"So why exactly did you leave your wand at a pub? From what I've heard lately that's very unlike you. And why were you at a bar last night, anyway? Why would anyone be at a bar alone on the ten-year anniversary of the victory of the Light? I don't understand you."

Granger had been talking solidly for 7.8 minutes. Draco's slight headache had escalated, and now the entirety of his head felt as if it were throbbing in time with his heartbeat, once every 0.7 seconds. He felt his nerves grate unevenly with each word she spoke, even as he managed to grind out a response. "Has anyone ever told you that you ask too many questions, Granger?"

She was interrupting his delicate calm, his quiet bliss of ignorance, and it was making everything hurt.

He was even forgetting to count.

"Yes, actually," she replied primly as they rounded the corner to the bar, ignorant of his distress. "But it is my firm belief that questions inspire knowledge, and knowledge is essential…"

After 10.4 seconds, Draco stopped paying attention.

Luckily, he was able to disappear into the calming darkness of the pub 1.6 minutes later, not caring whether she chose to follow him or not. He found his wand with the bartender, Granger trailing behind him the entire time, pestering him with questions still.

Once they reemerged into the unsettling heat of the daylight, Draco snapped.

He moved in uncharacteristic jerks, so different from his normally fluid grace. Grasping her shoulders, all sense of time and seconds and minutes gone from him for one odd, terrifying moment, and shook her. Not very hard, but enough to halt her incessant talking for just long enough so that she could really hear him.

"Shut the fuck up, Granger. Just… shut your mouth." It was so low and threatening that his voice shook with the pent up tension. "Let me be and don't talk so fucking much. You'll ruin everything."

And she didn't speak anymore, but her eyes flashed as they met his and it was not from fear. She followed him all the way to the Ministry, even apparating at the same instance as he did. It irked him to no end that a tiny, triumphant smile lingered on her lips the whole way.

-

It took him the entire day, nearly 23.4 hours, to regain his sense of time, his smooth, regular, harmonious counting. His normalcy.

Draco Malfoy had quite forgotten how frightening the world was without it.

(There was a reason why he avoided contact with everyone from before.)

It was because of this deviation that Draco finished only 5.1 "Illegal Instance of Magic" packets, putting him 2.4 packets behind his normal schedule. And it has been said before that Draco did not like to be put behind schedule.

He rather thought but didn't like to admit that it took him so long to regain that familiar rhythm because she kept appearing. Now that she knew where his office was, Hermione Granger seemed to be making an effort to include him in whatever inane activity in which she was intent on participating.

He did not want to join her for coffee.

He did not want to help her track down the latest escapee from St. Mungo's.

He did not want her to bring him back something for lunch.

And he, Draco Malfoy, son of the late Death Eater Lucius Malfoy, did most certainly not, under any circumstances, want to accompany Hermione Granger to her flat after work for drinks. Not even if she made the best hot chocolate in London, which he highly doubted she did, despite her insistence to the contrary.

It was not as if he was encouraging her. Each time she asked him some useless question (on average, every 1.4 hours, he calculated quickly in his head), he answered only with a negative grunt, scarcely sparing her a glance. But she seemed impervious to his obvious lack of enthusiasm.

Draco's hat noted this exchange from its perch on the top of the coat rack impassively—as there are precious few other ways for a hat to observe—quite pleased with the recent developments. Not that Draco's hat would ever admit it to anyone, but it was growing quite exasperated with the absence of excitement in its owner's life. It was an ordinary hat, after all, and ordinary hats were not completely lacking in any sense of joy or exhilaration. Draco's routine had grown quite tiresome for his hat, and it had thus made up its mind to do something about it. This morning had been a good start, Draco's hat mused, and had certainly induced some kind of variation. And this odd witch was obviously causing Draco some distress and prompting him to vary his routine at least slightly, which Draco's hat appreciated very much indeed. It decided, therefore, to encourage its owner's interaction with the witch as much as humanly—or rather hat-ly—possible.

-

When Draco returned home (2.3 minutes late, he noted), he took the envelope Granger had given him from his robes and placed it on his dresser.

