AN: This story is written in kind of a weird format. I've read a few stories like this lately and I just had to try it! All the snippets are in chronological order. Hope you guys like it! (For those of you reading A Lesson in Anatomy, I'm sorry. I've been super busy and am working on the next chapter now. Thank you for your patience.)

On Grief and a Shared Workspace

The first day that Hermione Granger had walked into work and passed Draco Malfoy at his newly-appointed desk, she had nearly quit her job. She had snapped two innocent pencils in half that day. She had contemplated stabbing him with them.

He had obviously noticed her as well, if the immediate tensing of his shoulders and the thin, firm press of his mouth was anything to go by. His stormy-grey eyes had snapped up to her face as she walked past him and held there. There was no hate or contempt in them, not initially, at least. Just a vague air of abject horror as she sat down at the desk nearest to his. She smiled at the thought that she had managed to upset him.

They sneered.

They frowned and they cursed beneath their breath and they argued with acid and spite. But still, as the weeks went by, they sat next to each other at their unfortunately positioned desks and pretended for the most part that the other one didn't exist.

She spilled coffee on his shoes.

He had told her nice going and called her a spasmatic, bushy-haired rhinoceros and she had scowled and said "twat." She wished she could take back the immediate and involuntary apology that had tumbled unchecked from her lips before she had realized whose shoes she had soiled.

They had ignored each other for the remainder of the day, until a few minutes before five o'clock, when he launched a balled-up piece of paper at her face. She glowered and gathered up the offending material in her small fist. She smoothed it out only after he had left for the day.

It read: "You're the twat", in handwriting infuriatingly and impossibly neat.

She smiled – only because he wasn't there to see it.

He worked hard.

She had frowned and told herself that she shouldn't be surprised, and his grades had always been close behind her own, hadn't they? Of course he possessed the capabilities to work hard. There was nothing special about it.

She sneezed far too often.

Her nose was always red and her desk was always covered with tissues and frankly, he found it disgusting. That was the justification behind his reasoning for leaving a bottle of allergy tablets on her desk early one morning with a little bin to throw her tissues in. He had felt her honey eyes on him when she sat down at her desk, and he had avoided her gaze with all the stoicism of a guilty child.

She asked him if the pills were poisoned.

He snorted and said "No."

There was a project.

It was her project of-bloody-course and it was his dumb-bloody-luck to be assigned to the team. They stayed until eight pm for three weeks, just him and Granger and two other bleeding-hearts whose names he pretended not to remember.

Their efforts saved upwards of one thousand magical creatures.

He swore he had never seen her so happy.

He had helped.

Even days after the project was over and had been deemed a success, she was still hung up on the fact that he had helped. He had feigned disinterest and he had groaned and complained, but she had seen his secret smile when things had turned positive and damn it all he had helped.

She had been crying. She cried throughout the day.

He could tell that she thought that she was being discreet, but her button nose was just a shade too red and the shine in her eyes was just a little bit off and damn it, it irked him senselessly. She kept glancing at a framed photo on her desk of two decidedly muggle-looking people and he frowned upon realizing that they were likely her parents.

"Dead?" he had asked her later, as they stood side-by-side in front of the vending machine with two inches between them.

"Who?"

"Your parents," he had clarified.

She shook her head, not once turning to make eye-contact with him as she half-choked on the word obliviated.

He had frowned and asked her if it was permanent and her shoulders had tensed as she explained that she had hoped not but it now seemed that it was.

He made a noise in his throat and she asked why he cared and he told her he didn't.

The look on her face made him regret it forever

Twat.

The man was an insufferable, spoiled, hateful brat and she truly took pity on the woman who would have to put up with him someday. Or man. She wasn't rightly sure on that front.

She had refused to so much as acknowledge his existence for a week. Not even when he had paused in front of her desk with his fist clenched at his side and his mouth pressed into a firm line as though he was physically holding back an apology.

She knew better than to believe that.

Listless.

There was no light in Hermione Granger's eyes and damn it if that wasn't the saddest sight he had ever seen than he surely didn't know what the hell was.

He had questioned her relentlessly, not caring that it was strikingly out of character for him to seem interested in anything or anyone but himself. She had scowled and fumed and he had continued to pick and pry just to see the spark of anger in her eyes when she looked at him.

"Weasley?" he had asked, and he was shocked to see her face crumple and her shoulders droop and…hadn't she had an engagement ring before?

