Hermione is justifiably terrified to Apparate on Tuesday. She stands in the entryway of her flat, pacing this way and that. Apparition is a tricky mode of transportation at best, not to be taken lightly if the witch is tired or distracted. Both of which Hermione has been since sending off that damned "yes" last night.
She slept terribly all night and couldn't concentrate at work today. This morning, she spent a solid forty-five minutes picking out her plum-coloured dress, convinced that this tea was another one of Malfoy's schemes to mock her for her inferior birth. As though purple knit could disabuse him of that idea. She even thought about whipping up some lemon-glazed ricotta biscuits to hold in front of her like a security blanket, in case things went awry.
Finally, at five minutes until six, Hermione takes two calming breaths, tells herself not to be a coward, and Apparates back to the strangely ordinary gates of Malfoy Manor. She's so jittery it's a miracle she doesn't splinch herself.
This time, no buzzy intercom is necessary. Just after Hermione appears the gates swing inward with a mechanized whirr.
"Onward ho?" she asks them. Pointlessly, she knows, since they're apparently not made of any kind of magic she understands. Not that anything magic at Malfoy Manor is obligated to respond to her. And not that she's rambling inside her brain in an attempt to delay the inevitable.
Holding tightly to the edges of her trench – waterproof once more, in an effort to avoid the unpredictable – Hermione makes her way down the Malfoys' impossibly long driveway. She's so distracted by nerves that she even forgets to insult the paranoia inherent in the Manor's architectural designs.
When Maevy finally opens the great set of front doors, Hermione is damn near ready to jump out of her skin. Her case of nerves only slightly improves when Maevy greets her brightly.
"Miss Granger. Maevy is glad to see Miss at the Manor again so soon. Very glad."
"As am I, Maevy," Hermione lies as she steps into the foyer of Malfoy Manor. Tonight, the chandeliers are already lit and battling the falling dark of the last evening in February. In the glow of the chandeliers, Hermione startles at Maevy's clothes. The little elf is wearing a new suit of rich purple silk, with a black fur ruff and smartly matching heels. Undoubtedly, the outfit costs more than Hermione makes in a month.
"Maevy, you…you look quite lovely this evening."
The elf glances down at her clothing almost absently, as if it's the most normal thing in the world for an indentured servant to wear couture.
"Maevy's glad you think so, Miss. Maevy noticed that Miss wore purple the last time she visited, so Maevy thought she'd wear Miss's favorite colour tonight. And look!" the elf exclaims as she helps remove Hermione's coat. "Maevy was right."
"You were," Hermione agrees, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her own purple dress. "But Maevy, exactly how many suits do you own, that you can pick and choose colours according to mood?"
Maevy simply gives the witch a placid shrug, stows away the trench coat, and then sweeps her small arm toward the marble staircase at the end of the hall. "Will Miss please follow Maevy to tea?"
"Are we…are we not going in there?" Hermione flails one hand blindly at the parlour behind her, not quite ready to face it yet.
"Oh goodness, no." Maevy shakes her head so hard her bat-like ears flap. "Never in there. No one goes in there anymore."
Hermione breathes an audible sigh of relief, before asking, "Where to then?"
"To the smaller of the two libraries, if Miss pleases."
Now that is a revelation. Not that the Malfoys have a library – all grand English homes do – but that they have two. And that the Malfoys would deign to serve tea in one, where books and ideas and logic might pollute the pureblood conversation.
It's a mean thought, and Hermione chides herself for it as she follows Maevy down the hall. Of course, she has plenty of time to atone for the sin on their journey of endless steps and hallways and another formal staircase. Hermione is half-convinced that she couldn't escape this house with a map, a Sherpa, and a month's worth of provisions, when Maevy announces that they've arrived.
"The Smaller Library, Miss. Please, go in."
With a hesitant lip-bite and a last glance at Maevy's large, cheerful eyes, Hermione does just that.
