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BLOOD
The end of a long work day at St. Mungo’s was drawing near. Hermione had been looking forward to the customary free hour she reserved in the late afternoon for updating case notes, when even that had abruptly vanished.
A last minute appointment, marked Urgent by Director Ramon Dwatting, had appeared out of nowhere on her magischeduler and had resulted in feelings of intense curiosity.
She glanced around her cosy office as she waited. The Department for the Research and Care of Magical Humanoid Creatures was tragically underfunded, but it had been a decade-long passion for her regardless, and she loved her work. Perhaps to a slightly unhealthy degree, if Blaise—who had yet to convince her to take a vacation—was to be believed.
Diplomas from Le Fay and St. George’s Universities—dual degrees in healing and magizoology, and medicine and biomedical science respectively—were framed prominently on the wall above her desk, next to her Cats of Britain calendar. The lone small window looked out at a line of squirrel-filled oak trees. The wall opposite where she sat held floor-ceiling bookshelves, which she had applied a raft of illegal expansion charms to the very second she’d managed to convince the janitorial staff to stop cleaning her office.
The magischeduler sat in front of her, and it gave no patient’s name for this next, apparently pressing, appointment. Only: Veela, male.
Male veela were rare. So rare that some theorised they simply didn’t exist, though these were the same hackish authors breathlessly fetishising creatures they found “fuckable” under the guise of academia, at the expense of those “less fuckable”. In her opinion, that theory belonged in the bin. Hermione wouldn’t have admitted it to Director Dwatting, but she’d never even met one, let alone treated one. She doubted there was any healer in England who had.
She looked over her shoulder at her bookshelf. She had exactly one book that might explore the topic in depth, and she’d thus far been putting off working through it because translating Runic French was a massive pain in the arse. In any case, it hadn’t been relevant yet—she had an excellent track record treating all of the most common ailments veela experienced, and many of the more obscure. There was no reason to think this would be any different.
She was excited about the potential for her research, though. She had just slipped into an excellent daydream about harnessing high-throughput sequencing for multiplexed specimen analysis, when the door flew open, and a man barged in with the presumption of someone who owned the entire hospital.
Within a few seconds of startled observation she realised that might not be the furthest thing from the truth.
“Wha—Malfoy?”
She hadn’t seen him in months, but he looked—different. The two of them had lingered on the outskirts of each others’ orbits for the past decade, through a mutual friendship with Blaise Zabini. For Hermione this had been an unexpected but desperately needed bond, formed amongst spliff smoke and late night cramming sessions when she and Blaise both attended Le Fay—her in the healing programme, Blaise in the arithmancy department. Harry and Ron had of course become aurors, apparently not sick of forever fighting and dogmatically demarcating the supposed line between good and evil.
Blaise was a dream of a friend. Thoughtful, possessing of a biting wit, and content to be in her company for hours without saying a word. He knew when to give affection, and when to hold back. There had been no suggestion of more between them, and no dishonesty when they’d spoken briefly of it and agreed there never would be.
However perfect their connection, with Blaise came a host of Slytherins, their opinions, and their aggressive approach to flirtation. One didn’t get Blaise without a mandatory side dish—his other best friend—Draco.
She didn’t particularly enjoy being around Draco. It always left her with a vague feeling of discomfort—as though something were tugging on her insides and heating her blood. The last time she’d seen him had been at the St. Mungo’s Yule Gala and she’d spent most of it avoiding him. But he’d at least looked like a normal—albeit dapper—wizard. Now…
He’d always been tall, but it appeared he’d grown at least another half foot in height. Something about him looked harsher, too. Sharper. More defined, as though he’d recently come into focus under the lens of a camera. And brighter, she thought, blinking at him.
“What are you doing here?” She asked, trying to summon some professionalism. “If you need to see me you’ll have to come back tomorrow, I have a patient arriving any moment—”
“I’m the patient.” He was looking at her like she was an idiot.
“You’re—Oh!” She supposed that would explain some of his physical changes. And the urgency of the appointment.
She stepped forward in sudden curiosity to get a closer look at him and was hit out of nowhere with an overpowering pull of warm, tightening strain. Some deific presence on the other end of a short leash had caught her and was rapidly spooling her in. It resembled the uncomfortable tugging irritation she’d always felt around him in the same way that a sunshower might technically be classed in the same category as a hurricane.
The tug had shifted from a hook-like feeling in her diaphragm to an area of her body unacceptably further south. She flushed with warmth immediately and all the professionalism she’d just invited in hung its hat on a peg and then promptly whirled around, re-donned the hat and exited.
He didn’t appear exactly unaffected by whatever was happening either. A tense look passed over his features as he appeared to rein something in. He seemed to struggle, and she thought unaccountably of Leloir’s Jacob Wrestling With An Angel, although she couldn’t have said which participant he was meant to be.
The feeling slowly receded, and not a moment too soon. She wondered for a brief second just what the hell that had all been about before she put a firm stop to it. Something told her she absolutely did not want to go down that road. Surely it was some sort of latent veela-related characteristic—perhaps the reason he’d come to see her.
They stared at each other for several heartbeats as an entirely silent contract was negotiated between the two of them to absolutely ignore whatever the fuck had just happened.
She cleared her throat. “Come in.” She gestured in the direction of the chair adjacent to her desk, which he examined with the put-upon expression of a prince being asked to mingle with the commoners, and to sit on their common chairs. She had always considered it to be a perfectly serviceable chair, but, to be fair, once seated he did rather dwarf it.
She sat down at her desk and looked at him with an open, expectant expression. “Can you tell me about what you’re experiencing?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I’m having issues with…control.” There were faint pink smudges of embarrassment along his cheekbones. “In the past few months I’ve had several—incidents. Very public incidents,” he stressed, “that I believe are related to emotional regulation.” He paused. “After a very unhelpful conversation with my mother I was informed that there’s a mostly dormant veela gene on the maternal side of her family. Apparently it manifests later in life in males. In any case, I was told that your department here has experience with treatment for this sort of thing.”
She tried to temper her hopes, but visions of publishing magischolarly journal articles, and chapters in academic texts written in English rather than arcane Franco-Runic syllabaries were dancing in her head again.
“Male veela are exceedingly rare,” she pointed out. “Are you certain that’s what’s happening?”
“I’m certain.” Draco raised a sardonic eyebrow at her. “There’s a…wing.”
