Chapter Text
Hermione Granger is twenty-seven years old when she stumbles her way into an earthquake of a realization; the kind that tremors and shakes the insides, until everything is all shifted about on its axis, and the whole world looks just a little bit different than before.
“What in Merlin’s name is she doing?”
The muttered question comes from Hermione’s left. She snorts, not bothering to look over to where Draco Malfoy is sitting in a chair at the window next to hers, peering out of his own telescope down into the dingy alleyway below.
A Muggle couple had stumbled along, clearly well past tipsy. They had just passed the sagging Muggle motel where Malfoy and Hermione had set up their surveillance station, when the woman, giggling, pushed the man playfully up against the opposite brick wall, and sank to her knees.
The shadows partly obscure them, but it is still painfully clear what is happening.
“Did she drop something?”
Hermione chuckles, jotting down the time on the parchment and adjusting the rune settings on her gold telescope. “Good one.”
Hermione’s partner looks up from his telescope, too. “What?”
Hermione rolls her eyes at him, still grinning. “I said good one. Good joke.”
Malfoy frowns at her. “She’s down on her knees.” He observes.
“Yes, that is typically how it’s done.”
“How what’s done?” Malfoy asks in the raspy tone he gets when he’s been surveilling too many nights in a row.
Hermione stares at him, and then peers through the telescope again for a second. Yep, the couple is still there, the man’s hands now scrabbling for purchase on the wall behind him.
“I mean, well, she’s…blowing him.” She says, uncertainly.
Malfoy squints through the telescope. “Blowing on him? Is that some strange Muggle greeting? Why does she have to get down for that?”
Hermione lets out a nervous burst of laughter. This is suddenly the strangest conversation they have ever had on surveillance, and once they were so bored out of their skulls that they argued for four hours about the most effective way of milking Horned Knotsap Beetles. “You’re not…seriously asking me that, are you?”
Malfoy looks up again, raising an aristocratic eyebrow. “Why are you acting strange?”
“Nope. No, that is definitely my question for you.”
He looks vaguely annoyed, but some movement in the alley catches his eye. “Merlin, they’re here. Granger, get the time.” They throw themselves back at the telescopes. Two hulking figures in drab cloaks stride into the alley. One flicks a wand at the Muggle couple. The woman staggers up and the two march dazedly out of the alley, without one look behind them. “Oh-five-thirty-three,” Hermione whispers, checking the gold pocket watch hanging from her vest, jotting down the number hurriedly. “Two men carrying suitcases. Think this could be the artifacts?”
“Could be. They’re headed in.” They watch intently as the men tap their wands simultaneously against the wall the couple had just been leaning against, and a large oak door with intricate Irish scrollwork materializes, pushing bricks out of the way. The men pass through quickly, and the door shrivels itself back into nothingness.
They spend the rest of the shift in tense silence, watching the blank brick wall; but nothing else comes in or out.
At seven, when the sun finally crosses over the horizon, a series of knocks come at the door. “There’s our replacements,” Hermione says, as Malfoy groans and stretches. “Salazar's Teeth, finally.”
Hermione Floos home and collapses face first onto her bed. She almost immediately feels consciousness slipping away. Her last fluttering thought before the blackness takes over is of her partner’s handsome, tired face, not a single shred of understanding in his silver eyes as he peers down on the couple.
“Here,” Hermione says the next evening, tossing a manila folder down on his desk. “My part of the report from last night.” He grunts, not looking up from his own report, scribbling with a nib of quill.
It’s sweltering in his office – Ministry Maintenance has gone on strike again, and their protest this time included charming the temperature in the building to mimic Saudi Arabia’s. Malfoy has an old metal fan going top speed on the corner of the desk, but it hasn’t seemed to help much, because he’s also shed his Auror robes and wand holster. The cuffs of his shirt are rolled up to his elbows and his collar opened two buttons, the chain of his badge glinting around his neck. She can see the lazy swirling of the tattoos on his left arm, changing shape and form hypnotically, but always covering the ugly mark branded on him. Hermione always notices whenever the tattoos slide down the back of his hand and wrap for a while around his long fingers.
Malfoy snaps those fingers in her face. “Earth to Granger. Why are you glaring at me?”
Hermione startles. “Argh, sorry.” She rubs the frown out of her forehead. “Heat is just getting to me.”
Malfoy nods, throwing down his quill. “Third time this month. Unbelievable.”
“Yep, and I have more bad news. I just came from Shacklebolt’s office; he wants us on double shifts starting next week.”
Malfoy narrows his eyes. “He must be joking.”
