It was not without reservations that he got up and went to work lately. Malfoys didn't historically work, not in the traditional sense anyway. Managing family and farming estates wasn't viewed as an occupation, but a duty, and political meddling, while potentially profitable, was more of a hobby. He technically didn't have to work, he'd inherited all the family lands and properties when Lucius passed, which all had income, mostly agricultural. His father had also dabbled a bit in Continental trade markets, and those contracts were still running, but he didn't fuss wth them. He knew the money was coming in, for better or for worse.

Despite what reputation he might have had of the pampered princeling as a younger man, Draco had never disliked managing the estates for Malfoy Manor and the winter house, Château d'Ivry personally, including the livestock. He did not mind getting mud on his boots if it meant helping a mare give birth, or aiding a leasing farmer find a wayward ram. His father had bemoaned this behavior and fobbed it off on him in all but name when he was thirteen. Not that he would have admitted it at school, but he'd been leasing land to farmers, planning crop acreage, discussing husbandry, seed-banking, and drawing up contracts with vendors since before his first kiss.

Malfoy Manor's immediate grounds had always been a showcase for his mother's gardening, but the surrounding land held stables, pastures, crops, and the kennels for his father's hunting dogs. He currently had various lessees: a hippogriff breeder, two baidrag sheep herders from Tibet, several crop farmers of both potion ingredients and food. The Ministry had even asked him two years prior to commit a few hectares of his land to growing aconite for new subsidized Wolfsbane potions, per new legislation allowing registered werewolves to work. It saved him a tidy bundle on his land taxes, and Remus Lupin had been a good professor, so he hadn't been upset to do it.

However, d'Ivry was a donjon, an ancient Norman keep, so he rented rooms in the summer for vacationers or for storage, but the surrounding lands had been mostly sold off to Muggles over the years. It worked out well, since Muggles seemed to perceive d'Ivry as ruins, so they left the keep itself alone and only toured it in the summer, and he was only there in the winter, if he visited at all. The dungeons and caves beneath were used to age cognac and cheese, which with the renters, it was enough income to keep the house solvent.

Regardless of his familial duties and earnings, somewhere along the line, it had become his habit to get up and go to work anyway. This morning, he was taciturn and strangely introspective, rubbing sleep from his face in broad swipes as he thought back over the last four years since the Battle of Hogwarts, six years since his induction into the service of Lord Voldemort.

His trial in June of 1998 had been terrifying, a month in solitary confinement in Azkaban had been more than enough time to ponder all the inane and unforgivable things he'd done. He'd been given leniency for his age and family pressures at the end of his trial, but had still been given parole with the expectation of community service beyond the buying of politicians that was called 'philanthropy' in polite society. He'd paid reparations, to be sure, and his movements, company, and wand were under surveillance for a time. Alas, the newly-minted Minister Shacklebolt and the Wizengamot had decided, with their usual panache for failing to think through the logistics, that he would finish his final year at Hogwarts and then serve his parole and community service time by training to be a Healer at St. Mungos.

Hogwarts had not been easy to face, but he'd muddled through and graduated, as looking down the Ministry's wand at parole had kept him well enough in line that he didn't think about hissed invective and the derision of him classmates most days. He'd gotten back in touch with Theo that year, which had been a personal boon to him in that it had kept his spirits up enough that he hadn't considered pitching himself off the Astronomy Tower more than was healthy. He'd even been able to mend bridges with Blaise, which was nigh-on a miracle.

Potter and Weasel were blessedly absent for the year, he'd expected it after seeing the front page articles about their having joined the DMLE. Granger had been back that year, but that had also been expected, so they'd been civil and distant to one another. It had served Headmistress McGonagall's post-war house unity goals, and it had been a quiet example to younger students that they ought to find ways to coexist. If he and Granger could, then anyone could. Their interactions that year had lacked malice, but they'd also lacked the semantic repartee that had made riling her up so interesting in the past. She'd still been visibly dedicated to her academics, but she'd seemed to be in an odd dream-state, muted and resigned somehow. That had been unexpected, but he'd been too focused on getting through the year that he'd mostly forgotten about it unless something triggered a specific memory:

She'd been in the library, and they'd both reached for the same Alchemy tome—she'd politely suggested they share a table so they could both get work done—he'd observed scars on her hands as she wrote and he'd desperately tried not to remember the sound of her screams. When she'd caught him staring, she'd quirked an espresso brow at him and he'd been compelled to ask her how it was she could treat him like she didn't hate him. Her answer had been sincere, spartan, melancholic, and the casual dismissal had put a rod of ice down his spine:

"I never hated you, I hated your upbringing, your vile language, and your blood supremacy. Anyway, I'm tired of hate, I've decided not to."

When he arrived at St. Mungos after graduation, he'd tried to save some face by acting as he had before, but it only ended with him appropriately cowed by his classmates who had academically fought tooth and nail to be there. His bonus for better overall public behavior was to constantly keep his head down lest the family members of patients recognize him in the pack of students roaming the hospital halls.

