Love and Other Misfortunes

Flashback

Seven months earlier.

Hermione was sitting in the warm sunshine on the grass outside Hogwarts. The heat of the unseasonably warm spring day was seeping into her skin and no one was disrupting her steady progress through the pile of books she had just checked out of the library.

Her neck was growing slightly tense from looking down onto the page. She tried to lift her head to twist and relieve it.

Her head was stuck.

She tried again.

She seemed to be—lodged against something.

She tried turning and couldn't do that either. There was, she realised, a sharp corner digging into her back. She tried reaching back to find it and found... a wall of some sort.

"You know, Granger, the fact that everyone says you live in this office doesn't mean you have to prove them right."

Draco Malfoy's drawling voice invaded her thoughts like an unexpected bucket of ice water.

Her eyes popped open and she found herself curled up under her Ministry desk. Malfoy was casually seated in her chair, his feet on her desk, folding origami and smirking down at her.

She scrambled out with as much dignity as she could manage.

"I hope you aren't planning to bill the Ministry for that nap," he said, as his eyes skimmed from her head to her toes, as though he were cataloging every wrinkle and rumple of her clothing, the dreadful state of her hair, her ragged nails, and general appearance of dishevelment.

Hermione straightened and decided not to correct him by admitting she had actually been there all night.

Her neck was in agony. She rolled it and it made such a loud crack that Malfoy actually flinched.

"When did you get here, Malfoy?" she asked groggily.

"A few minutes ago, I believe we had a meeting. Although, how is it that no one mentioned the Ministry was instituting casual Mondays?"

Hermione froze. She was in muggle clothes in her office.

"Oh, bollo—" she started to curse and then clapped her hands over her mouth when she realized Malfoy looked about ready to burst out laughing at her. He really didn't need any new material with which to taunt her.

"I fell asleep here last night when I got back from Scotland," she said, avoiding his gaze.

"Ah. And how are the lochs this fine February?"

She shivered. A wizarding water park company had been endeavoring to forcibly evict a huge colony on selkies residing in one of the Scottish lochs. It was completely illegal, but everyone in the Ministry had been turning a blind eye to it until it reached Hermione's desk in the legal branch of the Department of Magical Creatures.

She'd had to drop everything and go there in order to go stop it and had spent the entire weekend, chest deep in freezing water, acting simultaneously as a legal defense and translator (since no one on the eviction crew considered merfolk worthy of communicating with.)

It had been brutal, and Hermione wasn't sure if she would ever stop feeling cold. Just thinking about it made her skin ache with cold.

"I got it resolved," she said in a short voice.

"You better have," Malfoy said, his expression petulant. "After the way you derailed my weekend. If I'd wanted to be a Ministry hack I wouldn't have bothered being born the handsome and eligible heir of a wealthy estate."