Earth

After getting his acceptance, Draco threw himself into his work. Every day was a new challenge, and he delighted in doing well. Granger was quite receptive to his efforts, surprised by that as they both were, and they became a well-oiled machine, finishing paperwork like nobody's business and churning out reports quickly and efficiently. The fact that they shared an office only expedited this process. Alicia Spinnet was very pleased.

"So, Draco, are you enjoying working here? Do you like your colleagues?" Alicia asked him one day.

"Oh yes. It's a perfect fresh start and I'm really quite happy." Draco responded.

Alicia simply "humphed," deep in thought, and walked away, as Draco watched her leave with a rather puzzled look on his face.

Truth be told, it was really Granger who was making the office feel so welcoming. After the initial awkwardness, and after he had convinced her that five years of being on the outskirts of wizarding society was enough to show him that his world views had been painfully incorrect, Granger had decidedly thrown herself into friendship. He was taken aback, but welcomed it. It had been a long time since he'd had a real friend, after all.

Days passed. Then, weeks passed. He had lunch with Granger almost every day, and they fell into a steady rhythm of working, conversing, even laughing. He came to depend on her in a way, because he could always count on her to verbally spar with, brainstorm ideas with, and just spend time with.

Of course, they'd never met outside of working parameters—he wasn't sure he was quite ready for whatever the implications of that would entail—but they'd created a true friendship from the ground up. Talking to her was just kind of…well, fun. He spent a lot of time recounting his little moments with her, mostly because he'd never really had this with anyone.

"Granger?" he said, breaking a silence that had lasted about an hour.

"Yes, Malfoy?" she responded, barely startled, not even bothering to look up from the files she was looking at.

"I accidentally ripped open the top of this banana. Do you think I can save it by spell-o-taping it up?" he asked her, looking down at the fruit he had wanted to keep as a snack for later.

"I don't think it quite works that way, Malfoy."

"What if I did reparo?"

"Again, I am doubtful that that would work, but you are welcome to try," she responded, so used to his nonsense that she still remained fixed on her files.

She was right, as always, but he found great amusement in bothering her.

Another time, over lunch, "Granger, I have an announcement."

"Yes, Malfoy?"

"I just love babies so much," he proclaimed, rather ostentatiously.

"That's nice. Pity the witch who decides to make one with you, though," she responded, not phased by his strange topic choice.

"I once had a dream that I was laying on the floor and there were just babies crawling up to me, surrounding me. I was in a baby heaven."

She gave him a funny look. "That sounds like a nightmare. Imagine all the diapers that'd need changing, all the crying!"

He glared at her. "Thanks for ruining a beautiful thing, Granger."

She laughed at him and went back to her salad.

…

It wasn't as though Hermione was purposely hiding the fact that Draco Malfoy was working with her in the office. It was just that, she knew that if she told her friends, they'd make her want to dig herself into the ground in an early grave of embarrassment, because they'd make it seem like she was consorting with the enemy. He wasn't even the enemy anymore! She told herself, that if for some weird reason, Harry, Ron, or Ginny had decided to ask if a new member had joined their team, she would be completely forthcoming with information.

Of course, no such serendipitous opportunity was presented, and thus Hermione found herself in the uncomfortable position, two months after she signed off on Draco's assigning, of explaining why he was eating lunch with her so casually to Harry when he decided to pop by to ask for a lunch date.

"Hermione? What is Malfoy doing here? I didn't even know he was in the country!" Harry asked, as he made his way towards their table in the cafeteria. Since Harry was the head of the Auror department, he ate in a different wing, and with his busy schedule he hardly ever found himself in International Cooperation.

Hermione looked up at the familiar voice, frozen. "Oh, uh, well, um, yeah. Malfoy is back in England and he, well he works in my department now, so sometimes we'll eat together if we take a break at the same time…" Hermione trailed off, looking at anything but Harry.

"Now, now Granger, don't shortchange our friendship like that!" Malfoy interrupted with a delighted smirk. He turned to Harry. "I've been working as her assistant of sorts for two and a half months now. We have lunch together almost every day!"

"What do you mean, two and a half months!" Harry exclaimed, turning to Hermione, leaving Malfoy ignored. "You never told me about this! You never told any of us!"

It was at this that Hermione bristled. "We haven't seen each other in ages, Harry! I'm not required to tell you every miniscule detail of my life! We're all so busy with ourselves; none of us has any idea what's going on in anyone's lives. This isn't just my fault!"

Harry seemed taken aback by this. "I'm…I'm sorry Hermione. I didn't mean it like that. But still! Malfoy!"

"This whole situation just didn't seem relevant, Harry. International Cooperation happened to get a new employee. It occurs in every department, all the time. Why should this time require any fanfare?" Hermione sighed, picking up her uneaten sandwich to finish back in her office.

Harry watched her walk away, unsure of whether or not to run after her. Then, something gave him pause. He turned to Draco looking completely baffled, and asked, "Wait. What did you mean by friendship?!"

Draco smirked. "You see Potter, when you find yourself going to lunch with someone all the time, working with them closely, and even enjoying the time you spend together, it's called being friends."

