Hermione was walking about twice as fast as her usual pace, which was already a blur through the hallway. The parchment rolled in her fist crunched slightly as her fingers flexed with rage.
Malfoy would hear about this. He would hear every word he had to say. And then he would pay for it when she tore the parchment into pieces and fed him every single one with no seasoning and certainly no dessert to follow.
She had to confront him alone, not with his idiot friends. She sped to the part of the library where he usually studied and his usual wry smirk turned to a frown as she barreled into him, slapping his chest with the parchment.
“Is this some sort of a joke?” she hissed, shaking with fury and curls trembling. She shoved him and he staggered back, the parchment unrolling and scattering at his feet.
“What the fucking hell, Granger?”
“Is this a joke?” she snapped again, whipping out her wand — enjoying how his body suddenly stiffened at the sight of it. “And while you’re at it, did you steal my favorite inkpot too?”
Malfoy picked up the parchment and read it. He went even paler than usual as he scanned it, but after a few lines he looked at her and arched his eyebrow. Was he standing a little taller? Was he flexing a bit under his robes? Hermione groaned at the unstoppable vanity of the ferret.
“I could ask the same of you,” he said smoothly. “If this is your way of coming on to me, Granger, it’s a bit of a runaround. You didn’t have to write a randy little vignette to let me know you want to get inside these robes.”
Hermione huffed. The unsigned story on the parchment she’d found under her pillow that morning described a scene in which she kissed Malfoy against one of the stone Hogwarts pillars after she’d slapped him silly. It was no indifferent kiss, either, but a ravaging, full-body sort of engagement. It had ended suddenly, mid-scene.
It had also admittedly kept her attention. She’d read it a few times over, and every time she wished she could give the writer more kudos. Under a code name, she had added it to a list of her favorite reading, which did include a few non-assigned titles of a naughty nature.
She may even have touched herself a bit after reading it. And before she remembered to be angry about it.
“At the least, I’m glad to know the mighty Granger doesn’t spend all her time studying,” Malfoy crowed. A lock of blonde hair fell across his face as he thumbed the parchment suggestively. The Brightest Witch of Her Age fumed to see it.
“I didn’t write this,” she bit out. “You know it’s not my handwriting. I thought maybe you did and had someone put it under my pillow as a prank.”
“Gods, no,” scoffed Malfoy, pushing the fallen hair out of his (rather) intelligent grey eyes. “Of course, Potter and Weasley were there to see that little slapping incident, but I have it on authority they can barely read or write if you’re not helping them. And what other Gryffindor could execute a mission like that without shouting it from the top of the tower?”
He shoved the parchment back at her and turned on his heel. “I don’t know what happened here, Granger,” he said over his shoulder. “But if you ever want to push me up against something for real, feel free to swing by.”
***
Draco jogged back to the Slytherin dormitory whistling. It was always a good day when he got the best of Granger, and it made up for the loss of his own favorite quill earlier that day.
His good mood lasted until he turned back his covers for bed and found something under his own pillow.
Puzzled, he drew it out. The roll of parchment was nearly as long as he was tall. And the contents were definitely not in his handwriting — or hers. The script was small and tight, the surface clearly charmed to only accept perfectly straight lines.
In graphic detail, it depicted a second — perhaps luckier? — Malfoy grinding his hips feverishly against Granger’s on the faded Persian rug in the Divination classroom. But that was not the only liberty this author had taken with the truth. This Granger was dressed like Professor Trelawney, wearing giant black-rimmed glasses and a burgundy cashmere shawl. The only thing lifelike was the huge Granger hair spread on the rug as she writhed underneath him, squealing with pleasure: “Why Malfoy, I never saw this coming!”
It also ended mid-scene, just as the most interesting parts were in progress.
Draco fell forward onto his silken sheets and wanked himself into oblivion. The only difference between him and the fictional Trelawney was that he did see himself coming.
