i've been living in despair this whole fucking year

draco meets hermione in a bar so she can tell him to start doing something productive if he's so sorry about the war.
april 1999
Notes: (See the end of the work for notes.)
Work Text: Draco stopped just outside the door to the Leaky Cauldron. He did not particularly want to go inside.
But there was a crumpled note burning a (metaphorical) hole in his pocket, and he suspected it wouldn't stop until he did.
He yanked the door open and slumped inside. It was mercifully almost empty; he didn't feel particularly welcome among any subsets of the wizarding communities at this point, which was probably because he wasn't. It was the one thing that virtually everyone could agree on, which was really a feat in and of itself.
It could have been worse. He could have been in Azkaban - some of his former friends were. In a strange way, six years of active antipathy between him and three of the wizarding world's 'Most Celebrated War Heroes' had turned out to work in his favor, because it had meant that they'd been paying enough attention to him to have far more insight into his state of mind during the war than he was really comfortable with.
But it was better than Azkaban, dementors or no.
Which was really why he was here.
He spotted Granger sitting alone in one of the booths and nearly lost his nerve.
Most people he'd grown up socializing with hated Potter, on the fairly logical basis that they had supported You-Know-Who and Potter had killed him. Their hatred for Granger didn't quite reach those levels, but it wasn't too far off - blood purists always hated a competent Muggleborn. Given that she hadn't actually been the one to kill You-Know-Who, it felt a little overblown.
On the other hand, Draco had taken classes with them both for six years, and he doubted that Potter ever would have been able to plan well enough to successfully