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Their first meeting is something of an accident.
Hermione is reaching up at a book (Principles of Flame Charms, by Albert Damo) on the second highest shelf on the library, near one of the back corners. It’s just slightly too tall for her, but she doesn’t want to go find Madam Pince at the front of the library, and she just needs it for a single reference for her Charms essay, so she’s reaching at the tip of her toes for the dusty tome that probably hasn’t been checked out in the past decade. It was a shame, she thought, that Professor Flitwick wouldn’t be teaching the levitation charm until the end of October.
A hand reaches from behind her and grabs the book. Hermione startles and jumps and knocks the book onto the face of the owner of the offending arm, and she hears a muffled groan of pain as the person behind her falls on the ground. She whirls around, blushing, and comes face to face (or well, face to waist, with him currently being on the floor) with Harry Potter.
She knows who he is, of course. He’s mentioned in three of the books she bought at Diagon Alley on recent wizarding history, credited with the destruction of You-Know-Who, Britain’s worst Dark Wizard of the past three centuries. More than that, though, he’d been pointed out to every single Gryffindor first-year on the night of the Sorting, with warnings to stay away from all the Slytherins, but especially the Snake-Who-Lived. There were apparently nasty rumours floating about his first year, involving the death of a teacher and the theft of an important magical artifact, eventually culminating in the “theft” of the House Cup from Gryffindor after Dumbledore granted him a hundred house points for the incident, who’d been on the verge of winning for the first time in over a decade. This meant that although the House of Lions already hated Slytherins on principle, they particularly hated the supposed saviour of the wizarding world.
These are academic thoughts, however, and have no bearing on the fact that Hermione had just knocked a boy older than her down on his ass.
“I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” she sputters in apology.
As he rises from the ground, he chuckles. “I’m alright, but I’m getting the message that you Gryffindor lot really despise me if you’re going to knock a man down for trying to help you get a book.”
She glows an incandescent red, blushing furiously. He grabs the tome from the ground and hands it to her with a small smile.
“Thanks,” she chokes out, taking the book.
As he turns to leave, however, Hermione notices that his glasses have cracked (presumably from the book falling on him), and she stops him from walking away.
“Wait!” He turns to look at her, questioningly, but she doesn’t hesitate before tapping her wand on his glasses and muttering a quick “Reparo!”
His glasses mend, and as he stares at her, Hermione notes two more things about him that the books never really mention.
First, he’s tall. He almost towers over her (she is, admittedly, pretty short for her age), and Hermione can see why he was so amused by her struggling to reach a book on the shelves.
Second, are his eyes. With his eyes unmarred by cracked lenses and fixed directly at her, they are piercing. There is a sharpness there, a probing investigation, but all Hermione can do is think about just how green they are.
In the meantime, he seems to come to some kind of judgement about her.
He holds out a hand to shake. “I’m Harry Potter.” She knew that already, and from the way he says it, he knew that she knew – although that was probably common for him. “Thanks, Ms…?”
“Granger. But please, call me Hermione.” She takes his hand and shakes it – some kindness is the least she can do for him after he tried to help her out, even if she is still wary about what her housemates have told her.
“Harry, then. See you around.” He actually goes this time, but not before flashing Hermione with a smile, much unlike his previous smirks. This one is full, almost open, and as she realizes that he has dimples on his cheeks, she starts blushing again.
Oh. This could be dangerous.
And so her time with the loner of Slytherin began. It’s obvious that he’s had little chance to make friends, seeing as he’d been sorted into the house of the Dark Lord’s followers as You-Know-Who’s supposed vanquisher, meaning that his house had turned on him from the very first day (he’d had to be given his own room, after the other boys in his year had ganged up on him so badly Professor Snape was forced to bring him to the Hospital wing). The other houses aren’t so friendly to him either. Gryffindor for obvious reasons, but Ravenclaw seemed to dislike him because of how competent he was (top of the year in every subject except Astronomy and History) and Hufflepuff seemed to find it suspicious that he had no friends.
That last one made little sense to Hermione (wasn’t that a bit self-fulfilling?), but all it practically meant to her was that no one else had really gotten to experience what being friends with Harry Potter was like.
As she too was a loner (the unbearable know-it-all of the tower, Ron Weasley called her), they spent a considerable amount of time in the back corners of the library together. Harry would sit next to her as they did work, tucked away from the gossipmongers of the school, and it was here that she learned more about him.
Harry was, as his top class ranking suggested, incredibly smart. Although his theory wasn’t perfect (he lacked the patience for it, he explained), his practical application and ability to cast spells was remarkable, as though he literally breathed magic.
He was also kind in his observance. He never pushed his help onto her, despite being a year older and having already done all the assignments before but instead waited until she was struggling before offering advice: this book contained that information or thinking about this concept from that perspective might help. Occasionally, he even guided her through some wandwork.
