenly bad at this, when work had been one of the things that saved him from himself.

Ron and Hermione had applied to Auror camps right away, while Draco was still ghosting around London, weeping on strange men in pottery shops. Ron and Hermione met up with him in the evenings and told him all they were learning, and Draco listened with a starved mind, trying to hide how jealous he was. After two weeks, though, three days into a gruelling series of workshops on using the landscape around them to their advantage, Ron sat them down and said, "I'm out. I'm done. Sorry." It was too much like something Fred might have done, he said, this mad chaotic improvisation. What he didn't say, although Draco guessed and he presumed Hermione knew, was that Ron missed Harry, who had always been his partner, his ally, at his side in every fight, the biggest and most devoted believer in Ron's ability.

Hermione had been glum but understanding about it. Draco had been as sympathetic as it was possible to be while tamping down catastrophic yearning for a career of his own.

When Pinkie finally convinced Draco to apply the Aurors, Hermione must have done something. She must have. Draco could find no other reason for why they hadn't thrown his application straight into the bin.

He certainly had not expected her to pay attention to him when he graduated from the training program. But Hermione clung to him, and they developed an unsettling habit of rescuing each other. She missed Ron, he realised. She missed people who had known her when she was just an insufferable know-it-all. By the end of his first year, Hermione said determinedly, "If they don't assign us together as partners we'll just drop out and start again until they get it right," and Draco, without looking up, had said, "They'll assign us together. We look unbelievable for their optics."

"That," Hermione said, pointing a finger, "is why I love you."

The Ministry trotted them out at every post-war event they could, the muggleborn girl and the repentant failed Death Eater, and it was kind of revolting, but it meant that they got to do their job. Which they did very well, until they didn't—until Draco couldn't.

"We need to track where the treasure went," said Hermione, pushing a map of Britain flat on her desk. "Did you get the numbers on the incidents of strange resuscitation from St Mungo's?"

He took a breath to answer and then the word resuscitation got stuck behind his eyes. Could they have resuscitated Pinkie? He had been taken to a muggle hospital by the bus driver. Draco turned his head and stared at the pictures of Ron on the walls and tried to think of something appropriate to say.

"Uh," he said.

"Draco?"

"Yes, sorry," said Draco. His head was so empty. Trying to find words was like trudging through mud.