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Hermione Granger is not the person she appears to be.
Sounds melodramatic, Remus knows. Bear with him. There’s a point to be made, here—a series of premises that build to this fundamental, melodramatic conclusion. There is logic to this.
Perhaps he should start from the beginning.
Mornings, the First
If Remus could have cast a vote, he would have voted against it. It being, here, the sleeping arrangements assigned to him and Hermione at Hogwarts. There are hundreds of rooms in the castle, and he knows from developing the Marauder’s Map that only a good half of them are used at any one time. He could have had a wing of rooms, Hermione could have had a wing of rooms, and ne’er the twain shall have needed to meet.
Unfortunately, he did not get a vote. Neither did she.
In the recovering ruins of the Wizarding World, they both are heroic survivors of the Battle of Hogwarts, veterans of the front line, and idols. She is, naturally, the passionate genius that Harry Potter credits for keeping his head on straight for his entire Hogwarts career; as he’ll tell anyone that’ll listen, without Hermione’s wisdom, care, and dedication, he would never have survived his first year, let alone destroying all the Horcruxes and killing Voldemort. Remus is, conversely, the battle-weary soldier that proved (with Bill, of course) that werewolves fought for the side of good just as readily as they fought for darkness, revolutionizing werewolf rights in one fell swoop.
They are hardened people, the two of them. Yet, in some sick sense of balance, the hardness that made them survive the war brought weakness, too. Nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, all of it. A lot of people have post-traumatic stress, the reports say, but the people in the Order apparently have it the worst.
Thus, it is not Hermione and Remus who decide the sleeping arrangements for themselves, once they both decide to return to Hogwarts and resume their respective roles. It is a team of Mind Healers, Hogwarts staff, and Ministry personnel. That team insists that in order to keep the Order members safe, healthy, and healing, they need to be separated from the fame-greedy masses, yet clumped up together for moral support. Never mind that the only two Order members who returned, besides Minerva, are Remus and Hermione. Never mind that Remus is still grieving the loss of his wife four months later. Never mind that his bitter, aching loneliness makes him crave company in shameful ways. They are bunked up together, case closed.
The arrangements are these: They share an expanded version of a professor’s chambers. His professor chambers, to be exact. They have a small kitchenette for minor potions brewing or food preparation, a sitting room that surrounds a fireplace, an office and bedroom for each of them, and one shared lavatory.
There is space, Remus supposes, for them to lead separate lives without coming into much contact, if they so chose. They do not so choose. Frankly, despite the awkwardness, they both see the point of the cohabitation, which is that they should not be alone. When Hermione wakes screaming with nightmares, Remus is there to give her chocolate and remind her that Bellatrix is dead. When Remus falls into a memory, Hermione draws him out of it by reading passages of Shakespeare out loud. It works, somehow, for the two of them to serve as crutches for the other, and so they persist.
But as he said, the arrangements are awkward.
Hermione is a young, confident, beautiful witch that has more wiles than she realizes. Remus is the unsightly type of person who cannot help but notice those wiles. It goes without saying that the two of them living in close quarters creates its own brand of traumatic stress, at least for him.
Things are perfectly harmless for the first few weeks of term, when they are still adjusting to things and too busy to pay much attention to their sleeping situation. Hermione is in her eighth year and has elected to take as many N.E.W.T. classes as possible. Remus is the face of Defense Against the Dark Arts, the most important subject in post-war Hogwarts. They attend to their duties first, second, and third, each other’s needs fourth, and their own needs somewhere around sixth or seventh.
It’s what happens after the adjustment period that makes things unbearable.
Remus is a fellow who appreciates a strong cup of tea and a chapter of reading each morning. He takes his tea on the couch, reads his book by the fire, and then drags himself through his morning ablutions for breakfast with the rest of the school. It’s a lovely, fortifying morning ritual, and he feels wholly unprepared for the day until it’s done.
At the outset of their forced cohabitation, he would get himself fully dressed before so much as leaving his bedroom. Once it became obvious that Hermione had no such compunction, however, he stopped putting in as much effort. He now wears his standard, worn-thin-and-soft pajama pants, either with their matching shirt or with a t-shirt, depending on his preference of the day.
Hermione wears… less than that.
What she wears ostensibly counts as pajamas. Remus could also see her clothes being called torture devices. There’s a tiny tanktop (in light gray, muted red, or charcoal; Remus has seen and memorized all three) that just reaches the nip of her waist, and an equally tiny, matching pair of shorts that barely covers her bum. (Remus’ underwear would cover more; in a fit of madness, he snuck into her room, borrowed a pair of the shorts, and checked.) Both articles are ribbed, meaning that the material visibly stretches across her chest and rear.
She doesn’t wear a bra with them. Remus isn’t entirely sure if there are knickers involved, either. He certainly never sees any telltale seam lines, and he finds himself looking for them more often than he wants to admit. It’s awful enough just to look at her in her torture sets without feeling like a massive lech, but she makes it worse yet: She expects him to interact with her like this.
“Good morning, Remus,” she’ll say on an exhale, tying back her hair as she heads into the kitchen. She’ll wave her wand to start the kettle, then stretch her arms over her head and bounce up onto her tiptoes, groaning whenever her back pops. In this moment of every morning, Remus will feel the shape of each tooth where it sits in his mouth, and each of them will ache to find purchase in a swell of skin. She’ll drop back down onto the flats of her feet in a little jiggle that unseats his sanity. “Ready for another big, heroic day?”
“You know it,” he’ll reply, burying his nose in his book. He’ll run his tongue over the edges of his teeth and remind himself how repulsive it is to lust after someone half his age, let alone someone he’s known since their adolescence. “Wielding my red ink like a battle sword.”
And so their mornings commence. Remus tells himself that this is a hardship he can endure, and that if the worst parts of his days are those that tempt him, and not terrorize him, he’s doing fairly well for himself.
He doesn’t realize that tiny sleepwear and mouth-watering stretches are only just the start.
Mornings, the Second
A week into this new, wretched version of their daily ritual, Remus lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and telling himself to get over himself. He’s being ridiculous. He never used to be all that sexual; he repressed his urges in his youth, scared of getting close enough to someone to accidentally hurt them, and he found other ways of occupying his mind in his adulthood. This is a leftover from Dora. She was sexual, she was demanding, she was energetic. She kicked up all the dust and unlocked all the cages, bringing Remus’ libido to the forefront. She showed him how much more thrilling and rewarding life could be with oodles of sex in it. And now she’s gone, and all of the dust and cages inside Remus’ mind won’t shuffle themselves back to order.
Remus is just preparing to feel guilty for blaming his dead wife, of all things, for his lack of self-control, when he hears it:
A moan.
It’s quiet—so quiet, a normal set of ears wouldn’t hear it. Hogwarts walls aren’t built to carry sound like that. But Remus’ senses are werewolf-sharp, and they hear every moment of it. It’s a nightmare, he thinks, preparing himself for the inevitable scream and the inevitable comforting session that will follow. She’s having a nightmare again.
But then there’s a sigh. It is not the sigh of someone reliving their own torture. It’s soft, breathy, and luxurious. It’s the sigh of someone having a very, very pleasant experience.
Oh no.
Remus, still as a statue under his covers, holds his breath and tells himself that it’s because he’s horrified, and not because he wants to reduce his own noise pollution. He’s not waiting to hear more sounds. He’s just stuck.
He hears a whimper that’s bisected by a caught breath. A throaty groan. An anticipatory oh! followed a series of high-pitched, desperate exhales. ‘
Remus now lay in bed, staring at his ceiling and listening to Hermione Granger orgasm through their shared wall.
She sounds perfect.
In the seconds that follow, Remus tells himself to get over this, too. She’s a healthy, normal young adult who has healthy, normal needs. Needs that are not his business. He should ignore it, write it off as another awkwardness of their arrangement, and go about his day.
Instead, he rolls himself over, shoves a pillow under his hips, and muffles himself with a mouthful of his other pillow while he humps like the savage animal that he is. He orgasms to the thought of pressing a hand down on the back of Hermione’s neck, pushing her helpless, moaning face into the mattress.
It’s a fluke, he tells himself afterward. One shameful day, one failing, one mistake. He can move past it. Hermione probably doesn’t realize how sensitive his ears are; he’ll remind her subtly, somehow—a comment about something innocent, at some point, to let her know just how much he can hear. She’ll figure it out, and then it won’t happen again.
