And here is the second instalment! Enjoy!
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Dating Hermione Granger. Unpredicted, unprecedented, and unbelievable.
I hadn't had to interview for the job in Magical Relations, but they were so desperate that they hired me the first opportunity they had. A completely ridiculous chance episode of life. No matter, it happened. And there I was, hauling that ridiculous messenger bag to my ridiculous new job with my ridiculous blonde hair. Standing out like a sore thumb.
Trying to avoid eye contact with too many people, I was silent in the elevator to the floor. The problem was that no one knew what I had done during the war, and I was being punished. So, the key aim here was to just do my job, out of the way of society too much, and to just have a life that belonged to someone who had been on the light side. My key aim for the rest of my life was to avoid being bullied for the remainder of it, and to live out my life the way I would have done if I was anything but a Malfoy.
Bushy-haired and ignoring me, Hermione Granger sat in the desk beside me. I decided to introduce myself to her as if I was new. That way, maybe I can at least get a clean slate with her. If it has to be anyone.
"Nice to meet you. I'm Draco Malfoy, I like reader, and I am a hard worker. What's your name?" I asked, breaking out silence for the first time. And absolutely hoping that we can leave my terrible family out of all of this.
"Hermione Granger. Hard worker, love reading, and tend to work alone." Touché.
"You didn't work alone in the war."
"That's different." She paused. In what way was it different? "I saw your case file. The Bulgarians weren't impressed, but you did a good thing."
My entire body clenches for a moment, thinking back to that day. Working my way through their ranks, learning everything, and finally being able to be a part of taking down the Dark Lord. Voldemort. The only problem was that the whole case was confidential.
"How did you get clearance for that?" I asked, swallowing.
"I'm high security level."
"So, you're important."
"Not important enough to warrant actual change," she quipped back at me.
I smiled at her. She was smart. Really smart. She'd always been clever throughout Hogwarts, but it was absolutely clear then that she was more than book smart. Maybe the war had changed her. The war had changed all of us, really. Most people it was a good change, but a lot of people faced even worse after the horrors of the war.
When I left work that very first day, I met the first of my challenges in this new world.
"Stay away from Granger," someone muttered to me as they smacked their shoulder into my own. I ignored them, as I knew I would have to. The Minister warned me of this, and that I wouldn't be able to reveal my taking part in the light side of the war. I had accepted it. And I just needed to ignore the abuse.
However, the abuse kept coming.
Letters, curses, and cruel words in between the days annoyed me. I had never been one to get particularly lonely, so it didn't bother me that I sat with no one at lunch. It didn't bother me that no one asked me to get drinks after work. I didn't want to, anyway. Alas, one morning, a week after I first started the job, I returned to my desk early to do paperwork, seeing Granger there, eating her pathetic excuse for a salad by herself, and working avidly through her allotted lunch-hour.
"What are you doing?" I asked. She looked up, then back down at the parchment sitting beneath her lunchbox.
"Working," she mumbled through the lettuce.
"Fine," I sighed back, pulling out my own bagel and setting it on top the desk. "I need you to sign some things for me."
"Hand them over," she replied easily, not looking at me still.
I admit, it stung a little, but I did it anyway. It was possibly the weirdest thing to want a friend in Hermione Granger. But there I was, with the only person who didn't appear to jeer at me in every other room. I suspect anyone who had read my case didn't care whether I had done the war any good. To them, I was still a Malfoy. Yet, Granger had a shred more morality and common-sense than the most of them.
After the paper work she asked me questions about Bulgaria, and what it was like to be undercover. I figured she was doing it to appease me somehow, as I'd heard the stories of the dragon and Gringotts, and of everything she had done during the war. I felt something though, which was a something more than the nothing I'd been feeling towards everyone recently.
When the day was ended, I walked out of the Ministry, feeling admittedly lighter than I had done. That lasted all of ten seconds, when someone threw a stone at me. I was never sure where they picked it up from, but it hit me on the shoulder. Still, I ignored this, went home, and slept early that night.
Sometime following this event came the pivotal moment.
"You need to complete this paper work before the post goes tomorrow morning."
Thank you, Miranda. Bitch.
"Oh my god," Hermione muttered. "There has to be at least two hundred sheets of parchment here."
"We'll stay late," I suggested. "I'll get Chinese. You said it was your favourite."
"I did."
She gave me a look then, one that seemed to know I had been paying attention to her endless stories about her wonderfully mundane muggle childhood. So, when nearly everyone had left the office and Hermione was comfortably rifling through the pages of a news sheet to find some way to report the Ethiopian incidents to the muggle international government, I went to Tesco with my plain muggle money and bought red wine to go with the takeout. Red's always been my favourite. Mainly because my parents prefer white, but there you go.
We played a wonderfully ludicrous game called twenty-one questions. It was fascinating in a stupid sort of way. Talking about the boring stuff that no one ever finds out about each other anymore; what they like, what they dislike, and the little things that go on inside their minds. Eventually, we get to the heavier stuff. The war, and how the world all fell in like some sort of cavern.
At one in the morning, I was definitively attracted to her. The curse of red wine had befallen me, and I was too tipsy to ignore that pull I felt towards her. So, I brushed my leg against hers, half to make sure she was asleep, and half because I wanted to. I didn't want to be offensive, and I didn't want to be that alone all of a sudden. But I was so tired from the day, and the weeks I'd spent so far being under constant scrutiny abuse from what felt like everyone I had ever known.
At two in the morning we were halfway done.
At three she brought out some cheeky popcorn from her desk drawer.
