There was a time when Hermione wouldn't have dared walk into work with the swollen, blood-shot eyes she was currently sporting. She would have been mortified at the idea of the puffy red evidence of her tears out in the open, for all to see. Hermione Granger did not like to show weakness.

Instead, she would have lingered in front of her mirror in the morning, taking to her concealer like a woman on a mission. She would never have sauntered into her office sans makeup, not even attempting to cover up the fact that she'd been sobbing into her pillow all night.

But that was long ago.

When Hermione arrived at the Ministry on Thursday morning, sleep-deprived and exhausted from fighting, there was no hiding how much she'd cried the night before—nor was it the first time that week she'd gone to work looking that way. Draco Malfoy was already in her office waiting for her, seated across from her desk and lazily shuffling through a stack of crisp parchment.

"Finally," he muttered under his breath when he heard her enter. Then, as he whirled around and saw her face, he let out a short breath. "Merlin, Granger. You look a mess."

"I'm not late," she said irritably, throwing her bag on her chair and removing her cloak. "You're early."

"So what happened?" he asked. "Another fight with Weasley?"

Hermione remarked to herself that she couldn't recall a single time he'd said Ron's name without sneering it contemptuously. "That's none of your business."

"That means I'm right, then."

She chose not to reply. Sweeping the contents of her inbox into the air with a flick of her wand, Hermione picked out the memo she wanted and returned the rest to their rightful place on her desk. "Look at this letter I got from Bulgaria," she said, proffering it to him.

Malfoy's eyes glanced quickly over the parchment, then rose to meet hers. "This is why you asked me to meet you? You could have sent this to my desk."

She rolled her eyes. "Did you actually read the letter?" she asked. "Bulgaria doesn't even recognize werewolves as beings, let alone humans. They're classified as magical beasts."

"Put it in the report, then. Is that all?"

Quite used to his temperament by now, Hermione ignored his brusque tone and sat down across from him. "I know it isn't what they're looking for, but I was thinking: don't you think we ought to make a special note of countries like this? You know, nations that could use some guidance when it comes to their magical creatures laws."

Malfoy did not respond. He was still looking at her curiously.

"Well? What do you think?"

"What did you fight about?"

"Excuse me?"

"What did you two fight about?" he repeated, this time more slowly.

Hermione pulled her hands into her lap and began to toy with her engagement ring, turning it slowly around her finger like a rotating planet. "Could we please focus on the matter at hand?" she asked, in as brittle a tone as she could muster.

Malfoy tossed the letter on her desk and rose from his seat. "I'll get started on a list." Just before he turned to leave, he added, "You should take a day off, Granger. Not from work. From Weasley."

She wanted to respond, but could think of nothing to say. Instead, she watched silently, playing with her ring, as Malfoy walked out without looking back.

The sound of Ron's voice jolted her awake.

"Hermione!" he was yelling from outside her door. "HERMIONE!"

"I'm coming!" She peeled the pieces of parchment on which she had fallen asleep off her face before hurrying to the door. "Ron, I'm so sorry, I—"

"For the love of Merlin, Hermione," said Ron, brushing past her as soon as she had unlocked the door to her flat. "I've been shouting your name for the past hour."

"I fell asleep. I don't even know how that happened; I was doing some work, and I must have been more exhausted than I realized."

"You didn't hear me?"

"I must have been out like a light. I'm so sorry, Ron."

Ron had already plopped on her sofa and was busy Accio-ing himself a Butterbeer. "At least you'll be moving out of this building soon enough. It's such a pain to get here; I don't know how you can stand it."

"It's so much safer," she said, pulling her unruly hair back into a bun. "I know you're used to Apparating in and out of your flat, but without a fireplace or an Apparition point anywhere inside the building, there's hardly any way to break past its wards."

"That elf downstairs still makes me sign in," Ron grumbled.

Hermione walked over to her desk and had just begun to organize her notes into neat piles when she heard a loud groan from the sofa.

"No. Not again. I came all the way here; please don't do any work tonight."

"Will you relax? I'm just putting these notes away."

"You're working too hard. You've got to go easier on yourself, Hermione. When's this report going to be done?"

Not especially eager to discuss this particular subject, Hermione gave a sigh and sat down next to him. "That's the thing, Ron. I think the assignment needs to be taken further."

His eyes shot up. "Taken further?"

"It's just that so many of these countries don't have acceptable laws regarding non-human magical beings. And the Ministry's laws aren't without their own inadequacies."

