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Hermione’s life is, ostensibly, going well.
She’s gotten everything she’s worked so hard for, and she means to be pleased about it. Instead, she’s been insufferably existential lately, and feeling more alone than ever with her thoughts, the doubts that plague her at night now reaching tendrils into her waking hours.
Hermione has, historically, found solace in the sterility of wisdom. In reading the words of long-dead men, whose guidance she can follow when she cannot find her own way out of the labyrinth of her own longing and disappointment. The stoics and the sceptics comfort her in this stage of her life, the years where everything is meant to make sense and yet nothing does. To want is to suffer, to exist is to be unknowable, and if known, incommunicable. There’s comfort in accepting the inevitability of your own dissatisfaction.
There is also comfort in routine.
She’d won the war, secured a senior research position in the Department of Mysteries, convinced Ron to love her. By every possible metric, her life—the life she didn’t think she’d get, huddled in a cold tent with Harry—is going well.
Still, Hermione desires things she does not, cannot, have.
She is sure, after years of depersonalization, that she exists. Therefore, she cannot be known.
And above all else, she wants to be known, she just can’t figure out how to say it.
On the one year anniversary of her time in the DoM, she arrives early to the office, takeout cups in hand, to try and make sense of the noise of her own mind in the silence of a basement lab. She places a cup of Malfoy’s favorite Persian tea (darjeeling steeped lightly, fresh mint, an alarming volume of sugar) on his desk. It’s something she picks up at the café by her flat because it’s an easy sort of conciliatory gesture after their arguments, including that of the evening prior.
He was wrong about the substance of their fight; she'd overstepped in the violence with which she'd told him so.
She suspects he riles her up just to receive this specific apology, the prat. She brings him tea so very often.
Conventional wisdom would hold that adults in monogamous relationships occasionally have some interest in people other than their partners. It would also hold that an intense interest indicates something is amiss in the primary relationship. Of the many mysteries they study in her office, this hardly rates.
Acknowledging another man as fit, and Draco Malfoy specifically, is a symptom, not the disease itself.
Ending things with Ron hadn’t been easy, but it was the first time she’d felt conviction in her own decisions since school. She’d managed to surprise herself and all of her friends in the process.
Her attraction to Malfoy, however—
Ending things with Ron hadn’t been easy, but it was meant to be the cure.
Hermione is dismayed to find that her symptoms persist.
The first time Draco wears a muggle suit to work—after two years of robes, in spite of her teasing comments that he looks like a sad lad the Hogwarts Express has left behind—Hermione feels ill.
Watching him unbutton the suit jacket as he sits at his desk, just across from hers, alters her brain on a chemical level. She spends the rest of the day replaying the movements of his nimble fingers. He’s obliging enough to be in and out far more than usual, undoing and redoing the button of his jacket each time.
She feels a touch feverish after a full week of suits. He adopts them as his new uniform, and she resigns herself to her new disease state.
Hermione has always felt most at home in her own head, but in the ensuing weeks, her mind becomes hostile territory. She’ll be happily working, following a theory to its promising conclusion, until she catches a movement across the way, only to be completely derailed by her officemate stretching his neck, or sucking on a canine as he considers a draft, or pulling his bottom lip into his mouth to run his tongue along it—
Her thoughts devolve into chaos every single time. She thinks about tracing her fingers along the lines of muscle that she can see just under the charcoal wool of his suit, loses herself in the idea of his mouth sucking marks into her skin—
Sometimes, lost in this libidinous fugue that is sharing space with someone who looks and talks and sounds like him, she catches his eyes and feels a glimmer of guilt.
Surely it’s rude to hand a man a cup of tea and then imagine he sets it to the side in favor of pulling you into his lap? It’s a topic neglected by every etiquette book she’s ever read; she makes a reasonable deduction.
Although surely it’s more rude to smirk the way he does, pinning her with his full attention in that specific way of his as his fingers graze hers along the cardboard.
She swears he does it on purpose.
And then one day, she’s certain he does.