“A wing? Just one?” she asked, with rising ardour. Male veela were relatively unstudied, but those that were unmated were the only known creatures to manifest only a single wing. If that was occurring, he was almost certainly correct.
“Yes, it—pops up. From time to time.” His discomfort discussing this seemed to be growing.
She tried to put him at ease with a sage nod and an empathetic grimace. “Issues with control are very common in the veela I’ve treated. I’ll need to rule a few things out, and confirm a few others. I’d like to run a full panel of tests on you, take several samples, that sort of thing. But if everything goes smoothly I should be able to calibrate a potion for you that I believe will help.”
If anything he now looked even more uneasy. “You can’t just give me the potion now?”
She sensed he might be less inclined to play guinea pig than she’d been hoping. That was disappointing, but on the other hand, given the first few moments of their interaction today, perhaps it was best she not spend too much time around him. “I suppose we could start with just a blood sample and see where that gets us,” she offered hesitantly. “It will likely be enough to start you on a potion.”
“Right,” he bit off impatiently, already shrugging out of his suit jacket. “Let’s do that.”
Deft fingers removed a single, silver cufflink, and then rolled back his starched white sleeve—once, twice, thrice. It was mesmerising, and not simply because his forearm appeared to have been hewn from a slab of marble by Michaelangelo himself, but because of the absence of something that had once marred the moonlight of his skin.
She had quietly paid attention when Blaise offhandedly told her that Draco loathed his faded mark, and that nothing either of them had attempted made any difference. Thereafter she’d brewed the incredibly complex potion in her head over and over, perfecting her process, before she attempted the recipe in a cauldron. She was sure it would work, but when it was done and a tiny bottle was filled with shimmering fuschia—she couldn’t bring herself to present it to Draco.
Blaise had done the honours and passed her potion along, and she’d been too proud to enquire after the results.
But now she knew the mark was totally gone. With a little puff of breath, she flicked her eyes up, and found the grey gaze there, the same memory playing behind it.
It felt momentous.
Focus.
Back on task, she used a numbing charm, Accio vial, and Diffindo Minima in rapid succession.
“I’ll run a few magical diagnostics on your blood,” she said as she sealed his small cut. “You can come back tomorrow—”
“Fine,” he said, over his shoulder. He blew past her towards the door, acting for all the world as though he couldn’t spend another second in her presence.
⁂
The blood sample was…problematic.
Hermione had stayed late at St. Mungo’s running tests. Unfortunately, the sample was utterly unresponsive to everything she attempted—she had no idea how she could be expected to make a potion for Draco with this little to go on.
And that wasn’t the only problem she was having with it.
Hermione had never been turned on by blood in her life.
And she wasn’t turned on by this blood per se. There was nothing sexy about a crimson-filled vial with a stopper in it. Not even as it inexplicably made her think of the richest of red wines, spicy and full-bodied.
Hmm.
Something was happening.
The warm tug was back, but it had acquired an even more unfortunate—and even more wanton—edge. As she sat there, becoming less productive by the minute, she tried to explain it away.
It was almost certainly because she was just very hard up at the moment. Ages since she'd had sex, and all that. The last time had been with Cormac (a moment of weakness, excessive Chardonnay and extremely poor judgement), and it had been deeply unsatisfactory. Also, sixteen hour days meant she often fell asleep mid-wank, pre-orgasm. It had to be down to that.
Surely.
She sighed. She wasn’t going to get anything useful off of this sample. She ought to just go home and escape it, and whatever feelings it was absolutely not inspiring in her.
The problem did not alleviate itself once at home.
In fact, it trailed her around like Crookshanks, winding around her ankles and through her feet until she was tripping on it every few seconds.
It followed her all the way to her bedroom. In actuality, it was more like it dragged her there.
She succumbed to the urge—pulling off clothes, making herself comfortable, casting about for inspiration.
It didn’t take much. Her lingering annoyance at the blood sample still sitting on her desk returned her attention to the man who had contributed it.
The two of them are in her office, and yet, it feels unfamiliar. She looks at him and realises he’s the one wearing healer’s robes—not her. Infuriatingly attractive glasses perch on his nose.
She’s the one in a tailored suit, sitting on an examination table.
“You’re trembling,” he says gently, tracing his wand up the centreline of her body. Close, but not touching. Of course not; that would be highly improper. “Yes. Shaking, hot flushes… hardening of the areolae. It appears you are afflicted.”
“Afflicted with what?”
“Me.”
“Oh.”
“But I can’t be sure unless I take a closer look.” He smoulders (professionally). “I’m going to remove your clothes now.”
She swallows, and presses her knees together. His eyes track the movement, and a little line appears between his expressive brows.
“It’s more serious than I initially thought.”
His next enchantment causes her clothes to rustle to life, buttons popping open, material slinking and sliding off her sensitive skin. He remains the epitome of businesslike rectitude.
She attempts to cover herself—one hand cups the apex between her thighs and one arm presses across her breasts—only drawing attention to their roundness. The pathetic pretension to modesty is merely bellows to the fire burning within her. Her nipples are pebbled against her own pressure, and she brushes side to side.
“Show me.”
She removes the arm over her breasts, and his silver eyes flash with mercurial intent.
“The only way to treat your condition is through release. I need you to touch yourself.”
Hermione wants to be a good patient. She will do as the healer orders.
“Here?” Tentatively, Hermione brushes a finger over her nipple. The barest touch, and she still feels like she is a tower, struck by lightning. Toppling, toppling.
“In my professional opinion, Miss Granger, you like it hard.”
With a flick of his wand, her nipple is clamped in a vice grip made of warm magic. She screams in shock and pleasure, arching her back and straining her body towards him.
“Oh God—heal me—please!”
The next moment, his hand is over top of hers, encouraging her fingers to walk a ruinous path through her cleft and into her waiting cunt. One of his fingers, and one of hers—deep inside her.
He leans closer, licking and breathing words onto her lips as she whines and slick sounds fill the examination room. “You can see me now, can’t you?” he murmurs, and it feels like a portent. “You know this was inevitable. Maybe I am the affliction, but I am also the cure.”
The room catches fire, and Hermione does too—
In her bedroom, it still felt as though there is a strong, sure hand overlaid on hers. What, the fuck, was that?
