A Kingdom Beside the Sea (Dramione)

Chapter 1

Zero

We are born. A new, vibrant, screaming life emerging into the world. Later, when we are older and understand what a birth date truly is, we try to imagine ourselves as that kicking baby, new skin rubbed clean and red, bright and alive. But it still felt impossible. It still felt too miraculous to understand.

Draco jumped as a paper airplane hit off his cheek, and he reached up to snatch it from the air with a frown. Even after seven months, he still hadn't adjusted to the childish choice for sending office memos. He had thought it was a prank the first time he ever stepped into the Ministry as a kid and had waited for his father to comment on how incapable the Ministry was at anything.

He set the airplane down on his desk, letting it unfold itself, and glanced up at Granger's aggravated noise. She was shaking a newspaper over the rubbish bin, a drop of coffee trailing down the headline and smudging No Surprise: Ex-Death Eater Turned Inmate After Murder-Spree. His eyes flicked up to the movement by her head, and he smirked at the plane caught in her hair, the mass of curls barely holding on to decency at the end of their day. It would start to frizz up not an hour after she set her briefcase down, and children would flee at the sight of its shadow by five.

"Another meeting at seven in the morning?" Gunns asked, and Draco looked down at the memo. Mark Gunns was an overenthusiastic ponce that inspired a thinly controlled annoyance in Draco, but if there was something they agreed on, it was the hell of mornings.

"You would think they would want us to get decent sleep. A good sleep equals productive work, right?" Jones threw the memo at her own rubbish bin and missed, which was less surprising than the state of Granger's hair. Jones reminded him of Longbottom – shaky at the knees, uncoordinated, and absolutely accident prone.

"It's our job." Granger, of course. The killer of all joy, the obsessive workaholic, the most uptight swot of them all. She batted the airplane away from her hair, and her eyes flashed to his, already narrowed in a glare with her expectation of his amusement. She wasn't wrong – unfortunately, she rarely was. "We'll just go to sleep a little earlier, and then we'll be as productive as we should be."

She had probably been the one to request the meeting – some new plan for organization, a list of complaints that had to be sorted out, and a dozen different ways to suck more funding from the Ministry. He hadn't cared about Granger's addiction to morning meetings for the first four months he worked at the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. He hadn't been invited to them yet, as he hadn't been a real employee. After a short stint in jail, the Wizengamot ordered him to serve four months of community service every year for four years. It was his last community service run before he was a free man, and he spent the time keeping his head down, doing his work, and fighting with Granger.

Working with Granger hadn't been his ideal anything, but he dealt with it. People learned to deal with a lot of shit when it came to reaching freedom. There hadn't been enough room for ignorance, though. She filled it all up with her anger and accusations, and when they met his own, the space exploded. He would have rather been shoveling dragon feces for four months like he had his first run. Every day seemed to consist of icy silence from him, and then Granger with her face hot red and her frizz trying to eat them all alive.

He didn't know when that stopped exactly. Somewhere between the strain of worn vocal chords, adrenaline fueled blood, and clenched fists, they had reached a sort of understanding. She no longer screamed about the past, and he no longer had to yell back his defense for it. Now they argued over spilled ink, empty sugar bowls, and "stolen" quills. There were still big ones though, but those mostly had to do with Weasley, Pansy, and his beliefs on house-elves. In the way of the world, Draco was taller and would always see above her head, and Granger was too happy astride her high horse to not try looking down at him.