An unexpected feature of him was his wit and sense of humour. He wasn’t all dry sarcasm, as their first interaction suggested. In fact, his sarcasm sometimes felt forced, as though beaten into him by cynicism. Instead, he loved to reference muggle movies and literature in his jokes, both new and classic. It was a result of being raised by his godfather, he tells her, as the man loved muggle media, and had been sure to raise Harry on Disney movies but also classics that his parents had loved to read like Shakespeare and Dickens and particularly poets (Plath and Eliot and Whitman are his favourites, he tells her. He smirks at her surprise. “What can I say? I contain multitudes.”). His engagement with non-magical culture, her world, makes her feel seen as she never had been before in the magical world – wizards seemed to encourage muggleborns to give up their entire lives to integrate, and here there was a wizarding boy who was joking with her about Snape being a budget Jafar.
It's a shame, she thinks, as he is explaining the mechanics of the unlocking charm to her, that no one else wants to be Harry’s friend. Did they know that this kind, charming boy existed under all his sharp edges, honed by rejection?
She seems to have been caught daydreaming, however, and Harry seems amused as he catches her attention again.
“Hello? Earth to Hermione?”
“Sorry, just thinking,” she says.
“About what?”
“Why no one is friends with you,” she says honestly. There’s a teasing bite to it, and she knows from the way he smiles that he’s taken it as a joke – even though she does mean it quite genuinely too.
“Ouch – are you returning to your Gryffindor roots then? Gonna drop the snake?”
“Nope. Who else could ramble about the arithmantic basis of Alohomora to me? I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep otherwise.” He laughs, and goes back to his own work, but Hermione doesn’t stop thinking.
It is very un-Gryffindor of her to get closer with him. It is a betrayal of their traditional house feud, choosing to cross the lines and sit in the library with a Slytherin. Maybe she should have been a Ravenclaw, spending all her time with parchments and tomes as she did. But, as she reflects, a lot of her house is pretty un-Gryffindor: it’s not very daring nor chivalrous to pick on a little girl who just wants to learn and is excited by the prospect of magic being real.
And besides, a small part of her thinks that it makes sense that she’s at least a little bit Lion – she was being brave for herself, and made friends with a boy who she was told would otherwise hate her. The Hat sorts for a reason.
She also learns, that despite his ostracization, his one point of forced interaction with others is Quidditch – he’s the youngest seeker in a century and is so good on a broom that even though the rest of the Slytherin team hates him and forces him to practice separately, he still made the squad as a first year. He plays to feel free in the sky, he tells her, and wouldn’t trade that away for anything, so he disregards his teammates’ animosity.
Harry was so good, in fact, that when Draco Malfoy’s father bought the entire Quidditch team Nimbus 2001s in a bid to get Draco on the team as a first-year seeker to replace Harry, the team had refused to make the change. It was a bit embarrassing, Hermione thought, watching the blonde boy in her year throw a raging tantrum at an impassive Marcus Flint in the Great Hall.
It’s because of all this faff that Hermione goes to her first Quidditch game – Gryffindor versus Slytherin – without wearing any house colours (because how could she support the lions who cast her out?). When Harry asks her about it, she tells him as much, but then also reveals that she’s got a little snake pin under her jumper just for him. He laughs (has he always laughed so large?) and smiles his big smile as he tells her he appreciates it before heading down to the pitch to start warmups. She hopes he hadn’t noticed her blush.
She cheers inside her head when he catches the snitch (despite a rogue bludger dogging after him for half the match, stopped only when, during a timeout, Harry asked Hooch to do something about it and bring out a replacement), winning Slytherin the game 230-50.
The next day in the library, he presses the snitch into her palm and tells her to keep it a secret. She’s read about their touch memory, so whenever she feels it rolling about in her satchel, she can’t help but imagine the sensation of Harry’s hand pressing into hers as he gives her the golden ball.
Of course, Harry learns about her too. Hermione tells him about her parents – Dan and Emma, both dentists who live by Oxford, running their little practice. Shyly, she even tells him about her insecurity over her larger front teeth, and how she’s been asking her parents for braces for ages to fix them.
Later, he’s leading her down to the Hospital Wing to go see Madam Pomfrey to shrink her teeth as a “late birthday present” (he’d been suitably put out to realize he’d missed her turning 12 by the time they had met).
“I can’t do that!” she protests. “My parents would never let me.” She tries to turn and head back to the library when Harry grabs her wrist, and looks at her softly.
“Parents can’t be there for your entire life, Hermione, and pleasing them is less important than doing what we really want.”
She almost hurtfully protests – how can he know what parents are like? His are dead – when she realizes it’s probably that exact perspective that makes what he says so compelling. Her parents are separate people from her, and at some point, she’ll need to live and make choices for herself.
And so, she explains to Madam Pomfrey what she wants, and the matron kindly shrinks down her teeth.
This, and Harry, make her less scared of smiling.
Later, when the attacks and petrifications start, she never believes that Harry is the Heir of Slytherin despite the school thinking he’s a leading candidate – even after his ability to speak Parseltongue is revealed. She knows how much he hates the pureblood agenda (every word of it was an insult to his late mother), and that he had no hatred for muggles or muggleborns in his bones.
