Author's Note: Oh, the tributes that appear in this chapter.

Incidentally, I just want to say how ridiculously pleased and flattered I am that so many people are enjoying this fic. The compliments I get on the story, the characters, my style, and even my punctilious (to the point of being somewhat laughable) attention to grammar and spelling really make it all worthwhile. This is by far the best reception anything of mine has ever gotten, and I have you all to thank. So thank you. Unfortunately, some of the coming chapters (including, to some degree, this one) are almost… um… serious. My apologies for that.

Actually, looking at it, it's only Thirteen that's bad. I must have been having an Emo Day. And Sixteen makes me want to hide under a rock.

Just a little preview of what you're in for.

Chapter Eleven

A Dark and Stormy Night

It was the raining when Hermione awoke. It was coming down in buckets and pails and bathtubs and swimming pools, and it pounded at the building and pattered on the windows with a thousand insistent fingers.

Hermione looked blearily at her alarm clock, which proclaimed in violent red letters that it was a quarter to seven. She managed to slam her hand down on it on the second try, and it ceased to blare at her petulantly. Mumbling to herself about Monday mornings, she rolled out of bed and went in search of some clothes.

When she entered the kitchen twenty minutes later, Malfoy was wolfing down something that looked remarkably colorful for cold cereal.

"Are those marshmallows?" she asked in surprise.

"Mankind's third-greatest invention," he told her between heaping, dripping spoonfuls. "After fire and the bikini."

She made herself some toast. It was almost strange to be able to butter it.

There was also apple juice, orange juice, and mango-banana-papaya juice. Hermione wasn't even quite sure what a papaya was, so she went with apple. Maybe papaya was a tropical poison inserted into juices and then shipped to unsuspecting Britons who never knew what killed them.

The weather was so abysmally bad that even though they Apparated to the plaza just outside the Ministry, Malfoy and Hermione did so huddled under her old black umbrella. Hermione didn't really mind. Huddling with Malfoy was not at all unpleasant. He smelled nice.

It was very odd to realize that a few days ago, she would have slapped herself right across the face for that. Maybe even in public.

Just before they reached the door, Malfoy paused.

"If… it isn't a problem with you," he said slowly, "I think I might like to take the job Helicane was offering." He looked at his shoes. Wind batted the umbrella, and the rain rapped on it numbingly, but Hermione didn't move. "I really don't like relying on you," Malfoy went on quietly. "It isn't that I don't think you're capable of sustaining us both—though I think it does stretch your means, which isn't fair at all—so much as that it's just not right for me to take so much advantage of your generosity without contributing anything myself."

Over the course of the last few less-than-restful nights, Hermione had let scenarios play out in her wakeful mind, and this one had been among their number. Much as she wanted to sit down on the wet pavement, flail her limbs, and bawl her eyes out, it was time to step up and be an adult.

She took a deep breath. "That's not a problem," she said, and she almost believed it.

Malfoy smiled at her, and she knew she'd done something right.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mondays were always the hardest, and Hermione was glad to get back to good old Number 78, where she could kick off her shoes and forget for a few hours about letters that openly mocked all precepts of grammar and spelling. And, small as it was, said apartment was warmer, cozier, and nicer by far with two people in it. Sparky was good company, but he couldn't exactly hold up a conversation. Or ask to borrow your perfume.

She and Malfoy both dropped into the chairs at the table where Hermione had sat facing her mother just the day before. Marina Irving Granger had gone on for many, many hours about life goals, the pursuit of happiness, and what 'real joy' meant (though she hadn't clarified what fake joy was supposed to be). She had also updated her daughter on the doings of every member of the extended family, including a list of recent marriages so lengthy that Hermione suspected it was largely fabricated. Hermione, for her part, had taken a lot of furtive glances at the window hoping that no part of Malfoy was showing through it.

And now she was here, sitting across from her old enemy and enjoying it immensely.

The quiescence lasted a few minutes until she meditated a bit too intently on the "old enemy" part.

After all, it was a dark and stormy night. Thunder growled around the building, and gusts of wind slapped rain at the windowpane she'd watched so carefully the afternoon before. The more she thought about it, the more she knew she had to find out.

Despite the fact that Hermione was of the opinion that fidgeting indicated indecision, she drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "It's been three years since I've seen you," she declared slowly, drawing Malfoy's attention away from the rocky road ice cream he was working on, "and a year and a half since the war officially ended. Where did you go?"

