Hello dear readers,

If you read this in October 2022, then I'm happy to inform you that I'm currently revising and finishing this story.

As of 10/23/22 only Chapter 1 has been revised.

The other chapters will follow. I will move on to AO3 because I like the reading experience over there better but I didn't want to delete this story here because of the reviews and follows, so I am doing it bit by bit. If you want to join me over at AO3, then please do. I have the same pen name over there.

I hopefully will see you along the ride again. The revised version will differ from the original one, I changed some details and timelines, so it would be good if you read it again (I had to as well :D). But as I said, as of now, only Chapter 1 has been revised. You will see in the chapter titles, which chapter is revised and which is not.

I plan to do this with my other story "Pure" as well. And obviously, I will try to finish them this time, that's the whole point of re-posting/revising them.

Back then, I did have some betas for the story but it was always a bit of a hassle, so I won't have any this time (for now). Therefore, my English might suffer a little and some German word order or the wrong tenses could appear throughout the story. I do apologize for that. If you have time and want to help me out, let me know, though!

Other than that, enjoy reading :-)

Some story notes:

This is going to be a two-part Dramione fanfiction. This first part is set about two and a half years after the Battle of Hogwarts. Everything from DH happened, excluding the epilogue. Draco and his parents were on Voldemort's side but they didn't "actively" fight in the battle. Their views started to change after Hermione, Harry and Ron were captured and brought to Malfoy Manor.

I love Ron, so there won't be any bashing against him. He won't turn out to be the bad guy and he never broke Hermione's heart. This also won't be a Ginny/Harry story, I just decided that Luna would be a better fit for this story's plot. There are some OCs as well.

Oh, and Draco bakes ;-)

The rating was chosen because of the following warnings: dark magic use, mental abuse, non-consensual "body" abuse (NO rape or other sexual activities), magic abuse, Hermione is cursed and controlled against her will, she will be forced to use dark magic against others.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything!

Chapter 1: Mint & Chocolate

Draco gripped the counter hard, knuckles turning white as he watched the bustling bakery through the window in his kitchen. It was one-way, the customers only saw a black chalkboard with the menu on it on their side.

He was breathing hard, arms straining from the death-like grip as he watched the people come and go. They chatted with Luna, who was in charge of the register and then looked in awe at the two house elves, who prepared their order.

He wondered.

Would they smile like that if they knew who was currently in the kitchen? Would they still eat the pastries if they knew who had made them?

"Master Draco?"

Draco held his breath, counted one two three before he released the counter and turned around. Juniper looked up at him with curious eyes. The house elf wore a dark blue apron – the colour of juniper berries, a present from Luna – and currently she was clutching said apron with unsure hands. Nervously, she must be wondering what she could do for him.

Draco closed his eyes briefly, exhaling loudly before he answered. "It's alright, Jun. Do not worry."

"But Jun does worry, Master. The cupcakes, Master." The small elf tugged at her apron and Draco looked up, understanding now that he was about to burn his chocolate cupackes.

He crossed the kitchen and busied himself rescuing the cupcakes from the oven, putting them on the kitchen island in the middle of the kitchen. Jun let out a relived sigh.

Draco caught himself looking at the one-way window once again. The shop was still busy, customers walking in and out, black delivering boxes in their hands.

Suddenly, the floo was activated in the fireplace and Draco turned his head in time to see Harry Potter stumble into his kitchen, covered in soot and ash. The bane of Draco's existence coughed loudly and then accepted a handkerchief from Jun to clean his glasses.

"Potter," Draco drawled while finishing the mint frosting for the cupcakes.

"Draco," Harry said firmly, scourgifying the handkerchief before he gave it back to Jun.

"What do you want? I am busy."

"Just here to pick up my order."

"Orders are picked up in the front, not my kitchen."

Harry Potter just grinned and Draco rolled his eyes annoyed before he told Juniper to get Potter's order from the front. The elf obliged and disappeared through the swing door, which connected the kitchen with the bakery.

"Still not showing your face?" Harry asked while he pulled out one of the stools from under the kitchen island and sat down – much to Draco's dismay.