For a second, her pupils have to adjust to the renewed light. The hallways were quite dim, and the "smaller" library is lit by a roaring fire the size of her parents' car. In front of the wide fireplace two green armchairs wait. A narrow table sits between them, already stocked with a tea service. Around this pleasant setting are rows upon rows of books, most hiding in the shadows cast by the fire.
"It's cruel, I know," a voice says from one of those shadows. "To bring Hermione Granger to a library without the express purpose of letting her read."
He steps into the light, and she's taken aback. In front of the flickering light, she half-expected him to appear demonic – a Death Eater whose silhouette danced in the glow of hellfire. But despite his ubiquitous black suit, Draco Malfoy looks perfectly normal. Pleasant, even.
"Hello," he says, gesturing for her to sit in one of the overstuffed chairs. His tone is so disarmingly calm, his demeanor so relaxed, that she's unsettled. Counterintuitive, but there it is.
"Muggle gates?" she blurts out, and then cringes.
Hello, Hermione, she screams at herself internally. The appropriate response to 'Hello' is, not ironically, 'Hello.'
Draco's sharp features are blank for a moment. Then a slow smirk spreads across his mouth. "Ah. Of course you would notice those."
"Because I'm Muggleborn," she concludes flatly, but he shakes his head.
"Because you're you. Aren't you famous for, I don't know, noticing things?"
"How so?"
"Do the Deathly Hallows ring a bell? Or were all those Daily Prophet articles as inaccurate as my father claims?"
Hermione can't help her awkward laugh. Especially at the memory of Rita Skeeter's recent, rather confessional article about the Animagus registry.
"Some of the Prophet's stories were true," she concedes. "Most were false. So score one for Lucius Malfoy."
Draco shakes his head.
"It's rarely been 'score one' for Lucius Malfoy." He holds up a hand when she makes to argue. "Oh, I'm not talking about the fabulous wealth or the ancestral home or the wife who inexplicably loves him. I'm referring to the elusive category of 'solid decision making.' He's been a little lacking in that department for the past few years."
Hermione has the good sense to take her seat without nodding in agreement.
"So, tell me," Draco says, sliding gracefully into the chair across from hers. "Were the stories of your Great Big Love with Potter false, too?"
"I believe you're the one who started that particular rumour, our fourth year at Hogwarts. The story was false then and false now. Ginny Weasley happens to be the future Mrs. Harry Potter. As for me, I quite enjoy the role of best friend, thanks."
"Along with the Weasel," he drawls. "Speaking of which, when will you two be settling down in a humble shack to create more red-headed nuisances?"
Hermione blushes and stares briefly at her lap. "We won't, actually. Ron and I broke up on the first anniversary of…well, we broke up this past May. We're doing quite well as friends, if you'd like to know."
Draco opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off.
"And I'd like to remind you that tea is supposed to be a civil affair. Despite your behavior at school, that must have been part of your pureblood education. Along with calligraphy or falconry or whatever."
That quip earns a booming laugh from him, and she goes almost numb with shock. His laugh is...nice. Rich and full and room-filling. It comes as a total surprise to her, that Draco Malfoy has a genuinely nice laugh. Especially when it isn't directed at her hair or front teeth or parentage.
"The Malfoys opted to skip falconry," he says. "In favor of dueling."
"Really? I thought fencing was too eighteenth-century for modern aristocrats."
Draco laughs. Not as loudly this time, but still sincere. "Actually, I meant wand duels. Like we did our second year and during the Wa—" He stops short, and then amends himself. "After our school training."
"Oh." Hermione knows exactly to which duels he's not referring. And for now, at least, she's happy to leave off the subject. They haven't quite made it to the cry-about-the-War point in the conversation yet. Somehow, she thinks it's going to take more than a few golden-crusted tarts to get there with him.
Draco doesn't elaborate – doesn't really need to – as he goes to pour them each a cup of tea. Wordlessly, he holds up a pair of tongs with one sugar cube and she nods twice. He interprets the gesture correctly, drops two cubes into her cup, and then doctors his own.