Healer fantasies were worse than a cliché. If Hermione had a knut for every wizard who propositioned her while she tried to ascertain how they’d given themselves crumpets for hands, or treated them for bizarre sexually transmitted curses that indicated they had stuck their pricks somewhere they definitely didn’t belong… well, she would be drowning in copper coins.
So. Again. What The Fuck?
On top of the absolute dismay she was feeling over the mess her mind had just served up, she was barely satisfied. Like she’d needed a meal and been handed a communion wafer to eat instead. Mostly she felt annoyed, though she told herself it was because her failure to deduce anything from the blood sample—other than how to give herself a very confusing orgasm—meant this case wasn’t going to be as simple as she’d assumed. She really needed to start translating that book. She sighed, got up to send an owl to Blaise, and got to work.
FEATHER
The next day, Hermione, who couldn’t recall a single instance in which she had been late to work, was late to work.
Overnight, she had been beset by dreams full of winged angels and piercing arrows. She had enacted her own vivid ecstasy; herself a tormented saint—body besieged by the retribution of some sort of merciless divine creature. It had been both immensely satisfying while she slept and also a new hell upon waking, as it had not exactly soothed this recently inconvenient libidinousness. It was as though some curse had arrived out of the ether to afflict her with the thirst of a randy Olympian Goddess.
Logically, she knew that the new adjacency of the concepts of “sexy” and “wing” in her mind was not precisely out of nowhere. But as that would have required a level of self-reflection and serenity that she absolutely did not have time for, she shut the door firmly on that line of thought.
Rounds crawled by, and she snapped at three interns, including the one she already expected was spitting in her coffee.
She was wound up tight. This was partly because of her nocturnal foray into angel-fucking, but it was mostly because the next appointment on her schedule was Draco Malfoy, again, and she had no idea how she was going to look him in the eyes after nearly breaking her own clit getting off to thoughts of him playing naughty healer.
No. She was a professional. He’d come to her for help. This was nothing she couldn’t handle, after all Hermione had treatied with werewolves and bartered with banshees. Not to mention the time the previous year when she treated a roguish Seamus Finnigan and his eight undulous, groping tentacles, after he ran afoul of an enraged sea beast, and transformed into a rapacious kraken. She’d put him back to rights eventually, but not before several junior healers were spotted leaving his room dishevelled, with perfectly round hickeys peeking out of their robes and sated smiles on their faces. And so what if Hermione and Draco had water under the bridge? The water was white rapids, filled with jagged rocks, and maybe a monster of the Pleistocene era lurking deep below, but it was definitely under the bridge. And so what if he looked like he stepped out of a Bouguereau painting? That was of no consequence. He was now her patient, and healers did not fuck their patients. There wasn’t a world where Hermione would be fucking Draco.
There was tension in her shoulders and her jaw, in the curls she’d wrenched back into a high ponytail, and in the clenched knuckles that rested on her knees as she waited for Draco in her office. Truthfully, she was a ball made of only tension.
She could feel him in the building, somehow, making his way to her, the rachides of a thousand feathers all aligned and forming a path which arrowed unerringly in her direction. She couldn’t just stew in her office, antsily waiting for him to rudely pop in again without knocking.
She’d seek him out instead.
You are a medical professional, she reminded herself.
Again.
She made her way to the waiting room, where he’d been detained at the check-in desk. He still carried an outward elegance to himself—a grace of manner that would have been drilled into him since his pureblood birth—but subtle tells in the long lines of his body suggested his impatience. He leaned casually—God, the man was too tall now, leaning was practically a requirement—yet she could see a tension, the twin to hers, in his shoulders. His back. The corners of his mouth. His brow.
Warmth flooded her. And other things too, flooded being the operative word. She thought about what he looked like wearing glasses in her fantasy… his commanding not-quite-whisper… his finger alongside her own, moving inside her…
He was wearing a new suit, three piece, darkest grey. Impeccable.
“Good morning, Mr Malfoy,” she greeted, then cleared her throat. Her voice had come out husky. She willed herself not to blush, and set off down the hall back to her office, offering no further pleasantries.
She could feel him following, picking up the slack in a rope that connected both of them. A cord spun with the barbs of feathers, gossamer as soft clouds, but irritatingly unwavering. Surely this must be one of the issues he’d meant when he’d described control issues yesterday. Going around forming avian connections with random passers-by as he worked through his new veeladom would be distressing. He filled the space when she held the door for him, and—apparently unsatisfied with the chair she offered—transfigured it into a capacious leather statement with a wingback—her eyes narrowed at that—which took up at least three times as much space.
Right.
“How are you feeling today?” He swept a bored gaze over her, like this was all a monumental waste of his time, and she was an idiot to boot. She stared him down. She would not be intimidated.
“Maybe I am the affliction, but I am also the cure.”
She would not be distracted.
“Much the same,” he replied finally. “What did my blood tell you?”
She straightened and tried to look coolly didactic. “Unfortunately not as much as I had hoped. I’m afraid it seems that a normal course of treatment that might curb some of the more undesirable aspects of veeladom may not be effective in your case.”
“Why?” he demanded. There was some command in his voice that had her standing to attention. Underneath the cups of her bra, her nipples heeded some call and tightened against lace.
Hermione cleared her throat.
“I did some research yesterday,” she said, remembering the approximately sixteen pages of a two-hundred page book she’d been able to translate the prior evening. “I suspect it’s the differing way your… male pheromones interact with the veela gene, and the way it’s expressed through magic. It’s often the case that the males of any given species are more volatile… er—aggressive.”
He raised a light eyebrow. “Are you calling me volatile?”
“No. No. I’m simply saying, by your own admission, your experience has been related to strong emotions—”
“Volatile and aggressive.”
She folded her arms. “Don’t put words in my mouth.” The words had definitely been in her mouth. “I’m simply suggesting the way I work with my female veela patients may not suffice here, and I’d like to collect a different sample to investigate your issue.”
He looked affronted. “What kind of sample?”
“Not that kind of sample.” Well…perhaps that kind of sample. They’d cross that ejaculatory bridge when they came to it. She might need to work up to that. “A feather.”
He looked her up and down. “The transformations have happened randomly. I don’t know how to just… change.”
“What happened the last time your wing appeared?”
In his eyes, there was an unexpected flash of metallic brilliance, the quicksilver reflection of light colliding with a mirror. Milliseconds and decades performed a graceful waltz inside that gaze, until he looked away, to the British Longhair licking itself and marking the month of August on her wall calendar.