And it not happening again is a good thing. A good, healthy thing.
An opportunity presents itself two days later when they’re spending an evening reading by the fire. There’s a sound from the hallway outside that Remus notices a full minute before Hermione does—a group of students laughing and mucking about, totally innocent. She lifts her head and glances at the door, and his moment is upon him.
The words are there: a comment on how he can always hear when people walk by, a joke about feeling like the watchdog ready to bark at the knock on the door. It’s right there.
Remus flips a page in his book and says nothing.
The next morning, he stares at his bedroom ceiling and feels like the weakest, most pathetic pervert that ever lived. He could have fixed this.
Hermione releases a bitten-off whine in the other room. Her seventh of the morning.
And then—
And then—
“Oh,” Hermione cries, not even bothering to be quiet about it, “oh, Remus, oh!”
Remus sees red.
By the time he’s aware of himself, he’s got his arms wrapped under the edges of one of his pillows, like he might clutch at Hermione’s shoulders. His teeth have ripped a hole in the fabric, and his other pillow is in similarly soggy shape. His balls are empty.
It feels incredible.
Remus cleans himself up. He Scourgifies his pillows, repairs the bitemarks in the one, and tells himself that he can have this. He can permit himself this one private, indecent indiscretion. No one has to know. If this is what makes his school year survivable, it’s worth it. He’ll have this, and he’ll be fine. They’ll be fine.
He always was excellent at lying to himself.
Mornings, the Third
Hermione starts joining him on the sofa for his daily book chapter. This is, by itself, not a problem. Remus holds no territorial claim to the sofa, and in almost all situations, he would welcome a daily reading partner. It should be a companionable, quiet, and amicable experience.
Instead, Remus sits there and stares at the squiggles of ink on the page, frozen, while the wolf inside him howls and roars that Hermione Granger is within mounting distance.
It’s horrible. It’s embarrassing and undignified and disrespectful—Hermione is a colleague in the making, a kindred spirit, a friend. She is not some wolf’s plaything, and she is not a subject for mounting.
And yet, when Hermione sits there with her book propped up on her raised knees, coiling a curl around a fingertip as she reads, Remus finds himself suffused with an instinctive desire to flip her over and wear her like a cocksleeve. He can’t explain why. There’s nothing visibly, tangibly sexual about her on the sofa. But the thought is there, and it doesn’t leave until she does.
He chalks it up to wishful thinking. He’s making a daily habit of rutting his frustration into his pillow, imagining bushy curls in his face and liquid heat around his cock. He’s projecting. He heard her cry out his name once, and now he’s caught up in some idle fantasy that she wants him. He’s hoping. It’s all in his head, and it’s all foolish.
It’s another week before he realizes that it is not, in fact, all in his head. It’s all in his nose.
He can smell her.
Hermione glances down at him from where she’s just risen off the cushions. She’s a meter away, if that. Her crotch is at his eye-level—or, more appropriately, his nose-level. “Thank goodness it’s Friday. This week has felt endless, hasn’t it? Any plans?”
Remus swallows. Now that he knows what he’s looking for, he can catch her scent perfectly in the air. Musky, spicy, damp, warm, earthy, vibrant, sweet, tempting, haunting. She smells of arousal, and it’s right there.
It makes sense, he figures. If she’s touching herself in the mornings before leaving her room, it makes sense that the evidence is still present. Wizards eject their spend and can spell it all away, but witches tend to continue producing it for some time after. Tonks used to smell like sex for hours when they were done (which often led to Remus eventually cornering her and demanding a second go). Hermione still carrying the smell is just—it’s just biological.
Her breath catches and the scent coils sharply, freshly, in the air.
Fuck, fuck, he’s staring. He’s staring at her crotch, he’s sitting on the couch and staring at her, fuck.
Remus clears his throat and forces his gaze upward. Hermione looks down at him, biting her lip, a flush high on her cheeks.
She knows.
That isn’t the expression of an oblivious someone. An oblivious someone would be confused and expectant, or maybe perplexed and wary. It isn’t even the face of an ashamed someone who’s just realized a mortifying truth about their circumstances. It’s the face of someone who knows exactly what’s happening, and who isn’t embarrassed about it at all.
The scent of her arousal is vivid.
Remus rips his gaze back to his book, not seeing a single word on its pages. He’s supposed to be answering her. She asked him a question. A normal person would be responding right now.
“No plans,” he says hurriedly, praying to every star in the sky that he sounds casual. “Just—staying in.”
He doesn’t keep track of her response. All he knows is that she eventually retreats to her bedroom to get dressed, and that when she leaves for breakfast, he’s still staring at his book, having not read a thing.
Mornings, the Fourth
At this point, a healthy person would probably force a conversation. There would be some blisteringly awkward, firm dialogue about boundaries, werewolf senses, and consequences, and it would create necessary distance. Remus would intentionally make himself sound old and decrepit, and he’d use lots of alienating phrases such as witches of your age and I can remember when. He’d talk about inappropriate attachments and trauma, and he’d call it an oversight of the panel that put them in this mess, and he’d offer to sort it all out by demanding a change in living spaces. He’d sound paternal and kindly, and he’d weave just enough pity into things to make it properly humiliating so that it stops.
Remus writes the speech in his head. He stews on it while he grades homework, he tweaks specific words while he’s brushing his teeth, he practices his expression in the mirror. He finds himself obsessing over his tone when he’s lecturing the N.E.W.T. Defense class, ignoring the bushy head in the front row in favor of memorizing what a disinterested, professorly voice is supposed to sound like. He polishes his statements to a blinding shine.
He finds himself staring at the back of Hermione’s head in the evenings, and he tells himself, now, do it now. Tell her now.
He grinds his cock into his pillow in the mornings to the tune of her pleasure, and he tells himself, you have to, it’ll only get worse, you have to.
He inhales the intoxicating, seductive scent of her arousal in their chambers, and he tells himself, you can’t live like this, it’ll eat you alive, you need to end it before you ruin everything.
He doesn’t say a single bloody word.
It should be noted, at this point, that living as a werewolf has some… unfortunate side effects. Wizards nearing forty have certain biological setbacks—things like cooldown periods and, to put it delicately, production delays. One thorough wank in the mornings would suffice the average wizard for hours absent encouraging stimuli for more. And, under normal circumstances, Remus would fall squarely into that bucket, himself. He can quite contentedly satiate his libido with one daily session, sometimes even less.
The problem is that bit about encouraging stimuli. Remus doesn’t need nudity or filthy language to prompt his body, not like most men would. His wolf-sharp senses pick up sexual availability in scents, in pheromones, in body language. He picks up on all the absentminded, unconscious cues that people give each other, and when they’re directed at him, he reads the sex in all of it. He can’t help it—instinct is what it is. And he can’t help that his body, with all its ridiculous werewolf urges and abilities, overhauls itself to be ready for mating whenever, wherever it can.
To cut through the academia of it, Remus’ body doesn’t give a singular, soaring shite about the benefits of a morning wank. If it gets the right cues, it’s ready as soon as ten minutes later.
Mornings these days are, to his unending chagrin, a veritable parade of the right cues.
For example, here he sits, having coated his pillow in spunk not half an hour ago, rock hard in his pajama pants. It’s like he’s never even heard of masturbation. One cushion away from him, Hermione reclines back against the armrest with her knees raised and a book open on her lap. She smells like tea, sleep, and ecstasy. Remus wants to live inside her.
He can see her through the space of her calves. He can see how her shorts ruck up to expose the very bottoms of her arsecheeks. He can see the gathers of fabric at the seams of her thighs. He can see the small, round curve of her cunt stretching the ribs in the light gray cotton.
It’s a moment of weakness. A failing of forethought, a burning discomfort, a thoughtless correction.
He reaches down and adjusts himself while turning a page. It’s a quick grasp through the cloth of his pants, a nudge of a thumb to reset the angle. It’s fleeting, tiny.
He hears her breath catch and knows immediately that she’s caught him doing it. One mindless second, and he’s told her exactly how affected he is, exactly how much he’s interested in the assets she is putting on display.