"I don't plan to." Draco answered curtly.

Harry looked at the window as well, watching the customers come and go. "The people love it. I heard colleagues at the Ministry rave about your creations. And whenever I walk down Diagon, I see a lot of witches and wizards carry your delivering boxes. Even the Prophet had a piece about the opening. It's only been a week and your bakery is the most popular shop in Diagon Alley." Harry's cheeks tinted pink. "Don't tell George I just said that!"

Draco, who was quite uncomfortable receiving such a high praise from Harry Potter of all people, was about to reply with an insult but then June returned with one of the mentioned black delivering boxes. Harry was gloating at Draco's discomfort.

They have never been able to stop the banter completely, yet Draco had to accept that these days it was just that. Friendly banter.

Harry thanked Jun for getting the box, peeking inside quickly before he congratulated Draco again on his success. The blond waved him off and then proceeded to ignore him. While he continued to stir his mint frosting, Harry disappeared through the floo.

Once the green flames had dissipated, Draco looked again towards the window. The shop was still full. There hasn't been an outrage yet because someone had found out who the owner was. They were still happy and gushing and buying his treats with vigor and gusto.

Draco wondered again.

How long until the truth would be revealed?

The bakery closed at 5pm. They obviously were open in the morning to serve the customers, who were on their way to work. They were open in the afternoon to serve the customers, who came in for lunch. And then they stayed open until after tea time before they finally closed up.

The bakery had been open for a week now and Draco had mostly focused on sweet pastries and cakes. Before the opening, Luna had already wibbled about serving drinks or bread or sandwiches and other things, which Draco had stopped listing to after a while. He had wanted to focus on a small selection first and rather than have the same things all the time, he wanted to vary between creations. Seasonal highlights or new recipes should bring the customers back and every day or week, they should be presented with something new.

Draco cleaned the kitchen with Juniper's help, the elf was ecstatic that she was Draco's second baker, head of the kitchen and what not. Loony Lovegood – even though Draco didn't call her that anymore – had become his employee thanks to Harry Potter. The two were couple for the better part of a year now and when the idea of the bakery first sparked, Harry had graciously offered to include his girlfriend without waiting for Draco's consent.

Too be fair – it's not like Draco had that many options anyway.

"We are finished for today!" Luna floated into the kitchen, humming a tune while she smiled happily at Draco. She and the two elves, who work in the front, had finished up and closed the bakery already. Tinny and Rascal were two rescue elves, which Draco employed and housed in the bakery. They had their own aprons like Jun and lived in charmed quarters in the attic of the building.

"It has been a fantastic opening week, Draco." Luna continued, her eyes glossy and Draco never really knew if she was mentally present or not. She was a natural in the bakery though, charming the customers and making sure that everyone left the shop happy and content. The orders, the earnings and the management was done effortlessly and Draco had nothing that he could complain about.

"You should be proud." She added. "Tin and Ras are already upstairs. I will go home now." She singsonged and Draco nodded.

"Thank you...," He said as she stepped in the fireplace. "...Luna."

She smiled at him and then disappeared in the green flames.

"We are finished, Master" Jun said, and Draco took a look around the clean kitchen. He nodded and Juniper disappeared a second later as well. She had been his elf since he was a boy and therefore it wasn't a surprise that she stayed with him during the past years. Even after she had been freed, she stayed at the Manor with him and now worked happily at the side at the bakery.

Draco walked towards the front of the bakery, dared to step up to one of the floor-length shop windows. He watched the life of Diagon Alley pass by him in the form of wizards and witches, who either went to the different stores or just passed through to get to another destination. Draco glanced at the locked door, wishing that he could step outside as well.

He sighed. He rubbed his face as he turned around and walked up to the counter. He collected today's earnings from the register and then walked back into the kitchen. In one corner, there was a spiral staircase, which lead up to the flat upstairs. He walked up with heavy limbs, directly ascending into a small office. Shelves with folders lined the wall and a door led into the rest of the flat. There was a giant window, which looked down on Diagon Alley and in the middle of the room was a massive desk full with papers, recipes and notes. Draco put the money in the safe, which was hidden in one of the bookshelves before he fell into the leather chair behind the desk with a groan.

