A/N: A million thanks to my wonderful betas Alexandria Malfoy and BlueJeanJunkie.

---

Save the Date: 5F, Muggle Relations

Ginny Weasley was having a bad day, the fifth consecutive bad day in the fourth consecutive bad week in the eighth consecutive month. But who was keeping count?

Her partner had quit eight months ago without any notice, and the loss had been palpable. It wasn't that Ginny missed her partner in particular - the woman was probably certifiable, with a myriad of tics and idiosyncrasies that drove Ginny up the wall on a regular basis. But she had left Ginny with the majority of their project unfinished, and the deadline had loomed like a storm cloud over Ginny's head.

The department heads had promised to find her a new partner as soon as possible, but so far the search had produced overwhelmingly discouraging results.

The Ministry wasn't exactly considered a hotspot for young professionals, and the low government pay certainly didn't help matters any.

After weeks of getting no response to the hiring ad in the Prophet, Ginny's department had tried to buy time with a temp agency, only to have Ginny chase all of them out for utter incompetence. The Ministry's archaic filing and communications systems meant that the eager and bright-eyed temps were constantly trying to reorganize her office into some semblance of order, only to fail miserably and end up peppering her with questions about where things used to be before they'd mucked it all up.

Finally, Ginny gave up on the idea of getting real partner and, rather than have to deal with explaining the job to someone new every two weeks, told her department heads she would tackle the job alone in exchange for a padded paycheck.

Although her spirits had initially been buoyed by a slight pay rise for taking on a two-person job, they were dampened again when Ginny realised that coming in on weekends was necessary to make even the smallest dent in her work. And so it was with a rueful sigh that Ginny had officially waved her neglected boyfriend and already sluggish social life goodbye.

It had been some sort of miracle, or perhaps the effects of tremendous amounts of caffeine, that had allowed Ginny to finish the last project on time by herself with at least some of her sanity intact. She was not, however, looking forward to testing the limits of her mental and physical health again with the latest project, evidence of which was currently strewn in disorderly stacks about the office.

"Ginny."

She looked up from her work to see one of the junior assistants in her office doorway.

"Good news," he said happily. "Basil from the second floor's managed to reassign one of his people up here. You can finally dump some of that work on someone else."

Ginny felt a wide smile spread across her face. A reassignment from downstairs meant that whoever was coming up would already be familiar with the Ministry's organizational structures and wouldn't be fool enough to try to change it.

Things were looking up at last.

---

"Morning, Basil."

"Hello, Draco. Have a seat."

Draco sauntered over to the proffered chair, whereupon his boss affixed him with a gaze that, though not unfriendly, certainly meant business.

"We've got to talk about your performance here. You've been working here, what, almost a year?" Basil asked. At Draco's vaguely affirmative nod, he went on, flipping through a file. "And in that year, when you've actually showed up, you've been late to work, let's see... twenty-three times. You've taken more two-hour lunches than my secretary can keep track of, and you've left early several times on very, very thin pretexts."

Draco opened his mouth to protest, but shut it again, thinking better of explaining his early exits. He supposed bonking the downstairs receptionist didn't really count as a valid reason for leaving at three o'clock every other Friday.

"I like you, Draco," Basil said gruffly. "That's the only reason why you've lasted so long here. But the whole department's productivity is suffering because of you. You see that pile of papers and files in that little box on your desk?" He gestured to Draco's inbox, where a tower of files loomed menacingly and precariously over the cubicle. "That means you've got work to do, and when you don't get your work done, the rest of the people who are supposed to follow up on your work can't get their work done either."

"What are you saying, Basil?"

"Unfortunately, I can't fire you," Basil said brusquely. "The Ministry's short-staffed as it is. I can, however, demote you. Pack up your things, Draco. You're moving to the Department of Muggle Relations."

Draco gaped. "You can't be serious."

"I am perfectly so."

"Come on, Basil. Give me another chance," Draco pleaded, trying to look as winsome as was humanly possible.

"Draco, are you constipated?" Basil asked suddenly.

"What? No!"

"Then stop looking at me like I'm one of those vapid, twittering women you insist on bedding," Basil barked. He paused. "Besides, I'm married."

Draco frowned, turning off his Patented Malfoy Charm.

"Well, get out of my office," Basil said, almost kindly. "They're expecting you upstairs."

Draco shuffled back to his desk and threw his belongings into a box. He noticed a piece of parchment on top of the pile in his inbox, where the flashing 'Urgent' stamp turned into 'Past Due - You're A Dead Man'.

"Oops," he said, hefting up the box and walking to the lifts.

---

"Good morning," said Draco, flashing a suave grin at the Muggle Relations receptionist. "I'm looking for room 5F."

