"Honestly, I don't know how you do it." Hermione admitted to Ginny. They were sitting together on the patio of a new restaurant that had opened up where Florean Fortescue's had once been. It was a chic little place that made a delicious brunch and an even better mimosa. She hadn't had much time with her friend lately, so when Ginny had suggested meeting up that weekend, Hermione had jumped at the chance. The summer sun was now in full force and it was lovely to sit outside and feel her skin warm under its rays. Ginny was wearing an appropriately large hat to block that same sun.

"No. He's-" Ginny paused, thinking over what she was saying as she swirled her drink around and then took a rather large sip. "He's not quite what I was expecting."

Hermione gaped over at her friend. "What do you mean? He's Draco Malfoy. Captain of the Inquisitorial Squad! Son of a Death Eater-" she paused, frowning. "An actual Death Eater."

Ginny shrugged. "I'm not saying he's pleasant or anything, but he isn't deadly or terrifying. He's a right prick, and I didn't realize anyone could actually survive with the amount of alcohol he drinks. We don't exactly spend much time together... That house is so big you could go weeks without seeing anyone. His mother nods at me, if we happen to pass each other. Which, I suppose, is something."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Yes well, she lied to Voldemort. Saved Harry's life. Wouldn't really make sense for her to, I don't know, murder you at this point."

Ginny smirked. "I was worried, actually. I wouldn't think I'm exactly a suitable wife for her precious Draco." She cooed out his name and then shuddered, and Hermione couldn't help but laugh in response. It had been more than a month now, and it was good to see that her friend could finally approach this with some humour. That was probably only because Ginny had gotten laid not that long ago.

"Still, I'm so sorry that it ended up like this, Gin. It's just not fair."

"No," Ginny agreed. "It isn't. But, well. It isn't all bad?" Hermione raised a brow at the redhead, waiting for her to continue. Ginny shrugged. "Well, we're married, right? So that means I got access to the vault." She paused, and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "Weasley's Wizard Wheezes is quite pleased with their new investor. George can do a lot with three hundred and fifty galleons."

Hermione choked on her mimosa. "Ginny!" She said with a bit of a gasp as she coughed on her drink. "That's… that's more than a thousand pounds!"

Ginny smirked triumphantly. "And mum and dad are going to love their anniversary present. All-expenses-paid trip to Romania to see Charlie. Fancy hotel room and bottles of champagne delivered to their door and everything."

"And you're saying that he doesn't care?"

"Hermione, they have so much money, I highly doubt he would even notice. And besides, I technically earned it."

"You don't mean…?" Hermione cringed, thinking of all the things someone could do to earn that much money in such a short period of time.

"Oh god no!" Ginny swallowed a gulp of mimosa and shook her head. "Absolutely not. We play one-on-one Quidditch. Not my fault he keeps losing. Obviously I'm going to use my victories any way that I can."

"You play Quidditch together?"

"Mmm. He seems to think one day he'll beat me, just because he was the Slytherin Seeker and I was only ever Chaser on the team. But I've been training - our Seeker is looking like she's stepping out on maternity leave for a bit, and, well. I have a pretty good shot at replacing her."

Hermione smiled at her friend. "That's really great, Gin."

Ginny nodded, ears flushing pink. "So, Harry and I were talking."

This couldn't be good. Hermione nibbled at her scone and waited for the inevitable.

"We were thinking of doing a, um, double date. Picnic, swimming, a whole day of summer activities." Ginny batted her eyelashes at her friend. "It would… well. It means spending the day with the ferret," Ginny pulled a face. "But, you can pretty much ignore him, I'm sure he'll do the same to you. Bring a book if you want."

Hermione sighed and tried not to cringe at Ginny's ferret comment - that particular argument was still fresh in her mind. The last thing she wanted to do with a perfectly good summer day was waste it with the blonde git, but Ginny was so happy after seeing Harry. And Hermione still felt really quite terrible about ruining her friend's future marriage, which was why she found herself nodding. "Yeah. I suppose if I bring a book it'll be alright." She paused then. "Where?"

Ginny winced. "Well, the grounds at the Manor are really beautiful. We won't go anywhere near the house, I promise. Just the backyard. They have this gorgeous pond and peacocks just wandering around, can you imagine?"