"Electricity," he says suddenly, still stirring his drink.
"Pardon?"
"Electricity. It's what powers the Muggle gates out there."
"I guessed that much."
He nods without looking up from his cup.
"The original gates – I'm sure you remember them – were composed almost entirely of ancestral Malfoy wards. No small amount of Dark Magic in them, of course. As part of our sentencing, we were required to allow a team of Aurors on site to destroy the old gates. Then the Ministry had Muggle electricians, whom the Aurors later Obliviated, install the new ones. Mostly as a dig to my father, I think. The new gates are a pain in the arse, to be frank. They're always – what's it called? – 'shorting out' in the rain. Of which we have loads in Wiltshire. So, mission accomplished by the Ministry, I suppose."
It's a little funny, she has to admit. But it also seems like a sore subject. Hermione picks up her cup and saucer, determined to compliment him on the tea's taste or temperature or something. Luckily, the tea is fantastic – a floral blend she thinks she recognizes from one of her family's holidays in France – and she takes another eager sip. That's when she spies the maker's mark on the bottom of the cup and nearly drops the whole thing.
Draco must see her fumble, because he asks, "What is it? Too hot?"
"N-no," she stutters, setting both the cup and saucer back on the table. "I just realized that your tea service probably costs more than all the furniture in my flat. Maybe more than the flat itself. Maybe even the building."
He snorts again – he's so clearly better at that sound than Millicent – and lifts his own cup. "I wouldn't worry too much about it. More than a few of these are probably fakes, given the Lestrange brothers' habit of wandering off with the china."
Draco doesn't notice her jerky flinch when he says that surname. But she notices the faint clattering that his cup makes against his saucer, as he tries to hold both steady. Hermione wasn't sure how much of his speech last Saturday was true, but apparently Draco Malfoy didn't lie about his shaking hands.
Without thinking, Hermione reaches across the space between them to place her small hand on his larger one. This time, it's Draco who's so surprised he nearly drops his cup.
"You can add some," she says softly, pulling her hand back. "If you need to. I'll even look away. If you'd like."
He stares at her for a long minute, his face hard and unreadable in the firelight. Then, without taking his eyes from hers, he shifts the saucer to the table and pulls a small silver flask from the breast pocket of his suit. He adds a hefty pour of amber liquid – firewhisky, she thinks – to his tea. He screws the cap shut and returns the flask to its home.
"Aren't you going to tell me this is bad for me?" he asks as he picks the cup back up. "That this stuff will rot my brain and my insides until I'm nothing but a slurring, skinny parody of my father?"
Hermione shakes her head. "Why would I, when you just said it for me?"
Draco makes a small, humorless noise and begins to drink. After a few sips, his tremors start to subside.
Feeling very much like she's intruding on something private, Hermione regards the fire, her cup, anything but him. That's when she sees a silver tray sitting behind the tea service. Upon the tray lie a dozen or so darkly browned biscuits. They're painfully thin and misshapen, all topped with a single, scorched almond.
Her gaze flits back to his. "Are those what I think they are?" she asks.
He smirks again – or maybe not; maybe that expression is a little too wide for a smirk – and adds a light shrug. "Depends. What do you think they are?"
"Biscuits. Possibly."
Draco doesn't confirm or deny. Instead, he tilts his head suggestively between the almond biscuits and Hermione and then back to the biscuits. When she catches onto his meaning, her eyebrows dart upward.
"Do you want me to try those?" Without waiting for his answer, she reaches down, takes one, and taps it noisily on the edge of the tray. "Or do you want me to shingle a roof with them?"
He gives another annoyingly perfect snort. She thinks he's going to rant – how dare you insult the sugared offerings of the only Malfoy heir? – but his response throws her for a loop.
"Right?" he commiserates. "And that was my fourth try. Forty-eight biscuits and only twelve of them turned out edible."
The burnt biscuit pauses on its way to Hermione's mouth. Which is now hanging open. "You…you made these?"
