Chapter 3: In the Mate's Own Language
The corridor on Level Four was not, it turned out, private enough for what Hermione Granger had to say to him. She marched him past the Centaur Liaison Office and the Goblin Liaison Office and the cupboard that used to be the Werewolf Support Services until someone remembered werewolves had feelings and gave them a proper room, and into a disused meeting room with a long table and a portrait of a sleeping wizard in a ruff, and she shut the door with her wand and cast Muffliato without looking.
"In favour of the more qualified candidate," she said.
"You are the more qualified candidate."
"I know I'm the more qualified candidate. That's not the point."
"Then what is the point?" He'd meant to be calm. He'd rehearsed being calm since six that morning. But she was standing an arm's length away with her blouse buttoned wrong, smelling of his soap and her own skin under it, and the Veela in him was pacing like a caged thing, and calm had left the building. "Section Nine, Granger. Your section. A registered Veela may not hold a supervisory position over their bonded mate. If I got the job and you said yes, I'd have to resign it. If you got the job and you said yes, it doesn't matter, because I'm not proud, I'd work for you. So I took myself out of it. I made it simple. I made it so the only thing you have to decide is whether you want me, not whether you want me more than a promotion."
"You didn't ask me."
"I didn't want you to have to choose."
"That," said Hermione, very precisely, "is the stupidest thing anyone has ever done for me, and Ron Weasley once tried to propose with a Chocolate Frog card."
The man in the portrait snorted in his sleep.
Draco opened his mouth. Shut it. She was breathing hard, colour high in her cheeks, and there was something in her eyes beyond anger that he couldn't read and that made the Veela in him go quiet and alert.
"I don't want the job," she said.
He stared at her.
"I don't want the job," she repeated, louder, as if it had been stuck in her throat and she was dislodging it. "I've never wanted the job. Head of the Being Division is a budget, Draco. It's three hundred forms a week and Centaur grievances and arguing with Finance about the price of owl treats. I'd be miserable. I applied because you did."
"Because I..."
"Because the moment you put your name down, I could not bear the idea of you getting it. I could not bear you sitting in that big office with the real window and smirking at me through the door. So I applied, and I wrote a vision statement the length of a novella, and I've been preparing for the interview for six weeks, for a job I don't want, entirely to spite you."
The silence was long enough for the man in the portrait to wake up, look at them, and wisely pretend to go back to sleep.
"I don't want it either," said Draco.
Her mouth fell open.
"I applied because my father wrote to me from France and said a Malfoy should be running a division by twenty-five or what was the point of him." He heard himself and nearly laughed. "And then you applied, and I thought, well, I'm definitely not withdrawing now."
They looked at each other across the meeting room. Then Hermione Granger put both hands over her face and started to laugh, helplessly, the way she'd laughed in his bed with the wings over them, and after a moment he started too, and he had to lean on the long table to stay upright.
"We're idiots," she said through her fingers.
"Speak for yourself. I'm a Veela. I have an excuse."
She lowered her hands. Her eyes were wet. She took one step towards him, then another, until she stood right in front of him, and she reached up and straightened his collar with small, careful movements, as if it mattered.
"I'm going to withdraw too," she said. "And then Mafalda Hopkirk can have it. She actually wants it. She's got a colour-coded calendar."
"And then?"
"And then," she said, "you're going to ask me properly."
They stayed late. It wasn't hard: on a Friday, Level Four emptied by five like a bath with the plug pulled. He sat at his half of the L-shaped desk and did not work, and she sat at hers and pretended to, and the little white flower on her desk opened and closed and opened again in the false sunset of the window, like something breathing.
At seven, she put down her quill.
"Lock the door," she said.
He locked the door. When he turned back, she'd stood up, and she was standing on her side of the line of red tape across the floor, and she was looking at it.
"Do you remember why I put this down?"
"The coffee. The Kneazle report."
"You spilled an entire mug of coffee over forty pages of evidence, and then you said I shouldn't have left it on the corner of the desk, because the corner of the desk was obviously your territory." She nudged the tape with the toe of her shoe. "I wanted to kill you. I went home and told Ginny I'd been placed in an office with the most insufferable wizard in the Ministry, and she laughed at me for twenty minutes and said, 'Oh, Hermione. Not again.'"
"Not again?"
She didn't answer that. She crouched down, picked at the end of the tape with her thumbnail, and peeled it up off the floor in one long, slow strip. When it was free, she balled it up, and dropped it in his wastepaper basket, and straightened, and stepped across the place where it had been.
"Ask me," she said.
His heart had stopped. Started again. He stood very still by the door with the Veela rising in him like a tide, and he didn't push it down this time. He let her see it, the gold beginning at his shoulders, the faint lift of light behind him.