"Right," replied Ron suspiciously, "but what's that got to do with your report?"

Hermione looked down at her fingers as she began to play with her engagement ring again. "Well, I was thinking that the Ministry could propose one set of updated rights laws. For all the countries in the International Confederation."

"But that isn't even your department. The Department of International Magical Cooperation handles everything to do with the ICW."

"I know," Hermione said, pressure rising in her chest as she prepared to drop the bomb. "But… that is Malfoy's department."

Ron went silent.

After an awkward pause, she continued hurriedly, "So I was thinking that he could make the initial proposal to his Office, and if all goes well—"

"So you want to spend even more time with Malfoy. Of all people."

"Ron, if it gets approved, this project could be really important—"

"We don't even have a wedding date," Ron cut in. "You've been insisting that you've gotten bogged down with so much work that you don't have time to plan the wedding. I barely even see you anymore."

"That's not true," Hermione tried to interrupt, but Ron had no intention of stopping.

"It's one thing if it's your bosses giving you all that work. But it's you, isn't it? And now you're volunteering yourself for something that's not even your bloody job, Hermione. You aren't even supposed to be involved with the ICW. But you want to create this enormous project for yourself now, of all times—you'd actually rather spend your precious free time with Draco sodding Malfoy at your office than with me, planning our wedding. It's like you don't even want to get married."

"How can you say that?" she pleaded, but he went on—and she knew exactly what was coming.

"I thought we were finally ready to start thinking about having a family. I thought we were finally starting our life together. But it's like you didn't even mean any of it."

And there it was. Gripping her hands together tightly, Hermione looked down at her carpet and leapt into the all-too-familiar battle that she had been dreading. "I thought we agreed we were done talking about that for now."

"Well, how long do you plan to keep putting it off for, exactly?"

"That isn't fair, Ron. You've known me for ten years; you can't expect me to suddenly turn into your mother."

Ron put down his Butterbeer and stood up. "And what—in the name of Merlin—is that supposed to mean?" he said, his voice rising.

"You know very well what I mean," she replied, her volume beginning to match his.

"Are you saying there's something wrong with my mother?"

"I'm saying that I'm not ready to have children anytime soon, and when I am, I'm not going to just pop out seven of them like she did!"

The color of Ron's face now matched his hair perfectly, but Hermione was undeterred.

"And I am sick of having this fight. I am sick of having to defend myself and tell you, over and over again, that I'm not your mother, and I'm not going to change! If you want to marry someone who's just like her, then I'm completely baffled as to why you proposed to me!"

He stared at her, agape, and there was a moment of shocked silence before he responded. "When have I ever said that I wanted to marry someone like my mother?" he asked, his voice confused and considerably softer than before.

"You've never had to say it."

They were quiet. Ron sat back down and took a swig of his Butterbeer, while Hermione's ring made what was most likely its hundredth spin that evening.

After several minutes, he suddenly rose and threw his arms around her, pressing a tender kiss against her forehead. "I'm sorry," he murmured into her hair. "I love you. I don't want you to change. I don't want anyone else. You know that, don't you?"

Hermione wrapped her arms around his waist and breathed in the familiar scent she knew so well. Once, she thought, years earlier, this would have been enough to make her swoon. Once, it would have been enough to make her knees go weak; and she might have cried tears of joy, her heart filled with the warmth of certainty that they were meant for each other.

"Don't you, Hermione?"

The tears came, but they were not of joy.

Three years after she was tortured on his drawing room floor, Hermione was assigned to work on a project with Draco Malfoy.

She was still working for the Department of Magical Creatures, and he was with the International Magical Office of Law. The laws regarding the treatment of non-human magical beings varied greatly from country to country, and the Ministry wanted a report on all the laws regarding each creature, broken down by nation. The purpose of the report was to see how the Ministry's own laws compared to those abroad, in order to assess whether they needed to be updated.

Hermione was a natural fit for the project, as she was incredibly passionate about the treatment of magical beings—her area of expertise since the days of S.P.E.W. As far as she could make out, Malfoy was chosen mainly for his foreign language abilities—a skill set that was far from unique in his department. For days, after numerous failed attempts to get herself reassigned, Hermione feared the worst.

But to Hermione's great disbelief, it was not at work that she ended up facing bitter quarrels and never-ending arguments. In fact, her days spent at the office with Draco Malfoy became an escape from her constant fighting with Ron at home.

She and Ron had dated scarcely a year before he had started his campaign to pressure her into moving in together, which she had firmly refused to do. When he had finally proposed—and she, unable to imagine marrying anyone other than Ron, had accepted—she thought the fighting would cease at last.

