Chapter 2: Hold It Down
He did what any Malfoy would have done in the circumstances. He fled to Wiltshire.
"Isaure was a Veela of the Camargue," his mother said, pouring tea in the small sitting room at the back of the Manor, the only room in the house she still liked. "Your great-great-grandfather met her at a horse fair in Arles and lost his mind. It skips. It nearly always skips." She set the pot down. "Who is it, darling?"
Draco looked at the white peacocks dragging their tails across the lawn outside and said nothing.
"Draco."
"It's Granger."
The teacup in his mother's hand did not rattle. Narcissa Malfoy had survived the Dark Lord living in her house; her teacups did not rattle. But she was quiet for long enough that one of the peacocks finished its circuit of the fountain and started another.
"Well," she said at last. "She'll certainly keep you honest."
"Mother."
"I mean it kindly. You need someone who'll argue with you." She reached over and put her cool hand on his burning one. "You haven't used it on her. The allure."
"No."
"Don't. Ever. If she comes to you, it has to be her. Isaure used to say that the claim is a question you ask with your whole life, and you have to be able to bear the answer." Her mouth tightened. "Your great-great-grandfather couldn't. It wasn't a happy house."
He stayed three days. He owled the office to say he had dragon pox, which nobody believed, since he'd had it at six. The fever got worse with distance, a slow, low burn under his skin like a coal banked in ash, and the shapes on his back came and went at night and scorched the Manor linen. He did not write to Granger. She did not write to him.
On the fourth evening he went back to Marylebone, because he had run out of clean shirts and self-respect in roughly equal measure, and found her sitting on his doorstep.
She had a bag of books on one side of her and a sack of oranges on the other, and she was reading. He stopped at the foot of the steps with his heart going like a trapped bird and the scent of her coming at him on the warm evening air, oranges and ink and her, and the whole of his body tilting forward as though the pavement had become a slope.
"You weren't at work," she said, turning a page.
"Dragon pox."
"You had it when you were six. It's in your file."
"You read my file."
"I read everyone's file. I'm very thorough." She closed the book and looked up at him, and her face was pale and set and determined, and under it, he thought, something else. "Are you going to ask me in, or do you want to have this conversation on the street?"
He let her in. His flat was small and tidy, pale wood and books and one good painting of the sea. Granger put the oranges on the counter and the books on the table and turned round, and they stood there in his kitchen with six feet of floor between them that felt like a mile and a hand's breadth both at once.
"You didn't answer me," she said. "In the office."
"You didn't need me to. You'd worked it out."
"I want to hear you say it."
He looked at her. At her chin, set at the angle that meant she was going to see this through if it killed her.
"It's you," he said. "Of course it's you. It was always going to be you. Apparently some ancestral part of me has been taking notes for eight months." He heard his own voice crack and hated it. "I'm not asking you for anything, Granger. I know what the Act says. You wrote it. You can walk out of here and I'll transfer to Beasts. It'll hurt. I'll live. I'd rather that than have you here because some French horse-fair witch in my blood decided—"
"Turn it off," said Granger.
He stopped.
"The allure. I know you've got it. I've read every account. I can feel something, Draco, I can feel it right now, like warm water at the back of my neck. And I need to know." She took a step towards him. "I need to know what's mine. I've spent four days thinking about you. Every minute. I thought about your stupid hands on the arms of that chair. And I don't know if that's me, or if it's you, doing something to me, and I can't bear not knowing. So turn it off."
"It's not a tap. I can't just..."
"Then hold it down. As hard as you can. I'll wait."
He shut his eyes.
It was like closing his hand around a hot coal. He found the thing in himself that reached for her, the gold, insistent pull of it, and he dragged it back and down and held it, and it fought him. The fever spiked. His back burned. He kept holding it, because she had asked, and because he would rather have burned to the ground than have her not know.
When he opened his eyes, she was standing right in front of him.
"Is it off?" she whispered.
"As off as it goes." His voice was shredded. "Granger. Hermione. You don't have to..."
"Shut up," she said. "I'm checking."
She put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart. She looked up into his face for a long, long moment, her brown eyes searching his with that dark ring around the iris, and he watched her think and saw the instant she reached her conclusion.
"Oh, it's me," she said, sounding almost annoyed about it. "Bloody hell. It was always me."
She went up on her toes and kissed him.
It was not gentle. She kissed him like she argued, fierce and precise and going straight for the point, and he made a sound into her mouth he'd never made in his life and caught her by the waist and kissed her back, and for one wild second the hold slipped and the light flared out of his back and filled the kitchen gold. He felt her gasp. He wrenched it back.
"Sorry. Sorry, I..."
"Don't." She had her hands in his shirt. "I've decided. I'm allowed to change my mind and I'm telling you I won't. Let it go."
"Are you sure?"
"Draco." She pulled back far enough to look at him, flushed and furious and certain. "I want this. I want you. Ask me again and I'll hex you."
He let it go.