“It’s been sporadic—when I feel pent up. When I’m holding something back.”
Without realising, she’d rolled the wheels of her chair closer to him.
“Can you channel that feeling now?”
He hesitated, but then tossed his head, as if to say fuck it, and shrugged his suit jacket off his shoulders.
He was wearing a wand holster. Hermione had a very annoying weakness for wand holsters. How could a few simple strips of riveted, supple leather be so… arresting.
“What are you doing?” she asked, alarmed, when she realised he was stripping.
“Sorry, this suit didn’t come with a wing hole,” he replied, derisively.
Oh. “Yes, of course. Makes sense.”
Hermione was watching Draco hypnotically pinching buttons out of button holes for several moments before she realised what her face probably looked like. Her nipples were tighter than ever, and she became extremely aware of the exact location of the seam of her trousers. She rolled her chair back to her desk, and pretended to rummage in a drawer.
“Look at me,” he said, unexpectedly.
She looked up, and found him gloriously shirtless. The refined muscularity of his chest—merely teased by his three-piece suit—had just crossed the line from prophecy to gospel. How dare he, really? She looked at blasphemously beautiful pale skin and a strength which pilgrimaged all the way from wrists to shoulders, and her mouth went dry at the sight.
“Do you remember Blaise’s 30th birthday party? The one Pansy threw at the Savoy?”
Hermione had no idea what he was getting at.
“Do you remember the dress you wore?”
“I don’t see how—”
“It was black.”
There was a disconcerting amount of command in the silver of his eyes. Something which whispered to a back corner of her brain that she ought to be kneeling. She was appalled. At both of them.
“Pansy lent it to—”
Before she could finish her sentence, incandescent white light flickered all over his body, and then emitted outwards, like a solar halo. He stood up, and threw his head back, opening his muscled arms like he would embrace her. Behind him, a grey shape burst from his shoulder, growing upwards in an argent Pillar of Cloud and Fire, flaring wide and knocking several books off a wall shelf.
The wing was a soft, beautiful grey—like his eyes.
One wing. Just as he’d described.
Hermione had seen a great many things in her life, but this was staggeringly arousing. It was a good thing she was still seated. She took a moment to close her parted lips, remembering herself, and drew her wand. She hoped she was conveying only pure professionalism as she stood and approached Draco. He was very fucking tall, and she noted his nostrils flaring as she drew closer.
“Does it hurt when it comes out?” her voice came out softer than she had intended.
“Yes.”
“Is it okay if I touch it?”
He studied her closely. “Yes.”
With wand, and then with gentle fingers she threaded her touch along the silky, shimmering tegmena of the vanes. Caressed the rigid shafts of each feather. She’d held a quill every day of her magical life and somehow never contemplated its erotic potential—an exceptional oversight.
The path of her hand was clearly affecting him. His eyes were closed, his jaw was clenched. With a small jolt she realised he was shaking. “I’m going to take a feather now. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” he rasped.
She chose one of his large lower feathers, one that would assumedly help him fly should he eventually acquire his second wing, mirror and mate to this one. The thought of Draco gliding through the air made her chest constrict. As carefully as she could, she numbed his wing and plucked the feather.
“Are you done?” he demanded, once the calamus was pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
“Yes—thank you, I know that was—”
But he’d gathered up his jacket, and swept out of the room, wing and all.
⁂
Hermione had several other appointments that day, but every spare second she had, she spent with the feather. It resisted every spell she tried by simply lying on its specimen tray and acting exactly like a normal feather.
But it wasn’t a normal feather. Normal feathers didn’t make her feel like she was about to combust. She’d tried to keep herself to touching the vane only with her wand, but it was like she was confunded. She found herself running her thumb over grey silk, parting barbs and then smoothing them back together. It was only when she raised the tip of the thing to her jaw, and dragged it lightly, so lightly, back and forward that she realised what she was doing.
Not a normal feather.
Normal fucking feathers didn’t call to her, whisper over her hipbones and through her womb until she was shaking.
They didn’t command her to think outrageously profane thoughts about her patients and what said patients might be doing at this exact moment, all fussed and tense and clearly in need of symptomatic relief of some sort, and maybe if a potion wasn’t an option, she could—
Stop.
For the first time a legitimate flicker of concern—that the origin of these intrusive thoughts might actually be forcing themselves into her head from some external source—cracked open a silver-gazed eye. That idea was so immediately unacceptable she packed it right back up again, and then did the same with the feather.
Hermione left through the staff floo exit, and stumbled into her flat. She mounted the stairs, shedding clothes as she went. She pulled the wrapped feather out of her bag, and the moment it was in her fingers, she knelt.
She didn’t even make it to her bed.
On the plush pile of her bedroom rug, limned in the sodium orange glow of the street lamp outside her window, Hermione lay on her back and drew designs with the soft tip of Draco’s wing feather.
Lines down collarbones, a barely-there stripe across her lower lip… she made a map of her nude body, her every curve and perfect imperfection. The image of him came to her, as clear as the breaking dawn, naked above her—a one-winged angel.
He is kissing the base of her ribcage, the cruelly under-explored space above her navel, the sensitive sides of her breasts.
The first time the feathers brush against her it’s an accident, and she gasps. The second time, he’s cocooning her, blocking out the light, until all she can see is what filters through the starry grey primaries of his wings.
Enraptured, she strokes careful fingers over the soft miracle of his layered coverts—every feather a divine calculation in the wonder of flight.
Meanwhile, his own fingers are harsher. She doesn't know his wings, not yet, but he knows her. His hands understand her body. They will play her like a harp. Plucking. Edging. Tormenting. Each sigh and moan and scream will form the notes of the music of the spheres.
Hermione brought the tip of the feather to her inner thighs and performed a Mollis Pulsum, then dragged the gently vibrating barbs—the quivering ridge—back and forth over her clit.
Faster.
She unspooled suddenly—a celestial symphony overtaking her as every place she had envisioned that seraphic touch lit up like a star. Her nerve-endings were a Milky Way of coruscating bliss. The spill of galaxies.
She brought the feather up to her face, now touched with heady drops of her pleasure. Her deeply unprofessional pleasure.
Once she regained the ability to think, she sighed from the depths of her confused soul. Back to the fucking drawing board.
SEMEN
The finely grained wood of Hermione’s desk was cool under her forehead. It was her anchor point, keeping her tethered to the earth while her mind strained to ascend once more into empyrean horniness.
