A/N : I don't own anything, obviously ... I'm pretty sure if I was JKR I wouldn't be posting to the sound of my dreadfully dull history teacher going on about the Haitian Revolution.

Please comment with any ideas/comments about this fic or where you want to see it go... I'm excited about the premise but I need some help from all you kids reading!

But without further ado, I'll let you get to reading.

Hermione huffed and rolled her eyes. She didn't know quite why, exactly, but this morning was unmistakably irritating. Maybe it was the tiny rays of newborn sun which streamed through the thin lace curtains to speckle her clean white bedspread. Perhaps it was the sound of the birds brightly addressing the morning with hundreds of chipper little voices. It could even have been the constellations of wood dust dancing over her head, held captive and illuminated by pale morning light. It could, obviously, have been any one of these things, but it was most likely that the reason for Ms. Granger's immediate and deep rooted ill humor upon waking was the pounding headache assailing her skull.

She let out a little growl and shot her vision around the room, her eyesight compromised by eyebrows hunkering low over determinedly scowling eyes. The loft was exactly as it always was: neat and scarce, sparsely a thread out of place. The ghastly hangover she was harboring was, then, not conceived by one of her more destructive drinking episodes. Naturally, the next course of action was to search quickly for any sign of someone sleeping beside her; she had learned quickly in her adult life to always assume the worst about a night you can't remember. But the left side of the bed lay undisturbed, and Hermione heaved a sigh of relief before forcing herself out of the bed.

Her head was pounding worse than she could remember, but she said that every time. She grasped it tightly with one hand as she knelt in from of the large, beautifully carved wooden chest and opened it to reveal her clothing. It was the second of just four pieces of furniture in the expansive loft, the other three being her bead, the curtains covering the open window, and a wardrobe which matched the chest and housed spare sheets, blankets, and her shoes. The floor, walls and ceiling were uncovered to reveal wooden boards matching the ladder into the loft. The entire space was bright and immaculately clean, and smelled vaguely of linens and lemon thanks to the unique aftereffects of Hermione's cleaning charm.

After quickly dressing herself in a simple green dress spotted with flowers, the witch unlocked the bottom drawer of the chest and extracted a smooth, slender wand. Holding a looking glass to her face, she waved the wand in a quick, intricate pattern and almost immediately her bushy brown hair untangled itself and fell neatly down her back. Her eyelashes curled themselves, her cheeks gained a little color, and the weariness and bags from her eyes faded away. She smiled slightly to herself as she stored the glass gingerly back into the chest, tucking the wand into a pouch in her bodice. Keeping her feet bare, she padded lightly across the smooth floor and towards the ladder leading away from the loft and down to the storage room and kitchen of the tidy shop below. She would whip herself up a potion for the headache, restock the shelves, and open the doors to the bustling streets below. It was another day.

Draco Malfoy stood rigid in the tall window, looking up at the few feathered clouds just barely concealing the pale virgin sun. He had been awake for hours, cleaning and recleaning the bunker as he waited for the others in his squadron to return. The beds behind him were identical in every little fold of the thin sheet, every angle made by the rough, hard pillow. Fresh air from the open window combated the gloom in the long, dark room; birdsong pierced his ears. His bright red uniform was perfectly nipped and tucked. The uniforms of the rest of his squadron were starched and laid neatly on their bunks. Draco Malfoy detested being idle.

He turned sharply from the window, suddenly repelled by the sunlight he had been examining so closely. There was nothing more to see; morning had broken. He had always vaguely wondered if the phrase came from an egg. The first glimpse of the light on the horizon was the crackling of the thin white shell. After that the vivid yolk came bursting out all at once until before you know it everything is still: just a sedentary lump of yellow sitting suspended in a clear, untouched sky.

The others still weren't back, so he made his way slowly to the shared bathroom. Draco had been suspended from the meeting the rest were attending - the punishment had been designed to insult his sense of honor. It was all very silly, really; to Draco it just meant he had to sit bored and alone in the bunker for an hour or so. It was, after all, a price he was more than willing to pay for the lovely night he had spent with that brunette. No, blond? His memories of intimate encounters, especially those fogged and blotted by alcohol, never served him well in respect to those rather unimportant details. Her hair color, for instance. Or, from time to time, her name.

He came to a rest in front of the looking glass. It was old and dirty, warped strangely in places, but still it served its purpose. A thin, blunt face stared back at Draco. Its stormy grey eyes seemed bleak and emotionless, the pale lips low on his chin a crack in his stony expression. The eyebrows hunched over their lids, sternness and discipline evident in every feature as they passed over the lines of Draco's uniform, followed closely by Draco's hands as they flicked off the smallest pieces of dust. Finally the reflection threw his hands straight at his sides and turned with one sharp step away from Draco and towards the door, or rather towards the many pairs of feet stampeding outside. The day's work was beginning.