"Thataway," she said, jerking her thumb in the direction of the corridor to his right, her eyes never leaving the magazine in front of her.

"Thank you," Draco said, standing there for a moment, waiting for some sort of acknowledgement of his devilishly handsome good looks - a swoon, a smile, a titter, even a slight blush would do.

Nothing.

He huffed and strode down the hallway, wishing a paper cut on the receptionist. Maybe it was time to rework this whole getting-by-on-charm thing.

It had never been his intention to get a lowly job in the Ministry, but after he'd squandered half the Malfoy fortune on utter frivolity shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, his mother had put a severe withdrawal limit on his access to the Malfoy vault at Gringotts, after which she got the fool notion of putting him to work before she'd let him back anywhere near the Malfoy empire's Board of Directors. He was meant to inherit the business, that was for sure, but according to Narcissa Malfoy, he'd have to kill her first before she'd allow him to single-handedly destroy the company with his irresponsibility and recklessness.

He had gotten his job in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement with his slick tongue and a slightly embellished curriculum vitae, and from the way Basil had so unceremoniously kicked him to the curb, it was clear that it took more than a winning personality to make things work.

Still, old habits died hard.

Draco considered knocking on the open office door, but he decided to give it a minute or so, seeing as the woman in 5F (ostensibly his new colleague) was currently bent over a tall stack of files, giving him a truly spectacular view of her arse.

Well, well. This could be interesting.

She stood up and turned around, cradling an armload of files.

Or not.

"Weasley," he said distastefully.

"What?" Ginny asked, confused at his darkening of her doorway.

"I... Work here now?" he ventured.

Her files landed on the floor with a soft "whumpf". "You're joking. Right? Please say you're joking." She looked panicked.

Draco consulted the peeling lettering on the door. "No, 5F, Muggle Relations. This is right." He walked in and plunked his box down on what he assumed would be his desk, the empty one of the two in the office. Hers appeared to be decorated with all manner of dust-covered fluffy and fuzzy things that would probably trigger his allergies if he wasn't careful.

At the very least, it would give him a legitimate reason to stay as far away from her as possible. Somehow, "I'm afraid of contracting Weasley germs" didn't seem like an appropriate or particularly grown-up response.

"Nooo," she wailed, her hands flying up to her temples. "It can't be you; you have the worst work ethic in the entire building! What did I do to deserve you?"

He shrugged, thinking the exact same thing.

"This has got to be a mistake. You... You wait here. I'm going to find out what this is all about. This is not happening," Ginny muttered darkly as she exited the office.

Hoping he wouldn't have to unpack here, Draco left his things in the box and started poking around Ginny's desk, curiosity getting the better of his sensitive nose. A small menagerie of smiley little stuffed animals took up one corner of her desk, which Draco eyed with overt suspicion. Photo frames cluttered up the other corner, the frames' inhabitants being the usual suspects, waving and smiling like the buffoons that they were.

He picked up one frame from the back of the cluster, in which Ginny and a bloke he didn't recognise had their arms round each other. Ginny looked perfectly in love.

Boyfriend, I suppose. Smarmy-looking.

Draco frowned uncharitably at the supposed boyfriend and carried on with his surreptitious exploration.

"Don't touch that," Ginny snapped, upon returning and finding Draco prodding at her prized bonsai. "It's very delicate and needs precise daily care."

"What about weekends?" Draco asked, not unreasonably.

"I'm here on the weekends," she said shortly. She suddenly shot him a glare that he thought was quite unwarranted. "And I'm sure that's not going to change even with you here."

Draco ignored the jibe at his nonexistent work ethic in order to clutch on to a far more important detail. "So, I am, indeed, working here?"

"Yes," she hissed, very nearly scaring him. She must have noticed, and made a considerable effort to soften the edge in her voice to ask, "And put that back where it belongs, will you?"

He realised he was still holding the photo frame. "Boyfriend?" he asked genially. If he was going to be working with this witch for Merlin knew how long he might as well try to play nice.

Ginny looked at the picture in question. "Oh. Is that still there?" She shook her head. "Ex."

"Since?"

"Ages ago," Ginny replied, almost wistfully. She held out her hand for the frame, and took the photo out and tossed it in the rubbish bin. Putting the empty frame back on her desk, she said, "Well, Malfoy, if you're lucky, the next picture in here won't be one of me throttling you."

She stooped to pick up the files that were still lying haphazardly on the floor from her earlier shock-induced limb malfunction. "And that means," she said, halving the pile and handing him a stack, "you do your share of the work, and I won't poison your tea or murder you in your sleep."

"That sounds... fair," said Draco, eyeing his files with a frown. "So... What exactly do I do?"

