Chapter 2: Repealing Bad Legislation
Draco had imagined Hermione Granger in his bed before. He wasn't proud of it, but he was a realist, and he'd been sitting across a table from her for six weeks of witness preparation while she cross-examined him about dates with the cold, relentless focus of a hawk working a field, and he had imagined it. He had not imagined that she would build a wall.
She built it the first night, out of every pillow he owned and two sofa cushions, straight down the middle of the mattress like the Pennines. Then she lay down on her side of it with her back to him and said, "If any part of you crosses that line, I'll know, and I'll curse it off," and went to sleep almost at once, which he found frankly insulting.
He lay awake until four, listening to her breathe.
By the end of the first week he'd learned a number of things he hadn't known about her, none of which were in her Ministry file. She talked in her sleep, mostly in Latin legal phrases. She drank her first coffee standing up at his kitchen counter, staring at the wall, and could not be spoken to until it was finished. She hummed in the shower, badly, always the same three bars of something by a Muggle band he'd never heard of. She worked until midnight on the sofa with files spread across his coffee table in a fan, and when she got stuck on something she put the end of her quill in her mouth and chewed it, and every single time she did it, he had to go and stand in the kitchen.
He learned the precise shape of fifty feet. He could feel it now without trying: the gentle tug behind his ribs when she went to the far end of the corridor at the Ministry, the warning heat around his wrist when he drifted too far down a shop aisle. He learned to walk on her left so that he could take the inside of the pavement. He learned the lifts. The Ministry lifts were the worst; there were two in each bank and she always took the left one, and if he wasn't fast enough getting in beside her she'd wedge her foot in the grille and hold it for him with an expression of martyred patience that he found, against every instinct he possessed, unbearably attractive.
"People are staring," she muttered, on the fifth morning, as they rode up to Level Two pressed into the corner by a delegation of goblins.
"People have always stared at me. I'm used to it." He looked down at her. "You're the one who's blushing."
"I'm not blushing, I'm overheated, there are nine goblins in this lift."
"Eight. One of them's a very short wizard."
She bit her lip, hard, to stop herself laughing. He watched her do it and had to look at the ceiling.
"Why are you doing this?"
It was the eighth night. She was on the sofa with her files and he was at the other end with a book he hadn't read a word of, and she'd been chewing her quill for twenty minutes. He'd gone to the kitchen twice.
"Doing what?"
"Testifying." She put the quill down. "I've read your statement four hundred times. I know what you saw. You valued the Rosier estate, you found a ledger, you recognised Selwyn's mark, you traced the necklace back to the shop in Knockturn Alley and then to the Healer who bought it for her mother. You could have kept quiet. Nobody would have known. Selwyn's people have already sent you two threats. And you came to us anyway."
"Public-spirited."
"You're not public-spirited. You're the least public-spirited man I've ever met. You complain about the Muggle bus." She turned on the sofa to face him, tucking her feet under her. "Tell me the truth, Malfoy. I'm not your prosecutor at the moment. I'm just a person sitting on your sofa because an old man sneezed."
He looked at the book for a while. He didn't want to say it. Then, because it was her, and because she'd asked as though the answer mattered, he said it.
"I carried something like that once. For a man like him." He turned a page he hadn't read. "Different necklace. Same idea. I was terrified, the whole time, and I did it anyway, because I was more frightened of him than of what it might do. Someone nearly died." He shut the book. "I've been trying to put it down ever since. That's all. It's not noble. I just want to put it down."
She didn't say anything for a long time. When he finally looked up, she was watching him with an expression he'd never seen on her face before, not in six weeks of witness prep, not in all the years before that. It wasn't pity. He'd have hated pity. It was closer to recognition.
"That's the bravest reason anyone's ever given me," she said quietly.
"It's not brave. It's guilt with a filing system."
"Most bravery is." She moved along the sofa, all the way along, until she was sitting next to him, close enough that her knee touched his thigh. The Vow hummed, pleased, around his wrist. "Draco."
His heart did something violent.
"I need to ask you something," she said, "and I need you to tell me the truth, because I'll know if you don't. Does the Vow do anything to you? To how you feel. About me."
He understood the question. She was a careful woman, and a lawyer, and she wanted to know whose wanting it was.
"Vows bind actions," he said, very steadily. "Not feelings. It can make me stay in reach. It can't make me want to." He held her gaze. "And I wanted to long before Ogden ever got his wand out, Granger. I've wanted to since the first day of witness prep, when you told me my statement was 'riddled with adverbs' and made me rewrite it in front of you."
"It was riddled with adverbs."
"I know. I'd put them in to annoy you."
She laughed, and it caught halfway, and became something else. She put her hand on his jaw. Her fingers were cool and slightly ink-stained.
"For the record," she said, "it doesn't do anything to me either. I checked. I've been checking for a week. It's just me."
"Is that a confession?"
"It's a statement of fact," said Hermione Granger, and kissed him.