He’s just twirled his wand once in his left hand, sending her mind to a place of utter filth: other uses for his wand, his hands. She imagines him placing them at her entrance, filling her with his fingers while vibrations from his wand pulse just so—
She’s miscalculated, staring at him openly, so she captures the abrupt way in which his head snaps up from his work. As a consequence, they’re now looking at each other, which is awkward, but at least he doesn’t know what she’s been thinking about.
And then, Draco, usually still as a graveyard if never as quiet as one, twirls his wand again.
And again.
Watching her all the while, considering her.
Hermione has a good sense for when she’s in danger, or an overwrought system that feels as though she always is, but either way, she slams a barrier around her mind, exerts her own graceless occlumency. He knows.
And worse, he’s been driving her insane intentionally.
She'd been aware of his talent as a Legilimens. There's a registry, he's on it. Looking up Draco Malfoy’s various holdings and registrations had been a perfectly acceptable use of both her Unspeakable credentials and her Friday night, when it was late and he’d been on her mind. She’s made a hobby of many such minor ethical misdeeds where he’s concerned.
But she had never felt the violation of him trundling through her mind, hadn’t thought to worry about a more subtle exploration. Didn’t think him inclined to try and figure her out, where so many had failed before.
The sceptics were good for more than an existential crisis. There’s something of value to the idea that you presume nothing true until tested, until proven.
And now, Hermione has an idea to test.
If Draco has been skimming thoughts from her mind, then he’s seen how much she wants to fuck him. Fine, great. He knows. Bully for him.
More important, though, is what he’s done with this knowledge. It almost makes her smile through her mortification, what could be more quintessentially Draco than a seduction based on an unfair magical advantage?
He’s focused on his work in the final hour of their day—she wonders if he’s bored without the pornography her thoughts regularly provide as her attention wanes in the evening—when she strides over and perches on his desk.
He towers over her in most circumstances. She hates him a little bit for it, in that way where she also wants nothing more than to drag him down by his collar and force him onto her level. But here, with him seated and her looking down at him, she appreciates a height difference that is for once in her favor.
“Are you usually this obvious when seducing witches? Or was the conspicuousness deliberate?”
He doesn’t spare her with any attempt at equivocation. “I could ask the same of you.” He punctuates this with a raised brow. ”Do you know how loud you are with your interest?”
“That’s— I wasn’t trying to project my thoughts!” The implication that she should have suspected sooner is aggravating. He’s aggravating.
“I didn't have to work very hard for it, love. You were practically screaming that you wanted me to bend you over this desk last week.” He feigns innocence. “Did you not mean for me to know?”
She gets the distinct feeling he’s having a laugh at her expense.
Her attention sharpens to a single point, blurring out the backdrop of Ministry-standard pine furniture and walls covered in their frantic notes. All of her focus is on him.
He’s close enough to touch, so she does.
Adopting the role of predator provides her the confidence she otherwise lacks as prey before his hungry gaze. She pulls his face to hers the way she’s imagined many times before—the way she’s so sure he’s watched play out in her thoughts with increasing frequency these past few months—and holds him there, a breath away.
He’s close enough that she can taste the darjeeling and mint on his breath, far enough that he’ll have to experience this same unbearable wanting that consumes her.
His pupils are dilated. His breath comes fast.
She catalogs each detail with more than the usual fascination she has for him. Evidence.
She grips his shirt tight in her fist as he pushes toward her, into a kiss that is so much more aggressive than her fantasies had been.
It’s a mutual devouring. Confirmation.
Absent the constant denial and distraction of their usual working dynamic, she travels the space between fantasies and their actualization. She is finally sinking her teeth into his smooth lips, desperate to mark or to maim, hard enough to make him groan, a punishment for both the quality and sheer amount of feeling he inspires within her.
The thought is there, just within reach.
It’s sickening, how much she wants.
“Are you sure you want this?” He sounds desperate for her answer, in a way he never has before.
“Why don’t you see for yourself? I know that you can.” There, her formal accusation.
He seems intrigued as he reaches for his wand. “Are you going to let me in?”
No sooner than he’s finished asking, she opens her legs and pulls down the barrier erected in her mind.
He rucks her skirt up as he stands.