He ran a hand through his hair again and let out an exhausted sigh.

The fact that he was sitting here today was just the result of dumb luck.

During the war, his family had been broken. His father has been reduced to a mentally-unstable man, who couldn't distinguish between reality and nightmare anymore. His mother more or less had been imprisoned in the Manor's potion lab, where she was forced to work on something for the Dark Lord. Draco was forced to follow around Snape or Bellatrix and do things, which he had supplanted from his memory.

There was one thing, which Draco never doubted and that was the love his father had for his mother, so when Narcissa basically forced him to decide between her and Draco and Voldemort, his father had his first epiphany in months. It became clear when the snatchers had brought Potter, Weasley and Granger to the manor and his father lifted the wards, so they and the other prisoners could escape with Dobby's help. The repercussions had been nearly deadly but the Malfoys had found a purpose now, which peaked in Narcissa's blatant lie about Harry Potter being dead during the Battle of Hogwarts.

They were still arrested and spent an unnecessary while in Azkaban before their trials. They were guilty after all. Lucius had committed war crimes, his mother had assisted Voldemort and Draco had let the Death Eaters into the school and then watched Dumbledore fall to his death from the Astronomy Tower.

They were convicted to three years of house arrest, without counting the handful of months they already served in Azkaban.

In the first year, they had no wands or magic. They were confined to Malfoy Manor and had spent their days bored out of their minds. Potion making had always been Draco's passion, mostly because his mother was an outstanding potioneer. It was also the subject, which he always managed to beat Granger in.

But without magic, there was no potion making. So, Draco discovered the next best thing. Because basically, baking and potion making were the same.

You had introductions to follow and ingredients to prepare. You had to handle them in a certain way and mix them in a certain order. And if you did everything right, you would get the perfect result.

That fate of house arrest made Draco's days long and boring. There was only so much he could do at this ancestral home that he hadn't done a million times before.

And it was Harry Potter's fault that he got desperate and finally turned to baking. A year into the house arrest, Draco was just agitated, and one horrible meeting with Potter had riled him up so much that he just was irate. He needed to do something. Normally, potion making took his mind off things, made him calm down and relax, as he had to concentrate on cutting, mixing, and stirring. He needed to occupy his hands, but because potions were out of the question, he decided to settle for the next best thing.

And that's how Draco found himself on his way down to the kitchens, and once he entered, he barked at the house elves to bring him a cooking recipe. Any at all.

They were frightened, probably more of the fact that a Malfoy actually had walked into their kitchen than of Draco's behavior. They complied, though, presenting him with a chocolate cookie recipe that he greedily snatched out of the hand of some tiny elf cowering in front of him.

It took him a moment to realise that he had no idea how to read it. Or where the ingredients could be found. He blamed it on the fact that he had never been to the kitchens before.

Obviously.

This caused Juniper to appear and she made him a cup of tea, which calmed Draco enough that he sunk down on one of the chairs scattered around a table in the middle of the kitchen and listened to the elf, who eagerly explained the recipe to him.

Draco had read through the recipe again and again, memorizing the steps until he asked the little elf next to him if she could explain the abbreviations to him. She happily obliged, explaining this and that to him as well.

After he had finished his tea, he had come to a decision and almost gave Jun a heart attack when he announced that he wanted to bake the chocolate cookies.

By. Himself.

Speaking of heart attacks, his father nearly had one when Draco presented a tray of cupcakes with pale pink frosting to his parents a few weeks later. He had taken to baking as he had never done to anything else in life.

Draco spent his days down in the kitchens now, the baking helped to keep him sane in this gigantic house with too much space and too less to do. After a while, he decided to let his parents in on his new hobby. Putting the perfect coconut cupcake with strawberry frosting in front of them was probably the most nerve-racking day of his life, including the time when the Dark Lord had taken over his family home.

