Chapter 2: Please
He told her the truth in the end because she asked twice, and Draco had never once in his life been able to refuse Hermione Granger the second time she asked for something. It was the single most humiliating fact about him and nobody alive knew it.
"Because you write 'please,'" he said.
She stopped on the other side of the reading desk. "What?"
"On the requisitions. Nobody else does. Four hundred and thirty-one forms and every single one says 'please' at the bottom, in that tiny vicious handwriting, even the ones with the clock on." He was aware that he was gripping the edge of the shelf behind him. "Do you know what everyone else in this building sends me? Demands. Threats. Percy Weasley once sent me a Howler about a missing minute. You send me 'please' and a reference number in the right format, and then you come down here in person and shout at me anyway. I started pulling yours first because it was the only part of the day I looked forward to. And then I kept doing it because I couldn't stop."
The green lamp hummed. Granger's face had gone very still.
"There's a drawer," he said, because apparently now that he had started he could not find the brakes. "In my office. I kept the forms. All of them. I don't know why. That's a lie. I know exactly why. You can laugh now, if you like. I'd prefer it if you laughed."
She did not laugh.
She came round the reading desk instead, in three steps, and stood in front of him close enough that he could see the dust still on her jaw and a small pale freckle beside her mouth that he had somehow never noticed in eight years of looking at her.
"I submit them after five," Hermione said, "because you're the one who sends the replies after five. Your assistant does the daytime ones and he spells my name wrong. You do the evening ones yourself. 'Granger. Located. Do try to keep it out of the soup this time. D. M.'" Her voice was not entirely steady. "I have forty-six of those in a biscuit tin. I'm the Deputy Head of Magical Law Enforcement and I keep your notes in a biscuit tin, Malfoy."
He stared at her.
"So no," she said. "I'm not going to laugh."
"Granger."
"Ask me," she said. "Like the book."
For a moment he truly did not understand. Then he did, all at once, and it went through him like the drop at the top of a staircase in the dark.
He lifted one hand, slowly, and laid two fingers against the top button of her robes, at the base of her throat. He could feel her pulse there, hammering. He did not undo it. He waited, the way the Georgians had apparently been so good at waiting, and he looked at her face, and he let her see that he would wait there all night if he had to.
"Yes," she said.
He undid it.
The next one was at her collarbone. He waited. She said, "Yes," again, softer. The third was over her breastbone, and by then her breath was coming short, and when he waited there she made a small impatient noise and said, "Malfoy, I swear to God, if you make me say it nine more times…"
"You'll what?"
"File a complaint."
"In triplicate?"
"Please," she said, and her eyes were dark and laughing and absolutely certain, and that was the end of his self-control.
He kissed her.
It was not the kiss he had imagined, and he had imagined a great many. It was clumsy for exactly one second, her nose bumping his, and then she made a sound into his mouth and fisted both hands in his shirt and pulled him down to her, and it stopped being clumsy and started being the best thing that had ever happened in the Ministry of Magic. She kissed the way she argued, totally, with her whole attention, and when he slid his hand into the wild mess of her hair and the last pins gave way and it came down over his wrist, she gasped against his lips and bit his lower one, hard enough to sting.
"Sorry," she said, not sounding it.
"Do it again."
She did it again.
He turned them so her back was to the shelves and the old books shifted and murmured behind her, and he worked the rest of the buttons open one-handed, faster now, without asking, because she was saying yes against his neck, over and over, a low hot litany of it. The charcoal robes slid off her shoulders and fell to the floor. Underneath she was wearing a plain white blouse, and under the blouse, he discovered, absolutely nothing.
"Granger," he said, with real reverence, "you came to work like this."
"It's laundry day," she said, and then his mouth was on her breast through the thin cotton and she stopped being able to explain anything. Her head fell back against the spines of four centuries of confiscated filth. He found her nipple with his tongue and felt it tighten, and dragged the blouse open so he could do it properly, skin to skin, and she arched off the shelf with a sound he was going to hear in his sleep for the rest of his natural life.