Then his memory misted back to the time Granger had slapped him. The fire in her cheeks and eyes. How her arm had wheeled in a quick circle before she held the wand to his throat. Her lips quivering, parted. It was glorious. Even the part when he’d been afraid he was about to lose his head.
Draco defiled his sheets again just thinking about it.
Then he cleaned up, dived under the covers and pulled them up to his nose, his eyes darting from side to side. Wondering what the hell was happening. And why he wasn’t hating it more.
***
Draco spent the next few days debating whether to tell Granger about the fantasy that had appeared under his own pillow. His skin crawled at the thought of showing it to her. At the same time, it felt possible that they were both victims of a coordinated prank, and he knew he’d rather not figure out this mystery on his own. Granger was competent that way.
After a week, Draco stepped firmly on the hem of her robe as she hurried out of Potions class. “Granger,” he hissed. “Stay for a minute.”
“Why?” She smirked slightly. “See something you like? There’s a more convenient way to remove robes, you know.”
“Down, Granger. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Flustered, he led her to one of the brewing tables. Merlin, she smelled good. Making sure that Snape and others were truly gone for the day, he unrolled the slightly bent parchment, which he had now consulted for several more private sessions. She frowned and began to read.
Draco had never seen Granger turn so red as she did reading about herself laid out like a freshwater fillet on Trelawney’s rug. She looked up at him with embarrassment and something else in her eyes. The red rather suited her and he looked away quickly.
“Erm,” she said with dignity, rolling up the parchment more firmly than he had. “It appears we’re both the victim of a coordinated prank.”
“That’s exactly what I thought,” he said. See, Granger, I can be competent too. “And the day your inkpot went missing, my quill was lost. Maybe somebody charmed our personal belongings to write these messages…”
She chewed on a curl. “Perhaps using some archaic variation of the Blackboard Writing Spell. With a roll of special parchment infused with magic…”
“But how would they get under our pillows? And who actually composed the text — "
She hesitated. “I’m not sure, but there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
She turned to her bag and drew out a still longer parchment than his own. Gods, no. With a sheepish smile, she handed it to him. “Read this.”
***
The writing was smaller than on either of the first two parchments, and Malfoy was forced to pull out the silver-rimmed glasses he kept in his robe pocket for very small print. Hermione felt strange as he put them on.
After reading a few lines, he looked like he wanted to dive into one of the cauldrons.
The scene featured Malfoy in the infirmary after Buckbeak had attacked him. He was crying and tossing from side to side even though he knew — they all knew — that it had been a very minor injury. The head of Healing came in, but instead of Pomfrey, it was Hermione.
First she fed him green apple slices with her hands, letting her fingers linger quite a bit longer on his mouth than necessary.
Then she examined his arm, quite a bit more briefly than necessary.
Then she undressed him.
Then she undressed herself and climbed on top of him.
And then she began healing him in ways that Hermione had found alarmingly incompatible with the Healer-Patient relationship.
What alarmed Hermione the most, though, was her level of absorption in the story. It was quite well written, not purple at all. The action moved along briskly, but with nice pauses for reflection and descriptions of her…implements and techniques…of healing.
And this time, everything reached its conclusion.
Malfoy read with similar absorption, coloring behind his glasses but managing to keep most of his cool.
“Malfoy.”
He didn’t respond. She saw him underlining some of the sentences with his wand, rereading them as if focusing on something he’d newly noticed. But didn’t quite yet understand.
“Malfoy!” she snapped. She tried to snatch back the parchment but he held it away from her.
“Easy, Granger. You’ll have your wank material back soon.”
Then he lowered it and met her eyes.
They were really very pretty silver eyes, when she didn’t feel inclined to smack him. Behind the glasses, they sparkled with intelligence. Wit. His jokes could be rather sharp. He had a distinct point of view. An actual sense of curiosity. A —
“Point of view,” he exclaimed. Then he began rereading the parchment.
“What is it?” she asked, reading it over his shoulder and feeling inconvenienced by a clean, minty smell on his skin.
