Draco held the door to the library open for his co-worker and watched her walk past him. The hair he'd mocked for years was held back in a pair of braids that made an effort to contain her curls while making her look rather hilariously like a child. Whatever Hermione Granger's failings were, excessive feminine vanity wasn't one of them. Nor, he thought to himself, cowardice. He'd known she was absurdly brave about big things. The war had made that clear. Now he'd seen her be brave about small things as well.
He hadn't expected her to apologize.
Damn her for being the bigger person.
He could feel his jaw clench as he forced himself to make conversation while they walked. He was not going to let her be humble and gracious and pleasant and then scowl at her side like a child. "What's your favorite play?" he asked.
She stopped walking and gave him an incredulous look.
"Shakespeare," he said, as if she were slow. He was already regretting his decision to try to converse with her, manners be damned. "What's your favorite play?"
She started walking again and then said, "I haven't read them all."
"No one's read Timon of Athens," Draco said.
That tricked a laugh out of her. "Or Corialanus," she agreed. She bent her head down and he wondered if she was just not going to answer she waited so long but at least she said, "I know the obvious answer would be Hamlet or Midsummer but I always loved Much Ado. It's trivial and fun and you certainly know from the moment they start arguing they'll end up together but –"
"But seeing them get there is the fun," Draco said. "You would like a romance." He held the door to the dining room open for her and she murmured the generic thanks she always did and he spared a moment to consider that they both, at some point, had had automatic courtesy so drilled into them that they didn't even think about it. "How have you read so many plays," he asked as he held her chair. "Is that normal for Muggles?"
"How have you?" she asked.
"Governess," he said again. "Miss Bishop felt that only the Bard mattered."
"That seems surprising," Hermione said.
Draco gave her a sudden, conspiratorial grin. "Give me a moment," he said, and went over to the sideboard and prepared them both plates with sandwiches and crisps. After he slid back into place next to her he began to explain. "I was a bit of a spoiled child," he began. She made a rude snort and he ducked his head before continuing. "I tended to try to patience of the staff and I believe the woman before Miss Bishop said that no amount of money was worth trying to contain 'that horrid monster.'"
"My sympathy lies with the governess," Hermione said.
"I'm shocked," Draco said. "Miss Bishop was the only person who applied for the position after that. Apparently word had gotten out and my parents hired her for one summer holiday before they realized she was Muggle-born."
Hermione's sandwich had been halfway to her mouth when he said that. He watched her lower it and turn in her seat. "So she taught you Muggle classics," she said. "Did your parents ever find out?"
"They fired her," Draco said. He didn't mention that after the woman had left he'd been told to forget all the nonsense she'd polluted his head with, or that his mother had hired a professional cleaning service to scour every room the woman had been in. He'd salvaged a few books, mostly out of spite at how his favorite governess was just gone one day, and re-read them when he'd been locking himself in his room to avoid the Death Eaters in residence. The irony of that had not escaped him. In retrospect he wondered what desperation had made the woman take a job with people sure to despise her if her background came out. He assumed she was long dead.
"Naturally," Hermione said, and returned to her sandwich. After she took a few bites she said, "Most Muggles our age wouldn't have read as many as I have. I just… I didn't have a lot of friends as a child and I was somewhat precocious. When I went home over summer holidays I mostly read."
Draco nodded. He remembered what she had been like their first year; it had set the tone for his dislike of her. She'd been clever and desperate to prove it. He suspected that even the teachers had found her grating; he'd wanted to shove her into the dirt almost every time he'd been around her. When she'd finally found friends she'd been almost fanatically loyal to them which meant she'd set herself even more firmly against him than just their natural house loyalties and his prejudice would have guaranteed. Enemies from the very beginning.
"What was your favorite?"
"Play?" Draco asked her, just to be sure. When she nodded he shrugged. "Titus."
She gave him a horrified look so he elaborated. "It gave me a context. War generates atrocity. What I was… it wasn't unique. It was human." He lowered his head and said so quietly he doubted she heard him. "I was human."