Draco rolls his eyes. "Well, if Maevy made them, you wouldn't be seconds away from chipping a tooth."
"My parents are dentists, it wouldn't matter." She waves dismissively when he starts to ask the inevitable wizard question about dentists. "But why, Malfoy? Why make four dozen of these things?"
He smirks. Or...no. No, this one is actually a grin. There's a difference between those two movements of his mouth, she's starting to realize. No matter what, the right side of his lips always moves a bit higher than the left. But when Draco grins, she can see a sliver of his teeth. His smirk is as withering as it was when they were children. His grin, however? It's nice.
Oddly so.
"Granger," Draco says, oblivious to her analysis of his mouth. "For years I came in behind you or Potter in almost everything I did. So it stands to reason that I should at least try to beat you at something. And to no one's astonishment, I failed."
He sounds resigned, but Hermione takes a nibble of the biscuit anyway.
"This isn't necessarily a failure," she mumbles around a tough bite. "Not if you want to become a roofer."
"A possible option, maybe, if the Ministry orders more reparations."
She swallows roughly. "Reparations?"
"Didn't you read the transcripts of my family's trials?"
"Only a few lines from each of your parents'," she admits. "And none from yours."
"Why not?"
"Because I found the whole circus disgusting, honestly. You were seventeen, for Merlin's sake. That's hardly the age of majority in Muggle or Wizard society, and I didn't think the recommended sentence of two years in Azkaban was even remotely fair given the—"
"Yes, well," he cuts her off, clearly embarrassed.
They are silent, before she prompts, "Reparations?"
"Oh, sorry. I forgot."
He doesn't seem to realize how rattled she is by his use of the word "sorry." With her. To her. Instead, he takes intermittent sips of his tea as he explains.
"Part of our sentencing, in addition to my father's one-year prison stint and my mother's and my six-month house arrest, was reparations. In the form of Galleons, of course."
"How much?"
"Half the contents of our Gringotts' vault."
Hermione all but spits out her tea. "Half?!"
This time, he definitely smirks. "Don't worry your pretty little head about it, Granger. We're still filthy rich."
"That's good, I suppose." She nods absently and tries very hard not to think about the fact that Draco Malfoy just called her pretty. Well, he called her head pretty, anyway. And "pretty little head" is something distinctly different than "filthy little Mudblood."
After that they don't speak for a while, sipping their tea in silence – not an uncomfortable one, but not exactly comfortable either. She distracts herself from the disquiet by noting that, although he's poured them both more tea, Draco hasn't added more firewhisky to his cup. Given the renewed shake of his hands, he probably wants to crawl out of his skin right now. Hermione can only imagine how much restraint he must be exercising by not drinking more. So it must take some strength for him to break their silence first.
"You know," he says offhandedly, "Pleiades is quite taken with you."
"I like him, too. Far more than I expected, considering how pushy he is."
"They say that owls mirror their owners' personalities."
Hermione's lips twist in a parody of Draco's trademark sneer. "I'm well aware. Although I didn't expect him as your messenger. I thought you would have trained the white peacocks to fly by now."
Draco actually shudders. "Absolutely not. I hate those bloody things. As does Pleiades, by the way. They peck him mercilessly whenever he goes near them."
"Brutes."
"Quite."
"If they're so terrible, you should re-home them at a wildlife sanctuary."
"But then how would we flaunt our wealth outdoors?" he jokes. "Elaborate topiary?"
He takes another smug sip of his tea. Then his expression changes into one of exaggerated innocence. "So is Greg, by the way. Taken with you, that is."
Hermione does that faltering blink thing again. "Goyle?"
Draco nods, all mock solemnity. "Afraid so."
"Gregory Goyle?"
"Are you acquainted with any other Goyles who might be taken with you?"
"Aside from Goyle Senior?"
Now it's Draco's turn to wave his hand dismissively. "In Azkaban. So…no." Then his mock-solemn frown twists up wickedly at the edges. "Millie's none too pleased about this new infatuation, obviously."
