Chapter 2: Hermione doesn't remove her fingers from Briana's soaked cunt even as Harry stammers an apology - instead she crooks them just right to make Briana whimper, then challenges 'Problem, Potter?' with a defiant glare, watching his pupils dilate as Briana arches into her touch, the scent of their arousal thick in the dusty air.
The silence in Hermione’s flat the next morning was a living thing, thick with the scent of their bodies and the echo of what they’d done. Sunlight sliced through a gap in the curtains, illuminating dust motes dancing over discarded clothes. Briana stirred first, her curls a dark cloud on the pillow beside Hermione. She blinked, the previous night’s fear replaced by a wary, settled calm. She watched Hermione sleep, the fierce lines of her face softened in repose.
Hermione’s eyes opened. She didn’t startle. She turned her head, meeting Briana’s gaze. No regret. Only a deep, satisfied assessment.
“He knows,” Briana said quietly, giving voice to the thought that had hung in the air all night.
“I know.” Hermione sat up, the sheet pooling at her waist. The marks from Briana’s mouth and hands were faint shadows on her skin. She reached for her wand on the nightstand, giving it a casual flick. A silvery otter burst from the tip, paused for instruction, and then shot off through the wall. “Calling in a favor. We need information he can’t trace. And we need a place to work he’d never think to look.”
The reply came not by owl, but in the form of a small, charmed slip of parchment that materialized on the kettle an hour later. It bore a single, familiar, untidy scrawl: Sub-level nine, past the broken sneakoscope cupboard. Midnight. Bring coffee. -H.
Harry.
Of course. If anyone knew the forgotten corners of the Ministry, it was him.
The Abandoned Archives on Sub-level nine smelled of damp stone, mildew, and the peculiar, metallic tang of latent magic. The enchanted lanterns here had mostly failed, leaving pools of ominous darkness between sparse, flickering lights. Towers of crumbling scrolls leaned like drunken sentinels. The air was cold enough to see their breath.
“Cheery,” Harry muttered, his own Auror robes seeming to absorb the gloom. He held a thermos of coffee out to Hermione. His eyes, shadowed with the perpetual tiredness that had never really left him since the war, flicked to Briana and then away, a quick, professional scan. “You must be Briana. Hermione’s otter was… sparse on details. Said you needed a hole to hide in.”
“Something like that,” Briana said, her voice barely above a whisper in the vast, echoing space. She pulled her cloak tighter.
“It’s a family matter,” Hermione said, cutting to the chase. She moved to a rickety table, sweeping dust and dead ironbellies from its surface with her sleeve. “The Hawthornes.”
Harry’s posture changed instantly. The weary friend vanished; the Auror took his place. “Alistair Hawthorne. Nasty piece of work. Clean as a whistle, officially. Contributes generously to every Ministry re-election campaign. We’ve had whispers for years—coercion, magical coercion, memory alteration on muggle-baiting victims to drop charges… but nothing that sticks. The magic is always too clever, or the witnesses change their minds.”
“He used a Cogitatio Inquinamentum variant on his own daughter,” Hermione said, her words sharp in the cold air. “To ‘cure’ her bisexuality.”
Harry stared at Briana. The professional detachment in his gaze cracked, revealing a flash of pure, unvarnished anger. It was the same anger that had fueled him for years, the anger at bullies hiding behind wealth and tradition. “You broke it?”
“Last night.”
“Then he’ll be moving to contain the liability.” Harry began to pace, a prowling motion. “He won’t go to the Ministry. He’ll use family magic. Blood curses, binding vows, lineage seals. The old, deep stuff the Department of Mysteries doesn’t even fully understand. The kind of magic that doesn’t care about Azkaban.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Hermione said, pointing her wand at a towering shelf. “Accio texts on bloodline covenants and counter-curse theory.”
A few truly ancient, leather-bound volumes lumbered through the air, settling on the table with a thump that raised more dust. The work began. It was hours of squinting at archaic script, cross-referencing, arguing in low, intense voices. Harry’s practical Auror knowledge of dark artifacts complemented Hermione’s theoretical mastery. Briana sat mostly silent, but when she spoke, it was with a profound, instinctual understanding of the kind of magic they were discussing—the lived experience of its subtle, suffocating pressure.
The intimacy of the previous night thrummed beneath the surface of their work, a secret current. When Hermione’s hand brushed Briana’s over a diagram of a familial loyalty hex, the touch lingered for a second too long. When Briana leaned over Hermione’s shoulder to read a passage, her breath ghosted against Hermione’s neck. The tension was no longer just about the threat from outside; it was about this new, electric thing between them, born in defiance and sealed with sweat on a flat floor.