Draco had brought them up for tea, at first irritating them because he was the one carrying the tray. Then he gave each of them one of the small treats, and while his father eyed the pink frosting with suspicion, his mother cooed at how good they looked. Once they took a bite, he proudly announced that he was the one who made them, giving his father the shock of his life.

"What brought this on?" Lucius had asked, staring at the cupcake as if it had personally insulted everything he stood for, and Draco just shrugged, claiming that after months of house arrest, he started to get anxious. His parents understood as they had taken up some curious hobbies as well. So, they complimented him on his cupcakes, Lucius even muttered something about how next time he could make them green or something, and that was that. And then weeks of learning turned into months, and soon Draco was able to combine flavors to create delicious new creations, all while the house elves kept an eye on him.

Another thing that Draco was sort of forced into, was the company of Harry bloody Potter.

Of course, Saint Potter had become an Auror after the war and while Draco nearly bored himself to death in a cell in Azkaban and later in his house, Potter had received Auror training. Weasley as well, by the way.

For some reason, Potter managed to get assigned to Draco and his parents as supervisor. During the house arrest, they had monthly meetings with Potter to talk about ridiculous things like feelings and shite.

Once the first magicless year was up, and they received back their wands, the meetings became more frequent and Draco, who wouldn't even admit it on his deathbed, became socially starved.

And Potter was right there.

Most of Draco's friends were on house arrest as well. Or imprisoned or well, dead, and while he was allowed to write them through Ministry controlled owls, it just wasn't the same. And that's when Potter's visits turned into conversations about everything and nothing. It went as far as Potter sitting in the kitchen while Draco was baking.

It was Potter, who put the idea of selling his baked goods in his head. Not that Draco was particularly in need of income – the next ten and more generations of Malfoys wouldn't be – but he was good at baking and he was proud of his pastries and cakes and why the hell not?

And after putting down a chocolate cupcake with mint frosting – a green one, thank you very much - in front of his parents, he announced that very thought.

The house arrest wouldn't end for another year and a half, and obviously he wasn't allowed to leave the manor, but that didn't stop him from planning everything for when he could. And he did want to open a bakery.

Lucius had choked on his chocolate-mint cupcake, but Narcissa had told her husband that he had done enough. Therefore, her son would be allowed to do whatever he wanted. Draco was smug about that and wasn't surprised at all when his father had come to him a day later and told him that there was a shop for sale in the heart of Diagon Alley.

The problem was that even though he had full access to the Malfoy fortune, big investments still needed to be authorized by the Ministry while they were on probation. So, it wasn't until a few weeks later, that Draco swallowed his pride and presented his business plan to Potter, asking if he was allowed to buy the empty building in Diagon Alley in advance so that he could later turn it into a bakery.

It took another month for Potter to realize that Draco was actually serious about it.

And then something happened that - still to this day - was hard for Draco to grasp. Potter had not only authorized the request that allowed him to buy the shop, but he had also applied to get his house arrest extended to the shop, which meant that Draco was allowed to renovate it right away and would be able to work there as well.

The Ministry had granted Potter's request after he told them how the shop was Draco's way of integrating himself into the community on a lower level because he would work hard in the bakery and therefore make the people realise that he had changed.

Draco had no idea where that generous streak came from, he had rather expected something like that from Granger and not from Potter, but as it turned out, the boy-who-didn't-die had ulterior motives behind his actions. Because after Draco had bought the whole building (the shop as well as the flat above it) and started to renovate it the way he wanted, Potter dropped the bomb in the physical form of Loony Lovegood.

The girl was as irritating as ever, and once Draco found out that she and Potter shacked up, he had wanted to refuse her involvement straight away. In her past time, Lovegood took care of magical creatures, especially the ones, who had been hunted, hurt, or abused during the war. She had two house elves in her care and Potter's idea was that she and the house elves would help Draco until they were fully recovered. Plus, Luna being there would appease the Ministry as it would show that she trusted and had forgiven Draco, despite her being held captive at Malfoy Manor during the war.

They put a glamour on the building. No one walking by the shop would notice that it was currently being rebuilt. Draco spent three months redecorating the place, inside and out. Because the inside was fairly big, Draco decided to add tables and chairs to make a small café out of it. During the summertime, he could even put some tables outside. He added dark wood counters and displays and filled the large kitchen in the back with the newest equipment available - all Ministry approved.

