A.N: since I start every chapter off with some form of apology, I'll shake it up a little and just say thanks - if you've still stuck around and waited even though my updates are sporadic AT BEST, then thank you! Reading reviews and seeing my views go up does motivate me to just buckle down and actually get writing, so thank you so much. The reason for this delay was a *major* case of writers block and the fact that for the whole of January I was trapped at the bottom of a BBC Sherlock well. I hop you like the chapter and thank you for putting up with me 3 ola
An hour later, Hermione had recovered from the shock of Draco's response, but she hadn't been able to stop thinking about it.
Of all the things she'd ever heard, Draco Malfoy having genuine respect for anything Muggle had to be one of the strangest; and yet looking up from her book, she saw his furrowed brow and intent gaze - he was completely absorbed.
Hermione felt at a loss about... well, just about everything. Firstly, there had been the complete and utter bombshell that her and Malfoy were bloody soulmates (though Hermione was still reluctant to believe that), followed by seeing him at Pansy's house, then her revealing personal details for no apparent reason, leading to the argument and finally, and perhaps most shockingly, the apology. That had completely blindsided her.
When she had woken up that morning, that small piece of parchment had left her speechless for several long moments. Malfoy, the antagonist of her childhood, had just apologised of his own accord. And not only that, but it had felt genuine. Was it possible? Could someone she had long deemed heartless and cold have been actually effected enough to swallow his (enormous amounts of) pride and admit to his mistakes? Suddenly, she felt a slight pang of guilt. It hadn't been just him shouting last night, a small voice reminded her. She had said some pretty bad things too - it wasn't her place to talk about his dead father, regardless of how she felt about him.
Just as she was about to break the surprisingly comfortable silence, Luna beat her to it.
"I should probably get moving," she said airily as she stretched her arms above her head.
"Where are you going?" Hermione said, grimacing at how whiny and desperate she sounded. She didn't want to let the blonde man sat near to her know that she was less than happy about the prospect of being sat alone with him. Draco didn't seem to have noticed though - he looked just as scared as he watched Luna stand up to leave.
"I'm interviewing a woman about her recent findings on the benefits of Gnome saliva," she said brightly, not noticing (or more likely choosing to ignore) the palpable tension which had descended on their small corner of the upstairs library.
"Oh," Hermione said weakly. She was meeting Fred and George at one, which ideally meant that she had an hour before she needed to leave Flourish and Blotts. She could leave early she supposed, to avoid having to sit alone with Malfoy, but... no, she didn't like the guy, but she did still owe him an apology.
"Thanks for last night by the way, Luna," Draco said, pulling Hermione away from her thoughts and sparking her insatiable curiosity.
"Oh it was no problem," Luna said lightly, "I'm glad you liked the pancakes."
He smiled. It was a genuine, warm, friendly smile - one which made Hermione's breath catch slightly and her mind go blank. She had never seen Malfoy smile like that before, and she vaguely registered herself thinking that it looked... she wouldn't go as far as to say 'nice', but it was an improvement. Merlin. She pushed that thought deep down into the recesses of her brain.
Then Luna (ever the eccentric) simply smiled, waved and walked away without another word, leaving that uncomfortable tension to continue festering between the two of them that remained.
Before it got to be too much however, Hermione, against her better judgement and before she could change her mind, spoke up.
"Um, thanks, by the way," she said, meeting Dracos gaze. He looked slightly confused at her words.
"For the apology," she elaborated, "It was... a nice surprise. And, um, I'm sorry too. I-I shouldn't have spoken to you like that, so... yeah."
She cringed at her own awkwardness, blushing furiously. It was a good job her dark complexion was able to hide most of it - she felt like her head was on fire. She'd always been like this when it came to feelings though: awkward and easily embarrassed. It frustrated her to no end.
Draco however, the king of icy stares and controlled emotions, strangely looked just as awkward.
"I... ah... thanks. And... you're welcome, I guess" he mumbled, looking back down at his book, his cheeks a faint pink.
They went back to reading, some of the tension having dissipated and an almost comfortable silence filling the space it left. Neither of them noticed, but while their heads were angled downwards, they both had small smiles ghosting their lips.