Hermione took three deep breaths before she responded, remembering the book she had read on 'self-calming techniques'. Accio, bombarda, cave inimicum, descendo - the book had said that listing off things in a category alphabetically was a good method to reduce panic. Finally she opened her eyes and found Ginny watching her with concern. "Nowhere near the house." She confirmed and her friend, relieved, nodded.

It was a beautiful day, at least.

Hermione had agreed to the picnic lunch hoping that it would pour rain on the day they had chosen and the whole thing would be called off. Unfortunately, the sun was shining and the air was warm and now she was standing on the Malfoy's back lawn, watching as Ginny spread out a picnic blanket on the ground and then dropped down, patting the seat next to her for Harry to sit in.

This left Hermione, in a pale yellow sundress, awkwardly positioned on the blanket next to Draco Malfoy, who looked casual. In fact, she didn't even know the man knew what khakis were, let alone owned a pair and was wearing them. But then again, robes weren't exactly practical for picnic lunches and outside activities.

Ginny and Harry were already lost in mumbled conversation and so Hermione was forced to pick at her food in silence, enjoying the cheese spread and wine. It was better than speaking to Malfoy, of all people.

He seemed to have different ideas.

"So, Granger. What poor, impoverished species are you trying to help out these days?" He was lounged out, looking far too comfortable sitting so close to the ground, wine stem between his long fingers and his brow raised as he watched her fidget with her lunch. "Merpeople, perhaps? Trying to convince them to stop eating fish? Or maybe it's the centaurs this week - perhaps their mating habits are just a little too violent for you? Did you know that they hold down their-"

Hermione nearly choked on her mouthful of wine and she snapped her head around to glare at him, only to find him watching her with mild disinterest on his face, but something more in his eyes. "Honestly, Malfoy. In what world is that polite lunch conversation?" She couldn't help but snap back, shifting again. She really hadn't thought they would be having an actual picnic, or she would have worn shorts.

Draco shrugged. "Well, it's your job, isn't it? Certainly there has to be some excitement to it. I figured that centaurs mating habits were the most interesting things you dealt with. God forbid we have to sit here and speak about trolls or ghouls or some equally blasé species of animal."

Hermione rolled her eyes and picked up another piece of cheese, doing her best to give Harry and Ginny, who were practically sitting on each other, some privacy in their conversation. "Do you think that's all I talk about, Malfoy?" She asked.

"Well I didn't see you starting up a conversation." He drawled, taking a rather large sip of wine.

"Did you ever think I just didn't want to speak to you?" Hermione shook her head and shifted on her legs again, smoothing out her skirt around her and hoping it wasn't obvious how uncomfortable she was.

Thankfully, Draco did not respond, and they ate the rest of their lunch in relative silence, other than the whispers and occasional laughter from Harry and Ginny.

After they had finished the lunch and the two bottles of wine that Draco had carried down from the manor, Ginny suggested a game of pick up Quidditch. Seeing as Hermione refused to participate, the plan was a three player Seekers only game - whoever caught the snitch first won. Harry may have been the best when they were at school, but Ginny practised relentlessly and Draco was gambling on the couple distracting each other and giving him an opportunity.

They left Hermione to her picnic blanket as Draco summoned three brooms from the shed near the house and then they took off into the air, and Hermione let out a sigh of relief. As nice as it was to give her friends the opportunity to spend some time together, Malfoy was exhausting. She felt tense in his presence. At first she wondered if it were fear - was she bracing herself for the impact of torture or a drawled 'mudblood'? But, then. He hadn't called her that since before the final battle. And barely in their sixth year. And he wasn't his aunt, and he didn't send her spiraling into panic attacks. Plus there was the small fact of his strange apology, of his declaration that she was better than him.

Hermione still hadn't figured out what that meant.

Still, she took all the peaceful silence that she could get, and she spread her legs out in front of her on the blanket, digging a book out of her purse. Summers in the Isles did not last nearly as long as she would have liked, so she was determined to make the most of a forced afternoon off work and soak up the August sun, getting lost in the tattered paperback in her hands.

In fact, she got so lost that she didn't hear someone walking up to the blanket, or notice when another body joined her on the ground. It was only when she felt warm breath on the side of her neck that she tensed.