Draco was on the magischeduler again. This was the third day in a row. Wasn’t she extremely busy? Some of her other patients waited weeks to see her—quite rightly, she was brilliant at her job. Simply donating a… wing and an extra floor to St. Mungo’s, didn’t warrant special treatment.
If Hermione hadn’t been deeply invested in denying the compulsive, seraphic shape of her urges and the conclusions someone in their right mind might draw from them, she might have remembered she herself had scheduled this appointment.
Indecision was tearing her apart. On the one hand, she looked and felt like she’d slept in a lecherous haystack, her hair was mounting a coup, and she did not want to see him. On the other hand… the beautiful, strong, pleasure-giving hand… she needed to see him as much as she needed air to breathe.
The day crawled and slithered until the moment he burst through her door, looking quite as worked up as she felt. The sight of him made her burn and shiver—both too hot, and too cold all at once.
What came out of his mouth was supposed to be a greeting, she supposed, but it was more like an entire spectrum of sexy, strangled chest to throat noises. She responded in kind with a sort of breathless squeak which set the tone for the rest of the meeting.
I am a healer. I am an adult woman who doesn’t think with her vagina, and act with her clitoris. I am a professional.
This thought was followed immediately by a bout of mutual, unprofessionally intense staring for an unacceptable number of seconds.
“Er—please have a seat.” He transfigured a tufted and velvet-upholstered nightmare and draped himself across it. She made a note of the fact that it was big enough for two, and particularly cushiony and inviting.
This conversation was going to be very difficult to have. It was going to require her to clear her throat. Once. Twice.
Draco’s eyebrow rose, and he gave her that look she’d become all too familiar with.
Yes, Draco, I’m aware you think I’m an idiot.
“Are you going to say something?” he asked drily.
“Yes.” She proceeded to say absolutely nothing. Until. “I need a semen sample.”
It was a blurt. An ejection. Why was her voice so loud?
Emotions flitted over Draco’s face like a murmuration of starlings. If Hermione had to offer a diagnosis she would suggest that Draco was feeling appalled, agitated and… ravenous?
“May I ask—” he seemed to be taking care to keep his voice level. Unruffled. “—why you need a sample of my semen?”
“I have to explore all avenues, and as your condition seems to have something to do with… urges… I think it would be prudent.”
Hermione successfully managed not to blush by drawing her bottom lip between her teeth, and biting down. Draco’s eyes caught and held the movement. Grey flooded with molten silver, reflective and bright. Her wastepaper bin caught fire.
She tossed an extinguishing charm in that direction.
“I apologise.” Draco didn’t look contrite. He looked ready to raze St. Mungo’s to the ground like a pillaging viking. “I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”
Willing herself not to shake and shaking regardless, Hermione levitated a specimen jar towards Draco. She had to take extra care to not let it batter him about the head.
“So I—” He flicked his wrist elegantly, suggesting that bringing himself to orgasm would be an elegant affair. “Here?”
“Er—yes. I can find you an alternative room, or you’re welcome to apparate elsewhere and come back, but my other patients have felt comfortable enough to…”
“You ask such things of other patients?” There was a distinct note of affront to his tone—dare she say…jealousy? Her calendar went up in flames.
Hermione assiduously cast another Exstinguere, although the summer months now appeared to be a lost cause.
“Yes, it’s routine in some cases.” What even were these words leaving her mouth? Nothing was routine here. What was routine? Concepts were losing all meaning because she was thinking of Draco gripping himself tight, wing flaring wide.
She only hoped he couldn’t see the straws she was clutching at.
If she screamed the word professional enough times in her head, perhaps her professionalism would manifest itself.
“Fine.”
The jar was in his fingers, her lip was back between her teeth. She tasted copper.
“Is it standard procedure to be watched while producing the sample?”
“Wha—oh, no. Excuse me. I’ll be outside. But not close. Find me, when you’re… yes.”
She hurried out, putting as much distance between them as possible. She thought she was safe until she noticed she’d inexplicably drifted back down the length of an entire corridor. She was being summoned, as though by Accio, right back to where she’d left. Like a boomerang, she found herself leaning against her own office door again, drawn by the Heavenly music inside.
Her fierce anxiety was squaring off with delirious levels of lust. She was going to be fired. Arrested. This was sexual harassment. She had become criminally horny.
And yet couldn’t stop. She could hear rhythmic noises. A few soft grunts.
She was hysterically, ferociously aroused.
She was just beginning to wonder how much longer her knees could keep her upright when footsteps approached her office door. She nearly flew backwards into the opposite wall beneath a poster of a stern healer declaring SPATTERGROIT: IT’S NO JOKE.
He was standing in the doorway—sans shirt—avec wing—filling the doorway—becoming the doorway. The look he fixed her with suggested he was extremely unimpressed with her bedside manner. In his hand was a little jar and it was—
Oh Jesus H Merlin Christ. It was glowing with a diffuse phosphorescence simultaneously soothing to her eyes and profoundly alarming.
“Does it… normally do that?”
“Perhaps we can have this conversation back in your office.”
She followed him with her head down, like a naughty school child. This comparison was probably not a helpful one to make because she consequently thought of Professor Malfoy with a wooden ruler and that didn’t do her one bit of good.
Maybe the floor would grow a maw and eat her, so she could stop imagining him eating her out so thoroughly that she forgot who she was and why she wasn’t allowed to want such ravishment.
They were sitting again, and the jar, which had all the presence of a third person, was innocently glowing on her desk.
“To answer your question, my semen isn’t usually so radiant, no.”
She would murder him for his ability to school his features into beatific placidity. “Well, that probably means we’re on the right track.” She would bring levity into the heavy, heady air, even if it killed her. There was a new scent lingering: ozone and sex. Undertones of petrichor echoed beneath that like a perversely sanctified afterglow.
“When shall I return?”
“Huh?”
“Granger, I am growing concerned for your mental acuity. How long will it take to examine my specimen?”
“Ah yes, if you could possibly return at the same time tomorrow, I should be—” even more fucking adrift than I am now.
He nodded once.
Exeunt Draco.
Enter Panic.
Hermione found herself in a staring competition with a jar of jism. Professionalism was a dot on the horizon that was so indistinct it could’ve been anything; a speck of dust or a passing seagull.