Given that she expected another bout of sensual interaction with an eating utensil, she was somewhat surprised when Malfoy set the spoon down and looked at it, his hands folded in his lap. Then he jumped right in, without so much as a preface. "When things really started heating up," he said quietly, "I realized that I wasn't ready to play in the big leagues—and that I never should have pretended that I could or wanted to. I wanted out. So my parents told me to run for it. I never thought they'd understand, but…" Helplessly he shrugged. "I guess they were better people than I realized—stronger, too.

"I went and took some money out—directly out of Gringotts; our bills were being watched—and set myself up in a townhouse in the city. Settled down a little bit, tentatively, and went and tried to get a job. The transition was… not as easy as I might have hoped. Of course, I was an idiot even to hope that it would be, but that's never stopped me. I didn't have a résumé—or even a high school diploma—to go on, so everything rode on my being charming enough to nail the interviews. And when I did finally get a job, by which time the Gringotts money was running thin—getting food was quickly becoming an exercise in calculations—I didn't have any job skills. I ended up as a waiter. It made me uncomfortable, because I was so out in the open, but once I figured out how the system worked and leaned on the expertise of a few female coworkers who were all too happy to oblige, I got good tips, and I couldn't afford to drop it for something new and unstable. It was good for me, too—having to wait on people, rather than the other way around. Having to count every pound to pay the rent. It wasn't easy, though.

"And then one afternoon, when I happened to be off, there was an extremely insistent knock at the door, and I went down to answer it. There were some kids next door and some other neighbors down the street, neither of which I was keen on interacting with, so I'd taken to looking through the peephole. It saved my life, since Arturo Leonine was the one doing the knocking. I'd heard the war was over, but I wasn't dumb enough to think that it was over for good. Especially not for the fools who quit in the middle. The survivors of a war like that aren't going to take kindly to the old deserters. Likely Leonine blames people like me for the fact that they lost—they were down a few. He hadn't seen me, but I wasn't sure if he'd heard me, so I ran upstairs, threw the important stuff together, and Apparated as far as I could think to go.

"Landed in a Dumpster. That was unpleasant. Hadn't thought that one through very well.

"After I got the banana peels and fish-heads off, I took to the road. Couldn't stay in one place. Tried to lodge with some charitable people I managed to charm into it while I was sitting next to them in a Muggle church—great places to hide; churches—but before too long, Leonine was at the door again. I kept going. Slept on some doorsteps and in some alleys, befriended some hobos. Down-and-out people like me. It's been awhile, but Leonine's damn persistent. Dared to set foot in London again, had him onto me in minutes, and slipped into Diagon Alley for a few hours looking for a nice crowd to melt into. Picked up a Prophet and saw your name—bit of work with Muggle integration, wasn't it? Soften the edges where our world juts into theirs? Said you made a nice speech. And I thought, 'Hermione Granger. Hermione Granger might be able to keep me safe for a day or two. And wouldn't it be nice to have a day or two of peace?'" He smiled the old, lazy Malfoy smile, which looked out of place now—like a pink satin bow on a war monument. "Of course, we managed to get attacked within the first twenty minutes, but I suppose twenty minutes of peace is a nice little bit. Beggars can't be choosy and all of that."

"What about your parents?" Hermione dared to interject.

The Malfoy smile faded, leaving behind a pensive face instead. "I don't know. We didn't stay in contact—for obvious reasons." He glanced at her. "Might you have heard anything, by any chance? Seen them wandering around the more affluent areas of London, arguing over what color to paint the dining room?"

Mutely, wishing she had an answer, Hermione shook her head.

"Ah, well," Malfoy noted. "I suppose we'll have to assume the worst."

Hermione cringed, and he saw it.

"That they've retired to southern France without me," he specified accordingly. Luxuriantly he stretched. "Must be nice down there this time of year. It's nice down there every time of year." He paused. "Why didn't I Apparate there?"

"Do you speak French?" Hermione had been reduced to the worst kind of conversational fisherman—the kind that cast out for anything, no matter how circumstantial.

"Oui, bien sûr. Ma mère pensait qu'il est nécessaire qu'un jeune homme semble élégant." He smiled at her confusion. "My mother was of the impression that sophisticated people did things like that. I had a French tutor for years."

"How… nice," she said helplessly. The bait was dead, and her line had snapped. "So… so…"

"Can I get you some hot chocolate?" Draco—yes, Draco; she was going to say it, and she was going to be okay with it—asked.

"Yes," she replied, seizing onto the change of subject. "Yes, please."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hermione stared at the ceiling as if the answers might appear upon it, written in flowing cursive in sparkly pink ink. They didn't.

As the rain gouged at the outer walls of a hellhole apartment building, Hermione Granger wished that she could stop tossing, turning, and agonizing and go to sleep. She knew that if she didn't, tomorrow she would be like something out of Resident Evil.

And work was evil enough by itself.