"'There is,'" he began, and Hermione realized it was Malfoy who was now sitting beside her, looking over her shoulder and reading from the book she was holding. "'I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.'" Draco paused and Hermione couldn't help herself but fill in the next line of the book.

"'And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.'" She quoted back.

"'And yours is to willfully misunderstand them.'"

Hermione realized at that moment exactly what was happening and she jerked her body away from him, turning then so she could look at his face. He was smirking over at her, amusement dancing across his features.

"What on earth are you reading, Granger?"

Hermione frowned, feeling quite put on the spot, as she glanced down at the book in her hands. "Quite a famous muggle novel. I'm sure you've never heard of it, nor would you care to."

Before she had time to react, Draco had reached over and plucked the book from her fingertips, looking over it's ratty state, and glancing at the cover. He huffed out a small sound of amusement and opened the first page, clearly his throat softly. "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'" Draco couldn't contain the laugh as he read, and Hermione found herself thinking that she had never actually considered the fact that he could laugh so genuinely. "I wouldn't have taken you for someone who reads romance novels, Granger."

Hermione felt her face heating up and she snatched the book back from him, smoothing her hand over it carefully. It was a copy that she had owned for a long time, and she had lost track of how many times she read it. "It's a classic, Malfoy. Far more than a romance novel. Besides, the author is a muggle. I doubt you would sully yourself with literature written by such an inferior group of people."

If she had known him better, she may have recognized that his smirk had shifted, and he now had the look on his face that he got when told that he could not or should not do something. "'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great plith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.'"

Luckily, Hermione was not trying to eat anything at that moment, for she was sure if she had been she would have choked. "I," she began, pausing, trying to reconcile this vision of Malfoy spread out on a picnic blanket in the summer sun and quoting Hamlet at her with the boy who spat slurs at her in school and laughed when she tripped on her own feet.

With this, the blonde tossed his head back and laughed for the second time that afternoon, and she continued to stare at him, breathless and lost in her own confusion.

"What exactly do you think I've done with myself for the past two years, Granger?" When she didn't answer, he continued. "Sat around with my cronies, laughed about everyone who we had lost, the things we gave up? Gallivanted across the continent while we pretended nothing had ever happened, that we had not suffered too? 'The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind."

Hermione shook her head, but it was true that she had not once thought of Malfoy as a man with hobbies that were not more-or-less evil. "So instead you read Nietzsche? Hamlet?" She asked.

"And others, though I found that something in me resonated with that particular soliloquy. Rather on the nose, wouldn't you agree?"

Hermione shook her head to try and get over the fact that she was having a discussion about Shakespeare with her once sworn enemy. "I suppose." She agreed. "You fancy yourself as Hamlet, then?"

Draco shrugged again, a smooth motion of his thin shoulders. "You'd be wrong if you said we had no similarities."

Before Hermione had a chance to ponder this, she heard laughter from above, and Ginny and Harry landed a few steps away from them, stumbling over each other as they slid off their brooms, laughing. Ginny held the snitch triumphantly, and Harry was shaking his head at her through the laughter.

"That move would never fly in a legal game." He was saying, and Ginny was carefully adjusting her t-shirt.

"Yes, well. Why be given such useful… assets, if I'm never allowed to use them?"

Harry glanced over at Hermione and Draco, sitting on the blanket and looking up at them. "Realized you couldn't keep up, Malfoy?"

"Decided I'd rather not watch as the two of you figured out how to shag each other thirty feet off the ground."

Harry was trying to stutter out a response but Ginny waved her hand at him. "Just because you lack the dexterity, Malfoy, doesn't mean the rest of us do."

Hermione could, once again, feel her face heating and she shook her head. "Alright, yes, we understand." She looked over to see Draco smirking at her and she turned back to her friends, waiting to see if she could go home now, or if they had other shenanigans planned for the day.

Draco glanced down at his wristwatch and frowned. "Well, as lovely as this afternoon has been," he said, with no small amount of sarcasm. Harry snickered slightly and Draco pretended not to hear him. "I have a meeting I have to get to." The blonde man stood and brushed off his trousers, looking between the three Gryffindors. With a nod to Hermione, he left the three of them sitting on the grass and headed back to the house.

