This was originally written for Tygermine in the 2018 round of the DramioneDuet on LiveJournal. My sincere thanks to my wonderful betas Rachael and williamsnickers; any remaining mistakes are my own.


Chapter 1

-oOo-

Draco took his usual route to the doors of the Great Hall, keeping his eyes on the floor, when he bumped into something. Suddenly, his face was full of curly brown hair.

He took a step back to discover it was Granger who had waylaid him.

She looked acutely uncomfortable. "Malfoy – Draco – can I speak to you for a few minutes? Somewhere else?"

"Why?" He could think of no reason she would like to speak to him. They lived in the same castle, both completing their seventh year, but she may as well live on the moon as far as any interaction between them was concerned.

That suited him just fine, so a change to the status quo was worrying.

"Harry has been clearing out Grimmauld Place, and there are some things..."

She was doing Potter's bidding, then – plus ça change.

He may as well get it over with. Draco Malfoy was hardly in a position to deny Hermione Granger anything she asked these days.

"All right. Meet you in the Charms classroom in ten minutes?"


Granger was pulling objects out of a bedraggled beaded bag, lining them up on a desk at the front of the classroom. Draco recognised the Black family crest on a silver goblet and stretched his hand out to pick it up without thinking.

When she turned around to look at him, he let it drop again.

"As I was saying, Harry is trying to make Grimmauld Place fit to live in. I'm not sure if you would have visited before your aunt died, but it was left in quite a state, and with the war..."

"Great-aunt," Draco corrected her, hazy recollections of dark rooms with a mouldy smell and the curtains permanently shut was the best he could muster.

Granger rolled her eyes. "Great-aunt, then. Anyway, as you know Sirius inherited and left everything to Harry in his will."

Draco nodded. He had been told that much, at least.

"Seeing as Harry has even less interest in Black heirlooms than Sirius – and by that I mean he's not actually destroying anything he comes across..."

"What?" Apparently, the stories he had been told about his reprobate cousin had not gone far enough, rather than exaggerating as Draco had believed. "He would have destroyed – this?" He picked a priceless Regency wand holder from the pile at random.

"You don't know much about your cousin Sirius, do you?" Granger mumbled as she pulled out a footstool embroidered with the Black ensign from her little bag, wrestling to get the legs past the clasp.

"No." His voice was flat.

"Anyway, Mrs Tonks picked out a few things, and Harry thought..."

Hearing his aunt's name falling from Granger's lip as casually as she referred to one of their teachers further underscored to Draco how wrong this was. A Mu – Muggle-born was handing him Black family artefacts he remembered seeing on his great-aunt's mantlepiece, and she knew some members of his family better than he did.

Unbidden, his mother's words after the battle returned to him: "The worst thing with this wretched war is that it turned families against each other. Never forget that, Draco: put your family first, above everything."

"What did Potter think?" Draco asked resignedly. Most of the time he tried not to think about his mother's departure from normal, nor Potter, nor anything beyond getting through the day.

"That your mother should have a chance to see if there is anything she wants to keep. Harry doesn't want to just throw them away –"

"Throw them away? Have you any idea how much some of these things are worth?"

The rapier she had wrapped in a frayed bath towel was probably worth more than the Weasleys' house alone.

"Dispose of, then. They're not Harry's to keep. Will you take them?"

"Yes. Thank you," he remembered to say. His mother would almost certainly be happy, which was a rare occurrence in recent years.

"OK." She had a last rummage in her bag, and Draco belatedly realised this was his only opportunity.

He cleared his throat. "Would you – Can you tell me what Sirius was like?"

It came out in a rush.

Granger closed her little bag and slipped it into her robes. Her eyes didn't meet his. Was she going to refuse to acknowledge him, return to their usual pretence the other did not exist?

He didn't realise he had moved until she raised her hand slightly, signalling that he should wait.

Finally, she took a deep breath and spoke.

"It's different... I was so young when he died, even if I didn't think so then." The corner of her mouth lifted briefly. "Did you know he spent most of our fifth year stuck in Grimmauld Place? It was the Order headquarters at the time."

Draco shook his head – no one had told him anything of importance in fifth year. That had come later. Once it was too late to go back to being a child who hadn't a clue.

"As you can imagine, it wasn't exactly great for his mental health to be cooped up in the home he'd escaped as soon as he had been able to."

That wasn't quite the story Draco had been told about Cousin Sirius, but he had at least learnt enough to hold his tongue and let Granger continue.

"He was one of those people who could charm a troll. You know, the kind who are always late but no one minds because they're so much fun when they get there." She looked slightly wistful. "That's who he was meant to be, I think – what he would have been like if the war hadn't happened. He was intelligent, too – some of the stuff he got up to with his friends was truly brilliant, and it wasn't all Professor Lupin's doing."

Granger was pacing between the desks, pent-up energy spilling over in heavy steps and a whole row of desks left shuddering after she walked into it.

"It must have been hell for him," she said, coming to an abrupt stop. "Almost everyone he loved was dead, and it was looking pretty bleak for the ones remaining. And there was absolutely nothing Sirius could do about that. He couldn't even take Harry away from the Dursleys. He must have..."

Draco looked down at her hand, holding on to the worn back of a chair like she was drowning.

"He must have felt like everyone he cared about was leaving him behind, that he had failed them..." Her eyes were full of tears, but she looked Draco straight in the face.

"I understand now: what it's like to be desperate, to feel that you're losing everything you care about. I think that's what it was like for Sirius at the end. He loved Harry, and Harry was in mortal danger. He loved his friends, and most of them had died. Professor Lupin spent most of that year with the werewolves, so it wasn't looking too well for him either. All Sirius could do was to sit in that house, with the portrait of his mother screaming at him. Small wonder he seemed a bit edgy."