He didn't touch it again for two months.

-

Over the next two days (46.4 hours, Draco remembered to count), Hermione Granger's pestering lessened enough so that he could return to a more normal schedule. He could now complete 7.1 packets each day, almost as many as he had been able to finish before his life had been so unceremoniously interrupted.

While he did become more efficient, Granger had begun to do something that, in a way, unnerved him more than her ceaseless questions.

She stared at him.

It usually lasted no more than an average of 5.6 seconds, but it was still far longer than Draco was used to being stared at. If it had been a stare of distracted wondering, complete revulsion, or even of the amorous category, Draco would have been able to endure it with little thought. But no, Hermione Granger did not stare at him in any of those ways.

She stared at him like she was thinking furiously. Like she was stripping away his skin and muscles and organs and even bones, attempting to see the very core of him. Like she was considering—carefully and deliberately—everything that she saw.

-

4.3 days after Draco realized that Granger was staring at him, his supper was interrupted at 6.13 PM. The specialized alarms in the manor alerted him suddenly, sending an unsettling buzz throughout his limbs. He had always known of the alarms—they were programmed to forewarn any Malfoy heir physically, thus eliminating any chance of a stranger's knowledge of detection—but had never experienced them firsthand.

Draco pushed his chair back suddenly, taking nine steps to the window and peering through the double panes out into the courtyard.

Why was she always there?

Granger was at the manor gates. Granger was at the gates of Malfoy Manor.

Was she… crying?

She was certainly distressed, pounding against the iron bars of the gates with the flats of her fists, her hair flying every which way. He could hear her shouting his name, a thin, high "Malfoy!" that only just seeped through the thick walls of the manor.

Draco thought better of it for 16.5 seconds, but finally, with a roll of his eyes, he relented and made his way down the grand staircase (3 stairs per second) and out the door.

Granger's urgency seemed to only increase at the sight of him. She was indeed crying, her face a flushed glaze of tears, although he though she might not have known it. "Malfoy! Oh, thank God! Let me in!" she yelled, her voice high with panic.

Draco chose not to inform her that she was the first muggleborn to enter Malfoy property for more than one thousand years as he opened the gates. "What are you doing here, Granger?" It was a quiet question, but intensely articulated and not devoid of annoyance.

"Shut the gate!" she cried as he lingered with the gate ajar, glancing frantically through the bars as if she were being chased. "We've got to get inside!"

Draco counted to three—slowly—as she ran towards the entrance of the manor, attempting vainly to open the massive oak door. He followed her without urgency, glaring at the back of her head as he forgot to count the stairs.

Once they were within the confines of the manor, Granger calmed herself enough so that she could speak relatively normally. It took 38 seconds—Draco counted carefully—for her breathing to slow. He watched her silently, arms crossed, while she gazed out the window, her shoulders and spine tense.

After another 14.7 seconds, Draco was tired of waiting for her to explain and finally asked, "Are you planning on telling me what you're doing here?"

"No…Yes! Sorry, I'm…" She paused, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes. Draco noticed her hands were shaking. "I've had a bit of a fright."

"I can see that."

Granger sighed, her eyes wandering rather frequently towards the window. "I was taking a walk after work, and I thought I saw… but it's impossible, isn't it? Of course it's impossible," she said, releasing a small, nervous laugh. "I thought someone was following me. Someone in black, with that mask…" Draco watched her eyes flick down to his forearm. It was the briefest of moments, hardly a movement at all, but of course he noticed. "But they're all gone, aren't they?" She stared at him, her eyes almost pleading, as if he could provide her with a definite answer.

The truth of it was, no one really could.

Granger continued: "I was frightened, and your house was the closest place I knew. I'm sorry, but something about that image… I couldn't even think. I just panicked."

There was something about her—at that moment, those words—that irked him, something so subtle he couldn't even name it if he had to. Still, he wasn't about to deny the best friend of Harry Potter shelter; he wasn't completely lacking in intelligence. Resigning himself to the inevitability of her presence after 3.8 seconds (or was it 3.5?), he said, "It's fine. Until you feel it's safe, you can stay."