Ginny sighed a long-suffering sigh. "We take the Muggle research these fellows have done, extract the pertinent facts and file it down to something we can publish in an easily readable report for our department heads. And then they pass our work off as their own," she said, in a voice that in no way indicated long years of bitter resignation. "Oh, and just so you know, they like bullet points."

"O...kay," Draco said, opening his first file. He uttered something that sounded suspiciously like a frightened whimper upon being greeted with a folder full of coffee-stained, wrinkled parchment with notes scrawled haphazardly in tiny handwriting all over the pages. There were also several cocktail napkins defaced in a similar fashion. He thought he could make out the words "crazy" and "suicide" among the messy scrawls, but perhaps he was just projecting.

Ginny looked up. "Oh, did I give you Marshall? Here, take Greene instead. She's much easier to read," she said, swapping their files. "You're not ready for Marshall yet," Ginny added, with what might have been considered a sympathetic smile, had they not both been hardwired to hate each other for the rest of their lives.

Draco silently thanked her with a nod and got down to business.

He woke up he didn't know how long later with a piece of paper stuck to his face. This stuff was bloody boring and he mentally swore at whatever deity had cursed him with this horrible fate. Ginny was still at her desk diligently scribbling away.

She paused in her note-taking to look at him, her expression unreadable. "I'm cutting you slack because you just got demoted and it's your first day at Muggle Relations, but make that a habit and you'll find cyanide in your tea."

Against his better judgment, "What's cyanide?"

"Let's hope you'll never have to find out."

Ginny returned to her work and Draco stretched as unobtrusively as possible, lest his movements ignite some other murderous tendency in the madwoman he had to call partner.

Yes, it was definitely time to rethink this whole getting-by-on-charm thing.

---

Draco stared at her. "What are you doing?"

"Hm?" Ginny said, heaving a large pillow and worn sleeping bag into her side of the office.

"Are you planning on sleeping here tonight?" he asked incredulously.

Miraculously, he had survived nearly six months in 5F, Muggle Relations without any homicides occurring (it also helped that Ginny turned out to be a lot nicer and more understanding than she'd initially let on, though she rarely let him get away with too much skiving). And in that time, he'd gotten to know his partner fairly well, and if pressed, would admit to considering her a friend.

Inasmuch, he had little difficulty letting her know just when she was teetering on the edge of sanity, which mostly involved her keeping absurdly late hours and coming to work on weekends when she had absolutely no reason to. This sleeping bag business, however, was new territory.

"Well, there's a lot of work to do. I know I'll end up staying late and coming in early tomorrow, so I might as well save the trips back and forth from home."

"Are you mad?" he asked.

"No, I'm just turning into Percy," she said, her lips quirking upwards. She paused and looked at Draco. "This is terrible. There was a point in my life when that realisation would have stricken me with horror, but now it just passes me by," she mused, her fingers fluttering in the air.

"Yes, you must be mad," Draco said, walking out the door. "Well, I'm off. Enjoy your... this." He gestured to the sleeping bag.

She waved him off. "See you tomorrow."

"I'm not coming in tomorrow. It's the weekend," he called over his shoulder.

"You're not coming in? At all?" Ginny ran after him down the corridor. "Draco, our deadline's on Wednesday."

"Yeah, and there's Monday and Tuesday to finish."

"We're not even close to being done yet! You know it'll take longer than two days."

"Well, if you wanted me to stay, you should've told me earlier. I've already made plans for the weekend. I've got to leave town tonight," Draco said impatiently.

"Can't you cancel? You can't expect me to finish all of this by myself."

"No, Ginny, I cannot bloody well cancel. I'll help you finish on Monday. It's really not that much left." Sometimes he secretly suspected that she created more work for herself just to have something to get antsy about. It drove him mad.

Ginny glared. "Fine. I should've known this would happen," she muttered under her breath.

"Known what would happen?" Draco demanded.

"That the minute I thought I could start to rely on you, you'd leave me here to do all the work."

"Oh, bullshit, Ginny. Don't pin your relationship problems on me, all right? I'm sure it's just terrible that your last relationship didn't work out, but just because you're trying desperately to fill the emotional void in your life with copious amounts of work doesn't mean I should have to spend my weekends slaving away here too!"

Ginny's eyes glittered menacingly. "Oh, that's rich, coming from you. You want to talk about emotional voids? How about you, then? You haven't had a real relationship since... ever! All you do is have one night stands and hope the girl's too bloody drunk to remember who you are the next morning so you won't have to Floo her again!"

"At least I'm having sex!"

"And at least I'm not deluded enough to think that having meaningless sex actually means something!"

"Piss off, Weasley!"

"Up yours, Malfoy!"