"Maybe she's in Flourish and Blotts? She probably got absorbed in some huge book and forgot she's an actual person with actual plans," Fred suggested. George laughed.
"Of course," he chuckled, "obvious. Dear brother, I'd say you were a genius but I promised Mum I'd try to stop lying so much."
"Oh ha ha," Fred laughed sarcastically, hitting him on the arm, "you're hilarious."
They set off towards the book shop, setting out a plan for how best to creep up on Hermione and give her a good old fashioned jump-scare.
"So this Plato, he... who was he?"
Hermione laughed under her breath. He'd been reading the passage on Plato for the past ten minutes, but Hermione suspected that he hadn't yet made it past the first few sentences.
"An Ancient Greek philosopher; one of the greatest philosophers ever, in my opinion. He founded the first ever institution for higher learning and came up with some of the most fundamental ideas for philosophy, science, religion and..." she trailed off, slightly embarrassed at her own rambling and the fact that she'd been about to go into her personal ideas about the topic without a second thought. Harry and Ron had always been a little annoyed by her constantly reeling off information like she was reading straight from a book. But looking up she saw that, to her surprise, Draco didn't seem bothered. In fact he was staring off to the side somewhere, brow furrowed, obviously absorbing what she had been saying. He noticed that she'd stopped talking and looked back at her.
"...and? What's else were you going to say?" he asked simply.
Hermione was dumbfounded for a split second, but quickly recovered by launching back into what she had been saying, this time slightly more confident.
"And he... well, I feel like while a few of his ideas are a little odd by today's standard, a lot of what he had to say is just so intriguing. I've always loved his writings, even if quite a bit of it is difficult to get to grips with - and Plato's cave is just so... interesting."
She glanced towards the man sat across from her, vaguely anxious to see his reaction, and was surprised to see that he was regarding her with a sort of... intellectual interest.
"Plato's cave?" he questioned, one brow raised.
"It's..." she hesitated slightly, not wanting to push the conversation too far into 'know-it-all' territory. "It's an allegory written by Plato, but it was originally said to him by Socrates, who was actually Plato's teacher."
Draco nodded to let her know he was following.
"It's basically an idea about reality," she continued. "It tells you to imagine some prisoners who have been chained up inside a cave for as long as they've been alive, and they're facing a completely blank wall. These prisoners have never known anything outside of the cave, and the only thing they ever see are the shadows cast by people walking in front of the fire pit behind them."
Draco tilted his head, listening intently as Hermione continued, hands gesturing enthusiastically as she got more and more confident.
"The prisoners give names to these shadows and for them, the shadows are their reality; they've never known anything else. Socrates, in Plato's writing, says that philosophers are like the prisoners once they escape the cave, seeing everything clearly and for the first time. The people who don't contemplate or challenge their own reality are like the prisoners still chained up. It's just..." she trailed off again, this time looking up, trying to find the right words. "It's just so thought-provoking, isn't it?"
Draco nodded again, thinking. It really was. He'd already read a basic version of the story in the book he'd been reading, but the language had been too heavy to keep him interested and, somehow, having Granger explain it to him made him want to understand it, which was... odd.
He asked another question, and this time Hermione was happy to give him the answer. The pair fell into easy conversation, both of them glad to be intellectually stimulated for once.
Hermiones office job, while occasionally interesting, didn't exactly leave much room for innovative thought and, more often than not, she found herself mindlessly categorising pieces of evidence and filling out forms. Draco, on the other hand, was sick of the mind numbing routine he had fallen into - wake up, breakfast, read, sleep, lunch, sit in silence for a while, talk to mother, read, dinner, sit in his room, sleep. The past two days, what with Pansy's invite, the torturous meal, his argument with Granger, seeing Blaise again, meeting Luna and finally his current conversation had been more interesting than the majority of the last few months combined. In fact, he thought to himself, the most interesting things to have happened to him since he got back were all somehow related to Granger, his supposed-
He cut his thoughts off there and tried to concentrate on whatever the curly haired witch in front of him was actually saying, but found he had to resolve what his subconscious has started to wander towards.
Regardless of how stimulating conversation with her could actually be, he told himself, there was no way that they were actually... 'soulmates'. His eyes rolled internally at the mere thought. Tropes and cliches like that simply didn't exist outside of legends and fairytales.
