url: ?? / not my fandom | acceptable | exceeds expectations | outstanding | UNBELIEVABLEicon: acceptable | exceeds expectations | outstanding | AMAZINGtheme: acceptable | exceeds expectations | outstanding | GORGEOUSposts: acceptable | exceeds expectations | outstanding | FANTASTICoverall: acceptable | exceeds expectations | outstanding | MARVELOUSfollowing: no, sorry but ily <3 | i am now! | ofc | FOREVERcompliment: your writing?? is just?? oh my god i can’t EVEN articulate how amazing your writing is but WOW I always check to see if you’ve posted anything new (omg please tag me in all your stories)
Written for @arxturusblack as part of @dhrfaves Valentine’s Day exchange! I really love all the things you create and so I’m hoping that you like this!
There's a cup of tea sitting on her desk. It's a plain takeaway cup, red with snowflakes stamped on the sides and a plastic lid that doesn't quite fit right so the steam escapes and curls up towards the ceiling of her office. English Breakfast, Hermione thinks from the scent of it, and still hot enough to scald her tongue if she drank it too quickly. Someone must have forgotten their tea on her desk, but she doesn't know who. Most of her coworkers drink Earl Grey, if they drink tea at all, and almost no one else comes in as early as she does. And even if someone managed to drag themselves in on this early Monday morning, she knows that they couldn't possibly have gotten this tea from anywhere close by the Ministry. Because, strangest of all, this cup of tea is utterly, undeniably Muggle.
“It's not poisoned, Granger, I swear,” an all-too-familiar voice drawls from behind her and Hermione feels all the muscles in her shoulders tense at once.
Once again, Draco Malfoy is here before her and although it's completely illogical, she feels like he's beaten her to something. Before he transferred into the Department of Magical Law Enforcement six months ago, she was always the first person into the office. It was her time to slowly drink her tea and go through the piles of paperwork that always managed to accumulate on her desk overnight. In the early hours of the morning, the pale dawn light creeping in through her windows, she didn't have to be Hermione Granger, war hero, brilliant and bright and ready to change the world with a flick of her wand. She didn't have to be someone who never gets angry or tired, who never makes mistakes. But now, every morning, Malfoy is there, industriously writing away at his desk and just waiting for her to slip up.
“Go on,” Malfoy adds. “I thought you could use some. You've got awful circles under your eyes, you know.”
“Why would you bring me tea?” Hermione twists around in her chair to eye him suspiciously. She's more than aware of the circles under her eyes and hopeless state of her hair, thanks to a few unflattering items in the Daily Prophet penned by Rita Skeeter. (She should've kept her in that jar when she had a chance.)
“Last week, you said that I'd probably never been in Muggle London in my life. But I have. That's proof,” he says and points smugly to the coffee cup.
“You went to a Costa Coffee that's less than two blocks away from the Ministry. That's hardly a challenge,” Hermione says. She's not sure why she's arguing about this but seeing him scowl at her sends a little zip of electricity down her spine and she hasn't had a proper argument with anyone in ages. “I bet you didn't even have proper change.”
“I did. I gave them a full five...whatever the small six-sided coins are called. And one of the pieces of paper.” He leans against her desk and scowls at her full-on.
“They're called pounds, Malfoy. It's actually much easier than carrying around bags of Galleons and Sickles. Sometimes we even use these things called credit cards,” Hermione says smugly and waits for him to stalk off in a huff. But instead he just arches an eyebrow at her and saunters back towards his own desk. “I still need that report from the Auror Office,” she calls after him. “Go over and bother them.”
“Make Corner do it,” Malfoy grumbles and leans over to flick a bit of dust off his chair. God forbid he get anything on his hand-tailored suit.
“Corner doesn't bother people nearly as well as you do.”
The next day there's another cup of tea on her desk. It's from Pret a Manger this time and there's a piece of shortbread sitting next to it in a wax paper bag. “You can't walk for more than five minutes in London without finding a Pret,” she informs him.
“It was seven.” Malfoy frowns down at the memo she'd left on his desk last night. “What's wrong with the wording on the proposal?”
“Too self-satisfied. Take out a few adjectives and adverbs and it'll be much better.” They argue about wording for the next twenty-five minutes until his original proposal is covered with marks in red ink, she's drunk half of the tea and eaten all of the shortbread, and Malfoy's cheeks are actually flushed with irritation. It's very satisfactory.
A week later, the tea is actually loose-leaf instead of bagged and when Malfoy smirks over at her, she lets him be pleased with himself just this once. Then they spend the next few hours hammering out a new set of underage magic regulations. (Rogue dementor attacks will definitely be an exception this time around.)