They found a potential thread—an obscure counterspell mentioned in a marginal note, requiring a concentrated burst of intent tied to a specific lunar phase. It was a sliver of hope.
“It’s something,” Harry sighed, rubbing his eyes. “But we’d need to cast it at the Hawthorne estate’s central hearth to disrupt the network. It’s a suicide run.”
“Then we find another way in,” Hermione insisted, her jaw set.
The emotional and mental fatigue was oppressive. The single lantern on their table guttered, plunging their corner of the archives into deeper shadow. The silence between sentences grew heavier.
Briana stood up abruptly. “I can’t. Just for a minute. I can’t look at one more word about how my own blood can be used as a cage.” She walked a few paces away, into the deeper darkness between two high shelves, her figure dissolving into the gloom.
Hermione followed. Not out of concern, but from a pull she no longer wanted to resist.
She found Briana standing with her forehead pressed against the cold stone of a shelf, her shoulders trembling. Not crying. Shaking with contained rage.
“Hey,” Hermione murmured.
Briana turned. In the near-total dark, her eyes were vast pools of reflected, faint light. “I keep feeling his thumb on my mind. Even though it’s gone. The ghost of it. I need it gone. I need to feel something else.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a declaration.
Hermione closed the last gap between them, pushing Briana back against the shelves. Ancient scrolls rattled. She kissed her, hard, a claim and a comfort. Briana’s response was instantaneous, a raw, needy sound swallowed by Hermione’s mouth. Her hands flew to Hermione’s robes, fumbling with the fastenings.
“Here. Now,” Briana panted against her lips.
The recklessness of it, the danger, the smell of decay and knowledge—it fanned the flames. This was theirs. In this forgotten place, under the nose of the institution and the father, they would take this.
Hermione’s robes fell open. Briana’s fingers, surprisingly strong, shoved Hermione’s knickers down her thighs. The cold air hit her skin, followed by the searing heat of Briana’s palm cupping her. Briana’s other hand was behind her, gripping a shelf for leverage.
“Fuck me,” Briana hissed, guiding Hermione’s fingers down the front of her own trousers. “Don’t be gentle. I don’t want gentle.”
Hermione’s fingers slid into slick, molten heat. Briana was soaking wet. Hermione drove two fingers inside her, curling them up hard, and Briana’s head thudded back against the scrolls, a guttural moan tearing from her throat. Hermione set a punishing rhythm, her thumb grinding against Briana’s clit in tight, brutal circles. This was fucking, pure and simple—an exorcism through friction.
“Yes, just like that, harder,” Briana chanted, her hips pistoning against Hermione’s hand. Her own hand was between Hermione’s legs now, fingers sliding through slick folds, mimicking the same relentless cadence. “You feel that? That’s you. That’s real. That’s mine.”
Their breaths came in ragged, echoing gasps in the silent archives. The smell of sex, musky and alive, cut through the dust. Hermione’s world narrowed to the feeling of Briana clenching around her fingers and the furious, expert pressure of Briana’s fingers on her own clit. It was a race, a collision, a frantic rewriting of sensation.
“I’m gonna come,” Briana growled, her teeth nipping at Hermione’s shoulder. “Make me come.”
Hermione fucked her deeper, faster, pressing the heel of her hand against her. Briana shattered, a silent, seizing cry locked in her throat, her body convulsing in waves around Hermione’s fingers. The intense clenching was the final trigger. Hermione followed her over the edge, her own climax a sharp, blinding release that stole her breath and buckled her knees.
They slumped together, foreheads touching, panting hot mist into the cold space between them. Hermione could feel Briana’s heart hammering against her own chest. The ghost was gone, burned away in the raw, physical reality.
A soft, shocked intake of breath sliced through the post-coital haze.
It came from the entrance to their shadowy aisle.
Hermione and Briana froze, still intimately joined.
A figure stood silhouetted against the dim light of the main corridor. The outline of messy hair, the glint of round glasses.
Harry.
He stood utterly still, a file folder dangling forgotten from one hand. His face was a mask of stunned incomprehension. He’d seen. He’d heard.
Time suspended. The silence was no longer intimate; it was a vacuum, sucking all sound and reason out of the world.
Hermione acted first. With a swift, terrible dignity, she withdrew her hand from Briana’s trousers, pulling her own robes closed. Briana, pale and wide-eyed, fumbled to right her clothes.
“Harry,” Hermione said. Her voice was hoarse but steady. It was not the voice of someone caught. It was the voice of someone declaring a position.
He didn’t speak. He just stared, his gaze moving from Hermione’s flushed, defiant face to Briana’s terrified one, then down to the dusty floor between them, as if the answers to a thousand unasked questions were written there. The file in his hand slipped, parchment spilling across the stone with a sound like a dying sigh.