His world shuts down with the weight of his embarrassment. She has a crush on him—he’s accepted that much, even though he truly cannot understand it—and no matter how sexually it presents itself, it’s still just that: A crush, innocent and naïve and misguided. He’s supposed to amusedly tolerate it until she wises up and moves on. He’s not supposed to have a crush back.
He should apologize. He should call this whole thing out, here and now, and set those damned boundaries already. He should—
Hermione swallows once, loudly. He dares to glance at her expression, only to find her staring at his lap, with her bottom lip fitted snugly between her teeth. Her chest rises and falls at twice its usual speed.
She shifts in place, rolling her shoulder blades against the armrest. Her knees jostle each other, her hips fidget. It’s a repositioning, unconscious and trivial—it’s nothing. Remus stares at the words of his book and tells himself as much. It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s noth—
The scent of arousal cuts through the air, fresh and heady. Remus, heart in his throat, chances another look. She’s flushed down to her chest, and her blinks are slow. She’s still staring at his lap.
His eyes fall, and they find ruination:
There’s a small, dark, wet spot on the light gray cotton.
Remus turns back to his book as alarm bells wail in his head. He can feel every millimeter of his gums, every bump of every tastebud, every contact point between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He’s salivating enough to drool. His cock aches.
He wants to rip those shorts off with his teeth. He wants to dig his fingers into the swell of her arse nail-first, and he wants to set his jaw against the curve of her pubic bone. He wants flesh in his mouth, pressure on his tongue, fluid in his throat—he wants to drink her.
He wants to be pathetic about it. He wants to wrap his cock in the cotton, fit the head of his prick to that wet spot, and tug until he comes. He wants to shove the shorts back on her, filthy and dripping with semen, and press them hard against her so she knows—she knows—he’s marking her.
Fuck, he wants her marked.
“I should—breakfast will be over soon.” Her voice is small, sweet, and shy. She sounds either like she’s finally (finally) gaining a sense of shame, or like she’s desperate to get away for some other reason and finding an excuse. She stands in a rush of decadent air and flees to her room.
Remus should be scandalized. There should be horror and embarrassment and guilt swirling around him and dulling his hunger. He should be self-conscious and apologetic.
He should be Remus.
He’s not feeling very Remus right now.
He listens to her bedroom door shut, and his hand falls to his lap. His cock is a hot, hard bar against the crease of his hip; touching it makes him want to crunch his teeth through sinew, find a grip, hold something. He wants claw tracks on the floor and whimpers in his ears. He wants the quavering grasp of a cunt coming on him. He wants to see the whites of her eyes when they roll back in her head, wants her mouth bitten raw, wants her voice wrecked. He wants to hear the damage in it when she says his name.
Remus. Remus, please—Re—Moony, Moony, please, Moony, please, please .
Oh, how Moony wants.
Mornings, the Fifth
Remus expects a change. Call him foolish, call him gullible, but he genuinely expects something to give. In his head, she’s danced too close to fire and singed herself; she’s going to see the warning for what it is, and she’s going to back off. It’s what any sane, well-adjusted person with a crush would do.
Remus fails to remember that the whole reason they’re stuck in this hellish living arrangement is because neither of them are particularly sane, nor are they well-adjusted.
Hermione does not change. Remus does.
Something in him has broken. Whatever held his attraction at bay, whatever civility filled his head with shoulds and mustn’ts, whatever generosity kept his eyes from wandering and his mouth from watering—it’s cracked. Not gone, not removed, but unseated. It’s twisted at the hinges and prone to collapsing apart instead of edging open sensibly. He’s unstable about it.
He stops masturbating into his pillow. It’s a pale imitation of what he wants, and it does nothing to temper the madness when it inevitably comes. He doesn’t care about scratching his itches. He doesn’t care about giving the appearance of being flaccid when he drinks his tea.
She knows what she’s doing to him. He presumes that she always has; he was silly to think that Hermione Granger would forget crucial facts about lycanthropy. She hasn’t been negligent, she’s been intentional. He sees that now. Regardless, if she didn’t know from the start, she undoubtedly does now, and she doesn’t stop. She still whimpers his name through the stone walls. She still walks out into their living room reeking of sin. She still sits on the couch with her cunt pointed at him and pretends to read. As far as Remus—or Moony, it’s hard to tell when she’s around—is concerned, she’s begging for his attention.
Who is he to deny her?
When she walks into the common area and busies herself with the kettle, he lets his eyes consume her over the edge of his book. He traces the delicate shape of her bones under the straps of her tank top, the curved strip of her back between the shirt and shorts, the breadth of her hips. He lingers on the peaks of her nipples, the hollows under her ears, the swells of her thighs.
He adjusts himself openly now. Not drawing attention to it, not making a show, but not hiding anything either. He rests his hand there, not stroking but holding, shaping. He makes it a focal point, if she looks.
She always looks.
She joins him on the sofa anyway, trembling but without hesitation. She props up her knees, opens her book, and waits. She’d call it reading, he’s sure, but he knows better. She flips pages at random, and her eyes scuttle upwards as much as downwards. He can feel it when she looks up at him. He can hear the catch of her breath, the thud of her heart, the click of her swallow. He knows how he looks, sitting there with his hand on his cock, with his pants tenting unmistakably around the groin, with his tea undrunk and his chapter unread. She sees it all.
She could run if she wanted to. She could change rooms. She could leave.
Instead, she sits on the sofa and leaks a wet patch into her clothes. Every day.
And every day, he plays the waiting predator. He looks between her legs and doesn’t hide licking his chops. He doesn’t conceal squeezing himself. He doesn’t falter when he makes a wet spot of his own.
Through it all, they still have classes together. As Professor Lupin, Remus is immaculately professional; he lectures with the same humorous ease as always, he pays attention to all of his students equally, and he fastidiously ignores the heat and aroma coming from the front row. And then, when all of his pupils have shuffled out and the door is closed and locked, he kneels at her abandoned seat and licks the moisture off the wood grain.
They’re prowling, he knows. Circling the air like a pair of vultures, drawing lower and tighter toward some waiting feast. One of them is bound to break and cross the No Man’s Land. It’s just a contest to see which of them will snap.
Remus knows it’ll be him. He knows that with Moony gouging at his restraint, he’s at a handicap. He’s just not sure what will send him over the edge, or what he’ll do once he’s falling.
It’s a Friday morning. Remus wakes up, palms himself as she paints their shared wall with his name, and pulls himself out to the living room to make his tea, like always. Like always, she joins him, she props her book on her knees, and he spends thirty minutes working the tip of his tongue against the ridge of his hard palate, imagining that it’s her clit. She leaves to get dressed for the day like always, he waits on the couch like always.
She comes out in her uniform like always. She says a breezy goodbye like always.
She drops her wand by the doorway out, and she bends down to fetch it.
Remus’ mind goes blank.
She isn’t wearing knickers. She isn’t wearing anything. One brief flash, and Remus could see the shadow of her pubic hair, the precise pink of her cunt, the glisten of moisture.
She picks up her wand and slips out the door.
“Oh,” Remus exhales through pursed lips, unable to fight his growing grin. They have class together in the afternoon, and that tiny flash is all he’ll be thinking about for it. Hermione Granger, always the overachiever, always the teacher’s pet, always the mastermind. Dropping her wand. “You fucking bitch.”
No Man’s Land, here he comes.
Strangely, it’s the most normal day he’s had in weeks. Now that the offer is out there—and it was indisputably an offer, no doubt about it—Moony is finally satisfied. He isn’t clawing at the door and demanding relief, because the relief is coming. The hunt is over, the prey is felled; all that’s left is the taking. Moony is content to wait for the taking.
The afternoon comes, and Remus greets his N.E.W.T. class with his usual good cheer. Today they’re talking about chimeras. Remus—and Moony, who’s a clever bastard when he wants to be—delivers the lecture with relish.
“A peak predator, the chimera has an arsenal of weapons at its disposal,” he explains, sitting on the front edge of his desk. He slides his hands into his pockets, the picture of nonchalance. “If you face a chimera, you should know that the only thought in its head is of consumption. It wants to eat you whole, and if that’s not possible—which, for the record, is a legitimate question even for adult-sized wizards—it wants to get its mouth around as much of you as it can. It wants to drink you down. Feast on you. That is the only thing it can think about, and it will obsess over that goal until it gets what it wants.”