"I don't need your damn smart-assery, Malfoy!"

Draco was pleasantly surprised at the outcome of that confrontation, as it seemed as though Hermione was almost defending him. That's what friends did, right? They defended each other when someone decided to say something negative.

One thing struck a funny chord with him, though. Did she basically call him irrelevant?! Irrelevant?! He found that quite implausible, considering over the course of two months she was certainly not irrelevant to his life. (Though that wasn't something he was planning on broadcasting to the world at any point.) He supposed as he had not shared his recent employment to the few acquaintances he could call friends he couldn't really blame her.

However, he could not say his pride was not a little bit wounded.

…

Moments after she left the cafeteria found Hermione at her desk, thinking very deeply about the conversation that had just occurred.

The problem was, for quite a while after Harry and Ginny had gotten engaged, and Ron and Susan Bones had found each other and fallen in love, Hermione felt kind of like a floater. They were all still best friends of course (even after Ron and Hermione's utterly dull, utterly dismal attempt at a relationship), and they would of course always be there for each other. However, being there when it's needed and being there when it's wanted are two very different things, and as such Hermione found herself alone quite frequently.

It was part of the reason she was so devoted to her work, and part of the reason she hadn't pushed away Malfoy immediately upon meeting him. She just wanted someone around to keep her grounded, so that she didn't end up getting lost in the depths of her own mind.

If Malfoy ended up being the only person around to remind her that there was more to the world than her thoughts, then so be it. Beggars weren't choosers, and in this case, having companionship was much better than going back to the pre-Malfoy days of being very lonely and very isolated, a little island in the middle of a vast sea of happy people.

It wasn't her friends' faults that she was this way. She figured they had forgotten how introverted she really was. They were all wrapped up in their own lives, moving forward and moving on from their teenage selves. And besides, she was perfectly capable of being alone. That didn't mean she didn't also want to have a conversation once in a while. It was the only way she didn't retreat into the cavernous depths of her mind, burrowing deep into a hole that she would no longer be capable of digging herself out of.

Perhaps that was why Harry's disapproval of the situation had stung so much. Who was he to criticize the one thing that made her feel natural again? It wasn't as though he had taken up the duty of being her rock.

Wait. Had she just thought of Draco Malfoy…as…her…rock?

"So what are we gonna do for our three month anniversary of being coworkers, Granger? We could order fancy takeout so you don't have to eat your weird sandwiches and salads!" Malfoy asked, on the eve of the third month of his working in the Ministry.

"I don't really think that's the sort of thing someone celebrates, Malfoy. And my food is completely normal!" Granger replied.

"But friendiversarys are important!" he almost whined, but Malfoys did not whine.

"Friendiversary? That's entirely different from just coworkers, you know. You really shouldn't mislabel relationships."

Draco grinned. "So does that mean you want to celebrate?" he asked, delighted.

Granger simply rolled her eyes and walked away.

What was funny about Draco's relationship with Granger was that he'd found himself incredibly comfortable around her presence. She was completely unperturbed by the silly things he said, and had no reaction to the revealing of his childish personality that had previously remained hidden under years of war. A person usually had to dig deep to find these funny little quirks about him, but with Granger they seemed to spill out, unbound by the normal social conventions of the company he kept.

It had now been three months that they'd been working together, and in those three months neither had found it relevant to talk about anything deeply personal or private. For Draco, who was usually a pensieve of unspeakable secrets, this should have been an okay working relationship. But he found himself longing to share things with Granger that were very much off-limits. Things like, what had really happened to force him to reevaluate his prejudices. How his parents felt about him consorting with a Muggleborn. How sad and pathetic his love life was.

Instead, they stayed with safe topics. How their friends were doing, what they planned on doing for the weekend, the weather, their work cases. Sometimes they'd get wild and talk about their favourite books, albums, or movies. Those were fun conversations. They'd once had a 20-minute fight over whether or not wizarding fiction was better than muggle fiction, and to Granger's surprise he'd had a much more nuanced argument than just, "Muggles are simply inferior to wizards!"

It had taken Granger by even bigger surprise when she realized that Draco had plenty of knowledge about muggle television and film. He noticed that she kept with their unspoken agreement, however, and decided not to press him on the issue and break the ignorantly blissful peace they had. He appreciated it. He supposed if they ever drank together they'd divulge whole treasure chests of secrets, but he'd never seen her touch so much as a Butterbeer in his presence.

It was to his surprise, then, that on one of they days they'd ended up working very late, he returned to the office after a break to find Granger downing Firewhisky like it was her new profession.

…

Hermione felt that she had finally dug herself into a hole she could not climb out of. It had been months since the last time she had kissed a man. It had been two weeks since she last saw her best friends, probably after Harry had relayed her outburst to Ginny and Ron, but it had been brief as Ginny was leaving for a tour with the Holyhead Harpies later that day. It had been a year since she'd last been on a date. It had been two years since she'd last enjoyed something she did for her job.

All in all, she was holding it together quite well for someone who felt like she was completely forgotten by the world, but as everyone knows, it doesn't take much to push someone at the very edge, right over it.