He turned on his heel and strode down the entryway, counting his steps deliberately, leaving Granger to stare, utterly confused, at his retreating back.

-

He could hear her pacing, one revolution for every 5.4 seconds, even as he sat in the Malfoy library. Periodically he heard the faint hum of her voice—he sincerely hoped she wasn't talking to herself—and it was throwing his timing off.

Again.

He had finished approximately six pages of his book before he realized that she was standing behind him. He threw down his book, not bothering to mark his page, and stood quickly. "What?" It came out perhaps more harshly than he had meant it, but he resolved immediately to pay this no mind. Even so, he could recognize that she looked severely shaken, the coloring nearly gone from her face.

She blinked twice in response to his tone, and when she spoke her voice was high and thin. "I've flooed Harry, and he checked my flat for me. There are men there… w-with those masks." Draco watched a fluid tear trek down her cheek, hardly bothering to track its rate of progress. "He said they're searching all the rooms… There are v-very important documents and information in my flat, I don't know what…. Harry says that it's not safe for me to leave, to be out on the streets or… He says that the safest place for me to be is here, where they won't expect me… I have to stay, a-at least until they know it's safe."

"This is a joke, right? You're having a laugh," Draco asked coldly.

"You think I don't wish that? You think I don't wish, with everything I possess, that this isn't happening? The war is supposed to be over, Malfoy! This is supposed to have been over and done with!" She began to pace again, more quickly this time, wiping at her cheeks and nose with her sleeve. "I hate this feeling! I hate this! I thought they were all dead! Dead or too cowardly to show their faces! What on earth are they looking for?" She came towards him in an instant, grasping his collar so tightly that he could feel the tug on the back of his neck. He wanted nothing more than to pull away, but her face, riddled with tears and pink with anger, was so close. "I don't want to do this anymore. I can't," she pleaded, quietly and without inflection.

Draco felt something odd swelling up inside him, the subtle and almost controllable urge to explode in her face and tell her, impolitely and without any order whatsoever, to quit asking him questions to which he had no answers and to quit confiding in him like he was Harry fucking Potter, but the tidy wall he had built around himself won out in the end.

"That's very unfortunate, Granger."

"What?! You unfeeling, psychotic, arseho—"

"Tibsy! Please show Miss Granger to a guestroom and do your best to calm her down. I'll be in my rooms if you need me."

A tiny house elf pattered into the room, bowing in Draco's direction as she nearly pushed Granger, who was still ranting and tear-soaked, out of the room. "…dare you? What the fuck is the matter with you? I ought to—" Draco waved his wand towards the door and it shut solidly behind her, effectively blocking Granger's irate voice from his senses.

He began, slowly and purposely, to count the ticking of the large clock by the window.

One…Two…Three…Four…

-

On the first day, Draco wondered frequently (he didn't know how often, and that fact only served to frustrate him more) whether he could have made a better choice by throwing her out onto the sidewalk and locking the gates to Malfoy Manor behind her, erstwhile Death Eaters be damned.

"Think of it like this, Malfoy. At least you're helping the Light again, in a way. It will only serve to further prove your devotion, and all that rot."

"Mmph," was his reply, as per usual.

Apparently, a long sleep and period of reflection had done wonders to improve Granger's temper, although he still detected a slight puffiness around the redness of her eyes. And she was not smiling. He forked another bite of sausage into his mouth, attempting vainly to skim The Prophet, as was his custom in the morning.

"What am I supposed to do all day in this enormous house while you're at the Ministry? Cook? Clean? Knit?" He detected more than a hint of bitterness in her voice.

"The library, if you wish. Just don't touch anything that looks as if it might be enchanted to harm muggleborns, unless you aren't extremely attached to your fingers," he said, still not looking at her. She didn't speak, but he could almost feel the excitement radiating from her. Only Granger could be excited about books even as her house was being raided by… whomever.