"Hermione Granger," he said, and his voice did not sound like his own. "I don't know how to say this in any way that isn't ridiculous. Some witch from the Camargue a hundred and fifty years ago passed something to me, and it woke up on my birthday, and it looked at you, and it said yes. But it was late. I'd already said it. I said it about six months ago when you threw a copy of the Centaur Accords at me because I'd got a footnote wrong, and I thought, oh no. Oh, no, not her." He swallowed. "So I'm asking. Not the blood. Me. Will you let me be yours?"
She was smiling, wet-eyed and furious with herself for it.
"The words," she said. "There are words. I've read every account. The Veela asks, and the mate answers, in the mate's own language, so there's no misunderstanding."
"What are they?"
"There aren't set ones. It just has to be true." She crossed the last of the distance and took his face in both her hands. "I choose you. Not because of what's in your blood. Because you argue with me and you're nearly always wrong, and you bring me oranges, and you withdrew from a job you didn't want for a woman who didn't want it either. I choose you, Draco. Claim me. Please."
The light came out of him like a door blown open.
The wings went up and out, gold and enormous, knocking a stack of files off her desk and filling the tiny office wall to wall until the light from them made the charmed window look grey. He felt the Veela in him reach for her, finally, fully, without restraint, and her not flinch. She stepped into it. She lifted her chin and bared her throat to him, the place where her pulse beat, and said, "There. That's where it goes, isn't it? I read that too."
"You read everything."
"Shut up and do it."
He put his mouth to her throat.
It was a kiss, at first. Just a kiss, open-mouthed and slow, his lips against the hammering pulse, and he felt her shiver from head to foot. Then the Veela came up through him like heat through glass, and something passed from his mouth to her skin, not pain, a brightness, and she cried out and clutched at his shoulders. When he lifted his head there was a mark at the side of her throat, small and gold and shaped like a feather, shimmering faintly under the skin.
She touched it with wondering fingers.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, I can feel you. I can feel you in my chest."
He couldn't answer. He was shaking. He could feel her too, a warm second heartbeat under his own, her hunger and her happiness and, beneath them, a fierce bright possessiveness that matched his so exactly it made him dizzy. She was claiming him back. Of course she was.
She kissed him. Then she shoved him, hard, back against the edge of his own desk.
"Your side," she said. "Your territory. Isn't that right?"
He laughed, breathless, and pulled her with him.
They didn't get all their clothes off. There wasn't time; neither of them could stand to stop touching long enough. He got her blouse open, the mis-buttoned blouse, and pushed her bra down and put his mouth on her breasts while she fumbled at his belt. She got his trousers open and his cock in her hand, hot and hard and aching, and stroked him with a slow, firm grip that made the wings flare and blew every quill off both desks. He shoved her skirt up around her waist. She wasn't wearing anything under it.
He stared at her.
"I came straight from yours," she said, flushed and defiant. "I didn't have any clean ones. Don't look at me like that."
"I'm going to look at you like this for the rest of my life."
He turned them, lifted her onto the edge of the desk, scattering parchment, and she wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him in. He slid into her in one long stroke and they both cried out. She was slick and hot around him, and with the bond open between them he could feel it from both sides at once, his own pleasure and hers, the stretch and fullness of him inside her, the way she clenched when he rolled his hips. It was almost too much. It was everything.
"Draco." She was gripping his shoulders, her head thrown back. "Draco, harder, I can feel what you feel, that's not fair..."
"Nothing about this is fair." He drove into her, harder, the desk shuddering under them, the white flower in its pot jolting toward the edge. "You picked me. That's not fair. I'm going to spend years trying to deserve it."
"Then start now," she gasped, and dragged his mouth down to hers.
He fucked her across his own desk with the golden light of his wings filling the room and her heels locked at the small of his back, and every stroke he felt twice. When she started to come, it hit him through the bond like a wave breaking, and he lost himself completely, crying her name into her neck, against the gold feather mark, as he came deep inside her, and the light went out of him in one long, shuddering pulse that cracked the false window from corner to corner.
They lay on the floor of the office afterwards, on the spot where the red tape had been, her head on his chest and his wings folded loosely around them both like a blanket made of evening.
"We broke the window," she said drowsily.
"Magical Maintenance will be thrilled."
"We'll have to report it. Section Twenty, Damage to Ministry Property Caused by a Magical Being." She traced the gold mark on her throat, then his collarbone. "And you have to register. Seven days. You're on day five."
"I'll do it Monday."
"You'll do it now." She sat up, naked but for her open blouse, and reached up onto her desk for a form. She'd had it ready, of course. She filled in his name and his date of manifestation in her neat, tight hand, and then stopped at the line that read Name of chosen mate (if applicable), and held the quill above it.
He watched her write, very carefully, Hermione Jean Granger, and then sign it at the bottom as the witnessing officer.
"That's a conflict of interest," he said.
"I know." She blew on the ink. "Let them come for us, Malfoy." She looked down at him over her shoulder, the mark glowing at her throat, and smiled the smile that had been making his life difficult for eight months. "I'd like to see them try."