There were three questions in Hermione’s head. Each was progressively more unscientific in nature.
One, could the abiding scent of violent, licentious weather possibly be originating from the jar? In spite of its lid?
Two, how might the contents of the jar feel if she rubbed them into her skin?
Three, what would Draco Malfoy’s glowing come taste like flowing over her tongue, and down her lusty throat?
If she unscrewed the lid, she would fire herself. She would pull out her ballpoint quill and write a resignation letter. She would retire in disgrace and become an extravagant hermit.
Thunder seemed to rumble through St. Mungo’s and she slowly unscrewed the lid.
The heavenly chorus from before told her she needed to. This was life. This was purpose. This was the answer.
Hermione dipped her pinky finger into the sticky, slippery substance—still warm from his body—and before she knew it the tip of her finger brushed the tip of her tongue.
She saw the inside of a bursting star.
The compulsion she was now on a first name basis with carried her across the room. She found herself on her examination table. And then—between one blinding pulse between her legs and the next—
She is a madonna. She is a whore. She’s cavorting with kindred, lost souls in a sensuous Florentine bordello—languorous in rumpled sheets and the caramel of candlelight.
She will both feast and be feasted upon. She eats pomegranate seeds offered to her by a fallen angel.
One.
Two.
How many until she’s consigned to this netherworld of divine dark comedy for eternity?
The juice trickles in rivulets, sticky and warm. Down her chin. Between her breasts. Like wine. Sacramental and wicked.
It reminds her of his cursed blood—the blood that sings to her. It calls to him too—now he’s licking all over her crimson, stained skin, following this sanguine trail. The path to hell, paved with all his sinful intentions.
He’s devouring her cunt. Licking a stripe along her slit. Making her beg him.
She pleads for more, and he obliges, and she’s being split in half like the ripe fruit she still holds in one hand. With his cock inside her, she is muse. Masterpiece. Writhing in silk, trying to escape, trying to draw closer.
She senses every part of herself contracting, drawing in, drawing tight. She’s swirled like gesso, painted in long strokes. She’s a sunset of colour that spills across the canvas as she peaks. A pièce de résistance, completed.
Except.
Layers of pigmented oils are being scraped and reapplied. She’s being painted anew—the artist seeks something ever closer to the divine. He’ll decimate and rebuild her once again.
She shares a bemused Mona Lisa smile with him. Alright, if he insists. She enjoys the second, surprise, petit mort as much as the first, and the peaceful descent which follows her little death even more, now thoroughly laid to rest. Memento Mori.
And then, the creative process commences once more. She’s sculpted and moulded and coaxed into the sight of God a third time—a finger outstretched to receive her own creation.
But—
One fine brushstroke of concern—a line of paint two hairs wide—penetrates her blissful haze.
She wasn’t even touching herself anymore; her own participation in this nonsensical erotic pastiche had been irrelevant since her first orgasm, which appeared to be less of an orgasm and more of a toppling cosmic domino.
And yet the orgasming would not stop.
The salacious pomegranate fantasy faded—she was solidly within the walls of a pedestrian office in St. Mungo’s, but her body continued to spontaneously perform the kind of tantric feats gurus would kill to achieve. Oh, there’s number six, she thought, bleakly, now mildly hoping it might end.
It did not.
In the comedown of the tenth sheet-soaking, life-altering conclusion she summoned the magischeduler to the withered husk of her body with somehow unplumbed depths of professional resolve. She could admit there was some part of her that had quite enthusiastically consented to the first orgasm—professional, and potentially judicial, consequences be damned. Probably the second. Three through six fell into the realm of a biological curiosity she supposed she could submit herself to. For the good of science, etcetera. Somewhere after eight she would have sceptically described her interest in climaxing spectacularly yet again—at least until she had several days to rehydrate—as dubious at best.
She cancelled her next several appointments while still coming, her exhausted body acting as conductor for the storm front of realisation, and spasming over and over, as His name echoed over her bones, her heart and her cunt.
SALIVA
Draco had absolutely no idea how to knock on a door. What the fuck good were a decade’s worth of pureblood etiquette lessons if he couldn’t even adhere to this most basic tenet of human decency?
Fortunately, Hermione had used the last of her strength to down three replenishing potions, transfigure herself some clothes, and put on spare green robes. Her hair was beyond help.
Unfortunately, she was still lying in a wank-induced stupor on her examination bed, having quite transparently lost all control of her own life. All she was missing was a post coital-cigarette and a scarlet letter. W for Wank. O for nearly Orgasmed to death.
The door opened with a bang and he stormed in, heralded by a powerful rush of Divine wind. Papers swirled. Curtains fluttered. Strands of his profanely beautiful hair joined the flurry.
All she could say to his sudden reentry was a weak. “No.”
No. She couldn’t take it. She couldn’t take his presence, or his force majeure scent or losing another ounce of moisture to arousal.
He slammed the door shut as violently as he’d opened it. He was a glowering, glowing avatar of Chaos. His wing burst suddenly upwards through the Neapolitan seam of his suit jacket. A masterwork of Savile Row died a tragic, shredded death.
“Stand up.” She couldn’t. Her body had lost the plot. It was ungovernable—couldn’t he see? And yet she found herself standing.
Apparently there was one thing it still answered to.
She faced him, filled with pain and anger, and looked up—finding the same sorrow in the lines of his face.
“Tell me what you know,” he demanded. The tone that flavoured his words said he was done being denied.
“I—”
“Even simply what you suspect.” The word shimmered into existence before flickering out.
Mates.
Impossible. This was almost certainly pheromones. Female veela could dance and make men give away their fortunes. Male veela could perform bonding rituals and soak all the knickers in a mile radius. That seemed scientifically reasonable.
There was nothing reasonable about him, this situation or the way she was feeling.
“What are you doing to me?” she rasped.
His eyes drank her in with furious desperation. “Claiming you. I have to.”
She couldn’t have responded to that, even if she’d known how (she didn’t), because her mouth was immediately consumed in a rough, wet kiss.
Her sanity had been desecrated by every fluid of his she’d come into contact with—she resigned herself to the fact that his saliva was no different. She had the urge to beseech him to simply spit in her mouth, and decided to have herself committed instead.
He conquered her lips, devoured her as his tongue danced with hers. He pursued every scrap of sense she possessed across the mountains and valleys of her jaw, her neck, her collarbone. Biting. Sucking. Overpowering.