Ron's owl found her hunched over a particularly boring interaction between the French minister and British minister, which she was re-transcribing to be put away in the official files. The owl stretched out his leg, waiting for her to notice him. When no response was forthcoming, the owl hooted softly, jarring her into the present.

"Oh, hello, Pig," she said with a small smile. "What's this you have for me?"

He let her take the fancy looking scroll off his leg, and flew away without waiting for a response.

Hermione looked down at the thick, expensive looking letter, and broke open a rather pretentious seal, to find:

Susan Amelia Bones and Ronald Bilius Weasley

Cordially invite you to attend their wedding on

April 26, 2004.

This was, alas, the tipping point. Hermione didn't care about Ron in the romantic sense anymore. She truly wished him all the happiness in the world, and hoped him and Susan would live long, beautiful lives. However, for once in her life, she decided to be selfish and truly bemoan the fact that everyone else had made great progress in their lives while she remained pathetically alone, in the same place she had been a little after the war.

She didn't even make it to the bottom of the scroll before she fished out her emergency Firewhisky and took a gulp straight from the bottle. She would allow herself this one day to forget about her responsibilities and indulge, and tomorrow she would go back to being Hermione Granger, war heroine, golden girl, miss goody-two-shoes.

It was in this sorry state, a third of the way through the bottle, drunk and in tears, that Malfoy found her twenty minutes later.

…

"Granger…what the fuck?" Draco exclaimed, both shocked at seeing her in such a state but also quite intrigued.

"Don't curse at me, Malfy! I'm a grown woman! I'm oooold! I can do WHATEVER I want!" Granger was slurring, sleepy, mostly conscious, and quite terrifying, to be honest.

"Um. What exactly has you in this state, Granger?" Draco was moving towards her slowly, trying not to scare her into throwing the bottle at his head, as she looked rather volatile.

"Everyone! Everyone I know! Is gonna…they gonna get married! MARRIED! They're… happy with their job. THEY'RE DOIN SOME GREEEAAAT THINGS!" she took a pause to sniffle. "Me…I'm just…here….sad…alone. I'm never gonna have a boyfriend probably…I think some boy I went on a date with once called me fffrumpy. I don't wanna be frumpy. I wanna be pretty. But I guess I'll never be, huh Malfy? Do you think I'm preeettty?" Granger was rambling.

Draco did not know how to approach this situation.

Granger continued to look at him expectantly, as if waiting for a response that Draco did not know how to give.

"Granger…Hermione… I think I have to take that bottle from you before I answer any questions," he finally said, gently yanking it away from her.

"So that means youuuu don't think I'm PRETTY! You're HORRIBLE Malfy! Just horrible!" she was beginning to wail, to Draco's extreme alarm.

"No, no, it's not that! You're very pretty, Granger, really!" he quickly amended, sitting down in front of her.

"YOU'RE ONLY SAYING THAT CUS YOU HAAAVE TO! GO AWAY MALFY I JUST WANNA BE ALOOONE!" She was well and truly wailing now, and Draco immediately cast a muffliato at her door.

He ignored everything she'd just said, uncomfortable with the feelings it was rousing in him. "But what is wrong, Granger?" he tried again, patiently.

"I TOLD YOU! I AM ALOONE AND SAD AND EVEN WEIRD OLD RON IS GETTING MARRIED!" she said, shoving the wedding invitation at him.

Looking down at the scroll, he asked, "This can't possibly be the reason you're so upset. You don't still have feelings for the weasel do you?" Draco wasn't even sure why he cared.

At, this she immediately stopped sniffling. "OF COURSE NOT! We suited each other about as WELL as a DINGBAT and a WILD BOAR!" she said, and Draco had the good sense not to comment on the strangest analogy he'd ever heard.

"Okay, okay. How about I get you home, Granger? We've been working pretty late anyway." Draco was realizing that she was not going to be fit to interact with other humans at any point soon.

"YOUUUU don't know where I live!" her voice was lowering in octave with every word. "And I don't really think I should be appa—apparating anywhereeee…." She said this while gazing up at the ceiling, tracing imaginary things with her fingers, her eyelids slowly drooping.

Draco sighed, and took her hand. "Time for bed, Granger," he said firmly, and apparated them to his flat before she could utter a single word of protest.

….

Granger fell asleep immediately after her head hit the pillow, leaving Draco quite amused at the fact that she was such a lightweight.

But he knew, that if she woke up and remembered anything, she would probably smother herself if she were alone, the situation not made much better by the fact that she was in Draco Malfoy's guest room. So, he picked up a book entitled Mother Nature: How Science and the Natural World Interact with Magic, pulled up an armchair, and waited for the firewhisky to pass through her system, ever resilient in his diligent, watchful care.

A/N: This was a little longer than my usual, and I hope it made sense! I can tell that my connection to the elements is slowly fading, but I hope it still doesn't feel contrived. Hope the story isn't going in too bizarre of a direction, but I'm honestly just having some fun with it, if you can't tell-drunk Hermione is so amusing to write! Review if you enjoyed (or didn't, all thoughts are good), it keeps me going :) Much love!