While Draco couldn't leave the shop, he needed Luna's and the elves' help to finish the building from the outside and to find suppliers for the bakery. The elves were free, employed and got their own quarters in the attic of the building. Draco renovated the flat above the shop but left it empty expect for the office, which he connected to the kitchen through the spiral staircase. After finishing the shop, Luna offered her help to Draco for the future. He hadn't really thought about hiring employees to help him out in the shop until Luna had brought it up.

He had gotten to know her, and he did tolerate her and the idea of hiring a stranger was something of a sore point for him. The whole idea was suddenly a sore point. Draco wasn't part of the Wizarding community any longer and he did read the papers. His family wasn't exactly liked, and he feared that once the people found out that this was his bakery, then this would quickly become the joke of the century.

Nonetheless, he started to prepare to open the shop. He created new recipes and perfeced old ones, which made his mother swoon. And because he only was in contact with Luna and Potter, they were forced to try his creations as well. This also caused Weasley to suddenly show up, and Draco found out that as long as the redhead had something to eat and was unable to talk, Draco could tolerate him as well.

Soon, even more Weasleys showed up, but Draco was too busy baking and creating to care. Plus, the surviving twin's joke shop was his direct neighbor, and he even helped Draco to create his store's name and logo, so Draco couldn't care less who appeared in his shop way before it even was officially open. Important was only, that whoever came was forced to try that day's baking and every single one of them never ever complained.

Another month of preparing and creating had passed, and it wasn't until then that Draco realised he hadn't seen Granger around at all. He didn't dare ask, but it was still a curious observation he made and one that never actually left him alone.

Yet all those thoughts were pushed back as the opening day of his bakery came closer. The fireplace in the kitchen was connected to the manor and Draco wished that he could have brought his mother here before the opening. There were about ten months of house arrest left, Draco had taken his time with the renovation and the planning of the bakery. He was glad that everything had worked so smoothly. He had the support of the Ministry, he was allowed to open and sell his goods and have Luna and the elves as his employees. While he couldn't leave the shop or the manor, he actually would be able to integrate himself in the life of Diagon Alley again. He could leave the kitchen and work the front of the shop.

He could.

He hadn't.

Draco sighed, tugging at his hair once again as he thought about the past months and what a journey it had been. Last Wednesday, randomly, he had lifted the glamour, and every person in Diagon Alley stopped abruptly as they walked by the shop, trying to remember if they had seen it there before. Within just a few hours, everyone was talking about the new bakery that had opened that day.

A whole week of positive feedback, daily returning customers and a waiting line and Draco hadn't dared to come to the front. He stayed in the kitchen with Jun and just watched through the one-way window.

A coward, as always.

Draco sorted through the mail on his desk, separated supplier invoices from junk mail before he noticed the envelope with the Minister of Magic's seal. He swallowed, cursing Potter for not warning him, before he teared it open, pulling the letter out.

Kingsley Shacklebolt, Minister of Magic, congratulated him on his successful opening week.

He praised his lemon tarts, which had found their way to the Ministry, and continued to write that Harry Potter (as well as Ronald Weasley) had only positive things to say about this work ethnic and determination. Therefore, the Minister is happy to inform him that if he continues to work hard and align his bakery with the other business in Diagon Alley for the next two to three months, then his house arrest would end six months earlier.

Draco dropped the letter with shaking hands. Leaning back in his leather chair, he summoned a tumblr of fire whisky from the glass bar cart in the corner. He finished the whisky in one gulp before he reached for the letter again, re-reading it frantically.

Six months earlier.

That would be in less than four months from now. Draco couldn't believe it, refilling his glass once again. He was content with the bakery, proud of his achievement, the fact that he was determined and had made his idea come true. He loved baking, probably even more than potion making at this point. It was something he was good at, something he received praise for.

Something he built for himself.

Staring at the letter, sipping his drink, Draco was positive that he would do everything in his power to not screw this second chance up.