He'd made it through his time as a student, and as a parolee, without enough fuss to stop him from showing up after he'd completed the terms of his punishment. He'd hated the grunt work at first, cleaning up vomit and spilled potions was beneath him, even if he didn't have to actually use his hands to do it. After a while, he'd forgotten that he had even seen a mess, a Tergeo would fall from his lips, and he'd have already moved on to learning the next ailment, or treating the next set of injuries. He made the decision to keep his head down, grin, and bear it, if for nothing else than for the sake of his mother, who just wanted everything to return to normal. Which it never would.

Lucius had been irreparably broken by Azkaban, Voldemort, Azkaban again, and then wergild reparations, or 'The Bloodletting', as he'd haughtily dubbed it. Narcissa lamented the damage done to her husband privately, and would occasionally rail against Dumbledore's memory for not saving her son when he'd had a multitude of opportunities. After Lucius' death two years ago, she'd publicly clung blithely to the idea that she'd saved their family by lying to The Dark Lord, and as such, they would soon regain their social standing, regardless of the new world order. Draco did neither. He existed, he survived, and learned, and spoke very little.

He still found himself short on patience, sometimes jealous and materialistic, not the biggest fan of humanity in general, but he didn't bark or sneer nearly as much. He was still malicious before his morning tea, and his humor would likely always be equally acidic measures of sarcasm and biting criticism, but he lost his temper less often, slept better, drank less. Perhaps that had been the true goal of his punishment, to teach him humility. He didn't inspect that thought too much. St. Mungos had occupied his time, and given him sufficient distraction over the course of three years, that it had suddenly surprised him one morning when he realized he was slipping on Healers robes instead of Trainee ones.

But it had been one too many complaints after he'd done his job to the hospital administration, the temerity of the hospital to keep a former Death Eater, if somewhat a publicly-acknowledged shoddy one, on their staff. It hadn't been as much of an issue when everyone knew, it had been in the Prophet after all, that his service at the hospital had been a part of his parole, the public seemed to think it deserved, and when they needed to vomit, they seemed to aim for his shoes.

It hadn't mattered that he was capable, creative, or better with small children than anyone was anticipating. It hadn't mattered that he'd been sixteen and terrified, indoctrinated, or trying desperately to protect his mother. No one wanted him as their or their child's Healer, and none of the complaints were ever lodged to his face, so it had somewhat blindsided him when they'd told him he was being dismissed. It had become too much of hassle to keep him without the Ministry mandating his presence.

They'd suggested he go into private practice, but it hadn't appealed to him. He was generally a subdued, morose version of his former self most days, and he imagined that the only families that would hire him were families whose politics had gotten him into this mess in the first place. Shacklebolt had sent him a lunch invitation, and it did not behoove former parolees to ignore summons from the Minister for Magic, so he'd gone. Draco blamed his current employment solely at that man's sandal-strapped feet.

It was nearing the end of his first week at the Ministry serving as the department medic for the Aurors office in the DMLE, and his first day as a Trainee Auror. He'd spent the better part of the week in classes or physical training sessions and it was beginning to chafe, mentally. He'd been irritable all morning, which wasn't unusual when he woke up and thought back to the war and the aftermath, but keeping it compartmentalized was tiring and that only make him more tetchy.

He'd been pleasantly surprised to find out on his first day that in the four years since the Battle of Hogwarts, all of the Death Eaters and Snatchers had been rounded up, and with them, Ron Weasley had lost his taste for being an Auror. It would have severely tried his patience to have to deal with the Weasel. He'd apparently gone to work with the remaining older twin brother, and Draco had always privately thought the twins had been excellent fun, if lacking in subtlety.

Potter had been oddly welcoming, giving him a slightly sad smile on his first day and speaking to him about setting aside schoolboy rivalries. Draco had accepted and shaken the Boy Wonder's hand, because it had been good politics, and it had been so refreshing to be greeted affably, that he hadn't ever considered not accepting. The Head of the Auror Department had made them partners, Draco supposed it was likely because no one else would partner with him, but Potter laughed it off when Draco muttered something to that effect,

"It's more likely he wanted to stop blowing budget lines on my visits to St. Mungos. That man hates spending a knut he doesn't have to, and I get banged up more than a bit."

Potter had been an Auror since passing the entrance exam a few months after the Battle of Hogwarts, and had recently married the Weaselette, who was racking up championships for the Holyhead Harpies at a shocking speed. Ginevra Potter née Weasley was currently the bane of his existence, however; as she had breezed into the Auror training gym to give Potter his lunch, as usual, and then had begun laying into his former nemesis in a tone that reminded Draco strongly of her mother's Howlers from across the Great Hall.

"What do you mean you haven't tried to reach her again?" Potter ran his fingers through his already muddled hair and seemed to murmur an answer his wife didn't find satisfactory,

"I don't care what she wanted! No one has seen her in ages!" She threw her hands up in the air with a exasperated snort and stormed out. As if having his eardrums near to bursting wasn't bad enough, Potter then turned to him and started shout-drilling him on legal procedures while firing hexes at him in a impromptu practice duel. Not good.