Such aggression could have easily been too much, but it was tempered with a melting sweetness. His hand on her face—light, tender. The way he stood over her—bent so low to kiss her, like an angel bestowing a blessing. His hands—caressing and exploring and—
Strong arms wrapped around her and dragged her up his body. A small voice in her head thought maybe she should fight this, and a louder voice told that one to shut the fuck up, and instructed her to make contact. It was only a kiss, but she was absolutely dripping and fuck, she thought she was actually—impossibly—going to come again.
The pornographic noises coming from somewhere deep in his chest sent her right over the edge.
She orgasmed quickly. Spectacularly. Her cunt clenched over and over on emptiness as she rubbed herself up and down over his abs, and ground herself against him.
She was still chasing the orgasmic dragon when she began to notice a shift—a change in the air. His grasp had grown tighter. Kisses more furious. Like she’d looked away from a serene marble angel for a moment and then turned back to find it towering over her, a twisted incubus—toothy maw prepared to gorge itself on her soul.
She struggled—it did less than nothing. He was too strong. He finally let her go twenty seconds later after she managed to hit him over the head with her summoned book about male veela. This was, lamentably, the most amount of help it had managed to provide to date.
“I’m sorry.” His face was a map of beautifully tortured remorse—prepared to impale himself upon the shards of his own broken halo. “I feel like I’m about to die.”
It was becoming excruciatingly obvious this was not just pheromones.
The sum total of everything caused Hermione to finally flip the last of her shit, and leg it out of her office, with a shred of hope and a heavy book clutched to her heaving chest.
⁂
When Hermione ran away from things, she usually found herself in one place: Blaise’s sumptuous flat in Chelsea. Within moments, there would be wine in her hand and her best friend would already know whether she needed distraction, advice, or simply quiet. She flew in like a tornado, and Blaise looked up from his book, tracking her with a half-lidded, shadowy gaze—thinking thoughts that he would probably never share. His saluki Renzo stirred from his position at Blaise’s feet, and then decided Hermione was quite unworthy of his attention and rested his head back on his paws.
“I’m in trouble.”
“Kraken again?”
“Veela.”
“Female… or male?” So he had been getting her owls then.
“Male.”
“Is Draco okay?”
“What about me?!”
“Are you okay?”
“NO.”
In lieu of her usual crystal glass, Blaise floated a bottle of Chardonnay towards Hermione. She partook forthwith.
The entire sordid saga spilled out as she drank, pacing in small, agitated circles. Blaise listened.
Twenty minutes later and she still had yet to sit down.
“... So he told you he feels like he is about to die, and you abandoned him?”
“That’s what you got out of that?!”
Blaise sighed like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world. “If you wanted a friend who was interested in intervening in your love life, you should have befriended Theodore Nott.”
“There is no love life!”
“Either way, it suits me better if you two aren’t together. The staring at each other across rooms thing is admittedly tiresome, but I only have to suffer through the indignity of it once or twice a year. Fortunately for you—” He made a gesture at the book she’d fled her office with. “I am fluent in Runic French, give me that.”
She paced, and drank, with increasing vexation while Blaise read. Finally he looked up at her with an expression like no human man had ever been this bored.
“I retract my previous statement. You should probably fuck him and accept the soul mate bond.”
“What—but you just said—”
“Yes, it will be tedious, but if you don’t you’ll both die. Actually it could be just Draco dying, and you succumbing to madness. I wasn’t entirely clear on the final rune.” A deep, melodious hum of contemplation sounded from his chest. “All the same.”
Her knees had been threatening to quit on her for days and they finally just walked off the job. She sat down in an ungraceful slag heap. The wine sloshed.
“I don’t see the problem. Draco is in love with you—”
The wine bottle shattered on the floor. “Wha—”
“—and you’ll love him after one proper conversation. He corrects everyone’s grammar, abhors smoking, reads constantly, and loves lecturing people about the internalised blood supremacy of claiming famous muggles are actually magical folk, while acknowledging the fact that he used to do this constantly. To Narcissa’s dismay, he also eschewed all other prestigious avenues to be a primary school teacher, and raise baby abraxans.”
“But—”
“No. No more. Get out of my house.”
SOUL
Overwhelmed didn’t even begin to describe Hermione’s current physical, emotional and spiritual state. She fed Crookshanks a deluxe helping of the expensive catfood that she usually saved for when she had to slip him a potion, and practically crawled to bed. It was six p.m.
She fed herself a deluxe helping of dreamless sleep and embraced unconsciousness, comforted by the notion that she could count on a Draco-less oblivion, and ten to twelve hours of not having to think the word soul or mate.
Hermione is riding on a clam shell.
“Oh come on!”
Her hair has grown by several feet; it clothes her like silk. She can hear him, but she can’t see him.
He is the wind.
“Why are you running?” the wind says, in Draco’s deep voice. “What are you afraid of?”
“Losing control.”
“Liar. You’ve been gripping life too tight. I know you long to surrender.” Tempestuous fingers slip through her hair. Inclement lips kiss her cheeks.
“I know you’ve watched me. Wondered about me.”
Hermione woke, tangled in ropes. No, not ropes. An Incarcerous of her body’s own devising—bound by her long, shining curls.
In the dark, her skin was emitting a faint glow.
⁂
No spell would put her hair or skin to rights, so she set an angry glamour over herself and flooed to work.
Déjà vu. Draco was last up on her schedule. Perfect, a whole day of fretting about how she was supposed to break it to him that they needed to fuck and bind themselves together for eternity, or alternatively, die.
Somehow, she got through the day, and Draco’s appointment time came and went. He did not arrive to burst through her door. At first this annoyed her. Then, it terrified her. What if he was dead?
He was definitely dead.
She’d killed him.
The thought of this made her want to weep and destroy civilisations.
She reminded herself—amongst exhortations with gritted teeth and clenched fists to Be. A Fucking. Professional. Goddamnit—that going full Book of Revelation might be premature.
She then—very professionally, and afoul of several privacy and anti-stalking laws—looked up his address in the hospital owl registry.
⁂
She found him at sunset in the back garden of the property in Hertfordshire he’d evidently purchased some years ago. He looked up at her as she picked her way past primroses and around an ostentatious fountain.
He had not, in fact, died.
Yet.
“Are you aware that you’re faintly glowing?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, crossly.
“And your hair—”
“Yes, I know.”