"I – I –..." No other words would come, until Draco fell back to: "Thank you. And thanks for the – the things," he said, conjuring a chest to sweep the Black-crested heirlooms into, almost leaving the stool behind in his haste to be gone.

He couldn't look at Granger.

Fortunately, she didn't seem to remember he even was in the room.

"'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'," she told the large window at the front as Draco crept towards the door.


It took Draco the better part of a year to admit to himself that Granger probably had forgotten he was in the room by the time she said it, and even longer to look her in the eye again.

Fortunately, he managed to force himself to do it eventually. It would have been rather awkward otherwise, considering how often their paths crossed at the Ministry.

The Pre Pre-Budget Committee. The Draft White Paper Working Group. The Policy Committee – only the lowliest of ministry minions attended that one, those who had no leverage to get away from the deadly dullness of it all. Plus Granger, whose knowledge of the Code of Conduct went far beyond the limits of common decency.

In the fullness of time, the Modernisation Committee was added to their number.

Draco had risen so high he had his own secretary and a team he could send to boring meetings instead of going himself ('a team' sounded much better than spelling out that it consisted of two staff members) by the time it was constituted.

He wouldn't dream of sending a deputy to the Modernisation Committee, or the Mod-Con as some Ministry wit christened it. It was actually important.

Granger was on it, for one thing – she had gotten better at prioritising over the years.

The Mod-Con was chaired by Lucy Pilkington, for their sins. She had always reminded Draco of McGonagall. They had the same Calvinist approach to fun, or rather the lack thereof; unfortunately for the committee members, Madam Pilkington also had the memory of an elephant. No fudging the minutes to reflect what should have been agreed on rather than what formally approved under her keen eyes.

One afternoon in February found her presiding as usual over a great deal of nothingness.

Draco fought desperately to keep his eyes open. This was boring, boring, bo-ring. They were discussing Biros, for Merlin's sake – any moderately competent Ministry employee already had their own stash, be they ever so pure-blood. Perkins in Magical Maintenance ran a very profitable sideline providing Muggle pens to those too clueless to procure their own, so there was no excuse.

This was the great new dawn of technology for wizardkind? Rolling his eyes so violently he took in the whole group gathered around the conference table, Draco noticed Granger's expression.

She was intent on something; unlike the sagging figures surrounding her, she was coiled as a spring.

Momentarily doubting himself, Draco tuned into Mitchell's drawl. The man was still expounding on how improbable it was that anything made by Muggles could be superior to wizarding implements, so that wasn't what had caught Granger's attention. Draco had a healthy respect for her ability to pick out the pertinent facts from an ocean of drivel – it wasn't for nothing he had watched her crusade to decrease the threshold for capital spending.

No, he decided, it wasn't Mitchell that was causing Granger's preoccupation. Then what was it?

Draco looked in the same direction as her and his eyes landed on Pilkington before he could avert them elsewhere. There was absolutely nothing about Pilkington that merited further scrutiny, and Granger must know that as well as he did. Unless...

Madam Pilkington seemed strangely restless. Several times her hand rose to her neck and then fell back again, as if she were swatting something away.

Was he imagining it, or was there a faint buzzing when Mitchell occasionally had to stop for breath (regrettably, he was more adept at engaging his lungs than his brain)?

There definitely was.

Draco bit back a laugh. Unless he was much mistaken, the prim and proper Miss Granger, Second Permanent Secretary of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, had set an Aedes Angebus spell on the Ministry's Special Envoy for Modernisation. The conjured mosquito would cling to Pilkington until she managed to squish it.

Given that Granger was an extremely competent witch, that would be very difficult indeed.

Something moved at the corner of his vision, enough to send a tendril of fear down his spine. Draco recognised the shape of a wand pointing at him by now, even though it was mostly concealed by Granger's sleeve.

Forcing himself to relax, he raised one eyebrow in the grand manner of Severus Snape in a wordless salute.

To his wonder, she responded in kind – the corner of her mouth moved upwards very slightly and her wand disappeared from view. It made a reappearance ever so often, whenever the spell was wearing off.

Several hours later, Mitchell's outpourings had been succeeded by a number of better-informed but deathly dull Ministry officials.

Pilkington was on edge: her eyes were moving faster and faster between the current speaker and the regular committee members, crossing each other whenever the buzzing got particularly obnoxious. Madam Pilkington had not been in the war, but even she had learnt to spot a wand when the pointy end was directed at her.

It was only a matter of time before she caught Granger's wand in motion.

That was why Draco seized the opportunity to nod minutely to Granger while Unspeakable Gupta was dismissed and Edwards from Magical Maintenance was called up.

Edwards fluttered her long eyelashes and patted her hair before nodding to indicate when she was ready, which enraged Pilkington even more. As she had told them loudly and repeatedly, if there was one thing she couldn't stand it was faffing.

Draco disliked it too, but not as much as he detested Pilkington's particular brand of officialdom. That was why he took up the baton, as it were, and set off an Aedes Angebus that should singe the ears of its recipient.

He almost lost it as he looked across the table to see Granger using her wand to cast a cleaning spell on her fingernails, with Pilkington and most of the committee watching with horrified fascination.

Pilkington hit out at Draco's conjured mosquito and almost took the ear off the wizard next to her. Amidst her apologies, she had to admit defeat as most of the participants decided to take the long anticipated break.

Draco almost whistled as he strolled down to the Ministry canteen in search of coffee potent enough that he could stay awake for the rest of the afternoon. Based on past experience he was unlikely to find it there, but hope springs eternal.


To be continued next week