In fact, she thinks, if he wanted to kill her, he probably would have done it in person – Hermione remembers the dangerous gleam that appeared in his eyes when they first met, and somehow Hermione knew that underneath it all, there was a part of him ready and willing to show the world how unkind he could really be.
Regardless, the rest of the school doesn’t know that Harry spends time with a muggleborn first year in the library, and they aren’t exactly looking for reasons to exonerate him, so she dedicates herself to helping him find out about the Chamber of Secrets. At the very least, she thinks, Harry deserves to walk around Hogwarts without being feared in every hallway.
And then, when she’s finally got the answer and tries to find him to tell what she discovered, she sees a massive yellow eye in the mirror she thought to use to check around hallway corners, and everything goes black.
Later, when she finally wakes up from a dose of Mandrake draught and sees him hunched over on the side of her bed, he tells her what happened.
When she got petrified, he was forced to reveal their association to try and defend himself, but the school took it as confirmation that he was the Heir rather than a defence. He had been manipulating a defenceless first year all along, stringing her along to become his ultimate victim! (This will be funny to them later. It was not then.)
Eventually, after seeing the message that a student had been taken into the Chamber to die, and having realized it was a basilisk in the pipes from the paper clenched in her hands, he had rushed to Myrtle’s bathroom on the second floor, dragging along a terrified Gilderoy Lockhart, with nothing but his wand and a goblin-steel dagger that his godfather had made him withdraw from the Potter vaults on his 11th birthday (“Sirius says you always need a way to defend yourself without your wand”).
Inside, after nearly being Obliviated by Lockhart (being saved only through the former Professor’s duelling incompetence and his underestimation of Harry’s reflexes), he’d found the unconscious body of her roommate Ginny Weasley, a diary-shade of Voldemort, and a seventy-foot long King of Serpents. He had killed it, with the help of Dumbledore’s phoenix, by sticking his dagger straight through the roof of the snake’s mouth and then killing the diary by running it through with a basilisk tooth.
He had talked to Dumbledore (and freed a house elf) before the Weasleys had come to the hospital wing to thank him for saving their daughter.
One of the twins had apparently said he “wasn’t so bad for a snake,” before walking away and leaving him there with his petrified friend. He had sat there beside her for two days before the Mandrake draughts had finally finished.
Hermione takes this all in, head reeling from all the revelations. When she opens her mouth to ask him more questions, however, she sees a massive scar on Harry’s forearm. In fact, she sees a multitude of scars all over his arms, as the hospital gowns hid considerably less than the regular long sleeves of the Hogwarts uniform did.
He follows her gaze. “Ah. I got bit by the basilisk, by the way. Fawkes’ tears saved me though.”
Wordlessly, Hermione took his arm and traced the scar up and down, rubbing her thumb across its rough surface. She feels tears building in the corners of her eyes.
“Why would you risk your life like that?” she asks.
He replies softly. “I did it because of you. Because the teachers weren’t doing anything, and because I knew my friend wouldn’t be safe unless it was gone.”
“But I’d never want you to die for me!” she sobs. She buried her face in her hands, but she felt his arms slowly come around her, wrapping her up in a tight embrace. Through her fear and worry, there’s a starburst of happiness in her chest as she realizes just how much he cares.
A few hours later, when Headmaster Dumbledore comes in and Harry finally agrees to leave to go to the feast now that Hermione’s awake, the old wizard’s eyes seem to twinkle as she meets his gaze.
The year finishes, and she meets Sirius Black at King’s Cross Station; he’s a jovial man, teasing and laughing and ruffling Harry’s hair (albeit with some force about the whole basilisk incident) and it makes her heart soar that he’s got a home and that he, unlike in the school year, is free to laugh his amazing laugh in the summer.
She’s wrong but right all at once, but she doesn’t know this yet.
Time, and the war, passes.
The funny part is that as the years pass and they grow up, Hermione stops getting taller but Harry keeps shooting up, until she is barely 5 feet tall and he is 6’2”, and she remains petite while he continues to fill out his physique (duelling and quidditch, he tells her, as though she doesn’t also notice his morning runs and workouts during the school year).
It’s almost comical how ill-fitting they look together, with one a tiny speck of a girl and the other a physical and metaphorical titan of the wizarding world, but throughout the years their physical disparity does nothing for their emotional closeness.
And so, they witness each other.
He’s there for her, hexing her bullies and stomping on Malfoy until he finally learns the lesson, that Hermione is to be left alone unless he wanted to lose an eye and his manhood from the business end of Harry’s spellwork (as precise and excellent as ever).
She’s there for him when the dementors come (Bellatrix Lestrange has escaped from Azkaban) and remind him of screaming mothers and cruel laughs and flashes of green light.