That night, after Hermione and Harry had returned to Grimmauld Place, as Hermione lay in bed reading, she couldn't help but hear his smooth low voice in her head. It was infuriating, she decided, how he was able to bother her even when she was nowhere near him. Giving up on the book and calling it a night, Hermione snuggled down into her covers and flicked her wand to turn off the light, stashing it under her pillow when she was done. Closing her eyes to the darkness, she fell asleep with the image of Draco's blonde hair glinting in the sunlight, and the sight of the long expanse of his neck as he tossed his head back and laughed.

The next few months passed similarly. As summer faded into fall, Hermione continued to throw herself into her work and continued to get nowhere. Ginny did end up getting the Seeker spot on the Harpies, and with it a huge influx of practices. This meant that, thankfully, their double dates more or less slowed to a halt. Hermione was absolutely not complaining. Not really. She was mostly just ignoring the fact that she kept wondering what other muggle literature Malfoy had read, what other hobbies he had picked up to fill his time after the war.

Harry was rather despondent at the lack of events, though, and finally Hermione had floo'd Ginny and they made a plan to go out for dinner, to a fancy restaurant in muggle London. While that meant that Ginny and Harry wouldn't really have an opportunity to sneak off, scheduling much more time than a few hours was proving nearly impossible. Ginny promised that it would slow down soon, once her coach decided she didn't need to be in intensive practices anymore.

Hermione and Harry arrived at the restaurant just a little late, due to Hermione deciding to change at the last minute, worried that she wasn't fancy enough when she realized Harry was wearing a full suit. It had been the right decision, in the end, to change into a slightly more fancy dress. Even though she realized, as they sat down in the booth across from Draco and Ginny, that she had chosen a deep green dress and Draco was looking at her quite peculiarly.

The meal was delicious, which didn't come as a surprise - it was the type of restaurant with no prices on the menu and sparkling water on all the tables. Apparently Draco had picked the restaurant and Hermione did her best not to show that the fact startled her. Harry had made a remark about Draco's knowledge of muggle London, and Draco had sniped back a quote about preferring not to have spit in his food, and the table collectively moved on.

Before dessert, Ginny slipped away to the bathroom, and only a few minutes later Harry did as well. Hermione tried not to think about it. But she couldn't stop thinking about what the blonde had said.

"Malfoy?" She questioned, and he looked up from the whiskey glass in his hands. "Do people actually, uh, spit in your meals?"

Draco did that thing with his shoulder that Hermione was starting to recognize as him feigning indifference while actually having quite a few thoughts on the topic. "I've had it happen, yes."

"In Diagon Alley?" She asked, almost incredulous.

"Yes, Granger. Not everyone is a perfect war heroine like you. Some of us, as I'm sure you remember, were on the wrong side."

Hermione sighed and brushed this comment off with a wave of her hand. "You were acquitted." She stated. "And, besides, it's been more than two years now. And you're married to a Weasley."

Draco raised a well-manicured brow at her. "And that changes things how?"

"Well. It just isn't, it's not right! That they'd let you into their establishment and then bring you food that's been spit in. They should really have all moved on by now."

"In your world." Draco said, looking pointedly at her. "In the world where everyone is good or they're evil, and the bad guys have all gone to jail. That makes those of us who are not currently rotting or dying in Azkaban - what, exactly, in your books? Because to much of the general wizarding populace, we are scum. We are people who avoided the punishments we so rightly deserve, and they make it their goal to ensure everything they do reminds us of the fact."

Hermione clenched her hand into a fist, telling herself that the only reason this was bothering her at all was because no one deserved that kind of treatment. She was still thinking about exactly what could be done about this when Harry and Ginny returned to the table, Ginny's hair tousled and Harry with a smidge of lipstick on his neck.

"At least the stalls here are nice and large," Draco drawled, and Ginny leaned over to smack his arm. Harry, for his part, blushed, and Hermione wondered just when Draco's snarky comments became more about teasing in good fun than pointed attacks.

Once again, as she fell asleep she found herself thinking of the way Draco had looked. Self assured and confident on the outside, but he kept his shoulders held in a perfectly straight line, his entire body posed to hide the fact that while the worst of the war was long over he was still enduring and paying reparations for his sins.

A/N: Quotes from the chapter are from the wonderful Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Friedrich Nietzsche.