Apparently he could see straight through her glamour.
She cast an irritated glance around his stupid, edenic garden. In the presence of all that lush greenery, serenaded by a greek chorus of songbirds, the word fertile was the first thing that came to mind. Hermione mentally punched herself in the face for thinking it.
“Your garden is beautiful.” Well, it was.
“It grew right around the time I found out I was veela. Annoying, actually—this used to be my quidditch pitch.”
She looked curiously around once more, while the fountain babbled playfully behind them. Then she drew a deep breath. “Yes. So. About Why I’m Here. I think we need to talk about this—mate—thing. Because Blaise helped me translate some research and he says if we don’t consummate the bond then you’ll die and I’ll die, or maybe only go insane—” she was about to start rambling “—so we really should decide what to do. Perhaps make a list of pros and cons?”
He raised a brow. “Not seeing many pros to dying, to be honest.”
“What about not being bound to someone you don’t particularly care about for the rest of your life?”
“Is that what you think?” He frowned.
“Stop looking at me like I’m an idiot.”
“Stop acting like an idiot then.”
“Ugh, you’re intolerable!”
He held back the maelstrom of thoughts she could see under his surface, and simply scrunched his brow into handsome perturbation. "You're not an idiot. You're a genius, but you're also an absolute mess and it's... gods, it's endearing and maddening and so fucking sexy."
She drew back in confusion. “What are you saying?”
Nope. There was the look again. Or maybe…maybe that look didn’t mean he thought she was an idiot?
“Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of genius at research and evidence based conclusions? Figure it out.”
“No, that’s silly.” Wasn’t it? Was it not?! “This is all VERY SILLY.”
“Right. I’ll be off then.” He made to leave his own garden.
“No. Wait. Please, explain.”
He ground his jaw and gave her a haughty stare before finally sighing. “I’ve loved you since first year, alright?”
She was speechless. This couldn’t be real life. She’d been having a lot of dreams about heaven lately—was it possible she’d died and just somehow missed it?
“I was an arsehole to you because Abraxas—my favourite relative and an absolutely stellar male role model, by the way—always told me that I should treat witches terribly, and if I did, they would crawl at my feet. I extrapolated a bit, and thought that maybe if I was enough of a racist prat you might understand that I think you are more wondrous than summer rain, and the first snow, and autumn leaves underfoot. It’s awful logic, I admit, but to be fair, being rude to witches has mostly ended in blowjobs for me, so…”
No, still speechless. Her mouth had dropped right open. He’d made a lot of references to seasons and then blowjobs and she wasn’t quite sure if a response was required. If it was, she had no idea what to say regardless.
She was saved the trouble when he kept speaking in that same, passionate voice.
“But you just ignored me—quite rightly—and that drove me even more wild. I had a lot of other stuff going on for a while, you might recall, and then I thought maybe I would employ your tactic of prodigiously ignoring you. It wasn’t easy because every time you are in a room… there is no room, there’s only you. And Blaise is more than useless, he’s refused to be any kind of wingman or to even discuss you for all these years, but he gave me that potion and…” His voice deepened suddenly—earnest and so lovely. “I don’t want to die, but I don’t think I’m worthy of you.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
Hermione had never had someone confess to her before beyond Ron’s “I think I love you” which he concluded with finger guns, and Susan Bones who drunkenly proposed to her in the Leaky Cauldron, with a romantic “you’re well fit—how ‘bout it then?”
Yet amongst all that noise, there had been Draco’s quiet.
She cleared her throat. She’d been a keynote speaker. She’d forgone sleep for most of her life. She’d defeated the Dark Lord. Why was this the hardest thing she’d ever done?
“There’s always been… something, when I look at you. It’s a pull—right here—” She pressed her fingers into her sternum, in the hollow just below her breasts. “—I’m terrified right now. I have been for years, actually, because I think I always knew what it meant. I’m very good at compartmentalising but when I tried to compartmentalise you, you just found your own real estate—” she tapped at the Draco Spot on her sternum again. “—and OF COURSE you teach small children and raise baby flying horses and love reading. I suppose I can forgive the fact that you don’t know how to knock on doors, because honestly you are so beautiful it hurts to look at you. Here again—” She dug into the spot. “I’m mad at Blaise for hiding you from me, but I’m more mad at me for being so bloody determined not to notice. I-I… don’t want you to die either! Because actually, I think—God—I think I might love you, too.”
“Hermione.” He’d gotten a lot closer to her at some point. She was staring at the buttonholes of his immaculately tailored shirt about ten inches from her face.
She looked up, up, up into his beautiful eyes, and his mouth that was suddenly closer too, and—
He kissed her like they were the only two people in the world. Like they were the first two people in the world.
It was a paradise, here, with him, in this moment.
She needed more, needed to be closer to him—to have nothing in between them. He made it so, vanishing her clothes and his own, then laying her down on a bed of moss and daisies in this unspoilt oasis. Bare to each other.
He ate her cunt sinfully. Devoured her like the fruit of knowledge. Licked her like a serpent.
He was too good. Too tempting. Too much. She wanted him inside her—had been craving it for days now. Every fantasy had lacked that essential element. It hadn't been this. Hadn't been real. Now it was, and he redeemed himself magnificently.
In short, it was excellent sex—possibly too heavenly to be described or comprehended by the mortal mind.
He was an angel, about to fall, and he dragged her with him; they dropped off an Elysian cliff together.
They came at the same moment, in perfect concert, and set the entire garden aflame. A radiant, blinding white light exploded from their union as a second wing erupted from his shoulder.
The orgasm was unending. Perfectly eternal. Trees grew around them. Seasons passed and changed. Civilisations were born, crumbled and rose again—they noticed none of it, wrapped entirely in each other. They transcended beyond the need for food or sleep or replenishment. Everything was on fire.
They were known to each other now; not perfect but beautifully human, here at the beginning of everything. It was the start of the world. The start of their story.
fin.
EPILOGUE
Somewhere in the inferno, a recently delivered letter burned. Elsewhere, an owl had delivered an identical message to Hermione’s flat. The contents—if the letter wasn’t curling ashes and either of our eternally bound lovers had the capacity to read—would’ve suggested that there had been a mistranslation of Runic French by one Blaise Zabini. They need not bond in haste—the missive stated—if they would prefer, they could wait three more days, Draco’s
All's well that ends well, and all that.