He’s there to teach her, the second-year prodigy, the patronus charm. His is a dog and hers is a snowy owl. When she finds out about Sirius’s animagus form in a candid conversation about her discovery of Remus Lupin’s lycanthropy (it is astounding what a few boys will do for another, she thinks), she realizes Harry is protected by his father and she is protected by wisdom (and later, when she remembers Hedwig, she realizes she’s protected by a boy as well). She doesn’t tell him when she finally gets the charm to succeed, but her memory is the time he calls her his friend in the hospital wing.
She’s there when Bellatrix makes it onto the grounds at the end of the year, disguised as a Ministry executioner coming to put down Buckbeak. The Death Eater corners the two of them after stunning Hagrid during their supposed final moments with the hippogriff, and threatens them until they walk into the Shrieking Shack, where she spits with anger and asks Harry to pick who should be tortured first – him, or the Mudblood. Hermione thinks she’ll never forget the way his screams had echoed through the shack, nor her own screams trying to convince a psychopath to stop hurting Harry. They are saved only by the appearance of Professor Lupin, who had been on his way to console Hagrid until reaching the hut and smelling the scent of blood.
He's there, ultimately, to drive off the horde of dementors that come after them as the only available prey once Bellatrix has managed to escape from the grounds. It is the bright light of his patronus that lights up his pale face, stoic against impossible odds, and it is then that Hermione realizes she might be in love with this beautiful boy.
She’s there when his name comes out of a cerulean flame and commits him to a blood sport of a tournament; through dragons and death-defying flying, but also through a school eager to tell them they hate him via sneers and ugly pins.
He’s there to help her after Viktor Krum tries to take advantage of her at the Yule Ball. She’d been so taken with the Quidditch star, delighted that any boy other than Harry, who had asked Professor McGonogall herself to avoid public scrutiny, would have any interest in her. Unfortunately, the Bulgarian apparently had disgusting tendencies for younger girls. She runs from the Great Hall as she realizes she was only there to fulfill his vile fantasies, and overwhelmed, she starts sobbing on the steps. Hermione is there for what feels like ages, until Harry finds her and holds her (“I’ll kill him. I swear.”). He dances with her without any music right outside her common room, and later, Viktor Krum comes last in the Second Task after having floated to the surface of the Black Lake, mysteriously unconscious (Hermione is unfortunately unaware of this until after the fact, given she had been too busy being Harry’s hostage).
She’s there after the graveyard, after he arrived back with Cedric’s body and a forgotten Cup, the quiet admission that he can probably see thestrals now after Bellatrix killed the Hufflepuff champion, that Voldemort is back, and that he feels nothing but unrelenting guilt that once again he’s the one that survived, thinking back to the parents he’s never had the chance to know. After glancing at the lightning bolt on his forehead, she sees the new knife scar on his arm, almost matching his basilisk wound on the other. The latter scar was gotten because of a friend, and the former because of an enemy, and it was odd that the more gruesome of Harry’s disfigurements was borne from care for another. It helps her understand his guilt about her petrification a little bit better, the idea that oneself might be to blame for the hurt of a loved one.
He’s there to teach her defence when their new Ministry-sent teacher evidently wants them to be easily slaughtered fools. When they train in the Room of Requirement, she sees how a capacity for violence has been carved into Harry – his precise wandwork translates into impeccable aim and the air seems to hiss with the speed of his chain-casting, his magic destroying dummies left and right. It’s obvious he’s been trained before. In fact, it might be because he’s been trained before that he is so good at practical application in class. She thinks back to the other scars she knows mars his arms, and how he seems to want to punish himself in his drive to become better. It is only when he is training her, rather than himself, that he is gentle again, so she tries to get him to teach her as much as she can.
She’s there for him when he’s telling her about a poor Slytherin first year boy tortured by Umbridge, face dripping tears as his hands dripped blood (He’s not telling lies, she thinks, as he confesses how much he cares about children like little half-blood Connor).
He’s there for her when the pink toad threatens to torture her for the crime of being a mudblood, disarming their professor in the middle of the Great Hall. He’s taken with Umbridge into her office by her Inquisitorial Squad, and her heart races when she realizes he never came out.
She’s there for him when, later, he tells her that Sirius Black was killed by Bellatrix Lestrange in the Department of Mysteries.
He’s there for her at the Slug Club as her date to ward off Cormac McLaggen and, of all people, Ron Weasley (“C’mon Granger, I know you can see it. That snake just wants to get into your pants!” and “I’m sure you have ever so honourable intentions yourself, Weasley, but thankfully I can defend my honour myself.”). The Christmas party is their first kiss, pulled together as they were by alcohol and the air of celebration. Later, they insist to each other that it’s casual. Hermione knows it wasn’t. She has loved this boy since she was 13 and that he almost certainly felt the same deep care for her, but they were both too practical to think it was smart to be together as the snake-who-lived and the raven-in-lions-clothes – there was a war going on, and having each other meant giving targets to Voldemort and their enemies.