He'd imagined it, and he'd been wrong about everything. He'd imagined her cool and precise. She was neither. She kissed him hungrily, her hand sliding from his jaw into his hair and gripping, and when he pulled her into his lap she came with a small, rough sound against his mouth, straddling him, her knees sinking into the sofa cushions on either side of his hips. Files slid off the coffee table and fanned across the floor. Neither of them looked.
"Bed," she said, against his mouth. "There's a wall to take down."
"You built it."
"I'm aware." She bit his lower lip. "I'm a strong believer in the rule of law. I also believe in repealing bad legislation."
He stood with her still wrapped around him, and she laughed into his neck, and he carried her down the corridor, which was within reach the whole way, and dropped her onto the bed amid the pillow wall, and she swept it onto the floor with one arm like a woman clearing a desk.
Then she sat up on her knees and pulled the borrowed T-shirt over her head.
He'd forgotten how to breathe. She was all warm skin in the lamplight, soft curves, a faint pale scar along her ribs he wanted to know the story of, her breasts full and bare, nipples already tightening in the cool air of the room. She looked back at him with her chin up and her cheeks flushed, as if daring him to say something.
"Granger," he said hoarsely. "You're..."
"If you say 'riddled,' I'm leaving."
"You can't. Fifty feet."
"I can get to the bathroom and lock the door," she said, and reached for his shirt buttons.
He let her undress him. She did it the way she did everything, thoroughly, with complete attention, her hands sliding over each new stretch of skin she uncovered, down his chest and along his left forearm to the faded grey ghost of the Mark, which she traced, once, with a fingertip, and then kissed. He shuddered. She got his trousers open and pushed them down with his pants and took him in her hand, hard and aching, and stroked him slowly, watching his face.
"Is this all right?"
"Merlin, yes. Is this?" He cupped her breast, ran his thumb over the nipple, and felt her gasp.
"Yes. Keep going. Don't you dare stop."
He laid her back on the bed and kissed his way down her body. Her throat, her collarbone, the scar on her ribs, the soft curve of her stomach. He pulled her knickers down and off and settled between her thighs and looked up at her, and she was propped on her elbows, watching him with dark, hungry eyes.
"Tell me what you like," he said.
"I'll tell you if you get it wrong."
"Of course you will."
He put his mouth on her, slow at first, learning her: the long flat stroke of his tongue that made her hips jerk, the tight circles over her clit that made her fall back onto the pillows, the two fingers he slid inside her, curving, that made her say his name in a voice he'd never heard her use. She told him, in fact, exactly what she liked, in a breathless series of instructions that became less and less coherent, and he obeyed every one of them until she came against his mouth with her hand fisted in his hair and her thighs trembling around his head.
He moved up her body. She pulled him down into a deep, wet kiss, tasting herself on him, and reached between them to guide him.
"Wait," he said, and she stilled. "Are you sure?"
"I swept the wall onto the floor, Malfoy." She wrapped her legs around his waist. "Yes. I want you. Now."
He pushed into her slowly, inch by inch, watching her face. She was hot and slick and so tight he had to stop halfway and press his forehead to hers and breathe. She arched under him, taking him the rest of the way, and they both groaned. Around their wrists, the silver lines of the Vow flared briefly gold, and then faded, as if it were satisfied that they were finally, completely, within reach.
"Did you see..."
"I saw. Ignore it." She rolled her hips. "Move."
He moved. Slow, deep strokes, rocking into her while she clung to his shoulders and met him, her heels pressing into the backs of his thighs, urging him harder, faster. He gave her what she asked for. The headboard knocked against the wall in a rhythm the neighbours would complain about. She came a second time with his name on her lips and her nails in his back, clenching around him so hard he saw white, and he followed her over the edge a moment later, buried deep inside her, her name torn out of him like something he'd been keeping in his chest for years.
Afterwards she lay with her head on his shoulder and drew lazy shapes on his chest, and he lay with his arm around her and stared at the ceiling and thought, very clearly, I am not going to survive this woman.
"We should sleep," she murmured. "The Vow tightens."
"Let it." He turned his face into her hair. "I'm not going anywhere."
They slept tangled together without a single inch of pillow between them, and for the first night in a week, neither wrist burned.
He woke at seven to the sound of an owl hammering on the window. It was a Ministry owl, and it had a copy of the Daily Prophet tied to its leg, folded open to page three. Hermione, still half asleep, untied it, unfolded it, and went completely still.
There was a photograph. It had been taken through the grille of the Ministry lift three days earlier, at an angle, from the Atrium below, on the morning of the goblins. In it, Draco Malfoy was leaning down toward Hermione Granger, and she was biting her lip and looking up at him, and the expression on both their faces left nothing whatsoever to the imagination.
The headline read: PROSECUTOR AND STAR WITNESS: SELWYN DEFENCE CRIES FOUL.
Below it, in smaller type: Mockridge to move for dismissal on grounds of improper relationship. Hearing set for Monday.