I remember saying something about Horntails, and that there was a problem with the Hungarian Minister for Magic that we had to deal with.
At three-thirty she was looking at me. I could feel it, and I was exhausted.
I was reading the runes and trying to work out this one word, but my eyes just weren't working as well as they normally did. She translated, and suddenly her face was so close and so impossibly just there, within reach. In the moment, I felt something a little bit more than attraction, our noses brushed, and then we were kissing.
The next three weeks were hell. I got jumped seven times, and avoided coming into work for several of the days, wanting to see Hermione but knowing that if anyone sees me I'll just come in with more bruises the next day. And then she'd ask questions. So, I tried to work at home as often as I could, which was made difficult by my less-than-ideal living situation of 'my parents pathetically empty manor house', filled with constant distractions. But then, as soon as I was healed properly, and not aching because of my abysmal healing spells, I saw her at the desk, glancing around at the rest of the world. I asked her out. She said yes, which shocked me.
"Stay away from Granger," was punctuated with me being pushed down some stairs as I left the office that day, late after Hermione had disappeared to see her parents. Having no one to fix me, and being far too embarrassed to go to the hospital, I apparated poorly back to the manor and tried to siphon off any of the pain. The next day I took painkillers for the first time.
It made me appreciate that muggles have it hard.
Still, I took Hermione on the date. I wasn't in pain enough to be persuaded otherwise. She was the little sparkle in my otherwise dead and dull life. No way I was giving that up if I was just going to be pushed down the stairs every once in a while.
On our fourth date, she invited me inside her apartment for 'coffee'. Neither of us are massive fans of coffee, so we went straight for the proverbial dessert. It was wonderful. That's all I can really say about it. She didn't notice my flinching from the light brush on my stomach, where the day previously I had been punched repeatedly – I got better at hiding the bruises – and she didn't notice the scar on my lower back where someone had come up behind me with a knife.
"Stop dating Granger," one voiced told me.
"We'll just keep hurting you," another said.
"You're a piece of shit, Malfoy," someone else intoned.
I ignored them.
I didn't want to appeal to the Minister to release my case file any earlier, because that would seem like I couldn't handle it. And I was handling it, as far as I was concerned. The Minister didn't need to be dealing with me and my shortcomings. Plus, it was nothing short of unsafe to release the sensitive information until further notice.
Hermione invited me out to brunch with her parents. I did the good thing; shook hands, gave hugs, smiled alone with their conversation. They were lovely people, but there was so much running through my mind. I understood why the people were trying to hurt me, but they surely can't do it forever? And they'd know I'm a wizard, so the wounds would heal. But it's just relentless.
"What's wrong?" Hermione asked me as we left. Maybe I hadn't smiled enough.
"It's nothing," I replied, giving her a toothy grin.
Later that night she asked me to move in with her. I agreed, as I would have done anyway. At this point I was completely and irrevocably in love with her. The problem was that we would have to sign a disclosure form if were to move in together. Then everything would be even more in the open. But still, I agreed.
It took me a whole weekend to pack up everything I wanted from the manor. Just the two days to run around the house, glancing over the many objects that I didn't want, and then choosing only those really important to remain with me for what should have been the rest of my adult life. Hermione cooked up pasta and pesto with frozen peas while I unpacked around her, and we relished in the joy of being able to spend this much more time together.
One night, on my way back the apartment, someone caught me completely off-guard. For the first time, it wasn't near work and it was near to her. Near to our apartment.
"I told you to keep away from her." The guy came out of the shadows, wearing a muggle hoodie to hide his face. Coward. I didn't respond. "And yet here you are, dirty and returning to your little bitch." My anger flared. Neither was I dirty nor returning to a bitch. "You're thick, Malfoy. Thinking you could just get back in on the good side. Thinking you could just join and all would be forgotten."
"You were there when he killed my parents, and my brother," choked one voice.
"Your father hurt my little sister." The voice paused. "She was only nine."
The best, and only thing, I could do was to say sorry.
Of course, they beat me up until I was bleeding and the dark shade of the night sky.
Hermione cried when I stumbled in, asking for peas. I meant to stay relaxed about it and not say a word, and just say that I fell. However, it was far too obvious that time that something had gone wrong. I told her that I love her, and that everything will be alright. Everything was okay whilst I was with her. No one could get me in the apartment.
"I love you," I said. "So much. And it is so important that you know that." Because it was so important. So, important that she knew that she was just about everything that meant something at that point in life.
"I love you too," she replied, kissing me on the corner of my mouth to avoid the cuts. My heart and my chest and my body filled with happiness. And, for one whole year, it was the same.
For this one, wonderful, year, we travelled with our jobs, and managed to remain completely civil. Our families met – rather, I met the rest of her family – and our friends didn't hate each other, though there remained some animosity. I thought the abuse had gone, as it had turned to mere glares in the street and no more punching their way through my organs.
Then my own personal pivotal moment.
"Stay away from Granger or she'll be the one going headfirst down the stairs every day."
I told him to let me have one final day.
Hermione and I had a beautiful day in the late Autumn. Every corner he was there, waiting for me to mess up and for him to be able to make a move on her if I did something wrong. By my understanding, he wanted to go after her to get at me.
We had Chinese takeout for dinner, with red wine and popcorn, like those many months ago.
I sat down on the sofa beside her and just looked at her. Perfect, unbelievable Hermione Granger. Unpredicted, and unprecedented, and ultimately wonderful.
"I love you," I told her. "And I am so, so sorry. I can't let them hurt you, though."
She looked at me, confused.
"Obliviate."