They are always there for each other, except in Harry’s seventh year and Hermione’s sixth, when he doesn’t return to school (he told her at a Dumbledore’s funeral that he would be away, trying to end a war that was never his fault but treated as his to end anyways) and Hermione realizes that to be there for him now is to stay at Hogwarts, and protect all the little children, all the little Connors, who thought they’d be taught magic and instead were subjected to cruelty. She’d have to protect them, like he’d always done for her.
And so, grown up, it is like this when they stop witnessing each other.
Hermione thinks of him all the time when he’s gone. She thinks about his eyes, about how the entire country was searching for Undesirable Number One, about how there were monsters looking to kill the boy she was in love with. She never fully is able to grapple with the feeling, only pushing down the cold chill of fear and cursing that love could be so terrifying. The year passes, and it’s all she can do to stay alive and keep him in her thoughts.
But really, it all comes to a head when it’s finally over. After he’s been on the run alone for a year and she’s been tortured as a prominent muggleborn prefect trying to protect the younger years, after she’s screamed at the sight of his dead body, after she ended Bellatrix Lestrange, and after he finally defeats Voldemort and the Battle of Hogwarts is over, the first person he seeks out is her.
They embrace, they kiss, they’re desperate for each other, and later they find themselves in his (untouched, out of grudging respect) room in the dungeons. It’s the first she’s seen the inside of his dorms, she reflects, but soon she’s given much more the think about. She’s ever so full of him, and it’s then that they finally find themselves warm instead of cold.
(“I’m not sure I can live without you anymore,” she says.
He takes in her words as they lay there, spent and exhausted. He brushes her cheek with a knuckle. His hair is messy, she thinks. She had been the one to run her hands through it as they made love. Finally, he moves and kisses her shoulder.
“I didn’t without you,” he murmurs against her skin.
She doesn’t know what that means just yet, but she knows its not just poetry from the way he says it, and from the way his body had been cold and dead just hours before.)
And now, after.
They publicly date as he comes back for his “eighth” year - he’s been made Head Boy, and she’s Head Girl, and McGonagall tells them they will share the head dorms.
None of Hermione’s friends (tentatively made during the year of the Carrows) approve. Neville says he’s dangerous, and Parvati tells her about rumours she’s heard about what he did when he had been on the run alone for a year.
(She knows exactly how dangerous he is. She saw him duel Voldemort to a standstill. She’s seen him train in the Room of Requirement even after the war ended, exceptionally quick and violent and glorious, with his wand in one hand and his goblin-wrought blade in the other. The blade’s name was Windsong when it was first christened by its makers, but Harry sarcastically calls it Death, soaked in basilisk venom as it was. As she watches him whip the blade through the air and into the chest of a training dummy on a tether of controlled lightning, she thinks the name is both ironic and appropriate, ironic because it devoured so many Death Eaters, and appropriate because even Voldemort, ever the tempter of fate, attempted to fly once he faced it in combat.)
The rest of her house say he’s damaged goods and she should be careful of his emotional baggage.
(She’s aware; she’s held him close to her chest when he wakes flailing from his nightmares, and he in turn has kissed the tears off her face when she tries to sleep and instead sees terrors. They’ve witnessed each other through the worst already, so a few more bruises is nothing.)
His detractors (the losers, the families who are shamed after their Dark Lord was defeated and the rest of the wizarding world realized that blood was red no matter who it spilled from) liked to whisper that their relationship was grotesque because she was so small - she’s like a child, they say, not a real woman, and he’s groomed her all this time to please himself – a perverted reminder of the rumours that had abounded during the Chamber of Secrets era.
(She finds this one the funniest, as though she doesn’t adore it when his too large hands roam her too small body that hadn’t really grown since she was 13. It’s with him that she feels comfortable giving up her control. It’s under his body - that she fits so neatly into - that she feels absolutely safe from evil people that would kill her for her nothing other than who her parents were. In less words, she loves how much bigger he is than her.)
The part of the school that cares very little for her says she’s got him enthralled with love potions.
(It’s so ridiculous, because when he tells her just how fucking pretty she is wearing nothing, and when she’s biting her bottom lip so hard it turns pink and nearly breaks skin and bleeds from his teasing, and when Harry laughs at her pouting and begging at him to please just let her cum, she thinks that Amortentia might have always smelled like a broom polish and grass and his citrus body wash, and that she feels like she’s been dosed with so much of it she could never really love someone else. She’s the one whose been dosed with a bottle of Harry Potter, if anything.)
Even the press seems to want a piece, saying that the Man-Who-Conquered was simply with a muggleborn for appearances, trying to indicate that the Blood War was piece of the past.
(But she knows there’s nothing for appearances when his cum is all over her face and she sucks on his thumb after giving him a blowjob, him panting “fuck, Hermione”, her red lipstick smudged around the base of his cock and her makeup running from her tearing up and gagging around his length. Hermione knows there’s nothing for appearances when she’s breathless and he tells her to come on his long, pumping fingers “for him, like a good girl.” She knows there’s nothing for appearances when she’s whimpering and her hands are bound as he denies her climax for the third time in half an hour, telling her that no one would ever get to see her messy and ruined and begging for his tongue and his cock like this but him.)