Instead, they only switched subjects.

Now, instead of spending all their time together arguing about why Ron was slowly and surreptitiously moving what seemed like the entirety of his belongings into Hermione's flat, they spent all of their time together arguing about why he wanted so badly to start a family immediately, with no concern for how that might affect her career goals and the things she wanted to accomplish while she was still young. Ron could not fathom why she might want to do anything with her life that did not directly involve him. She loved him, and she had wanted to marry him for as long as she could remember, but she was growing less sure of it by the day.

The relationship was draining her, and the bizarre fact that she and Draco Malfoy were able to achieve more peace and harmony in their many hours together than she and Ron could did not exactly inspire confidence in her future marriage.

Not that she and Malfoy were friends, in any sense of the word; nor did they even attempt to feign friendship. They had merely found that they were able to work surprisingly well together. It helped that time had healed some of Hermione's wounds from the war, and Draco had also certainly matured to some degree. While as arrogant and cocksure as ever, he was less hostile than before, and Hermione couldn't shake the feeling that he regretted some of the things he'd done in the past, perhaps including his behavior towards her. And so, despite the initial stiffness on both sides, they had become very good at ignoring their ugly history and had managed to fall quickly into an established rhythm of civil cooperation.

They had fought only once, the day after she and Ron were engaged. They had been comparing notes on their translations of German goblin laws when he caught sight of her engagement ring and suddenly stopped talking.

"What is it?" she asked.

After a long pause, he said, very quietly, "You idiot."

"What?"

"You. Idiot." He looked up at her then, his eyes strangely dark. "You threw your life away for that? It's so small I can barely see it from here."

It took her a moment to realize that he was talking about her ring. "How dare you," she finally managed to spit out, so angry that she could barely form words.

"You'll be wasted on him."

"I couldn't care less what you think, Malfoy." And then, with some confusion, after realizing what he had just said, "And since when do you think so highly of me?"

"I don't," Malfoy replied coolly. "In fact, I just told you that you're an idiot."

"Shouldn't I be a genius, according to you? For tricking a real wizard into marrying me and my filthy blood?"

"Convincing Weasley to marry you could hardly be considered an accomplishment."

Furious, Hermione jumped up from her chair, fists curled tightly at her sides. "But I'm a Mudblood, aren't I, Malfoy? Shouldn't I be considered lucky to have a pureblooded wizard even deign to propose to me?"

"He doesn't care about that, though, does he? He's a moron, and you were the smartest witch in our year at Hogwarts. He doesn't deserve you."

With those words, Malfoy rose from his seat and began to put his belongings away. Hermione stared at him in shock, faced with an onslaught of questions and emotions for which she had not been prepared. Had he just complimented her? Struggling to process the new information she'd been given and unable to make sense of it all, she searched for something to say before he left but felt overwhelmed.

Finally, from the storm rushing through her mind surfaced a single, pulsing memory.

"So now I'm a witch?" she asked quietly, her voice brimming with barely contained anger. "I thought I was just a filthy, disgusting little Mudblood who didn't even deserve to be at Hogwarts. I thought I didn't deserve to live."

Malfoy suddenly went very still.

"I thought I was a disgrace to wizarding society," she continued, her voice still quiet and fierce. "You didn't seem to think I deserved better back then. I thought I needed to be put in my proper place—"

At this final echoing of his aunt's words, his head whipped up, and he moved quickly and menacingly in her direction, his eyes burning. "I didn't have a choice, Granger. I never had a choice." His voice was strained but threatening and full of rage, and Hermione was suddenly terrified of him. She wished she could back away as he approached, but she did not want to show weakness; and so her pride kept her in place, her chin held high with false confidence, as he came closer and closer with every word.

"If you think I wanted that—if you think I wanted to watch her—" He stopped and swallowed hard before continuing. "You don't know everything. You think you know everything—that you can know everything by reading those books you love so much—but you're wrong. Not everything you read in those books is true. Not everything you know about people is true. You don't know me, Granger. Just like Weasley doesn't know you."

Before she could process those last words, he moved even closer. By now, he was scarcely a breath away from her. "If you think you can know someone from the outside—from looking at them, from what you hear about them—then you're an idiot." He paused, suddenly considering something. "But then, you are marrying Weasley. I thought you were too smart for that, and I was wrong, wasn't I?" He chuckled mirthlessly. "Public opinion really is worthless. See? Everyone said, 'Smartest witch in our year.' But congratulations, Granger, apparently you're just as brainless as that freckled dimwit you're engaged to."