-

By the third day, Draco had lost so much of his timing that he could hardly make it through tallying the tiles in the dining room without losing count and having to start over.

Granger kept him updated regularly. Potter was attempting to find out what they had wanted. One of the Weasleys was tracking an intruder. Longbottom was searching for their hideout. The two of them, locked either in an office at the Ministry all day or in the large isolation of the manor, were secluded from all of this. Potter approached him briefly, only to warn him that if any harm were to befall upon Granger, any harm at all, he would see to it personally that Draco never enjoyed the comforts of independent and vigorous life again.

As far as Draco's hat was concerned, all of this was going swimmingly. Its owner's routine was permanently disrupted, and the Granger girl was, if nothing else, entertainment. So far, its plan to increase interaction between the two wizards was progressing quite easily and had required little effort on the hat's part. It could sense, as only hats can, the changing dynamics within the household, the annoyance and frustration that the girl could coax so easily from its owner and the increasing absence of Draco's constant, methodical counting. As far as it was concerned, anything was better than the boring, relentless schedule that its owner had upheld before the witch's arrival.

Draco's customs were indeed enduring considerable intrusion. He was continuously late for work because Granger insisted on harassing him, as always, with ceaseless questions. He could not read uninterrupted after supper because she would be reading in the library as well, and he could not concentrate with her sitting there, devouring his books in his library in his house. And he could not fall asleep at his customary time because he could not stop thinking about her sleeping in his guestroom, just one floor below.

"You're extremely monosyllabic, did you know? You weren't always."

"Did you run into Harry at the Ministry today?"

"Have you read this book?"

"How can you still keep house elves? I thought it was going out of style."

"So why were you out getting drunk on the tenth anniversary of victory?"

"Do you mean to say that you have lived in this obscenely large house alone for ten years?"

"Malfoy, why do you never talk about the war?"

-

By the time the seventh day arrived, Draco had taken to waking earlier than his customary time. It was yet another disruption to his schedule—which, as mentioned before, was something he very much disliked—but he gladly rose at 6:30 AM in exchange for a morning without Granger's interruptions.

On this particular morning, Draco had misplaced his hat. It was odd, he thought, because for 9.7 years he had never misplaced anything, but he supposed that everyone, no matter how orderly, was inclined to make some kind of mistake sometime. So Draco snapped at the house elves and stalked down some of the most obscure hallways of the manor for 10.8 minutes until, by chance, he caught sight of the offending accessory. It was sitting, quite innocently, on the floor of a room in which Draco could not remember setting foot in a very long time. He found this very strange—this morning had brought a few too many bizarre occurrences already, and Draco considerably disapproved—and reasoned that one of the house elves must have dropped it in its flurry of house cleaning. The door to the room was slightly ajar, enough that Draco could see black brim of the hat and not much more.

The door emitted a lengthy creak as he pushed it open another twelve inches. It was only after Draco had taken 2.3 steps inside the room and stooped to pick up his hat that he heard the breathing. His head snapped to his left, towards the bed.

Towards the guest bed.

The first thing he noticed was a small, slender foot poking out from beneath the lush navy of the coverlet. That foot led up to the delicate joint of an ankle, which in turn tapered into a smooth, curving calf. The flesh was very pale, almost white but somehow more alive, and he could not help but imagine that same flesh spreading, molding over the firm thighs and stomach, narrowing at the waist and expanding, soft and pliable, at the breasts and hips and buttocks. He stared for far longer than he dared to count, and it wasn't until his deliberate gaze came to rest upon a snarl of familiar hair clouding out from the pillows that he sucked in a quick breath and dropped his eyes, cursing softly.

(…remembering indeed who she was.)

If Draco's hat had arms, it would have crossed them in a huff.

-

Author's note: So it's been a long time… like years. And that's terrible. But life changes, and sometimes the things we had ample time for in the past suddenly don't seem like high priority activities any longer. I do hope this summer to start writing again. I already had this chapter written, so I figured I would post it. Wonder if anyone still has this fic on alert? Doubt it :). Enjoy.