“It’s…it’s told from my point of view, Granger,” he realized. He pointed to a sentence, his voice thick with embarrassment — or want? — and highlighted it with a quick tap of his wand.
As she lowered her wet opening to his face, teasing his mouth with her most intimate parts, he wished the ginger dolt were watching. If the heavenly, musky dew between her legs were ever bottled in a potion, he would call it Tears of Weasley. As he licked and savored her hot core he knew the idiot had never deserved her and never would.
Hermione snorted. Since a few fraught moments with Ron had led nowhere, Ron-bashing had become a bit of a guilty pastime for her.
Malfoy coughed to regain her attention. “Everything in here is narrated through my eyes. It’s not written in the first person, but it still concentrates on how I’m experiencing things. It’s almost as if the reader can see over my shoulder.”
And up my muff, she thought, heat curling in her belly.
“Typical that it would privilege your point of view,” she rallied, grumbling. “Though it’s fairly limited, seeing how oblivious you were to what this Healer had in mind until…erm…everything was underway.”
He flushed but held his ground. “Check the other stories. I have an idea…”
Avoiding each other’s eyes, they reread the chronicle of humiliation on Trelawney’s rug, looking for clues. Within a minute Hermione tapped a section with her wand:
‘Been a bad girl, Granger?’ he drawled. She whirled and dropped her teacup, shocked to have been caught illicitly practicing the very art she despised. Malfoy’s grey eyes pierced into her as if undecided whether to punish her or join in. He was in front of her in a flash, gripping her shoulders, making her choice more inevitable by the moment. She chose: a quick tug and her shawl slipped from her bare breasts. She felt her nipples swell as his erection pressed firmly into her and his lips crashed onto hers, claiming and marking her as his own.
“How does the parchment know that we call each other by our last names?” Malfoy said, irrelevantly.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps it improves the sexual tension?” Which does not exist between us, let us be clear. “But see, this rug-shagging one is from my point of view. Looking over my shoulder at you. You’re described not through the eyes of an all-knowing narrator, but through mine.”
“Indeed. Through your eyes I appear to be some sort of a sex god. In the market for a bad boy, Granger?" he purred.
“Not my eyes, you idiot. Through a highly unrealistic, fabricated, out-of-character version of my eyes.”
“That may be, but I’d argue that you’re just as much an oblivious idiot in this one as I was in yours,” he grinned. "Divination really must be a fraud after all.”
She scowled. “Let’s just check the last one and we can put this to rest.”
***
Heads a little closer together than any of their classmates might have expected, they reread the first parchment: the account of the Slap Heard Around Hogwarts.
It was, again, from Draco’s point of view. It described his arrogance as he taunted Granger, the jolt of fear as she whipped out her wand. His terror as it skimmed his throat. His pleasure as she pushed him against the pillar, held his wrists against the stone, and trailed her lips along his neck until —
“Wait,” he burst out. Again, something was crystallizing in his mind. “Where the hell are Harry and Ron? Crabbe and Goyle? They were there. They would have seen all of this. Probably would've tried to join in, the perverts.”
The thought of Weasley touching her in any way tore open a dull rage in him. He shook his head to regain focus.
Granger frowned. “It’s not a Pensieve, Malfoy. This isn’t an exact document of what happened, even if it comes the closest to describing something that’s at least remotely based in reality.”
“I did go to the infirmary, you know. Poor, ailing Draco would have appreciated a visit. Especially like this one.” He pouted, and went warm when she grinned back.
Then she put her palms on the table and leaned forward, thinking. “We did have Divination together. And I was very outspoken in my condemnation of the class, which couldn’t have escaped your attention.”
“There has never been a class or a situation at this school in which you escaped attention, Granger.” Not mine. Not for a minute.
“What brings them all together?” she said. “All are set here at Hogwarts, which makes sense since this is where we spend the majority of our time together. But the story of the slap is unfinished. The story of Trelawney’s classroom is also unfinished. We’re cut off before the culmination of the, erm — ”
“Rendezvous? Tryst?” he supplied unhelpfully. “Implied sexual content?”