Hermione gaped at him, speechless. Malfoy suddenly seemed to notice how close he was standing to her, and he jumped back as if burned. After taking a moment to regain his composure, he grabbed his belongings and fled from the room.

The fight—the only one they'd ever had—haunted Hermione for days afterwards. Malfoy went back to working with her as if nothing had ever happened, but she couldn't get his words out of her head. She started looking at him differently, searching for what might lie underneath that she had not seen before. Even the fact that he was able to act so calm and composed around her, as though he had never exploded, fascinated her. What was there, inside Malfoy, that could not be observed from the outside? What was there that no one else knew?

Eventually, her thirst for knowledge drove her to seek out what he would not reveal. One evening, when Hermione had to work long past her usual hours and the Ministry was nearly empty, a whim took her to the Room of Records, where she discreetly located his file and crept into a secluded corner to indulge her love of reading. Everything was there. She looked at his genealogy, at his Hogwarts grades, turning each page delicately, as though it were a gem between her fingers. And then she hit treasure—at the very end of his file waited the full transcript of his official post-war Ministry interview.

Hermione did not go home until 4 AM that night, and even then, she found it hard to sleep. She was transfixed. She lied awake in bed, her sheets cold against her skin, her mind an overcrowded aquarium through which everything she had ever known about Malfoy was now frantically swimming. Over and over, a single thought floated to the surface.

He had not mentioned the incident at Malfoy Manor.

Everything else that she had known about his involvement in the war, whether from direct interaction or through hearsay, had been dutifully included in the interview. Seemingly, he had spared no detail. And yet there it was: the gaping hole, the one event he had chosen to forget.

But why? What did it mean? Did it indicate remorse, some kind of deeper feeling about the incident that made him loathe to relive it? Hermione could not stop imagining the heated look in his eyes as he had said, "I didn't have a choice." She struggled to place the emotion she had seen—pain? fury? regret?—but she had to admit that she did not know, could never know, what he had been thinking or feeling.

And what else had he left out? There was so little she knew, she realized, of what Malfoy's experiences in the war had been. If he had skipped over her torture, he could have omitted countless other significant episodes. He could have lied about what he did include. There was no way to know how much information he had kept from the Ministry, how much he was hiding away for himself. Hermione suddenly recalled with horror that she herself had glossed over certain parts in her own account of the war, putting a spin on less honorable moments and leaving out anything that wasn't strictly legal. Future historians would use those flawed accounts in their research.

She was now struck by the enormous fallibility of records. Hermione believed so strongly in the power of knowledge above all else that it had always been her greatest comfort. When confronted at age eleven with an entire world of which she knew nothing, it was books that had given her answers. When she had faced difficulty making friends at a new school, it was in books that she had sought solace. And when she had discovered that in this new environment, she was an outsider—that some believed her kind could never belong—it was in books that she had found her strength, her dignity, and her self-worth. She had trusted them completely. No matter what else was uncertain, facts were facts.

But if records could not be trusted, then books could not be either, and suddenly facts were not so non-negotiable. Fear shot through her veins at the idea of questioning everything she had learned. What could she now say that she knew for sure? Hermione suddenly felt very vulnerable, as though holes had found their way into the armor of information she had amassed over the years.

All that was certain, she thought, was that Malfoy had been right: she did not know him as well as she thought.

Once Hermione had come up with her idea of proposing an international standard for non-human being laws, she put off asking Malfoy about it for a week. After all, they did not particularly like each other. She couldn't imagine that he would want to spend more time with her than necessary—and the project would make spending a lot more time with her very necessary. She was afraid that he would say no, and she cared so much about it that the rejection would have devastated her.

Hermione knew how stubborn he could be—he didn't often like to make things easy for people. So she prepared. She came up with all sorts of arguments in favor of the project, then planned rebuttals to all the potential reasons he might give for refusing. Finally, she memorized a speech to describe her request, which she then recited to him very nervously and all in one breath.

Malfoy looked at her appraisingly as she made her pitch, then said, "All right."

Caught off guard, she simply stared at him.

"Is that all?" he asked.

"Yes," she stammered, "that's all."

Seemingly unperturbed, he returned to the books in front of him.

Unable to believe her luck, Hermione tried unsuccessfully to hide her smile as she resumed her work—but Malfoy glanced up at her and saw, before responding with a crooked smile of his own.