He pauses and takes a breath, subtly scenting the air. He can smell her arousal already. Good. She’s not the only mastermind in this school; she is dealing with a Marauder, here.
“If its mouth isn’t enough to destroy you, well, that’s where the arsenal comes in,” Remus says, grinning. A few of the students chuckle. “It has razor-sharp claws, and it is not afraid to sink them into you. Down to the knuckle, if it can. If you manage to avoid its grasp somehow, its tail is a formidable weapon with the speed and power of ten men. If you’ve got daylights, the tail will pound them out of you, and relentlessly. And, if brute strength doesn’t take care of you, the chimera is loaded down with venom that it will inject into you, repeatedly, until you’re saturated with it.”
He’s laying it on a little thick, he knows. He doesn’t care. Nine of his ten N.E.W.T. students can think he’s giving an oddly visceral lecture; the one that knows better is leaking all over her chair. He can smell it from here.
“I’ll give you a word of warning,” Remus continues, leaning back and not looking at Hermione once. “When confronted with a predator of the chimera’s magnitude, the answer is to run. Only one wizard has ever bested a chimera; his name was Bellerophon, and he was so utterly drained by the time he was done, he fell off his horse and died. If you choose to engage a beast like the chimera, it will ruin you forever. But—and don’t tell any of your parents I said this—all reports indicate that fighting such a beast, though ruinous, is some of the best fun you’ll ever have in your life.”
The class laughs again. Remus licks his lips and flicks his gaze to Hermione. Her mouth is wet and bitten pink. She hasn’t written a word of notes.
“Now,” Remus says, standing and clapping his hands. “Let’s take a deeper dive, shall we?”
At the end of class, he retreats behind his desk and fusses with a few stacks of parchment, moving scrolls around to make himself look busy.
“Ms. Granger,” he calls out once she stumbles to her feet, “a moment, please.”
He waits until the last student has left the room, then snaps his fingers to wandlessly close and lock the door. A wave of his hand Muffles it all, too. It’s a flashy display—wandless magic is advanced, even when the spells involved are simple—but he wants to be flashy.
“Professor?” Hermione asks, curling her hands around the strap of her bag. She’s feigning ignorance, making him do the work. “Did you need me for something?”
“I did,” he tells her, coming around his desk and walking toward her. He sounds casual and friendly, but his steps are slow, rolling things. “And, in fact, I still do. I very much need you for something.”
Hermione’s eyelashes flutter as she drops her gaze to his hips. “Well, I’m here. You’ve got me.”
Yes, he very much does.
“You are,” he murmurs, stepping closer to her, “quite naughty, Ms. Granger. To coin a phrase from our lecture, you’ve been engaging. You know that, don’t you?”
She licks her lips and flickers her eyes up to his. “I wasn’t aware that the beast involved was a chimera.”
“Not a chimera,” he allows, smirking at her cheekiness. “A predator of its magnitude. Something that can only think of sinking knuckle-deep into you. Something that wants to fill its mouth and drink you down. Something that has an arsenal of ways to ruin you, and finds itself singularly possessed with the notion of doing so.”
Her chest heaves with her next breath. Her knuckles are white on her bag. “Is this where you tell me to run?”
“Ah,” Remus laments, now close enough to her to touch, “we’re a bit past that, I’m afraid.”
He takes a final step forward and, in one quick motion, cinches one arm around her waist and shoves the other one up her skirt. She gasps, startled, just as his fingers land against her.
Finally.
“You could have run weeks ago,” he tells her as he slides two fingertips coarsely down her slit. She’s hot, swollen, and soaked around him—slippery as satin, plump, delicate, perfect.
“Maybe,”—her voice shakes as he presses his fingertips against her clit—“maybe I don’t mind being ruined. I hear before it happens, you have the most fun of your life.”
Merlin, he wants her.
“Oh, Ms. Granger,” he purrs. “You will.”
He plunges his fingers into her silken heat, sliding them into her until he knows she can feel his knuckles. She cries out, resting her hands on his chest for support, and he has to shut his eyes at just how tight and molten she is around him. She feels even better than he’d hoped. All that enthralling scent, all that wetness, all that eagerness—it’s his. He gets to have it now, at long last.
He pulls his fingers free and shows them to her, wanting her to confront what she’s done to him. Her face burns red.
“You have no idea what this has been like,” he tells her. He raises his gleaming fingers to his nose, reveling in having her scent so close. He sucks his fingers clean and groans at the taste. “You wicked minx.”
He doesn’t let her reply. Instead, he picks her up and carries her to his desk, sweeping its contents aside to set her down on it. He can hear the slap of her cunt hitting the wood. It makes him so feverish, he’s nearly angry: All this time, all this waiting, all this torture, and she’s still doing it. She’s still shoving that perfect cunt in his direction, still showing off how plush and ready and available it is. A bitch in heat, presenting herself to him.
He shoves her flat against the desk, yanks her to the edge, and falls to his knees. It’s his turn to be greedy.
He flips up her skirt and dives in, sucking her clit hard into his mouth. She tenses and cries out again, scrabbling her nails at the wood by her hips. She can search for purchase as much as she likes, he’ll give her none. He rests an arm over her hips to hold her down and thrusts his tongue into her hole. And it is that—not an entrance, not an opening, a hole. A wet, empty, needy thing waiting for him to fill it.
He adds a finger in alongside his tongue, then two. He spreads them, feeling the stretch, gauging the give, and adds a third. It’s a tight fit, pulling the gentle meat of her hole taut. She’s uncomfortable now. She must be.
Her moans above him take on a helpless, overwhelmed pitch. Good. He wants her overwhelmed. She’s been overwhelming him all these weeks, after all, and he’s been kind to her about it. He’s groped himself to show her what she’s asking for, he’s let his gazes linger to let her know what he wants to do with it—acts of kindness. Offers, instead of demands. Opportunities, instead of damnations.
He fits his teeth against the swell of her clit and sucks hard, wanting her to feel the sharp edges of him. He won’t damage her, he won’t injure her, but he wants it to hurt. He wants her to regret it, ever so slightly.
Hermione screams as the walls of her hole start to flutter. The flesh of her clit contracts in pulls—she’s coming. He’s got her coming, and it’s been less than a minute.
“Desperate,” he says around her clit, licking broadly and grinning when she shudders in oversensitivity. Like he cares about oversensitivity, of all things. “Desperate, greedy, needy little thing.”
“Yes,” Hermione pants out, writhing. He can’t tell if she’s trying to get away or get closer; either way, she fails. “Yes, I—I’ve wanted—God, Remus, I’ve wanted—”
“I know what you’ve wanted,” he hisses, thrusting his fingers into her and curling them harshly. She cries out and shudders again. “You think I’ve missed it, somehow? You think I misread it when you make a mess right in front of my eyes? When you traipse around in nothing? When you fuck yourself to my name? Do you take me for a fool, Hermione?”
“I’ll take you however you are,” she promises, arching into his thrusts. Her cunt squelches with every move; he angles his fingers and curls them harder just to make the noises louder, more filthy. “Gods, I—I’ve wanted—fuck, you’re so good, Remus.”
Remus snarls and latches onto her clit again, feral and pleased and preening and starving. She’s so perfect, so sweet, so young, so unbroken—it makes him furious that she wants him, of all people. She could have her pick of men. Half the Weasleys would fall over themselves to fuck her, all the boys in the N.E.W.T. class have stared at her, a portion of the bloody world has fawned over her. She’s the sweetheart of everyone, and she’s sprawled across his desk, squeezing on his hand, whimpering his name.
By the time he’s done with her, she’ll never be able to think about sex again without thinking of him. He’ll give it to her so good, she’ll have dreams about it, she’ll panic about it, she’ll get flashbacks. Sex so incredible, it traumatizes her afterward.
He rolls his tongue against her and milks the spongy spot inside her with his fingertips. There’s a combination of saliva and slick running down his hand, in between his knuckles, pooling in his palm, soaking his shirtsleeve. He’s going to smell this on his desk for the rest of his career here. He growls and fucks her harder, angry about that, too.
She comes a second time, once again screaming.
He leans back to catch his breath, wanting to see her. The space between her legs is red all over, puffy and sodden. She’s already so wrecked from him.
They haven’t even gotten started.