The light poured out of him, and the wings came with it, fully this time, vast and translucent and edged in fire, arching up and out until they brushed the ceiling and the walls and the painting of the sea, and Hermione Granger looked up at them with her lips parted and her eyes huge and said, in a voice of pure scholarly greed, "Oh, I need to measure those."
He laughed against her neck and she laughed with him, breathless, and then neither of them was laughing.
He got her to the bedroom somehow. He remembered the buttons of her blouse, small and pearl and unreasonable, and her hands shoving his shirt off his shoulders, and the noise she made when she got it off and ran her palms up the hot skin of his back, up and up, to the place where the wings met his body. He nearly went to his knees.
"Sensitive?" she said, wickedly, against his mouth.
"You have no idea."
"I'm going to find out." She did it again, slower, her fingertips tracing the join where light became skin, and he shuddered from head to foot and bore her down onto the bed and kissed her until she stopped being smug.
She was all soft heat under him, and the scent of her was everywhere now, in his mouth, in the sheets, rising off her skin as he kissed his way down her throat and across her collarbone. He got the blouse off. He got the plain cotton bra off and put his mouth to her breast, and she arched up off the bed with a sound that went straight through him. He took his time. He licked and sucked until her nipple was a hard, wet peak and she was pulling his hair, then moved to the other, while his hand found the zip of her skirt.
"Tell me," he said, against her stomach.
"Yes. Draco, yes, don't stop."
He didn't stop. He drew the skirt and her knickers down her legs together and knelt between her thighs and looked at her, spread out on his sheets in the gold light of his own wings, flushed down to her breasts, curls everywhere, watching him with dark eyes, and the creature in him went utterly still with something that felt like reverence.
"Mine," it said, through him. He hadn't meant to say it.
Her breath caught. "Not yet," she said. "Not the claim. Not tonight." She reached down and touched his face. "But this. All of this. I want this."
"Then you'll have it."
He put his mouth on her.
She was wet already, and she tasted like salt and heat and something under it that the Veela in him knew and wanted with a savagery that frightened him. He held it down. He gave her his tongue instead, slow and broad and then narrower, circling her clit until her thighs began to shake against his shoulders, then pushing two fingers into her, curling them, finding the place that made her cry out and grab at the headboard. When she came it was with his name, both of his names, gasped out in a rising string, and her heels drumming on his back, and every plant in the flat, he would find out later, blooming at once.
He kissed his way back up her body. She dragged at his belt with clumsy, determined hands. He helped her. When he was naked, she pushed him over onto his back with surprising strength, the wings flaring out across the bed beneath him like spilt light, and climbed astride his hips.
"Hermione."
"I know." She took him in her hand. He nearly died. "I want to watch you."
She sank down onto him slowly, her lip caught in her teeth, and he watched her face as she took him inch by inch, wet and tight and scalding, until she was seated fully against him and they were both shaking. For a moment neither of them moved. She put her hands flat on his chest. He put his on her hips. His wings curved up around her without his asking them to, a cage of gold light, holding her in.
"Is that them?" she whispered. "Doing that?"
"That's me," he said. "That's all me."
She started to move.
He let her set the pace, because the Veela wanted to take her and he wanted, more than that, to be chosen. She rode him slowly at first, rolling her hips, finding the angle she liked and grinding down onto it with little gasps. Then faster. He met her, thrust for thrust, his fingers digging into her hips, watching her breasts move and her head fall back and her mouth fall open. When she came the second time, her whole body clenched around him and she fell forward onto his chest with a broken cry, and he wrapped his arms and his wings around her and rolled her under him and thrust into her, deep and hard, once, twice, again, and followed her over the edge with her name in his mouth and gold light pouring out of him in a flood that lit the room like noon.
Afterwards, she lay with her head on his chest and traced the edge of a wing with one finger, and it felt like being stroked from the inside.
"They're bigger than any recorded case," she murmured. "We'll have to update the literature."
"Romantic."
"I'm being romantic. That's what I sound like." She tipped her chin up and looked at him. "I meant it. Not the claim yet. I need a little time. I'm not saying no. I'm saying I want to say yes properly, when I can stand behind it."
"I know." He smoothed a curl off her forehead. "I'll wait."
She smiled and fell asleep in the middle of it, and he lay awake for a long time with her breath on his skin and the light slowly dimming on the ceiling, and made a decision.
He left her sleeping, with coffee on and a note on the pillow: Gone in early. Oranges in the bowl. Don't read anything on my desk.
It was, he understood, the single most effective way to guarantee that she would.
She came into the office at five past nine with her hair still damp and her blouse buttoned one hole off. She didn't look at him. She went straight to his half of the L, picked up the sheet of parchment on top of his blotter, signed, dated and already stamped by Personnel, and read it.
I hereby withdraw my application for the post of Head of the Being Division, in favour of the more qualified candidate.
She read it three times. The little white flower on her desk, he noticed, had closed.
Then Hermione Granger set the parchment down very gently, turned to him, and said, in the quiet, pleasant voice she used on Wizengamot members just before she ended their careers, "Corridor. Now."