Author's Note: My first attempt at Fanfiction. My first update on . I appreciate comments and criticism. Or readership. I like readership.

This is a Draco/Hermione fanfiction. As much as I love the Harry Potter series, I am not J K Rowling. I wish I was that awesome, but I'm not. Thus, I don't own any of these characters.

The Rules

Rule 1: Not Everything Is Always Beautiful

Draco Malfoy was not attractive in the mornings. He was unable to wake up quickly or with any sort of dignity. His shocklingly light hair stuck up on one side and plastered itself to his head on the other, making him look like a painfully asymmetrical albino rat. Conversations were limited to grunts until he managed to pull his pasty self out of bed and into the shower, and after that, he was an insufferable asshole until he had consumed a morning cup of tea (he refused to drink coffee). The stubble on his chin was incapable of growing evenly, proving that nature seemed to understand that Draco Lucius Malfoy was not supposed to have a beard.

Hermione enjoyed mornings, and was consistently awake before he was. This didn't bother her at all; quite the opposite, in fact. The problems with Draco's visage and demeanor in the mornings was not such a problem while his gray eyes still chased dreams around the inside of his head. It was her habit to leave for work before Draco woke up. The motivation behind this was to retain the image of him peacefully asleep in the bed they shared, and not the image of the same person yelling at her across the kitchen about not having any sugar for his tea, or the fact that their apartment seemed so damn cold all the time. Whatever he was shouting about was invariably made ten times worse by the fact that he had the worst morning breath of any person she had ever met and he could not understand why she never wanted to give him a passionate kiss goodbye on the rare days he was not a complete git.

Rule 2: The Little Things Are the Only Things That Matter

Draco liked to surprise Hermione with gifts for three reasons:

Firstly, she was easy to please, never expected much, and it always came back to him in a very good way. In this, she was very unlike the women he was used to dealing with; his mother or Astoria, for instance, both of whom expected nothing less than thousand-galleon, sparkly, gifts every Christmas. Draco was a firm believer in the cost-benefit relationship between all things. While there would be much personal cost if Draco did not get his mother something large and fashionable for Christmas, there was guaranteed to not be much benefit. With Hermione, on the other hand, he found that it mattered less the cost and rarity of the gift he gave than the emotional significance that she could extrapolate from it. After she received something of some significance, she would be in a wonderful mood for days, surprising him with kisses and smiles across the dinner table. She was always warm, but in the few days after even the most trifling thing was purchased for her, she would positively glow.

Secondly, it was not difficult. He kept a list in his mind of things he knew she loved, but a general rule was that if he purchased it from Flourish and Blott's, she would enjoy it. If it smelled good, tasted good, or could be related to Gryffindor or S.P.E.W., she would enjoy it. "It doesn't really matter what you get me," She said to him once, back when he was still trying to surprise her with jewelry, "Just knowing that you thought about me when I wasn't there makes me happy." He didn't doubt this. He could probably buy her mandrake root or hippogriff dung and she would be grateful, but he would never even consider doing that in reality. A Malfoy did nothing by half.

Thirdly, he genuinely enjoyed making her happy. When she smiled, her nose wrinkled and her dark eyes crinkled into two half-moons. It wasn't her prettiest face, but it was his favorite. He liked that she didn't smile like that for other people, that her happy-gift-getting face was just for him. He liked that she always made a fuss about putting flowers in highly visible locations and he liked how proud she was when she announced to Ginny or Harry or whoever asked that the flowers were from "Draco, and aren't they lovely?" He liked the satisfied tone of her voice. But mostly, he liked her smile.

Rule 3: No One Said It Would Be Easy.

There were nights when she would wake up screaming, clawing at her face and arms, her eyes wild with terror and the memory of pain, the words I don't know anything! tripping over her tongue. He would cradle her like a baby in his arms until she shook herself back to sleep, her small hands balled into fists in the knotted and sweat-soaked sheets, her dark, damp hair everywhere. On these nights, he would not fall asleep – if at all – until after the sun opened its ugly orange eye on the horizon, and he hated himself.

He did not regret the war. More specifically, he did not regret the part he played in the war. He knew he should, logically. If the outcome of the war had been different, and he and his family had been on the winning side, he knew that he would not be where he was today, that Hermione would not be with him. But there was some wall keeping him from regretting it all; like if he conceded that he had been wrong, then his entire life would come unraveled and he would be nothing more than a hollow-out version of a human. A few years back, after a failed attempt at escape, his father had been kissed by a dementor. Draco imagined that that was what regret looked like – hollowed-out. He figured that at some point, he would need to make peace with the things he did, Hermione was helping with that already, but as of yet he wasn't able to look at what he did and say, "This is what I did. I was wrong and I am sorry." Maybe he would never be able to do that. Hermione believed otherwise, but in some dark corner of his mind, he truly believed that there were some things he wasn't brave enough to face.