But he doesn’t want to do it all here. No, there’s a very specific place where he wants to obliterate her—a place that she’s already tainted with her torture of him.
He forces himself to withdraw his fingers, taking it slow to ease her through it. She whines and shivers as he slips free.
Fuck. Fuck, she’s so—she’s so open and hollow and empty and—fuck.
Remus groans and buries his face between her legs, licking at the gape of her hole. He can’t help it, she’s just so intoxicating. He could get drunk off this; he might be halfway there already. He sucks the blood-plump skin of one of her lips into his mouth, worrying his teeth along it as he pulls away, feeling the tenderness of its meat. It would be so easy to bite down, so easy make it hurt.
His mouth pops obscenely as the lip pulls free and he repeats the action on the other side. He doesn’t want to hurt her. Just the thought of her being afraid of him makes him want to claw his skin apart. He wants her to hurt, but he wants it good. He wants her hurt in a way that makes her crawl back for more afterwards. He wants her hooked on him, the way he’s hooked on her.
He allows himself one final, long lick and rests back on his heels. “Up.”
Hermione shuffles up onto her elbows and peers down at him, her hair a thundercloud about her pink, dazed face. When she blinks, tears track down her cheeks; Remus nearly comes on the spot. “What?”
“We’re not doing this here,” he tells her, wiping her moisture off his face and licking his fingers clean. “We’re going back to the room.”
Her eyebrows pinch together and she exhales incredulously. “We’re not—not doing this here? What on earth? What have we been doing, then?”
Her cunt is a fucking siren’s call. He slides a finger back into her, too weak to keep himself away. She’s so warm and lovely, it’s a crime for him to not be touching her. “You got me worked up. I needed to vent some pressure.”
She makes a helpless noise. “This is—this is you venting pressure? Remus, you haven’t even—unless you’ve been down there doing yourself, you haven’t—”
“I haven’t,” Remus interrupts. He slides another finger into her, eyelids falling half-mast at how bloody cozy she feels. He wants to curl up here and take a nap, like her cunt is a patch of sunshine. “I wasn’t worked up about me.”
Hermione’s eyes roll back into her head with her next blink. Her hips twitch down onto his fingers. So greedy. “And what happens when we get back to the room? More of this?”
Dammit, he can’t not just—he leans in and licks her again, sighing. He’s going to get addicted to this, he can tell. “To start.”
He has her leave first, after he makes her promise not to spell herself clean for the trip back to their chambers. It’s only a floor away, he tells her, she’ll make it. Once she’s gone on her wobbly, indignant way, he climbs stiffly to his feet and adjusts himself in his trousers. He waves his wand to vanish the mess she left behind, and another wave sends his papers back to their rightful place. He cleans himself last, running his hands through his hair to put it in some kind of order.
He shouldn’t have done anything to her. All this talk of ruining her, and he’s the one unraveling. He’s never going to be the same after this, never going to undo this damage. Never going to be the same around her, now that he knows what messy, hungry, eager creature lives between her legs. No more dinners at the Burrow without wanting his hand up her skirt under the table. No more Order meetings where he isn’t wanting her to sit on his face instead of a chair. No more holidays at Grimmauld Place where he doesn’t want to fuck her loudly enough to disrupt Walburga’s portrait.
Merlin, he’s been away from her cunt for too long. He’s going through withdrawal, just standing here.
He grabs his bag, freshens the air, and leaves.
Hermione is on the couch waiting for him when he arrives back at their room. She still looks like a natural disaster. She stands, and her expression is some combination of cajoling and hopeful. “Remus, I—”
Remus spent the entire trip calming himself down—telling himself to settle his pace, take it easier, make things softer. Hermione Granger is a woman to be cherished, he told himself, not savaged. She deserves patience and encouragement. She’s so young, he said, so innocent.
But when she stands up, all he can see is the stained mess she made on the sofa. All he can see is how wet and filthy and needy she is, how she keeps ruining things. All his thoughts of delicacy and tenderness disappear.
He drops his bag and undoes his belt. Whatever she’s saying, she cuts herself off in favor of swallowing thickly. He yanks his belt free and casts it aside, then tugs his trousers open and takes a grasp of himself through his underwear.
“What were you saying?” he asks, watching the way her eyes track his hand. “I missed it.”
She takes an uneven breath, looking lost. “I—I don’t—I don’t remember.”
Moony howls inside him—he’s got Hermione Granger losing words and forgetting bossiness. “Good.”
He tears off his jumper and undoes the buttons of his shirt while he walks over to the sofa. His body is a battlefield of scars, but he’s gotten over his self-consciousness; it’s hard to worry about signs of his lycanthropy when she’s been preying on it for weeks.
“You’re very clothed,” he informs her, toeing off his shoes. He drops his trousers and steps out of them. “Fix it.”
Ever the obedient student, she hastens to comply. “Remus, we should really talk about—”
“What?” he demands, removing his underwear. He watches her take him in, and the desire on her face makes him wrap a hand around himself to show off. He’s not massive—not like certain roguish womanizers in his past—but he’s got nothing to be ashamed of. He’s got plenty to spare. “What do you want to talk about?”
“... I’ve engaged a chimera, haven’t I?” she asks breathlessly, fingers stalling at the buttons of her skirt. She’s gotten her jumper and tie off, and half her shirt is undone. She looks debauched. Her hands tremble and slip. “I should run.”
“Do you want to?” he asks her, stepping forward. Maybe it’s the trace of worry in her voice, or maybe it’s the sight of her so out of sorts, but something makes him gentle when he goes for the remaining buttons of her blouse. He eyes the red, twisted scar on her chest. “Do you want to run, Hermione? If you really want to, you can. I won’t stop you.”
She stands there while he tugs the bottom of her shirt free and undoes the last few buttons. She twists her wrists around at her sides, letting him push the shirt off her shoulders. She’s in a white, cotton bra—simple, practical—and it’s so perfectly Hermione, it steals Remus’ breath away.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been less interested in running in my life,” she whispers.
He hides his smile and nods. “You let me know if that changes.”
He unbuttons her skirt and slides it free, groaning at the sight of her. She’s just—she’s so smooth and slim and lovely, so unblemished besides the skin on her sternum. He wants to lay waste to her perfection.
He dispatches her bra and groans all over again at the sight of her exposed breasts. “You would not believe how those things have tormented me.”
She ducks her head, glancing down at her chest, then quirks her brow. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he exhales, almost dream-like. He cups one of her breasts in his palm, thumbing over the nipple and swallowing when her breath hitches. “You come out here in those horrid little shirts, and these are on display. Everytime you move, they move with you.”
“Well, that is how body parts work,” she teases in a streak of Gryffindor boldness.
Remus growls and steps closer, letting the head of his cock drag along the skin of her belly. He lifts his other hand to her other nipple, tweaking them both at once. Her bravado falls with a squeak. “I want to watch them while I fuck you. Want to see them bounce. Want to hold them in place so they’ll stop distracting me.”
Hermione shivers and nods. “O-okay.”
He can smell her cunt again. His mouth waters. “On the sofa.”
He prompts her to sit at her usual spot and, inspired, nudges her legs up until she’s in her usual position. He drinks his fill: This is what she looks like under all those clothes. This is what she’s hiding from him every morning when she pretends to read her stupid books.
How dare she? How dare she keep this from him?
Remus pets his fingertips over her cunt. It spills like an overripe peach into his hand.
“You’re not allowed to be dressed in the mornings anymore,” he comments, absently sinking his fingers along her slit. This is that small, round space under the fabric. This is what seeps wetness into her shorts. Finally, he gets to give it the appreciation it deserves. “If you try, I’ll rip your clothes off you.”
“That’s—ah!” Hermione starts, moaning when his fingers circle her clit. “That’s not the discouragement you think it is.”
The call of her hole beckons, and Remus follows it. The position is awkward with her folded in on herself so much, but he doesn’t care. There’s plenty of room in that greedy little cavern of hers for him to fit.
“I’d picture this, you know,” he says. He pushes a finger in deep, splaying the rest out on the perfect skin where her thigh meets her arse and grinding the butt of his hand against her clit. Her moan sounds like petrol raining down onto an open flame. “I’d sit on this couch and imagine all the things you’d let me do to you.”
Hermione’s hips twitch, and she ducks her head shyly. “You’d have a lot to imagine, then.”