"Weasley," she spat the name with such unexpected venom that he flinched. "Traitorous, slut-loving, bastard, that one."

A snort had escaped his mouth before he could do the wise thing and stop it.

She told him that she was glad that someone could enjoy her pain and there were tears in her eyes and no light.

He told her he didn't enjoy it and that she was more fun to look at when she was smiling.

"It's alright," she had told him, later. "Harry hexed him. Ginny too."

"And you?"

"I punched him."

"You punched him."

"I punched him. Right then and there with Lavender sitting next to him on my couch. They thought it wise to tell me as a couple, you know."

He noted the slightly swollen first two knuckles of her right hand, then, and he fleetingly wondered how many men the most magically capable woman he knew had punched. The compliment had flown through his mind with barely a second thought .

He hadn't even blinked.

His father had died in Azkaban.

She read about it in the Daily Prophet on a dreary Tuesday morning and Draco Malfoy didn't come to work that day.

He did come to work on Wednesday. At lunch, she went out and bought a dozen red roses and she gave them to Draco and she told him to give them to his mother and that she was so sorry. He had just stared at her and she was led to force the flowers into his empty hands. He reached out lightly and touched the ends of her hair so briefly that later she would question whether or not it had actually happened.

Grief did funny things to people.

She drank far too much at the office Christmas party.

He apparated her to his flat, since for all the time he had known her, and now worked with her, he hadn't the slightest idea where she lived. No one at the party had so much as batted an eye at his leaving with her, at the way he looped an arm around her waist and supported her drunken teetering. No one found it off, because to the outside eye, he supposed it probably appeared that they were friends.

They had lunch together every day. It had started the day after she had given him those wretched flowers for his wretched mother and his own wretched sensibilities had betrayed him the first time he sat down at her otherwise unoccupied table.

She didn't object and he didn't speak.

The next day they talked about school and she told him about the time she had set Snape on fire. He laughed for the first time in what felt like centuries.

And now he had brought her to his home, and she was sitting on his couch with her head in her hands, taking slow, drunken breaths while her curls slipped wildly from her messy bun.

And she was fucking beautiful.

And he had stared at her for an indefinite and undoubtedly inappropriate amount of time before the first shuddering sob wracked her body and he held her.

She grieved over her parents and she cried over goddamn-bloody-asshole Weasley and the status of her blood didn't once cross his mind as she dampened his skin with her tears.

He decided then that he never wanted to see Hermione Granger cry again and that Ronald Weasley would most certainly pay for his crimes.

She thanked him for taking care of her and she blushed when she remembered how much she had cried. He simply shrugged at her, avoiding eye-contact and fisting his treacherous hands in his pockets to keep them from shaking and to keep them from reaching out to touch her again.

They were something different, after that.

Their fingers brushed and their eyes locked and their hearts thrummed wildly. He felt dizzyingly unworthy of a girl he had spent his entire life considering to be miles beneath him. He wasn't really sure when that feeling had changed.

Nothing happened.

She took a job at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and she left him alone at his unfortunately-situated desk next to her unfortunately-situated empty one. She had left her tissue bin and he wondered if she had gone back to throwing her used tissues into a pile on her desk. He frowned at the thought.

And so, he dutifully went back to work and at lunch he sat at her table alone and eventually he thought that maybe he had gone crazy. Never in one million years would he have believed someone if they had told him that someday he would miss Hermione Granger, and yet he did.

Acutely, and in the way you would expect a knife through the heart to ache.

She almost didn't take the job.

But there were implications that she would soon be promoted to Department Head and there was just no way she could turn down such an opportunity.

Was there?

And so, she didn't turn it down. She accepted the job and cleaned out her desk late one night and she didn't tell him that she was leaving. Her hand hovered over her tissue bin before she decided to leave it and her eyes hovered over his desk before she decided not to leave him a note.

Why should she?

Their tentative friendship, or whatever the hell it was, was likely only the result of grief and a shared workspace. Once some distance was between them, once they didn't eat lunch together five days a week, she would come to remember the disdain she had once felt towards him so forcefully.

Wouldn't she?

She didn't.

She felt none of the disdain and all of the heartsick you get when you've done something wrong but lack the knowledge of how to fix your mistake.

She sat alone at lunch with no one there to make a snide comment about how she always put too many croutons in her soup and no one to bump her foot under the table when she had been staring off into space for too long. When the memories were haunting her and she just needed a little help coming back to the present. Back to him.