All that is to say that after fighting in a war, they don’t really care about what other people think of them anymore, and they will love each other as they like.
They seem to want to fuck all the time. Hermione thinks it’s the outcome of years of tension and then impossibility resulting in them being hormonal messes. Harry tells her it’s just because he finds her irresistible, and she giggles. Regardless of the reason, their relationship is very sexual deeply satisfying to both of them. It’s a recovery of sorts, making up for their lost time, but also a sometimes a way of hurting the other too, with how rough they are. Hermione thinks they both know parts of it are unhealthy, but she leaves it be for now.
They are also very possessive of each other.
“Greengrass and Ginny need to back the fuck off,” she tells him one night when he’s deep inside of her and her legs are wrapped up around his waist.
She knows she’s being particularly bratty, but she’d seen Astoria try and get touchy with him that day when they did patrols in the dungeons. Worse, Ginny had sat with them in their Gryffindor-Slytherin DADA classes earlier, Hermione’s former roommate obviously trying to get closer to Harry, with obvious adoration in her eyes.
“Well then, Longbottom needs to get with Abbot soon or I’ll fucking slice off his eyes for looking at you,” he replies, voice breathy next to her ear. “And stop talking about other women when I’m with you,” his tone dark.
She moans when she feels him shift his head and suck hard on her neck, teeth biting and certainly leaving a mark.
“Are you punishing me?” she gasps, trying her best to find a teasing tone when all she really wants to do is scream in pleasure from his cock pounding into her and his mouth on her skin.
“If you keep being such a fucking brat, I’ll show you what punishment really looks like. Stop mouthing off and be a good girl, won’t you? Come on, cum for me darling.” He starts moving his hips into her faster, and all she can do is nod as she reaches her peak.
When she wakes up (she’d had three more orgasms that night, each rougher than the last, before basically blacking out), and looks at the mirror in her room, Hermione finds herself rewarded with marks above and below her neckline; she thinks her favourite is on her throat, right below her chin, where she would die if he had merely sank his teeth in a little deeper to taste her blood. The vulnerability of it had excited her last night, and it was thrilling to her now.
At least he’s the same, fingernail scratches and hickeys adorning his front and back alike. When they both lose house points in Transfiguration after a stern admonishment from Headmistress McGonogall, they laugh. Hermione silently giggles at the glares the other girls give her throughout the day, and for once, finds the attention not so bad.
A few weeks later, Harry gifts her a black lace choker with snake motifs worked into it, with a little silver charm of an owl, and she wears it everywhere for him. The message is abundantly clear, that Hermione is Harry Potter’s.
They have pet names, and as Harry fucks into her he calls her all of them.
For example, Hermione tries her very best to be his good girl while being plowed into a mattress.
She always has to gasp and clench her hands when he first enters her, even when she’s ready for him, however. He’s too big and she feels too full to do react otherwise, and at first she had worried that her struggles with his size would be a turn off – their first time, she had even been hesitant about his cock, seeing it lay on her belly and come up to her navel. Now though, all she wants is to take him obediently and she’s frustrated every time she winces and shifts as he presses into her from behind. But he always starts gently and tells her how good she’s being for taking him, how perfect and tight and wet she is for his cock, and she cannot help but preen and lift her ass slightly higher as his length moves inside of her.
In a different position, she knows that due to his size she’d be able to see her stomach bulge with his thrusts, but with her face in his pillow and hands held in place by his interlaced fingers above her head, all she can do is feel the length of him stretch her into their bed as she hears his thighs smack into her ass, and he tells her just how amazing she’s being for him.
Hermione likes being called a good girl, but she thinks she likes it when Harry calls her “my darling” the best, because it means she is his and he is hers and they belong to each other. Other names are delightful too, but she’s no princess, her heart has never been honey nor sweet, and it feels like a long time ago her innocence was carved out of her so she could never be anyone’s baby.
And so, she thinks, she’ll be a darling for him as his cock nearly splits her tiny body in two for the third time in a night, and she revels in feeling loved by his words even as tears prick the corners of her eyes from just how roughly he uses her body.
He eventually goes to therapy after she convinces him to (they both do), and it does wonders for their communication issues – whenever they argue, they tend to fuck their disagreement away instead of really talking about it.
Harry opens up more with her, more than she ever thought was possible for him. He tells her about watching Sirius die, falling through the Veil to Bellatrix’s spell.
She tells him that the only thing she could think of as Alecto carved the word mudblood into her arms was that Harry had been through worse hells. She remembered that he “must not tell lies,” and so she told no lies to the Carrows when she defended the worth of younger muggleborn students from their wrath.
He tells her about horcruxes and how Dumbledore raised him into a slaughter animal, and how at the end, he wasn’t all that scared of dying, but he came back because the prettiest girl he’d ever met gave him a kiss one time, and when he was at his worst, on the run, he’d think back to the moment he finally believed Dumbledore’s ramblings that that magic was more than spells and wands, and that love was the strongest magic of all.