"Oh, no," Hermione moans, her hand fluttering to her mouth. "That's not what I intended."
"It's what you accomplished, nonetheless."
"But…how? And why?"
Draco's face goes slack.
"That swot, Granger, yeah?" he says, in an uncanny impression of his hulking friend. "She's gotten quite…uh…pretty, hasn't she, Dray? You 'member her, like, saving me, in the Room of Hidden Things? That was nice of her, yeah? And her cake, Dray. Her sodding cake…"
"But it was Black Forest!" Hermione protests, before he can go on. She tries to ignore the fact that he has, however inadvertently, now called her pretty twice in one evening. "I only meant it as a peace offering. And…and as a metaphor!"
Draco barks another loud laugh. "What, black for his soul?"
For the second time that night, Hermione's mouth hangs open. From the information he's just shared, as well as the fact that Draco Malfoy gets it. He actually gets it. And he finds it funny.
Even more so, they're talking to each other. And it's easy. And nice. Like, nice nice.
And therefore weird. Weird weird.
To cover her sudden confusion, Hermione picks her cup back up and begins to sip. But things have been going so well, she can't resist just one more shot. Smiling lightly against the rim of the teacup, she asks, "So…you do just want me for my cake, then?"
"I thought that much was obvious."
"Oh, Draco, Draco," she says, setting down her cup and secretly relishing how her use of his given name makes him stiffen. "Judging by the quality of those almond biscuits, you have a long way to go until you graduate to cake."
His smirk fades so quickly, she worries that she's said the wrong thing. But he surprises her yet again.
"If that's the case," he says, enunciating each word, "may I make a request?"
"You may."
"Teach me."
"Pardon?"
"Teach me," Draco repeats. "'In the spirit of reconciliation,' as you wrote yesterday. You've been making these pastry-filled pity stops every Saturday for the past few months—"
"How did you know—?"
"Theodore Nott," he interrupts her interruption. "Anyway, as I understand it, I was the last person on your to-do list. I mean, Pansy was higher up than me, for Merlin's sake. So I'm asking that you take those newly empty Saturdays of yours and do the same thing you were doing before: rehabilitating the broken – this time, that's me – with dessert foods."
"My Saturdays aren't empty," she mutters petulantly.
Draco puts his hands up in faux surrender. "Sure they're not. But mine are. And you are on some kind of mercy mission. So why not distract me from my troubles? I can't think of a better way for you to do so than to help me outdo you in something. For once."
Instead of answering, Hermione takes stock of him: the planes of his face, grown sharper yet finer with age; the long, thin lines of his fingers; the amused yet somehow earnest set of his mouth.
"Why?" she asks plainly.
"Because I love sweets?" he jokes, but she only scowls in response.
Draco sighs and drops his hands, which are now fully shaking again, into his lap. "Because I'm a goddamned mess about ninety-percent of the time, and I need something to do other than drink myself to death."
His honesty takes her breath away. Without thinking – and Hermione really should be thinking, given that this is Draco Malfoy – she nods.
"Okay then," she says. "Saturdays. Starting this weekend, in the Manor kitchen. The work will be mostly wandless. That means you have to clean up after yourself – you, not Maevy. I'll be here promptly at 9 a.m., and I expect you to answer the door – you, not Maevy. She needs breaks, too."
Draco chuckles. "She won't like that."
"Since when do you worry about what house-elves like?"
He simply shrugs and stands. "Saturday at nine, then," he says, gesturing to the library entrance where Maevy has suddenly reappeared. And just like that, their tea has apparently concluded.
"Nine," Hermione confirms. She follows Maevy, glancing back at Draco just once before exiting the library. He's watching them, with a gaze that she can only describe as intense.
Draco's right hand moves almost subconsciously to the breast pocket of his suit, where the flask of firewhisky waits. It strikes Hermione, not for the first time, that this strange man is very different from the rotten little boy she once knew.