He'd forgotten how easily she had always soaked up information about magic, how thoroughly she retained detailed information, and he'd watched her face as she added up the attributes of his tattoos. Knowing what she now knew, she could have easily done the Slytherin thing and held his need for his family's forgiveness over his head, but she didn't. He could practically watch her thought process skim past that, a moment of speculation, and then arriving at a satisfied expression. It was the sort of face his mother made when she approved of the cut and fit of someone's clothing. Granger's tacit approval of his tattoos, particularly considered the one she couldn't see, was oddly affirming. He felt a preening smirk on his face and a bubble of warmth in his cheeks as he asked about hers.

She answered as if she hadn't made something incredibly powerful, as if she hadn't seen the possibilities of magic as infinite, and applied it to her needs as she saw fit. It was the sort of complexity that a pureblood would never attempt for fear of broaching the bounds of tradition. His mind was spinning, the reserved stoic he was raised to be was disgusted to feel his mouth falling slightly open and his eyes widening ever so slightly. She'd managed to balance so much, and he was trying to figure out all the possible ramifications of those choices.

He was still pondering her choices in hearth ash after telling her about Potter. It constituted an odd compulsion in her presence that anything he thought about just would not stay in his head,

"That's how you didn't go mad!"

It was then that he realized he'd been silent and smiling at her for a long moment, and that spitting anything out of his mouth without context was something she could actually keep up with. She reasoned nearly immediately that he was talking about Bellatrix, that horrific Easter holiday, and she flinched. Her smile collapsed like a stone ruin. He suddenly sucked in a loud breath and started stammering, his hands held toward her and spread in supplication,

"I'm sorry, I was—I was just amazed at the strength of the magic you made—that it kept you all safe—I wasn't trying to make you remember!"

She had flinched back from his approaching hands during his stupid rant, but had stilled at his final declaration. She was staring at her feet with a tight jaw and glistening eyes and now that he looked as well, there were more tattoos across all the tops of her feet like lace socks. He heard his own awed whisper,

"Everywhere you walked and everything you touched—Brilliant—you've been walking ahead of them for years—you didn't do that our first couple years at Hogwarts."

She giggled, and it grew into a full, if a little watery, and boisterous laugh,

"You are the last person on Earth I would have thought to have noticed something like that!"

"I'm observant, perhaps even a little hyper-vigilant, it's a habit I picked up from my mother. You had done something different—of course I was bound to take notice—it just didn't mean anything until now."

She chuckled, but it was both a grief-ridden and maliciously dark, and whispered the way one might murmur a prayer,

"Constant Vigilance."

...

She turned from the room, she knew he hadn't meant to remind her, frighten her, or likely hadn't realized he'd complimented her or her magic. She needed to leave the room, she needed to do something with her hands. She could make tea, she supposed, or go read, or start working on her written report to Kingsley, but she hadn't been out to her garden in days. The sunshine, the smell of dirt, the mindlessness of manual labor, these things would help smooth over her muddled emotions and the roiling feeling in her stomach.

After a moment, she could hear his quiet measured footsteps behind her, following her into the kitchen. He seemed to have developed the tact to not speak and that was fine with her. She didn't turn around or look at him, but she held a pair of garden gloves out to him.

Once there were through to the gardens, she did turn to watch him, seeing his eyes roam over and note the species, no doubt mentally listing their uses. She understood that had he never participated in a war, that this was likely still a habit he would have, but it appeared that the habit had become frenetic. He held his body taunt, like a bowstring, seeming to always be a little on edge. It was a sensation she could relate to.

Garden gloves were the answer—research work—parchment and notes—books to be read in squashy chairs—effort and determination—growing things in the sunshine—the smell of fresh ink bottles. She knew the clawing, squeezing breathlessness of a panic attack, and she knew the stinking, cold cortisol sweat-soaked sheets of a night terror. She knew Harry did, she knew Ginny did. She imagined Malfoy knew as well. Her personal experience had led her to seek the little pleasures.

Hermione knew that she had grown out of being a chipper morning person, had grown into someone whose whole body melted with satisfaction at a morning coffee, growled and hissing at birds or Crookshanks or bad dreams, whatever woke her before eight o'clock, otherwise known as 'a reasonable hour to be awake.' She abjectly refused early mornings, but if she was up anyway, and had coffee, she could admit that she had liked watching the sun rise on a Saturday morning through the Hogwarts library windows. She had grown out of her need to micromanage the deeds of others. Her temper had changed—she no longer became angry over every little annoyance, irrationality, or flippant comment. It took her much longer to get angry now—a slow boil—but when her temper did turn these days, it was explosive. Harry had said that in the past she had been a constantly trickling volcano, but when she and Ron split, and she'd lost her temper, he'd called her 'Hiroshima'. Better to not linger on that thought.

She began pulling weeds, breathing in deeply the scent of the herbs she'd brushed against. The smell of the sea breeze seemed to sweep across her skin tangibly, warm in the sun calmed her. There was a flash of shade in her view, as Malfoy sat across from her and began pulling weeds. He didn't look up at her when she stopped moving, he appeared to be applying all of his attention to decimating the weed population. She knew even in school, that he was studious, as much as he tried to cover up his academia and work ethic with brashness and trouble-making. She had never really expected him to participate in anything that involved dirt. Hermione sat for a moment watching his concise work, how we knew what to pull and what to leave. He didn't even seem to notice the black soil getting on his dress pants, or that he had brushed his fringe out of his face and left a smudge on his brow. It was a strong contrast to the mulish ways she always confronted when trying to get any kind of attention-span out of either Harry or Ron.

Thinking about Ron occasionally led her to episodes of either weeping or throwing frangibles, so she let her mind go blank. It was Occlumency, essentially, but it was also bliss. To not think, and simply be for a while, was lovely.

...

Draco hadn't felt this calm in ages. The sun was beginning to set, and was only then that he realized they'd been silent for hours. The garden had been cleared of interloping plants, and Granger had produced a small curved knife and was deftly setting it against joints in plants to get perfect angled cuttings. She'd pulled rosemary, thyme, sage, and marjoram into a bouquet garni and stood, turning towards a collection of hutches at the back of the garden.

He immediately knew what was coming and before he could stop her, she'd pulled a scarred Ixworth cockerel from the coop, wrung it's neck and used her little harvest knife to behead the beast. She was allowing the blood to dribble out into a small bowl of dirt on the South side of the garden, and he briefly wondered if she knew the ramifications of feeding blood to the land. No, he was talking about Granger, of course she knew.

Something about the idea of her killing anything, even livestock, bothered him and he wasn't sure why. He supposed it had something to do with knowing she had been lethal in the war, knowing she had a vicious streak, but never having seen that lethality in person, and certainly not applied so clinically. She looked up at him finally, and seemed to sense his apprehension,

"I was going to make coq au vin. He'd stopped protecting the hens, I had a fox in last week."

She was still acting a little mechanically, it was the only thing that kept him from being more disturbed by watching her end a life. She'd done it quickly, mercifully, and she wasn't wasting the blood. Even when he was young he'd thought that messy butchery was wasteful and crude, to the farmer and the beast, so even as he recoiled in general, he approved of the respect she'd shown to the process.

This time when he entered the kitchen, he noted that she'd hung up one of the cockerel's feet to dry over the hearth, and she was plucking feathers rapidly between dunks in a pot of hot water. He pulled a knife from the block and rummaged through some wooden bins along one wall for root veg to cut up, in order to speed things along. She needed to eat a go back to bed. Even if the work they'd done in the garden wasn't overtly strenuous, she needed rest, and he'd forgotten that in the tranquility of the quiet day.