“Is that right?” Dissatisfied with his lack of access, he gives up on the fantasy fodder of keeping her in her normal position. He tugs her legs out and drags her down until her head is the only thing propped up on the armrest. He spreads her thighs—better. That’s what he wants. He sinks down onto the couch and nuzzles affectionately at her pink, sodden skin. “Have you got a list, Hermione? I do.”
“No,” she breathes, sighing when he laps at her. He isn’t trying to make it good, he just wants his mouth on her. He can make it good later. “Having a list implies specificity. What I want is more… a blank page. Write on it whatever you want.”
“There’s nothing?” he checks, sliding two fingers back into her. Really, it’s a sin for her to ever be empty. He imagines ways of keeping her full and has to press his cock into the cushions. “There must be something, Ms. Granger.”
“Love it when you call me that,” she groans, digging her fingers into the meat of her thighs. He rewards her by sucking gently on her clit. “God, it makes me hot. Makes me hot to call you Professor, too.”
“Are you kinky, Hermione?” he asks, vaguely delighted at the idea. “I’m stunned.”
She repositions her head against the armrest, furrowing her brow down at him. “I’m currently laid out naked under my werewolf professor, who is twice my age. Did you honestly think I wasn’t?”
He wants to make her come so many times, she forgets how to be cheeky. He settles for biting down on her clit and grinding his fingertips up inside her. He decides that he can hear the apology in her whine. “Did you picture this, then?”
“Not—like this,” she replies between mewls. He suckles at her encouragingly, and her body breaks out in gooseflesh. “I—I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“What did you picture instead?”
“A bit of this,” she admits, “for a few minutes. Enough for me to—ah—enjoy it. Then—oh, please, yes—there was a lot more you involved.”
The way she says it tells him the unfiltered answer: She expected him to be young, randy, and dedicated to getting his prick wet. Which, to be fair, he does want with some degree of dedication. He’s getting there.
“Should I stop?” he asks around sucking kisses. He flicks his tongue over her—she’s so firm now. Her clit is swollen and hard like it’s a tiny little cock tucked up against her. He can trace the swell of it all the way up to her pubic hair. “I can get a lot more me involved. I’d hate to disappoint.”
She laughs wryly, making a punched out little noise when he lays his tongue over the length of her engorged clit and undulates it. “I am not disappointed.”
Just for that, he brings her off for a third time. That, and because he’s pretty sure he’s getting addicted purely to the feeling of her fluttering around him, on top of the growing pile of other addictions.
She cries again, tears seeping silently down her cheeks as she quakes. If his mouth weren’t so happily preoccupied elsewhere, he’d lick them off her.
Once she’s stopped trembling, he urges her around onto her hands and knees. He wants to mount her like nothing else he’s ever wanted; no other position will do. He expects her to obey and wait for him, but once she’s on her knees, she whines and slinks down onto her elbows, then onto her shoulders. Her back curves obscenely, pushing her hips up and out.
“I’ve wanted this,” she confesses from where her cheek is pressed into the sofa cushion. “Wanted to offer myself up to you like this, like—oh.”
Remus’s mouth is back on her cunt again. It’s a problem, how magnetically attracted he is to it. It’s just that with her bent over this far, it’s all out there and pink and tempting. He can’t not.
“Is that what you wanted?” he asks, burying two fingers back into her. He works in the third, too, craving the stretch. “Did you want to be a bitch for me, Ms. Granger? Want me to breed you?”
She bites off her reply, but her cunt clenches an answer around his fingers.
Suddenly, he can see it. He can see himself looming over her, pounding into her, pumping her full of semen. He can hear her begging for it, pleading for pups like some kind of filthy werewolf fetishist.
Moony lays into him, claws extended. He wants it. He wants the fetish, the breeding, the pups, the rawness of it all. He wants her fat and hazy with come-lust. Wants it drying on her cheeks, clumping in her eyelashes, smeared around her mouth, dripping off her tits, oozing out of her cunt. He wants to drag his nose across her skin and smell himself everywhere.
High off the visual, Remus straightens and lines himself up, pushing inside her in one thick, glossy, squelching thrust.
He was wrong before—there are no other addictions besides this. This is the only one that matters. He makes a wounded noise in harmony with Hermione’s, then forces himself to retreat just so he can drive in again. Her cunt is glorious. It’s so hot, so tight, so wet, so soft. He doesn’t want to leave it, ever.
“Oh, please, Remus,” she begs brokenly, grinding her forehead into the sofa. “Please fuck me, please.”
Remus’ head descends into static. That’s what he heard through the wall all those times. That voice, those words, that tone.
He’s got that torturous bint under him, finally.
“You pictured this exactly,” he accuses through gritted teeth, curling himself over her. He rests on his elbows and takes ahold of her shoulders from the underside. She feels worlds better than a pillow. “You pictured me like this in your bedroom.”
The thought of it registers in his mind—that all those mornings he’s heard her, she’s been like this, she’s been folded over and open for him like this—and he fucks into her hard, using his grip to shove her body onto his cock. She feels like a bitch, now. A plaything, a hole for him to hump himself into. He growls and presses the flats of his teeth into her shoulder, loving every moment.
He makes it animalistic, keeping his thrusts short and brutal for himself, not stretching them out and rolling them for her benefit. She wanted the werewolf and the breeding, and he’s giving it to her.
“Yes,” she whimpers, scraping her fingernails uselessly over the cushions. “Yes, I—I wanted this. Wanted you everywhere, wanted—wanted you on top of me, behind me, inside of me. You’re—you’re everywhere, Remus.”
Merlin, he is. He’s tucked up against her so hard, they’re aligned from where her toes brush his calves to where his forehead nudges her ear. She is everywhere under him, and he’s not alone.
He noses desperately at the side of her neck, freeing one hand to find her clit. She makes a noise of protest when he presses against it, and he growls a warning in her ear.
“I want to feel you squeeze around me,” he rumbles out. He’s barely even Remus anymore, the Moony in him is so strong. It’s Moony that’s inhaling lungfuls of their scent, Moony that’s grinding against her clit, Moony licking his tongue along the edges of his teeth. “I want this perfect little cunt of yours to suck the come right out of me. Gonna fill you up with it—isn’t that what you want?”
“I—” she attempts, squeezing her eyes shut. “I don’t know if—”
“You can,” he tells her. He gives up on using two fingertips; they’re moving too much, and she is too slippery, for him to be accurate with his placement. He presses all four to her instead, massaging everything at once. “You’re Hermione fucking Granger, of course you bloody can. Don’t you want to come on my cock? You’ve been begging for it every morning. Such a pretty, perfect little slut for it.”
She makes a tiny, choked noise, and her cunt spasms. He chuckles darkly, knowing he’s found a sweet spot.
“You’ve been so good for me, haven’t you? So sweet and patient.” He nips at her shoulder, tugs at the shell of her ear. “Getting your nipples all hard and needy in your shirt, staring at me, waiting for me, working yourself up. It hurt, didn’t it? It hurt, sitting there, watching me hold my prick, knowing you could have it inside you like this. It’s no wonder you leaked all over yourself, poor thing; it’s not your fault you’ve got a greedy fucking cunt. You just needed something to plug you up. Isn’t that right?”
She takes a deep, shuddering inhale, like she’s had four epiphanies in rapid succession. Her cunt starts to flutter tellingly around him. She feels divine—if he weren’t wrapped up in urging her to come, he’d be shooting off at the suckling sweetness of that flutter.
“I’ve learned my lesson, darling,” he soothes her, slowing down his thrusts to make them deep, cruel grinds. His fingers work madly against her. “I won’t make you suffer like that again. I’ll keep you filled up like you deserve. I’ll keep you bred, keep you plugged, keep you coming.”
She’s taut as a band under him, frozen, right on the edge. She’s so close, he can taste it.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he purrs raggedly into her ear. “Sleep with me. I’ll fill you up all night. I’ll pump load after load into you while we sleep, keep you nice and plugged. And when we wake up, I’ll shove my head between your legs and eat it all out of you.”
She manages to whimper out an ‘oh, fu—’ before she shatters apart. Her cunt gushes. There’s wetness everywhere, coating their thighs, dripping down his hand and wrist, soaking into his balls. She’s a vise, a clamp, a seizure—
He snarls viciously and empties himself into her in long, draining pulls. His orgasm is outrage given form, fury and rage and adoration and exaltation driven up into the hungry clutch of her cunt. He crushes his hips against her, wanting her to feel it.