Hermione shrugs, lifting her heavy hair off the back of her sweaty neck in the hope of catching a breeze. “Apparently the Cairo attaché is leaning on him hard for results. They want those stolen artifacts back and sealed into their sarcophagi as soon as possible.”
Malfoy groans, running one hand through his hair. Hermione does not look at the drop of sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat.
“We need to just raid the place.”
Hermione shakes her head. “We need to get more intel before we can move on them. Seamus and Angelina are going in to get eyes in there.”
“Potter thinks we have enough already.”
“Harry is almost as hex-happy as you are, so of course he does. As soon as we know what we’ll be getting into, I promise you lot can go barging in.”
“Granger, stop talking sense and ruining all the fun of this job.”
She grins. “Someone has to.”
He turns back to his report, but Hermione doesn’t move to the door. She crosses her arms, then uncrosses them, then smooths her hands nervously down her skirt (she had been wearing tweed trousers this morning until she stepped foot in the sauna that was now the Atrium and promptly transfigured them).
Malfoy looks up again. “Was there something else?”
“Um. Not really. I mean, yes. I mean-“
Hermione glances nervously at the open door, slides her wand out of her sleeve, hurriedly shuts it and casts a Muffliato.
Malfoy leans back in his chair, his eyebrows raising.
Hermione sits down nervously. “Malfoy.”
The corners of his mouth tick up. “Granger,” he says, his tone slightly mocking.
She forges ahead. “Last night. The Muggles in the alleyway. Were you…yanking my chain, or…?”
Malfoy's eyebrows scrunch together. “What?”
“Were you just joking when you asked what they were up to?”
He tilts his head back, regarding her through half lidded eyes, frowning. “What is this about, Granger?”
“I mean, do you really not know?”
Malfoy rolls his eyes. “You’ve always known that I’m not exactly the expert on all things Muggle.”
Hermione gapes at him, her mind spinning its wheels, not quite catching.
“You cannot possibly be saying- If you don’t know what that was-“
“Granger, as fascinating as whatever mini crisis you’re having right now is, I do have to finish up my repo-“
“-are you saying that witches don’t ever suck cock?”
Malfoy goes impossibly still. The only sound in the room for a moment is the dull hum of the metal fan blades inside their cage. “…What?”
Hermione flushes, feeling the heat crawl down her neck, where her curls are already sticking. But she’s already said it now. “Do magical women not…use their mouths, on magical men?” She continues, hesitantly. "Um. Sexually?"
Hermione has not seen Draco Malfoy at a loss for words many times. When she slapped him in their third year. After his acquittal, maybe. When he picked her up off the floor once Bellatrix was done with her, and fixed her up as best he could.
And right now.
“Is that not allowed, or something, in Wizarding culture?”
Malfoy rubs a large hand along the back of his neck, and clears his throat, before folding his arms across his chest. Hermione can’t help but stare. She’s been his partner for five years and she’s never seen him be anything but calm and collected, and annoyingly self-assured. Not even in Marrakech, when they were still hunting down escaped Death Eaters. “Rather than not allowed…it just isn’t something that’s done. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
She knows she should just shut up and leave. She knows it. “Why not? Why isn't it done?”
“Merlin’s Beard. I don’t know.” Malfoy replies, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. “Why do you wear lavender oil in your hair when you’re not actually trying to seduce every man in the office?”
Hermione flushes. Pansy Parkinson of all people had broken it to her gently in the women’s loo that wearing that particular scent was very much not appropriate for the workplace.
Perhaps Hermione is a little overwhelmed by this sudden seismic tilt in her understanding of the Wizarding World. Perhaps she doesn’t like the feeling of getting caught not knowing something, or maybe it’s just the dizzying heat of his office.
“But,” she says earnestly, leaning forward, “It would make you feel so good."
She means "you" in the general sense, trying to convey to him what all wizards were apparently missing out on.
But for one moment, the time between a sluggish heartbeat, Hermione sees his eyes sharpen on her lips, and she knows without a shadow of a doubt that he’s wondering what it would feel like to have her mouth on his cock.
There’s a knock on Malfoy’s office door, muffled by Hermione’s spell. She shoots up from the chair and whirls around, just as Harry steps into the office.
“Hey, Malfoy-oh, Hermione!”
“Hi!” she says, too cheerfully.
“Merlin, it’s hot in here,” Harry says, tugging at his robes. “Malfoy, you still on for the pickup match tonight?”
“What?...Oh, yes, I'll be there.”
“Ginny says she’ll be on your team if you promise to come watch Teddy this weekend.”
Hermione is already squeezing past Harry and out the door, escaping back to her small office down the hall, her heart thudding an uneven rhythm against her breastbone.