Chapter 3: Located
Draco had always assumed that when Hermione Granger finally broke his heart, she would at least have the decency to do it on a form.
"Geneva," he said.
"Geneva."
"Head of Legal."
"Yes."
"That's…" He lay there on the floor of Section C with her hair still wound around his fingers and tried, very hard, to find the right word. It turned out the right word was the true one, which was inconvenient. "That's brilliant. Granger, that's the best job in the wizarding world. They've been trying to rewrite the Statute of Secrecy since 1965 and nobody's had the spine. You'll do it in a year."
She stared at him.
"What?" he said.
"You're pleased for me."
"Of course I'm pleased for you. I'm not a monster. I'm a moderately unpleasant archivist." He unwound his hand from her hair, because it suddenly seemed like something he should not be allowed to keep doing. "When were you going to tell me? Before or after you got me on the reading desk?"
"Before. That was the plan." She sat up, pulling his shirt round her shoulders, and glared at him. Her mouth was swollen and her hair was a catastrophe and she was furious, and he had never wanted anything so much in his life. "And then I got up that ladder and you were being so smug about the sign, and then you showed me this room, and then you said the thing about 'please,' and I lost my nerve. All right? I'm the bravest witch of my generation according to at least three Chocolate Frog cards and I lost my nerve. So, no. I didn't tell you before."
"Granger."
"And now you're lying there being gracious about it and it's unbearable."
"What would you like me to do instead?"
"I don't know!" She threw up her hands. The shirt slid off one shoulder. "Sulk. Be awful. Tell me not to go."
He sat up too, slowly, so they were face to face in the green light on his robes on the cold floor.
"No," he said.
She flinched as if he had slapped her.
"Listen to me." He reached out and caught her wrist, gently, the way he had touched the first button. "I spent the first eighteen years of my life being told what I was allowed to want, and then I spent a year in a war doing what I was told, and then I spent eight years learning, mostly in this basement, how to want anything at all. I'm not going to be the reason you stay small, Granger. I'm not going to be the man who asked you to turn down Geneva for a fortnight of shagging in the stacks. You'd hate me in a year. I'd deserve it."
Her eyes were very bright.
"I wasn't going to ask you to make me stay," she said quietly.
"Then what?"
She looked at his hand on her wrist for a long moment. Then she turned her hand over in his, so that their palms met, and laced her fingers through his.
"I don't know yet," she said. "I've got four hours to work it out. Will you help me?"
It was different the second time. Slower. They had worn the edge off the first hunger and what was left underneath was something steadier and much more dangerous.
She pushed him back down onto the robes and straddled him and took her time. She kissed him the way she read: thoroughly, from the beginning, missing nothing. His jaw. The hinge of it beneath his ear, which made him swear. The hollow of his throat. The scars across his chest, one by one, without asking this time, as though she had already decided they were part of the text. When she reached his stomach and kept going he said her name in a voice he did not recognise, and she glanced up at him through the wreckage of her hair and said, "Shh. I'm researching," and then took him into her mouth and he stopped being able to form words in any language.
She was as merciless about this as she was about everything. She learned what he liked the same way he had learned her, by close attention and correction, and when he was gripping the robes in both fists and begging her, honestly begging, she let him go and climbed back up his body and kissed him hard.
"Tell me what you want," she said against his lips.
"You. Like this. Where I can see you."
She sank down onto him slowly, her eyes on his, and they both let out the same long shaking breath.
He sat up to meet her, so she was in his lap with her legs wrapped around him, chest to chest, and they moved together like that, barely moving at all, a slow deep rock that built and built. He could feel every breath she took. He could feel her heartbeat against his. Her forehead was pressed to his and her eyes were open, and his were too, and that was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life: keep looking at her while she looked at him, and let her see all of it.
"Draco," she whispered.
"I know."
"I don't want to go without you."
His rhythm faltered. She tightened her legs around him and held him there.
"Don't stop," she said. "Don't you dare stop. I'm just telling you. I don't want to go without you. I didn't know that until about ten minutes ago and now I do and I'm telling you."
He kissed her, because there was nothing else he could do with the size of what was in his chest. He held her by the hips and moved her on him, deeper, slow and certain, until she was gasping into his mouth. Then he slid one hand between them and stroked her in tight patient circles until she broke apart in his arms with his name on her lips, shaking, clinging to him. He followed her a moment later, pulled under by the feel of her and the sound of her and the absolute impossibility of ever, ever getting enough of either.
They stayed like that for a long time, wrapped around each other in the green light, sweaty and boneless, while far above them the Ministry of Magic slept.
At twenty past six, give or take, the Curfew Ward lifted with a sound like a very large book being opened.
They were dressed by then, more or less. Her blouse was buttoned wrong. He had fixed it once and she had undone it again on purpose, to make a point, and then he had forgotten what point and had to start over, and at some stage they had both given up. She was holding the Cadwallader scroll in its box against her chest. He was holding her robes, because she had refused to put them on until they had properly aired out, citing four centuries of Georgian dust.
At the end of the aisle the great iron doors groaned in their frames and swung inward, and grey morning light came down the stone stairs from the Ministry above.
Granger stopped at the threshold. She looked back at him.
"The Confederation keeps an archive," she said. "In Geneva. Under the lake. Seven hundred years of international wizarding law."
"I'm aware," said Draco. "I've read the inventory. It's a national disgrace. Several national disgraces. They shelve by colour."
"They do not."
"They shelve by colour, Granger, I've seen the catalogue, it's like a rainbow had a nervous breakdown." He came to stand beside her in the doorway. "Why?"
She looked at him with that small crease between her eyebrows that meant she was building an argument, and then, for once in her life, she didn't make one.
"I'll be in court at nine," she said instead. "The Keeper has to authenticate the original document in person. It's in the statute."
"You read that statute."
"I read everything." She went up on her toes and kissed him in the open doorway of the Ministry Archives, in full view of the stairs, quick and certain, as though she was signing something. "Don't be late."
He wasn't late. He stood up in front of the Wizengamot at four minutes past nine and swore on his magic that the scroll in the box was the original Cadwallader ruling, and watched Hermione Granger take the court apart with it, clause by clause, in robes that still faintly smelt of Section C. Owen Pryce kept his house. His grandmother's house. Draco watched the man cry in the gallery and found he had to look at the ceiling for a while.
Granger did not look at him once the whole time. He would have been offended if he had not seen her hands shaking as she packed up her papers.
He went back to the basement. He ate lunch at his desk. He did not open the drawer.
At one minute past five, a paper aeroplane in Ministry lilac sailed down the archive stairs and landed on his blotter.
It was a requisition form, filled in completely, in tiny vicious handwriting. Under Item Requested, it said, Keeper of the Archives (one). Under Destination, it said, Geneva, under the lake, a disgrace. Under Duration, it said, Indefinite. At the top, in red ink, it said URGENT, underlined three times, beside a small furious drawing of a clock.
At the bottom, of course, it said please.
Draco read it four times. Then he took out his quill and wrote across the bottom, in his own neat hand, Located. D. M.
Ministry forms came in duplicate. He folded the original back into an aeroplane and sent it sailing up the stairs towards Level Two. Then he opened the drawer and laid the copy on top of the others, where it belonged.