Her hands were busy. Granger, it turned out, did not need permission for buttons. She had his waistcoat open and his shirt half off his shoulders before he had properly registered she had started, and then her palms were flat on his chest, sliding down, small and warm and very sure, over his ribs and the old pale scars that crossed them, the ones he never explained to anyone. She traced one of them with her fingertip. He went still.
"Is this all right?" she asked.
"It's yours," he said, which was not what he had meant to say.
She looked up at him for a long moment. Then she bent her head and kissed the scar, very gently, right over his heart, and he thought he might actually die on the floor of Section C and be catalogued.
He picked her up.
She was not heavy, and the reading desk was right there, and he set her on the edge of it and swept the rose-coloured book out of the way with a care that made her laugh breathlessly. The green lamp lit her from one side: bare shoulders, the open blouse, her hair a dark chaos down her back. Her skirt had ridden up. He put his hands on her knees and slid them up her thighs, slowly, watching her face.
"Yes?"
"Draco." It was the first time she had ever said his name. She said it like a command. "Yes. Obviously yes. Stop waiting."
He sank to his knees on the cold flagstones of the Ministry Archives and stopped waiting.
She tasted like salt and heat, and she was already wet for him, and the first stroke of his tongue made her whole body jerk and her hand fly to his hair. He took his time. He learned her the way he had learned the archive, aisle by aisle, by trial and correction: what made her gasp, what made her swear, what made her go quiet and tense and grip his hair hard enough to hurt. That last one he did again, and again, slow and steady, his hands spread wide on her thighs to hold her open, until she was saying his name over and over in a broken voice and the books on the shelves around them were rustling like a crowd. When she came, it was with her back arched and her heels against his shoulders and a cry that rang off the stone ceiling, and he held her through it and did not stop until she pushed at his head, gasping, laughing, "Enough, enough, oh my God."
He rested his forehead against her inner thigh and breathed. His heart was going like a war drum.
"Up," she said, when she could speak. She was tugging at his shoulders. "Up, come here, I want…" She did not finish. She did not need to. She found his belt with shaking fingers and he helped her, and then she wrapped her hand around him and he had to put one palm flat on the desk to stay standing.
"Granger," he managed. "If you keep doing that, this is going to be a very short and embarrassing night."
"We have six hours," she said against his mouth. "I'm sure you'll recover."
"Is that a challenge?"
"It's a requisition." She guided him to her, and looked him dead in the eye, and said, "Please."
He pushed into her slowly, an inch at a time, watching her face, and her lips parted and her eyes went wide and dark, and when he was fully inside her neither of them moved at all for a long moment. She was hot and tight around him and her fingers were digging into his back and he could feel her breathing.
"All right?" he said, barely.
"Better than all right." She hooked one leg around the back of his thighs and pulled him closer. "Move."
He moved. Slow at first, deep, the desk creaking under them in a rhythm that would have scandalised the Georgians. Then faster, because she asked for faster, and harder, because she asked for that too, in a low ragged voice right against his ear. She met every stroke. She held on to him like she had been waiting years to be allowed, and he realised with a jolt that she had, that they both had, that every URGENT and every 'please' and every note in a biscuit tin had been leading here, to this green-lit room and her teeth on his shoulder and the sound she made when he slid his hand between them and touched her where she needed it.
She came again around him, shuddering, his name broken in half in her mouth, and it pulled him over with her. He buried his face in her hair and let go, and for a while the world was nothing but her heartbeat and his and the old books whispering on their shelves.
Afterwards they lay on his robes on the floor of Section C, because the desk had been declared structurally unsound. Her head was on his chest. His fingers were wound in her hair. Somewhere far above them, a clock struck two.
"Four more hours," he said into her curls.
She did not answer.
He felt her go tense against him, a small thing, barely noticeable, the way you might notice a single book pulled slightly out of line on a shelf you knew by heart.
"Granger."
"I need to tell you something," she said to his ribs. "I should have told you before. I meant to. That's why I came down here myself tonight, instead of sending a form. I wanted to see you once before."
"Before what?"
She lifted her head and looked at him, and he watched her decide.
"The International Confederation of Wizards has offered me a post in Geneva," she said. "Head of Legal. I accepted it on Monday. I leave in three weeks."