And then, with one final, agonizing twitch, he’s done. The anger is gone, the cruelty is gone, the ferality is gone. Moony is gone.
And everything in his balls is definitely gone, sweet Merlin.
Remus forces himself upright before can do something terribly rude like collapse on her. He braces himself and slides out, hissing. He’s going to be so sensitive after this, he can already tell.
Hermione groans right along with him when he finally slips free. He takes one look at her and has to shut his eyes at the sight. The image of his spend slipping out of her red, swollen cunt is far too much of a good thing right now. He needs to save it for a later revisit, maybe once he’s had some water and about a decade of sleep.
She wrestles herself around and flops onto her back. She looks up at him with wide, exasperated eyes. “Remus.”
“Don’t Remus me,” he huffs, collapsing back against his usual end of the couch. “I haven’t the energy for a scolding.”
“Yeah!” she scoffs, flopping her hands uselessly at him. “I wonder why!”
He grins breathlessly up at the ceiling, feeling better than he has in months. Possibly years. “Complaining?”
Hermione is quiet from the other end of the sofa, which is all the answer he needs. His grin broadens.
“I ought to be,” she says finally. “It’s like you said, I haven’t the energy.”
Remus hums, glad to hear it. He wanted to give her a fuck she’d never forget, and it sounds very much like he succeeded. He definitely won’t be forgetting this any time soon.
He exhales and feels the breeze of his breath all down his front. He desperately needs a shower. And about four meals’ worth of food.
“Did you mean it?” she asks after a moment. Her voice is quieter, softer—this is something important. Something she’s vulnerable about. “What you said at the end? Your… your deal?”
Remus looks down the length of his body at her. She’s a disaster of hair and blushes, pink and frazzled all over. The beauty of her reminds him of the very first time he glimpsed Hogwarts. “What, with all the—the breeding and the plugging, and all that?”
“No,” she says, rolling her eyes. She swallows and looks off to the side, away from him. “The… the sleeping with me. The being around all night. Being there when I wake up. Is that—I mean, well, it’s not like you have to, I just thought—”
“I’ll sleep with you,” he offers. He quiets his voice, too, because she’s right: This is important. “I’d like that. Not for… not just for the sexy bits. I’d—blimey, Hermione I’m not—do you mean it? You want—you want me? Are you sure?”
Hermione bites her lip and shrugs self-consciously. That one, little, innocent gesture ruins him all over again. “I’ve maybe been wanting this for a while. Like… before I understood what I actually wanted. Used to be, I really wanted you to pat me on the head and tell me that I impressed you. But I—I wanted to sit on your lap for it, and I wanted it to give me that wriggly, anxious feeling I hadn’t figured out yet.”
Remus gapes at her. “You mean—you mean like… when we met? Hermione. You were thir—oh Merlin, I’m horrible.”
“It was a crush!” she exclaims defensively. “I’m not that way anymore. I’m—well, I still want you to be impressed with me, and I still want to be on your lap, but it’s different now.”
The fantasy splatters itself across Remus’ mind before he can fend it off: Hermione waiting after class until all the other students have left, then coming up to him and straddling his lap. She slides his hand up under her skirt—not wearing underwear again, little harlot that she is—while she works open the button of his trousers. She sinks onto him, all liquid warmth, and leans in to whisper in his ear, Have I impressed you yet, Professor?
If there is a hell, he’s going there straight away the instant he croaks. He is irredeemable.
“I didn’t mean to torment you,” she confesses. She winces. “Well, no, I did, eventually. But… but I just… I got caught up in it. I’m sorry it was torturous.”
He swallows around a mouthful of words and takes time crafting his response. As frustrated and primitive as he was, he said a lot of harsh things to her today; he doesn’t regret them, but he doesn’t want them to be all she’s left with, either.
“You do impress me.” He rather wishes he were a bit less naked for this, given how big it feels, but he soldiers on. “You impressed me back then. Not like—not like this, but… you were always special, Hermione. I suppose… I suppose at some point, I realized that, but I excepted myself out of the running for people who could appreciate it. You were young, lovely, smart, prudent. Someone I would have fallen over trying to woo back my Hogwarts days.” He grins fleetingly. “Someone Padfoot would have talked about endlessly, just to rile me up. But I’m… I’m old now. I’m tired and bitter, and you—”
“You’re in your thirties,” Hermione cuts in, rolling her eyes. “I know the Wizarding population tends to marry them off young, but in the Muggle world, you’ve barely stopped being a young adult. You’re tired and bitter because you’ve decided you're tired and bitter. I don’t see you that way.”
Remus inhales deeply, curling his lips up into a smile. “How do you see me?”
“Lovely,” she replies. She crosses her feet at the ankles and folds her hands over her abdomen, somehow regaining a sense of Hermione Granger propriety even while nude and disheveled. “Smart. Prudent. Someone Ginny did nag me about endlessly, because I was smitten for a while, there.”
“Smitten,” he echoes, unable to keep the glee out of his voice.
“Come off it,” Hermione says, grinning a little foolishly as she blushes. “A lot of girls liked you; you were a popular choice. They probably still do—do any of your essays get turned in smelling like perfume?”
Remus blinks at her, taken aback. “How did you know that? They keep making me sneeze.”
Hermione smirks and lifts a shoulder. “Classic schoolgirl seduction technique. I knew better, once I figured you out. You’re a werewolf, you’re not going to be overcome by the smell of gardenia, or whatever. I usually just handled a bit of chocolate before I rolled mine up.”
His mouth falls open in shock. He… he remembers that. He always used to save her essays for last because he looked forward to them. And he can remember always cracking open something from Honeydukes while he read them, because something about them needled his sweet tooth.
“That’s… that’s manipulation!” he protests. “That’s conning the system, that’s—”
“You are so validating all of it right now,” she advises, beaming and pleased. He clicks his jaw shut. “Don’t worry, I don’t use chocolate on my essays anymore. Although you might have just given me a better idea of something to smudge on them.”
His jaw drops all over again. “Don’t you dare.”
She breaks into a peal of laughter, only to freeze a moment later. She shifts awkwardly on the cushions, and Remus knows exactly what’s just happened. Or, more precisely, what she’s inadvertently just pushed out of herself.
His cock twitches against his thigh—this is exactly the sort of thing he’d label a right cue—drawing her gaze to it. He shakes his head, not wanting to get distracted from what he knows is a necessary conversation.
“There’s a difference between a schoolyard crush and this,” he points out. “I’ve been a lot of things to you since then, and you’ve met a lot of people who would gladly share a bed with you.”
He doesn’t ask the question outright, because he doesn’t need to. In Hermione’s life, there are more age-appropriate people, more experience-appropriate people, more attractive people, more—everything.
She takes a slow, thoughtful breath. “I just… I ended up following a path where I got tired and bitter, too. Everyone talks about me like I’m some—some doll, some cherub, for what I did. They make it sound noble. And… and that’s not how it feels at all. I’m not gallant for fighting to survive. If—if Harry hadn’t won, if we lost, that would have been my life, over. I would have been hunted down and slaughtered for being what I was, and for doing what I did with it. And all the rest—fighting for my friends to survive, sometimes losing that battle, running, hiding—it’s not something people want to relate to. It’s something they make panels where they decide what to do with you, because you’re abnormal.”
Remus exhales through his nose, amused. “I know that feeling.”
“You do.” She stares right at him with her massive, wonderful eyes. “We’re not the same, but… but you get it. You aren’t trying to just move on like the rest of them. You’re ready to be tired and bitter, if that’s what lets you be honest. I truly don’t think you’re that way, but… but I like that you’re willing to be.”
That is a confession he can’t place words to. His lycanthropy has put so much hardship in his life, it’s hard to imagine that there’s been something worthwhile to come out of it. It’s a curse quite literally. He almost rejects the idea of someone finding value in it, because it’s despicable. A blight on his life.
But it does make him honest. She’s right about that. He’s so used to the bad things in his life sticking around to haunt him, he doesn’t try to pretend that the war is over simply because the fighting has stopped. The losses of that war haven’t ended. The damage isn’t all healing. People still hate Muggleborns, and they still hate werewolves. That is the tiring, embittering truth.