“Legilimens.”
For the majority of their time working together, his magic has felt comforting, familiar. A kind of background hum in their shared space that tells her she’s home.
She’s not prepared, then, for an intrusion that is so much sharper. The pointed edges of him that she’d known, intellectually, existed but have not defined him in her mind. Only, now he’s quite literally inserting himself into her mind with none of his prior subtlety and it’s fast, disorienting, too much.
He traces the outline of her knickers with a gentleness that contradicts the intensity of their kiss, the brutality of his entry into her thoughts, and she’s fighting for air. Having him this close, touching her in all the ways she’s imagined late at night, alone in bed — oh fuck, in this very office, with him watching — he smirks at that — fuck you, Draco.
He pulls her in for another kiss. It’s all too much, overstimulating. She could quite easily be convinced of her own non-existence, floating as she is outside of herself.
She hadn’t even felt his other hand slide up into her hair, but she certainly feels the tug as he grabs a handful and twists. Just like that, she’s back in her body, extant, present in this moment with Draco and the feel of his fine cotton shirt and the smell of his neck.
It’s impetus enough for her to unzip his trousers and take him in hand, savoring the feeling of his cock as he flexes within her grip.
The rapidity of his response to each of her desires is disconcerting. No sooner has she realized she’d quite like to fuck him, right now, on his desk, than he’s pushing the gusset of her kickers to the side and slowly, so slowly, pushing inside her.
Torturous pace aside, she’s frustrated knowing this exquisite pleasure derives from months of fantasies and her own conflicting desires. Parts of her she’d never meant for him to know on full, desperate display as he keeps her pinned against his desk.
She wants more, harder, faster, but she also needs the gradual build up to come and— He licks his thumb, brings it back to her body, circles her clit at an agonizingly slow pace. The absolute prick, he’s giving her what she needs while she goes mad with impatience, chokes on the enormity of her own desire where it sticks in her throat, alongside her words. More, more, more.
It’s the worst kind of ambivalence, stretched taut between what she wants and what she needs and what he knows, what she never would have told him.
The way he’s touching her is so exactly like how she regularly touches herself to thoughts of him and — smug fuck that he is, he winks. She bites his neck in retaliation.
Finally, he starts to move faster in her, just when her tolerance has reached its limit. Her growl of frustration loses its gravel and gives way to a moan.
He releases the handful of her hair, to slide down her jawline and cup her face. She feels his grip tighten as he tries to pull her chin up toward him.
She can’t look him in the eyes. It’s gratifying and humiliating and she’s wanted him for so long, in so many more ways than this, and what if—
“Granger, look at me,” he urges, sounding as wrecked as she feels. He changes the angle of his hips when she forces herself to meet his eyes, and suddenly the friction of her knickers is working in concert with his thumb and his cock and she’s losing her tether to her body once more, this time in exhaustive pleasure as she comes.
“You’re not the only one who’s wanted this, Granger,” he says. “I’d even,” he’s enunciating so slowly, so carefully, punctuating his words with long thrusts, “be willing to show you.”
The implication that there is something she doesn’t know, about him, and the offer to learn it — she is unequal to his temptation.
She steadies herself on a shaking breath, still coming down from her orgasm. And then, as she often does with him, she gives in: “Alright then, show me.”
The pressure of his magic increases within her. She already feels stretched beyond capacity in so many ways but—
Her own longing is nothing, nothing, to what he forces through the theoretical membrane of her magic. Everything he feels burns impossibly hot, bright, an overexposed film playing out in their shared mental space.
Memories of his own daydreams, him kneeling before her in an expensive suit, to whisper his devotion against her inner thigh before he sucks a mark into her flesh on his way to her cunt while she looks at him like he’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen (he is).
Flashes of his view of their bodies as he thrusts into her again and again, as he marvels at the sight of her body stretching to welcome his.
Through it all, the fleeting bits of then and now, the pleasure she feels traveling his spine, there’s the depth of his feelings, his affection.
She sees herself through his eyes, feels his fixation on the severe furrow of her brow as she’s about to come for the second time. The urge he has even now, to kiss her there. She feels how he wants to, the expanding warmth in his chest as he finally does.