Working with him is better and worse than she expected it to be. Better, because he's clever and quick and knows all the entrenched pureblood rules and tiny courtesies that no one ever bothered to teach her. Better, because something happened to him during the war (didn't something happen to them all during the war?) and he no longer sneers down his (ridiculously patrician) nose at her. He still doesn't like her, not exactly, but sometimes there's a flash of respect in his eyes whenever she makes a particularly good point. Worse, because he's grown into his looks into a way that is patently unfair and sometimes when they're arguing, she feels strangely, shockingly alive.
And Draco Malfoy shouldn't be the one making her feel anything. Stories have a certain shape to them, a rise and fall and a carefully arranged ending, and there are certain kinds of people who are together at the end of them. It all seemed so neat and easy at seventeen: her and Ron, Harry and Ginny, the inevitable pairs that had been planned out since the age of eleven. But not everything ended when the war did and seventeen-year-old Hermione never remembered to account for the messy after. Now, she scowls down at one of Rita Skeeter's columns in the Prophet and begins to methodically rip it into tiny pieces.
“She goes through our trash, you know. Want to plant some fake items in there and send her off chasing her own arse?” Malfoy's standing at her desk, a cup of tea in each hand. “Darjeeling or chai?”
“Darjeeling, please.” She takes a sip and is pleasantly surprised. “Where did you find this?”
“Camden.” He shrugs and it could be Hermione's imagination but his cheeks look slightly less pale than before, almost like he’s blushing.
“You know where Camden is?”
“All your fault, Granger. London is...larger than I expected. Not completely terrible. Quite pleasant sometimes, actually.” He shifts from foot to foot and comes close to shoving his hands into his pockets and ruining the lines of his suit. “I'll...I'll go and bother the idiots in Magical Creatures now, shall I?”
“Thank you, Dr--Malfoy,” she says and readjusts the papers on her desk just for something to do. They are certainly not first name people and they never will be.
Three days later, they're the only ones stuck in the office late on a Friday night when he tells her that she's brilliant. She just stares at him.
“You can't tell me that you didn't already know that. I'll have to take it back if you didn't,” he says. “Because you are quite bloody brilliant and I'm frankly terrified of what you'll do with it. Not in a bad way.”
She tries very hard not to smile at him and fails.
“You're rather clever too,” she says. “Sometimes.”
They comb through twelve more lines of fine print on an extradition agreement with the French Department of Magical Law Enforcement before Malfoy pushes his chair back from the table with a sigh and tugs on a handful of his hair until it stands up in tiny spikes.
“What do you say we finish this up tomorrow morning?” he asks. “I read about a place in Holborn that does Dutch pancakes. We could even call it a work breakfast and get reimbursed—that bit's for your inner bureaucrat. I'm fairly sure
“I've heard of it. That's in Muggle London.” Breakfast. With Draco Malfoy. She's more intrigued than she should be.
“It is.”
“And you want to do work there. With me. Possibly violating the International Statue of Secrecy.”
“I do. Not the violating the International Statue of Secrecy bit but...” He shrugs, trailing off, and she thinks that this is the first time she's seen him without a clever reply ready. It's a disconcerting feeling.
Hermione takes a deep breath and sets her quill down. She tells herself that it isn't anything, not really, just breakfast and endless arguing over word choice, but really she knows that it's something. Because she is Hermione Granger and he is Draco Malfoy and they shouldn't have even been here in the first place. Because she's very good at planning ahead and she never planned for anything like this. Because he brings her tea and he once quietly arranged Graham Montague's transfer to the Werewolf Support Office when Montague called her a Mudblood and still thinks that she doesn't know about it. Because everyone thinks that her story is already set out and there's a part of her that wants to chase down this plot twist.
“All right, then,” she says quietly. “Let's do breakfast.”
“Good,” he says and grins, wide and bright and completely unlike any smile she could ever have imagined him having. “I've been waiting for you to show me how to use the Tube.”
And when she slides her hand over to rest by his, he twists his fingers through hers and she thinks that she's been waiting a long time too.
@arxturusblack (your ask got eaten by tumblr just as I reloaded the page, so im posting it here because this is relavant): yes we will accept late posts (we understand totally promise) if you’re off a day or something, as long as it’s not after the actual week is over :)
arxturusblack is absolutely lovely(followed)! best of luck :)
Whoa. Thanks, that’s very nice of you! Getting a message like this two days into starting the blog reminds me what good a decision this blog is. Again, thanks! [heart-frickin’-eyes emoji] Blog here.