From their vantage point behind one of the bookcases, a pair of red-headed twins had heard and saw the last ten minutes of Hermione and Draco's friendly conversation. George gestured to Fred after a minute or two; a jerk of his thumb towards the exit. Fred nodded in agreement, a sly smile on his face, and they both slipped away, undetected. Once they were far enough to be out of earshot, they burst into fits of giggles.
"No way," Fred said through a laugh, "absolutely no way!"
"So Ron wasn't lying, they really are soulmates," George said, a mix of wonderment, mischievous glee and confusion on his face.
"What do you think," said Fred with a grin, "shall we let her off for missing our lunch arrangements?"
George thought for a second.
"Yeah," he said, "but only if we can agree to tease her about this later."
"Agreed."
"...and that's why...that's...why..." Hermione trailed off, looking down at her battered old watch. "Shit."
She stood up hurriedly from the table, cursing under her breath as she packed up the paperwork she'd been working on before Draco had gotten there.
"What's the hurry?" he asked, at a loss as to her sudden movements.
"It's me," she said exasperatedly, "I just... lost track of time."
She glanced at him as she continued trying to stuff reams and reams of paper into a fairly small satchel, obviously having forgotten that, as a witch, she could easily pack them away using magic in a matter of seconds. Draco looked at her amusedly as he realised this, and then asked what she was late for.
"I was meant to meet Fred and George for lunch and then get into work by..." (she looked at her watch again and growled) "about ten minutes ago."
"How come you weren't in work this morning?"
"They basically told me not to come in until after lunch in order to give myself 'plenty time to recover from what must have been an emotionally exhausting day'" she said, air-quoting as she went. "I told them last year that I want to just carry on as normal and pretend it's any other day but, apparently, I don't have the authority to make that decision."
Draco noted her bitter tone of voice, and how her upper lip curled and brows knitted together whenever she thought something was stupid.
"Idiots," she muttered under her breath as she slung her bag over her shoulder and straightened her work attire.
Draco laughed out loud at that, which made Hermione smirk slightly and again register how much more normal and unthreatening he looked whenever he had a genuine smile on his face.
"Well... see you later," she said, suddenly unsure of herself for the first time in over an hour. She didn't really want to leave this little bubble that had sprung up around them as they had chatted - it had been a brief escape from the monotony and exhaustion of her life of late, which was... odd, given that it had been in the presence of Malfoy.
"Yeah," he said, seeming equally unsure. "Bye, I guess."
Hermione stood still for a second and started to say something more, but stopped, nodded, and turned to leave.
As he watched her slowly make her way down the aisle between the bookshelves, Draco had the sudden realisation that he had also lost track of how long they had been sat talking. Usually, he would be counting down the hours until he got to go and take some Dreamless Sleep and have a nightmare free nights sleep, but the past two hours had made him forget everything that had been running through his mind since he'd got back from America. Suddenly, a panic gripped him; it was small, but noticeable enough to make him stand up from his chair and follow after the curly haired witch. His long stride meant he caught up to her in a matter of seconds, and, hearing him approach, she turned just as he reached her.
"Did I leave something?" she asked, looking mildly confused.
"No I just..." shit, he thought. He hadn't actually planned what he was going to say. What did he even want? "I ah, I just wondered if... can we do this again one day? The, you know, just reading and talking and..." fuck, he thought; was it even possible to mess up a single sentence that badly? "I don't know, forget it," he said, internally kicking himself for acting so impulsively. Just one of his many, many faults, he thought to himself. He half expected her to make some awkward excuse or just leave without answering, but, once again, she surprised him.
"Yeah, I mean... yeah, I'd like that. It was certainly interesting, wasn't it?" she said tentatively, saving him from his embarrassment. And there was that word again - interesting. He was beginning to see that every interaction with Granger somehow fit into that general description.
"So... I'll owl you," she said, so unsure that it sounded more like a question.
"I- yeah, okay," he said lamely. "Well... bye again then."
She chuckled, still slightly uneasy.
"Bye again."
She turned to leave again, and Draco found that the anxiety from before didn't make an appearance this time.