The resulting sensation he causes in her, the feeling of his lips pressed tenderly against yet another place of tension within her and the release that follows.
He’s coming — she feels it from the inside out, and maybe it’s just him, or maybe she’s coming too. She doesn’t know that she can identify the owner of this pleasure. It’s his and it’s hers and it’s all consuming.
Her experience of his mind has been that it’s quieter than hers. Much more sure. But in their shared orgasm there is the violent noise of rushing blood and her own whimpers, ringing in his mind and echoing in hers.
Hermione realizes she’s crying at a delay, through his perception of her tears and his answering impulse to hold her to his chest, followed by his immediate action.
She cries harder, at this reminder that he is decisive where she is not.
He’s still inside of her, in every sense, as he holds her body tightly to his and she sobs into his shirt.
They’d not bothered to undress, but she feels more naked than she’s ever been in the company of anyone, even herself.
Lingering in the background, as she becomes increasingly aware of how uncomfortably wet her knickers are now, and the dread of having to wear them, is an ache.
It does stand to reason that Hermione, who exists, if she is knowable, cannot communicate that to another person. Of course it takes magic and a violation of her very being for someone else to understand her, to meet her needs.
She feels the dual exit of his cock and his magic in one sharp movement.
"Please talk to me, Granger. I hate it when you won't talk to me." His words vibrate against her chest. It's the reminder she needs to pull further away.
“I can’t— it’s better if you just cast the spell again,” she says, voice raw but tears thankfully, finally dry. “Or, I suppose you don’t need to, what with the constant mind-reading and privacy invasion.” She doesn’t want to sound bitter, but the words have an unpleasant after-taste.
He puts them both back to rights with the same precise movements she’s observed during their biweekly office cleaning. Her hair, she fears, is beyond even his capacity to smooth.
“Granger— Hermione, I’ve never used legilimency on you before this,” he sounds resigned. This is the effect she has on people, she knows. “But of course, of course you would think that.”
He rakes his hand through his fine white-blond hair, and she’s momentarily struck dumb by how pretty he is, even in his frustration. Then she realizes he’s rolling his eyes, and she remembers it’s her he’s frustrated with.
“How else could you possibly know? You’ve been so— every time I think about us—” she cuts herself off, hearing the patent absurdity of it.
Legilimency without casting? And neither sophisticated torture nor mind-reading magic will drag the words “you kept unbuttoning your suit jacket to seduce me” out of her.
She feels numb, except, unfortunately, for the cum pooling in her knickers. No, that she feels quite presently.
“Granger, love, are you so set on being impossible to understand that I’d have to resort to, what, infiltrating your mind? Instead of just paying attention to you.” He sighs. It’s an unexpectedly fond sound, for all its affected drama. Prat.
“I just — it really feels like there are things you know about me that nobody else does.” She wishes most fervently to hide under her desk until he leaves for the day, which should be… about ten minutes ago, actually.
“How do you know how I take my tea?”
She fears she's dissociated her way into an entirely different conversation. “Er, you… told me? Have I been wrong this whole time?”
“No, absolutely not, you stop that this very moment. No. Bad Granger!” He chastises her with a wave of his finger, like she’s a naughty child, the way he sometimes does when she skips lunch. “No spiraling. You know these things, because I’ve told you.” He holds her face between his hands, forces her to keep looking up at him. “And you know other things about me that I haven’t told you, don’t you?”
She does, she knows this, him. He would absolutely spend their work days watching her sexual fantasies if he could, for example, and he would let her think that he’d managed to do it without her noticing because it’s funny to him when she hangs herself on the scantest bit of conversational rope, but—
His grip on her face is firm, certain as he ever is. “You are special, you are inexplicably wonderful, but you are not fundamentally unknowable.”
Hermione realizes, even awash in the contentment he provides, that she will likely always desire things she does not have.
She had tried, and failed, to reason her way into happiness. Feeling it now, as she folds herself into the arms of someone who has made the effort to understand her, she is sure that she exists.
She can be known.
She’s learning how to say it.