Even though he didn't regret the war, he hated it. Some days, he hated it so much that he wasn't sure that anything would ever be right. The mark on his left arm ached from time to time. He kept it hidden, most days, with an enchanted second-skin bandage, which made the skin on his arm look flawless and new. He knew some Death Eaters who had had the mark removed, and others who still wore theirs proudly. All of them said it hurt sometimes, like a toothache under the skin. The mark itself never moved; the snake never waggled the way it did when The Dark Lord touched them. But it did hurt. And he hated it.

More than anything, he hated Bellatrix Lestrange. He could not bring himself to regret anything that he did during the war, but that did not stop him from regretting what he did not do to help Hermione while his aunt prodded her memory and in the process, broke something irreparable and irreplaceable. It was this event that Hermione had nightmares about, and it was these nightmares that had eventually pulled her away from Weasley, and probably in some way had lead her to Draco. Ron was apparently ill-equipped to deal with the emotional after-effects of the war. In their first year together, Ron and Hermione had done spectacularly well. They seemed to be made for each other and Ron's loyal behavior and unintentional chivalry only won Hermione's heart more with each passing day, but after that first year of peace, the events of the war-years caught up with her. She was afraid to be left alone, couldn't make decisions, and was fired from her job at the ministry after she had been absent from her job for a week due to her inability to leave the house. Then the nightmares started with an intensity that frightened both halves of the young couple. Ron got angry that he couldn't protect her from the things in her mind, but he failed to understand why she couldn't control them. It confused him that the memories of Bellatrix's torture were still so fresh in her head. For her part, Hermione secretly hated that Ron couldn't understand. Of course the war had not been kind to him – he had lost so many people he loved, had faced death and bodily harm even more than she or Harry had – but he did not know what it was like to have his brain picked apart against his will; the war for him was physical thing – like a rainstorm or earthquake – and now it was like a closed book in his mind. They didn't last a second year, and no one who knew them very well was surprised.

A short time after that, Hermione checked herself in to St. Mungo's, which was actually where she and Draco met again. He had landed himself in the mental ward of St. Mungo's after a six-month stay at Azkaban left him with some nasty mental baggage. He didn't like to talk about it, but was always quick to point out that no, he hadn't gone to Azkaban because of Death Eater activities, but for a completely (well, mostly completely) separate offense.

It surprised him how willing she was to talk to him after everything he had done to her, but apparently it was hard to find people who knew exactly what the Death Eaters did to people. For most of the wizarding world, according to Hermione, the war had been removed; romanticized, almost, and as a war hero, she was expected to be stronger than that. Sympathy apparently isn't forthcoming for the deified in a society. He was just happy to have someone to talk to, the mark on his arm a personal scarlet letter, marking him as a Judas; a wolf among the lambs; a bogeyman in the wizarding world. They talked a lot about Bellatrix at first, or about how their lives had gone since the war ended, but as life improved for both of them, their conversations began to grow more varied. Then they talked about books and the news. They did not start dating until a year or two later, after they were safely away from all of that, and even still things were not easy. There were days when he caught her looking at him sideways through her eyelashes, almost like she was unsure of who he was or how he got there. Sometimes he wasn't sure, either. After all, not even love can erase an upbringing in which the purity of blood was worth more than all the gold in Gringots.

Now he was the one to hold her when the nightmares returned. They were less frequent than they had been, but they still came, and when they did, Draco would hold her until she fell asleep again, and then he would watch her sleep until the sun came up. She didn't know he did this. She didn't know that on those nights he would look at the tattoo on his arm and would wish that it belonged to someone else. She didn't know that even though he did all this, he could never ever regret anything that lead them to be together. This may have been selfish or unkind, but if not for the bushy-haired woman to come home to, he was not sure there would be any point in going anywhere. She did not know any of this, and he felt no need to change that.

Rule 4: Know When A Battle Is Lost. Know Which Side You're On.

There are some things that Hermione will never fully understand, and she's accepted this and has stopped trying to figure it out. There are some things that are so wrong that they cannot be fixed.

Draco has not been home in seven years and Hermione does not need to ask to know why. Astoria still lives there with Narcissa, even though she and Draco have been separated for almost a decade now. Sometimes, Hermione wonders what life would be like if she were a jealous woman; if she and Draco would be together at all. She tries not to think about it. She knows, logically, that the way pureblood society is set up, he couldn't marry her even if he wanted to. Logically, he can't divorce Astoria because the Malfoys were ruined after the war, like so many other pureblood families who had allied themselves with the dark lord, and it was now those who hadn't gotten their hands dirty during the war who had inherited the wizarding world. Logically, it would kill his parents if he divorced Mrs. Malfoy nee Greengrass for a mudblood. Logically, this shouldn't bother her, since Draco had not been home in seven years, since he loves her, since she knows he would never leave her. Logically, she knows better than to let this destroy her from the inside out – that she would never give Naricssa or any of those other silly aristocratic morons the satisfaction of knowing that it was their stupid little games of marriage that destroyed her. Logically, she knows better. She really does.

Rule 5: Life Will Continue

And he is good for her.