“Eventual smut is what I was going to say. But this most recent story, of the infirmary, is complete. It’s almost as though the others are works in progress, still evolving in whatever direction the writer is taking them.”
“That’s to be expected for the majority of fantasies,” he said without thinking. “Sometimes they’re very complete and fleshed out, but sometimes they’re just a flash here, a flash — ”
Draco choked.
Granger gasped.
Fantasies.
It was true. The general thought of Granger climbing on top of him, pushing him up against things, lightly threatening him, thrilling him by engulfing him in her power…took his breath away.
She, meanwhile, was turning an unprecedented shade of red. Enough that he might need to take her to the infirmary himself.
“Granger,” he said quietly. “The stories under your pillow are my fantasies about you.”
She trembled. “But you didn’t recognize them.”
“They could be subconscious. A brew of a million different memories and impressions and desires and — ”
“But we didn’t write them!” she said, almost frantically. “They showed up magically, unsigned, on parchment we didn’t own, using — “
“Your ink. My quill.” Well, that works.
“But how? How? Could someone have cursed our pillows? Our linens?" Now she was wringing her hands. Granger always panicked at the edge of understanding. Beyond the endings of her books. Beyond the edge of what the waking mind could comprehend.
Yet here they were.
“It’s too many coincidences,” he said, his voice taking on a dreamy quality. “Some sort of magical connection could have formed between our writing instruments when we lost them…”
“No. It’s impossible.”
He pressed on. “Maybe because of all the things we haven’t bothered to say to each other all this time…” — his voice caught — “or admit about ourselves even if obvious to everyone else…maybe they found a way to make us talk to each other, finally?”
“I’m not listening,” she wailed. “You’re preposterous. As bad as Trelawney.”
“Hermione.” Hermione. I love saying it. Hermione. “You of all people should be open to it. You came from the Muggle world to go to school in a magical fucking castle. With ghosts and flying broomsticks and owls that deliver mail and blackboards that fill themselves. You keep trying to find the plot…what plot?”
His voice rose and caught. “Can you accept, just for once, that you’re not always in control of the story? That maybe the story has its own plans for you?”
Is this a love story?
She was silent now. “Does that mean…?
“Yes, Hermione Granger. You beautiful, brilliant idiot. If anything I just said is even remotely true, the story under my pillow is your fantasy about me.”
And then Draco took a deep breath, willed his heart to stop pounding (it didn’t) and slid off his glasses.
“Do you have any others?”
***
It turned out she did.
Some were very sweet. He hadn’t known she wanted to take him home for the holidays to watch something called The Great British Baking Show on her Muggle television with her parents. He became incredibly absorbed in its strategies, its rivalries, its paths to victory, its potential for sabotage, and in trying to figure out whether the hosts were actually wizards. But the desserts looked delicious as well — tooth-rotting, even.
He hadn’t known she wanted to kiss him properly — not just after slapping his brains out or seducing him in a hospital bed. He hadn’t known that under all that swottiness, she longed for kisses in classrooms, against library shelves, and on the Quidditch field at night. And in her bed, where the resentful orange mountain of Crookshanks kept guard, covering them in domestic fluff as they embraced and whispered and laughed of things his cat brain could never understand.
Once Draco clarified with Hermione that he was more sex mortal than sex god, a relatively inexperienced teenager in need of sustained sexprenticeship, they commandeered Trelawney’s classroom after hours for extremely inappropriate use of her Persian rug.
Tears of Weasley never came to market, because over time Draco became too good at orally attending Hermione to bother.
Harry and Ron never did learn to read or write or fend for themselves, but they remained expert at manipulating the people around them into doing their work for them. Eventually, Draco helped Hermione to stop, which gave her more time for studying, extra electives, and sneaking into the infirmary for semi-public sex.
And Buckbeak and Draco reconciled enough for Buckbeak to offer them the occasional moonlit ride.
It was reassuring to Draco to discover that they’d just been idiots in love — and that happily evers after existed, even for idiots like them.