They glared at each other for one dangerously tense moment and spun on their heels at the same time, storming off in opposite directions.

---

Walking quietly towards 5F with a number of house elves in tow, Draco wondered what kind of apology would sound the least like he actually cared that he'd hurt Ginny's feelings.

She was sitting on the floor in the office, wearing what he assumed were her pyjamas, and furrowing her brow at a piece of what he again assumed to be mind-numbingly dull and undecipherable research.

He cleared his throat.

Ginny looked up, and he noticed with a slight pang of regret that her eyes were puffy. "Oh," she said, surprised. "I wasn't expecting to see you."

"I brought breakfast," he said, deftly sidestepping her implied question and gesturing to the house elves behind him. "I don't know what you like, so I had them make everything. There's, uh," he looked at the dishes in question. "Kippers and porridge, eggs, kedgeree, scones with jam and - ooh, clotted cream, and I don't know what this gunk is..."

The elf holding up the gunk in question sniffed haughtily and frowned at him, its culinary spirit apparently offended.

"Oh, erm, the kedgeree, then," said Ginny slowly, and the house elf who'd made it beamed at her while clearing space off her desk to put down its plate.

The smell perked her up right away; it was a dish her mum made to perfection, but since moving out on her own and getting a job, the home cooking Ginny usually had the time and energy for ranged from dry toast to soup in a cup.

Ginny gave Draco a grateful look. "Thank you," she said in a small voice. "And - I'm sorry."

He looked at her uncomfortably. "Can we just say we were both beastly and move on?"

"Yes. Yes, that would be good," Ginny said and grinned in relief.

The house elves quickly made themselves scarce, and Draco and Ginny breakfasted and worked in a fairly companionable silence until Ginny suddenly asked, "What happened to your plans?"

"Oh, well, Blaise - We were going to go - Well, he had this last minute thing," Draco said, mentally flogging himself for sounding like such a moron.

"Oh," said Ginny. She eyed him suspiciously, obviously not quite buying his story, but she didn't press it.

In truth, Draco hadn't planned to do anything with Blaise at all. He had, in fact, finally managed to convince the pretty bartender from the pub down the street to go on a dirty weekend with him, but instead, here he was, having unceremoniously cancelled what had promised to be a raucous good time in order to have a perfectly platonic breakfast with Ginny Weasley. He was sure it meant something, and he was equally sure he didn't want to know what.

Ginny frowned at the papers in her ink-stained hands. "This is a bit pathetic, isn't it?" she asked quietly, as though talking to herself.

"What is?" Draco asked absently.

"This. Me," Ginny said, distressed. "Roger and I broke up ages ago, and I haven't gone on a single date since then. He said I was working too much and now I'm in here all the time, and if I'm working seven days a week, how am I ever going to meet someone and settle down?" She paused, a look of horror gradually dawning on her face. "Oh. Oh. This is great. Now I sound just like my mother."

Draco stared at her, his eyes wide. He silently wondered if it was that time of the month, but he'd gone out with enough women to know that that question should never, ever be raised.

"But it's not like there's an abundance of men to choose from here," Ginny continued, oblivious to Draco's discomfort. "They're all either married or gay or old or - or you," she said rather accusatorily, as though it was all Draco's fault that the Ministry was sorely lacking in available bachelors.

"Hey," he said, feeling offended for reasons he couldn't explain. "I'm a very good date."

"Pfft," said Ginny, barely acknowledging him. "Why? Why is this so hard? Why can't I have a good job and see someone nice and stable at the same time? Is that so much to ask?"

"No?" Draco offered tentatively.

"What?" Ginny asked, as though she'd just realised he was there.

"Look, the reason you never meet anyone is because you are in here all the time. I know you like your work or you'd have quit ages ago, but the way you do things borders on insanity. You sleep in here, for god's sake. And, look," Draco said, grabbing a report off her desk. "You've redone this thing seven times, and it was fine the first. You just keep making more work for yourself - and, well, we both know what I think the reasons are for that," he said, hoping this wouldn't result in another shouting match.

"Yes, my emotional void," Ginny said flatly.

"Okay, Weasley. Here's what we're going to do," Draco said. "We'll finish all this up by Wednesday - and we will, I assure you. We'll finish this, and then we're going out on Friday."

"We are? Where?"

"We'll go on a practice date," Draco said, ignoring Ginny's skeptical look. "I mean, since you've been off the dating scene for so long, you mightn't want to plunge right back in."

"That's true," Ginny said slowly.

"We'll brush up your social skills a bit, is all," Draco said.

"Okay," said Ginny, warming to the idea.

"So, dinner at eight on Friday, then?"

Ginny grinned. "It's a date."