When had it happened? She had nearly torn her hair out one Friday night as she walked to the fireplace to floo home from work without a pale-haired man by her side to bump shoulders with. She had expected to be sad for a day or two, to mourn what was a budding friendship and might have been a nice one. She had not expected to crumple to her knees on her living room floor two weeks after she had left and nearly choke herself with sobs when she thought about him.

She couldn't begin to know when he had become so magnificently important.

Work had become mind-numbingly dull.

Somewhere along the line, she had made things interesting for him. Never before had he been passionate about magical creatures, or anything for that matter, but somehow she had forced him to care and now that she was gone all that caring was leaking out of him like a punctured balloon and he just felt empty. He was revolted to find that caring had been nice.

Her desk sat empty for two weeks before a pretty blonde girl took her spot. She smiled at Draco Malfoy and reached her hand out to him to shake and introduced herself with a name he didn't even hear. She had been a classmate a year younger than him in Slytherin. He stared at her hand blankly before standing and leaving.

He quit.

He didn't see Hermione Granger for three months.

Yes, her name was in the papers as well as her photo, usually waving shyly towards the camera before ducking her head and blushing discreetly as she hurried on her way. And he would stare at her picture and he would tell himself that it wasn't strange that he was doing so and he would wonder where it was that she was in such a hurry to get to.

He wondered if she had gotten back together with the ginger-haired dumbass. She worked with him now after all, and with her beloved Chosen One as well, for that matter. He scoffed at the idea of Hermione and the redhead together, she wasn't dumb enough to get back together with that worthless excuse for a man.

Was she?

He pretended that the thought didn't plague him because it didn't make sense and there was no logical reason for it.

She missed him.

She scrunched her eyes shut and she held a tear back and she rubbed her temples with her hands. She had been the one to leave. She had been the one to cut off contact with him. She had been the one who didn't say goodbye.

So why did it feel like it was the other way around? Why had it been three months and she still missed him and gods help her why did she miss him in the first place? He was Draco and she was Hermione and Hermione Grangers did not miss Draco Malfoys.

And yet there she was, defying the odds.

She stared at the contact in her phone: Draco Malfoy (work).

That extra glass of wine suddenly seemed like a terrible idea as her fingers moved independently and she couldn't stop herself from sending the message, "The fountain down the street from your flat, you know it?"

It was only a moment before he responded, "I'll be there."

It was cold now.

It was cold and Hermione Granger's nose was red like it always was and her hair was held down by a blue knit cap and her hands were tucked safely in her pockets as she kicked her toe awkwardly into the ground. He froze when he saw her.

He would never fail to be surprised by his reaction to her.

She smiled when she saw him, and his chest constricted in a way it never had before and his feet moved on their own so that soon he was standing so close that she had to tip her head back to see him properly.

"Draco Malfoy," she smiled around his name. "You came to see me."

He didn't say anything.

He didn't say anything and her confidence faltered for a beat when he just stared at her. She opened her mouth to say something, to say anything, when his hands fell on her and he pulled her to him. She was on her tiptoes and one of his arms was around the small of her back while the other was tangled in the hair on the back of her head as he crushed her body to his own.

It only took a moment for her to wrap her own arms around his neck.

"You left," he choked out, after twenty seconds or twenty minutes or a million years.

She said she knew she did and she was so very sorry. Could he forgive her?

And then he pulled back from her and looked her in the eye and she saw the storm of grey that was raging beneath his lashes. His nose was getting red from the cold.

He couldn't stop looking at her.

He had no idea when such a ridiculous plight had overcome him, when he had become so devastatingly and pathetically weak in the presence of Hermione Granger, but he was and it ached like a physical pain and he almost hated her for it all over again.

And she was there. She was really in his arms staring up at him with her goddamned red nose and her honey eyes and her ridiculous hair.

So he kissed her because he didn't know what to do and suddenly she was the only thing in the universe that mattered. And he didn't stop because she kissed him back and within a moment he felt like he had direction again. He had been lost and it only took Hermione Granger five seconds to find him.

They didn't spend much time apart, after that. People talked and Ron blew up a small house and Harry griped and complained until Ginny threatened to hex him. The drama died down after a few months and Hermione moved in with Draco and they both smiled more.

He got a new job even though he didn't need it and she had given him a new purpose altogether and he suddenly felt like he meant something again.

The girl he had done nothing but torment, the girl who had punched him in the face, had become his savior, his lover, and his hero.

Draco Malfoy loved Hermione Granger.