When they reveal these things to each other, when they strip each other back and see the broken messes that they are, they still fuck. Not to use each other or to avoid things anymore, just merely because when their memories drown them so, they are the only things that feel real to each other. They need each other to understand themselves that maybe broken messes can still be worthy.
It’s on one of these nights, specifically after Harry told her about the White Place and about maybe hopping on the train to leave, when Hermione begins the practice of whispering his name like a prayer. He’s holding her waist so tightly she thinks she might slip under his skin as he fucks her, his chest pressed up against her back, and all she wants to do is say his name, as though it might keep him there. It’s a tender but firm love, that night, so soft and loving that Hermione thinks parts of her soul are mending from where she was torn open by cruelty.
Most importantly, when they finish and she stays kneeling as he falls back into the mattress, and she’s feeling him drip out of her, she whispers “Please don’t leave me again. Promise me.” She’s not looking back at his face, but she knows his green eyes are filled with adoration and worship for her.
She feels loved when he says, “I promise.”
Another day, when they’re both bare, she’s straddling him while he’s sitting up in their bed (Harry’s room in the head dorms had long been converted into a study, as the elves noticed he never slept there), running her hands all over his scars - its an intimate examination, more curious than sexual, his length resting between their bodies, warm against Hermione’s stomach.
She traces some a few starbursts on his chest and feels similar indentations on his back. Her hands must linger, and so he quietly tells her about a different Sirius than the one she had known, about the man who trained him into a warrior and taught him the best ways to stab with a knife, who loved Harry so much that he beat survival into his very skin with spellfire.
It’s hard to reconcile for her. There was the cheery man she’d meet every June and September at King’s Cross, the man she’d once baked with in the kitchen of 12 Grimmauld Place when she visited in the summer of her second year, who loved Tiana the best out of all the Disney princesses. And apparently, there was this beast who had beaten Harry black and blue even as a child ever since he could walk, who blasted a boy with spells until he could dodge, who stitched Harry together only so he could continue to work on his casting.
She thinks there’s something missing from the story, some gap that explains it all, but if there is, Harry says nothing more of the man. She weeps anyways, for it is the death of her hope that Harry had had any sort of normal family after the events of Godric's Hollow.
It’s no wonder to her now that Harry, this poor boy, was sorted into Slytherin, taught to survive as he was.
These weren’t the only scars on his body that she traced, however. She had seen the alarming lines on his arms whenever they were naked, but she’d never pushed him. She didn’t say a word as he finally told her, apparently now in a sharing mood about the story of his scars, that he went to meet his mother’s sister’s family for the first time after the war had ended (she had been away, gone to see her parents and bring them out from one of McGonogall’s safehouses). His aunt Petunia had slammed the door on him after he explained who he was and said that freaks weren’t welcome in her family, and that he could go die like Lily. He needed the pain, he said. To ground him. Her heart rages for him, even as she cries.
“Never cut yourself again. I’m not asking. So many people have taken their pounds of flesh from you already love, please don’t hurt yourself alongside them.”
He agrees.
Hermione realizes that not all monsters were like Voldemort, and that love can turn normal people like Sirius and Petunia into monsters too.
They graduate.
Harry’s decided he’s becoming an auror (he was made to fight, he confesses to her, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself without the outlet) and Hermione’s chosen to go into the Ministry (prejudice was a hydra, and while they might have killed a head by ending Voldemort, the task was far from done).
He asks her to move into 12 Grimmauld Place with him, and she, with the approval of her parents, does.
(“It’s closer to the ministry for your job, and he does seem a gentleman.” Her mother had said to her. Oh, he was a gentleman, Hermione thought, but perhaps in a different way than her mother imagined. The “gentleman” dutifully ate her out on the kitchen counters the morning after she moved in, claiming she looked “too delicious not to taste”. Hermione had planned it, in his defence, wearing his old green quidditch jersey she stole back in her fifth year with his name emblazoned on it, so big on her that it fell halfway down her thighs.)
They renovate Grimmauld (with Kreacher’s help). The bookshelves are moved into the living room and filled with colourful muggle titles instead of dark magic. They paint the walls a soft autumn brown and gentle olive green (their eyes, she thinks to herself). They even install a TV, made resistant to the short-circuiting of magic by some inspired engineering.
Picture frames are put up. An old moving still of Harry’s parents hangs from one of the walls. A picture of them dancing together at one of Slughorn’s parties sits on their nightstand. On the mantle, a moment from Christmas, when they were both a little tipsy and Hermione had insisted they take a selfie, with her arms wrapped around his neck from behind and their smiling faces smooshed together side by side.
They eventually rename the home to Lily Place, both for his mum but also for the flowers they plant in the garden, and for them both it feels like a new beginning for just the two of them.
It’s really when he holds her in front of the roaring hearth one night, however, and she’s glancing up at Harry’s face basked in an orange glow and at her rolling library ladder (“So I don’t need to risk dropping books on my face for a pretty girl again,” he claims) and feeling the warmth around her, that she realizes she’s found a home.