“I’m not….” Remus starts, again wishing he had more clothes, and again wanting his words to be precise, “I’m not ready for something committed. Not yet. I don’t—I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Hermione, by promising you more than I can deliver.”
She shakes her head. “I know. I’ve thought a lot about it. Molly is—well, Molly—so I’ve been reminded plenty about things like commitment and all those big life items. That’s not what I want. I’m back here for another year because I’m not ready to sign up for something permanent. Professionally or otherwise.”
He nods, clearing his throat. “Good. That’s—that’s wise.”
The room grows quiet for a long, heavy moment. Remus finds himself wondering, for the first time in a long, long time, what he wants. He called Hermione’s behavior torturous—and it was that, very much—but it was earnest, too. She wasn’t pushing him or coaxing him, she was making herself painfully, shamelessly available. He got to choose to take her up on it and choose what to do about it. And here, too, she’s giving him the option: She’s here and painfully, shamelessly available for him, for whatever he wants. He gets to choose.
“I… I want something that makes me feel a little less tired, and a little less bitter,” Hermione says carefully. “I want both of us to have that. I don’t need to be everything for you, but I want to be something. And, between you and me, I want it to involve a lot more of what happened today.”
He stews on that. He pictures waking up to a faceful of bushy hair and sitting side-by-side to drink tea and read books in the mornings. He pictures heated debates over nonsense that lead to falling in bed together and writing down notes on things to research so they can hash out those same debates all over again. He pictures sex and laughter and waking up feeling less alone again.
He’s not ready for another everything, and he might not be for a long time. But… he could be, someday. And he could do a lot worse—a lot worse—than Hermione Granger.
“It won’t be easy,” he warns her. “I’m an enormous grouch around the full moon. You haven’t seen that yet, not fully. And I get very cross about bad essays. I’m a handful, on the inside.”
Hermione grins at him, and it’s young and lovely and perfect. “I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge.”
Mornings, the Final
Remus wakes up to an absolutely gorgeous, succulent heat around his cock. He stares up at the ceiling, mindless and thoughtless, uncomprehending of what is happening. The pleasure is exquisite.
“Good morning,” Hermione greets, once she’s slid her mouth off him. “Sleep well?”
He blinks down at her, taking in the mass of hair and the gloss of saliva on her lips. The memories filter back into place like leaves falling in reverse. He opens his mouth to reply, then shuts it. Then opens it again.
It really happened. All that sex, all that pent up aggression, all that madness. All the sweetness that came after.
He shuts his mouth again.
Hermione giggles, wrapping a hand around the base of his prick. She gives him a kitten lick at the head that makes him see stars. “I’ll take that as a yes, then, shall I?”
“Ah-huh,” Remus replies intelligently.
There’s a young, trim woman in his bed, a woman he both respects and likes, and she’s presently hollowing her cheeks around the glans of his cock. That’s—that’s just—
“This is a great way to wake up,” he announces abruptly, fisting his hands in the sheets.
“Thought so,” she replies primly. She bobs her head once, deeply, then pulls back off. “Seemed a bit unfair, all that time you spent getting acquainted with me yesterday. Wanted to even the score.”
“Ha-uh,” he returns, stuck on just how much she just fit in her mouth. “Y—you—yeah.”
She rolls her lips together, biting them while her eyes sparkle her laughter up at him. She nods seriously. “Excellent point, Professor.”
Oh, that’s definitely a kink they share. Remus’s voice hitches at the same time his hips do.
Hermione’s eyebrows twitch as she undoubtedly memorizes that little discovery into her massive brain. She shifts, sliding up his body so his cock drags down her throat, her sternum, her belly. Remus has all of a second to mourn the loss of her mouth when he feels warm, slick heat drag over him.
Oh, bloody hell, her cunt. He’d forgotten.
“It’s a Saturday,” she tells him, holding herself up on one arm so her other hand can disappear between her legs. She lines herself up and sinks down, and Remus loses the ability to think in any words whatsoever. Her eyelashes flutter and she licks her lips as she keeps going, down, down, down, until she’s seated on him. “I was thinking we could… do this?”
“Ha-ah-huh,” Remus says, caught somewhere between a groan and a grunt. There are—breasts. Smooth, silky skin. Warm eyes. A cunt made of heaven itself. A scent.
Every inch of Remus’ sorry, lycanthropic soul is in love with that scent.
“The picture of eloquence,” she teases. She sits up and hums, then rolls her hips experimentally. “I’ve never been on top before. Am I doing it right?”
She’s never—fuck.
Remus opens his mouth, then realizes if he vocalizes anything less than words, he’s going to outright embarrass himself. He makes a significant amount of effort and finds something coherent to say.
“You feel like sex,” he says, only to immediately grimace. He’d meant to say you feel like heaven, or I cannot believe we’re having sex, or something like that. Something observational and simple, that made some kind of sense. Not you feel like sex. They’re having sex, of course she feels like sex.
Merlin, he’s just waking up and they’re having sex.
“That’s… a step in the right direction? I guess?” She holds her composure for a split second longer before breaking down into giggles. “Maybe you really need that tea in the mornings?”
“I do,” he replies, and then his eyes catch on her lips and he realizes, dismayed, that he hasn’t kissed her yet. All this sex, all this depravity, and he hasn’t even kissed her.
That won’t do.
He sits up and rolls them both over, pressing her into the mattress. He tucks his hips against her, finally starting to properly wake up. He takes in the details of her face. “Hi.”
She blinks up at him, surprised and looking suddenly shy. “Hi.”
“You feel amazing,” he tells her, meaning it. He tucks one of her legs up over his hip and thrusts slow and deep. “Amazing.”
“Ah,” she says, mouth falling open. “Back—back at you.”
“I haven’t kissed you yet,” he informs her, thrusting again. “May I?”
She clicks her mouth shut and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
Remus ducks his head and kisses her slow and deep like his strokes. He uses lots of tongue. He swallows down Hermione’s moans and sighs, and he exhales his own into her mouth.
“It’s a Saturday,” he repeats back to her. He trails a hand between their bodies and circles her clit. “I was thinking….”
“Yes,” she says, nodding encouragingly. “Yes, that.”
“I was thinking we do this,” he continues, punctuating his words with a snap of his hips, “and then I find out if you taste as good full as you do empty.”
Her expression pinches helplessly and she trembles. “O-okay.”
“And then,” he says, “we go out to the living room. I get you on my lap, followed by my cock, and I finish that bloody book I’m on.”
“Oh,” she replies dazedly. “Is that—people do this and read?”
“We do,” he decides. “I don’t want you off me, but I’ve been on the same sodding chapter for the last two weeks. Compromises must be made.”
“I—I don’t know if I can read,” she admits, rolling her hips to meet him. They both groan, and she does it again. “I’m willing to try.”
“We’ll learn,” he says, because he’s not sure he’ll be able to read much either. Every thought he has seems to collapse in on itself at the slightest shift of her body. “We’ve got every morning to practice.”
“Yeah,” she says. Her smile unfolds slowly, like a brand new book falling open on never-before-read pages. “Yeah, we do.”
Hermione Granger is not the person she appears to be.
Sounds melodramatic, Remus knows. Bear with him.
Hermione appears to be a practical, bright, inquisitive witch with an eye for detail and a tongue just as sharp. She tolerates no nonsense, she holds no prisoners, and she humors no idiocy. She’s fearsome and breathtaking and visionary.
The person that she is on the inside, though, is even better. She’s practical and bright, yes, but she’s warmth and kindness, too. She tolerates no nonsense, yet she entertains endless, inane jokes and arguments when he lobs them at her. She holds no prisoners, but when he falls prisoner to his memories, she holds him until he can breathe without shaking again. She humors no idiocy, but she finds a way whenever he plays the fool. She’s the kiss on his throat while he swallows his Wolfsbane and the snort in his ear when he marks points off an essay. She is fearsome and fearless, breathtaking and life-giving, visionary and vulnerable.
Little by little, she makes the chapters of his life easier to read, because she’s in them.
She isn’t his everything. Not yet. But the longer he goes, the more he understands that the point of all this—the melodramatic, fundamental conclusion sitting at the end of all these premises—is that sometimes, in some ways, something can be even better.