They get married after a year (really, they elope and tell her parents and their few friends who've finally come around to Harry - Luna, Neville, Hannah, Susan, Dean, and somehow Daphne) but nothing has changed much for them, even though Hermione Jean Granger is now Hermione Jean Potter and they wear little bands on their fourth fingers. They’ve been each other’s missing halves for years now, and the certificate is just a piece of paper.
It is satisfying, however, to see other witches squirm at Ministry balls when she mentions “her husband”. She doesn’t often get to indulge her possessive side anymore, now that they both see people less than in school, so she takes her chances when she can.
The only thing better is when she’s riding him and he’s thrusting up into her, and he worships her as his wife. She thinks she likes being called wife as much as darling.
When Harry comes home one night from auror work (he accomplished the fastest training period ever for a junior, but it wasn’t so fast when one realized he’d been trained his entire life) with bruises all over and a cut on his cheek, Hermione confesses that sometimes, when he’s away in the field, she sees his body, carried by Hagrid, and she dreams that he had truly died rather than the soul sliver. She’s not even sure why she tells him this- it’s not close to the worst he’s been hurt, but the thought rolls out of her anyways.
He tells her he remembers her scream ringing in his ears; he wishes he could erase it from his mind, sometimes, the anguish he caused her.
She says they should do something to erase it - she wants to make it so she can feel that his body is warm, not cold, and make it so that he only thinks of one kind of screaming with her. He tells her that she tells shitty jokes, but they fuck until the sun breaks the horizon anyways.
He quits being an auror the next day and makes an agreement with McGonagall to teach DADA next year if he can still come home in the evenings.
Hermione beams.
A few months later, it is a quiet night. They are talking about his new classes when he returns, and how his students were actually curious this year and asking him insightful questions.
“What does it feel like to do dark magic?” she asks him as he’s putting away his coat. Her absent mind supplies the thought that he must have some experience with it, having killed as many as he had (this doesn’t bother her at all, she finds, as they had all deserved it being killers and rapists themselves).
She knows she’s said something wrong immediately. It’s the only time she has seen him truly angry at her, in all their years of knowing and loving each other – it’s so abnormal, in fact, that she barely recognizes his reaction. He freezes with a fury that mere upset could never conjure.
Hermione realizes he takes it as an accusation. She realizes she’s assumed the worst of him, when in reality, the darkest thing he’s ever cast in front of her was the blasting curse, and even she’s cast that hundreds of times.
She doesn’t know if his eyes have ever glowed with more danger. More hurt.
He leaves, twisting on the spot and apparating away.
The apology in her throat never makes it into words. It feels like a blasting heart to her chest when she realizes she doesn’t know where her husband has gone (where is he? where is her other half?) and she can do nothing but sob her apologies to an empty room, worried that he had left her for good. Hermione had thought that the therapy had fixed their communication issues, that they were past hurting each other, and so it is this episode that hurts her fragile heart the most.
He left, and she didn’t know why.
Hermione hears him when the door opens, later at night. He steps into their room.
He is silent for minutes. “I’m sorry I broke my promise to you. I left to go visit my parents and Sirius. It’s not an excuse.” His voice was raspy; he’d been crying.
Her hurt lessened. At least he was no longer angry. “I’m sorry I assumed you had done dark magic. I know you better than that.”
And they make up.
Later, when she begs for forgiveness even though they’d already really made up with their words, Hermione realizes she hadn’t until then come to terms with the fact that Harry’s absence could leave her so fucking cold.
She begs him to punish her; she needs the sting of pain to push away the memories of earlier. Evidently, she too has regressed a little bit from her therapy goals. He sees her face and obliges her, and he spanks her so viciously that her ass must be a glowing, pretty ruddy red, and she’s crying and grateful and driven mad by her arousal, but most importantly, she’s warm again.
Then he holds her, caring, and he tells her the rest of the story of Sirius Black and how the only parent he had ever was dragged into insanity by his unchecked desire to do anything to protect his godson. Dark magic had twisted him slowly - it fills in the gaps for her, and it’s clear why he never told her; he’s ashamed out of the love he still holds for Sirius, wanting as much as possible to make it seem like his godfather’s insanity and brutality had been random, or the inherited Black madness. In reality, it had been active, conscious choices to warp himself that destroyed the only man Harry had ever known as a father.
After the talking is done, Harry turns his attentions back to her and she’s finally allowed her orgasm, a final resolution of the punishment, of the love, she asked for. They go to sleep.
She listens to his sleeping heart, and she thinks that it aches more than her body ever could after being loved by Harry - he’s been hurt so many times by love. Dumbledore, his aunt, his parents, Sirius. She is dumbfounded by the room he has carved out in his heart for her.
Whispering first into his hair as she kisses his temple (what an apt name, she thinks, for she worships this boy-become-man she has loved her whole life), and then again into the skin of his shoulder, she promises to never let her love hurt him again.
When she falls asleep, she is still warm.