Chapter Text
A still somewhat-beleaguered Hermione trudged back into Dumbledore’s floo about an hour later with an odd look on her face. No one else, she soon realized, was there.
So she wandered, her thoughts clearly elsewhere, in the general direction of her rooms.
As soon as she’d opened the door to the faculty apartment hall, she heard steps nearing, followed by the opening of a door.
“Hermio-,” Sirius started before slowing to take her in, approaching her slowly with hands in view as if nearing a spooked horse. “What happened?”, he asked, slowing to a stop as she sort of trudged into him.
“Mrfflegrrphle,” she seemed to say, from where her face was buried in the dip just below his collarbone. His arms had automatically come up around her, and one was smoothing her hair from crown to nape in long, slow strokes.
“Well,” he murmured, nose twitching at the oceanic bouquet of her, “I’m afraid I don’t speak mermish, if that’s what that was.”
She drew up and then slowly deflated with a long-suffering sigh, one more muffled syllable grumping into his chest as she evinced no particular hurry to become intelligible again.
He shook his head, swaying slowly with her as he kissed the top of her head. “It’s alright. I’ll wait. I’m here.”
The tension she still held in her slumping frame slowly drained from her as she leaned into him.
She leaned into him a long while.
❧
“I hadn’t remembered that Luna wasn’t born yet,” Hermione finally said, turning her head just enough to the side to speak unmuffled.
Sirius thought a moment, then looked down at her questioningly, tipping up her chin so he could catch her eye. “We are, I take it, speaking of some living thing rather than the celestial body?”
Hermione nodded, looking up at him with a sort of impersonal balefulness from where her face nestled in the refuge of his shirt front. “Girl. Year below me, as it was, in school. Went to check on her because,” she sighed, shaking her head and nosing into him before continuing, slightly muffled again, “her mum’s an Unspeakable, and was knocked out in the Azkaban omnishambles, and her dad… has failed to make a positive impression on me. He’s runs The Quibbler.”
Sirius searched his memory. “Omni… and wait, what, you mean that weird tabloid with the moon mages and whatnot?”
“Probably,” came a response aimed more or less at his diaphragm. “He’s, among his faults, not the most attentive of parents.”
“So,” Sirius mused, “You saw the mother, but she’s what, not pregnant yet? I would have thought…”
Hermione groaned and face planted into him again, minutely shaking her head despite it. “Furry smeg,” she mumbled into his shirt.
He blinked. “Beg pardon?”
She sighed and then let her head fall back again, looking up at him. “She’s an egg. She’s there, but not in the usual fashion. Not hatched yet. Mum’s at least half fae and into magical experiments and I guess, if she had a choice, not into stretch marks?” Hermione shook her head before resting her ear over his heart, which seemed to soothe her slightly. “Donno if it’s just that she’s fae, and some sort of fae who lays, or if there’s further shenanigans, or what, but Luna’s this blue speckled fairy egg, now. She never told me that’d been how she came to be, though I hardly would have asked - donno if she even knew, but can’t imagine her father would find it anything other than cause to crow. The neighbor kid - well, the one only-child neighbor kid - found her egg rolling slowly through a field in the wind and decided he should stop her and sit with her until one of her parents showed up. He was just hugging her in his lap, keeping her warm. Apparently Xenophilius ‘just steps away a moment’ and forgets her with some frequency, and so Cedric has appointed himself her protector. He was telling her stories and occasionally putting her aside to catch grasshoppers, which he would then tell her about. I just,” she sniffed, “sat with him - them? - a while. Cedric’s a good kid.” She shook her head, her eyes suddenly dampening the cotton between them. “The best, really. Little, little boy,” she sobbed, “About to start Primary school, I think.”
Sirius frowned, tightening his arms around her and considering how to help. “We’re going to walk a moment, love, and I’m going to get you in a nice warm bath with a cup of mostly-whisky tea. Alright?”
Hermione nodded weakly, though her arms tightened around him right back.
He started walking backward, tugging her after him at a slow trudge.
❧
Perhaps an hour later, after ducking out of the bathroom a moment, Sirius rejoined Hermione at her tubside. She, meanwhile, was up to her ears in bubbles, slowly nursing her second cup of only-slightly-tea. Only the rim of the cup was visible above the lavender-scented foam.
Her red-rimmed eyes turned toward him as he crouched beside her, laying the side of his face on his folded arms along the tub’s edge.
“Well,” he said, “I admit I’ve just sent two of my venerated elders and my dear cousin Howlers. Any chance I could just, I don’t know, get some sort of up-to-the-minute update service on your peril level?” He furrowed his brow in concern, not waiting for her to consider the question on a non-rhetorical basis and remember the instance of Molly’s remarkable clock. “I can’t believe no one told me what happened,” he fumed, frustrated. “Has it all just gone so reliably tits up around here that when you’re flat on your back in the infirmary, no one feels it’s incumbent upon them to send the word around?”
Hermione canted her head, pursing her lips consideringly as she looked back at him. “Well, flat on my back does have an obligatory level of tits up to it, I suppose,” giving a half-hearted little wiggle mostly lost beneath suds.
He sighed, shoving his sleeve up to keep it more or less clear of heaps of fragrant froth as he reached out and tweaked her nose. “Perhaps let’s not push that envelope on days you’ve nearly drowned twice, especially when that’s about the least catastrophic drama to have recently befallen you.”
She mustered a playful moue of disappointment, the lifting banks of bubbles atop her shoulders communicating her shrug. “I also walked in on Narcissa and Ismay having fireball-hot Sapphic Veela adventures this morning, quite accidentally, and wound up in a compromising position with Alastor because Albus thought maybe I should take him for a spin and I, it would seem, have the world’s most absurd white knight complex.”
Sirius’s face went completely blank, and his voice, flat, as he gazed at her. “No. Not you. Never.”
She huffed and flung some bubbles at him, which he tried to ward off by throwing his hands up as a shield, laughing and falling backward on his ass. Which made her giggle and peer down at him over the tub’s edge.
“Honestly, Sirius, if we’re to speak of pots and kettles,” she smirked, extending a slick and sudsy arm to help him right himself.
He took her hand, letting her pull him up. “I have no idea,” he said, sounding unconvincingly gruff, “what you could possibly mean.”
She pulled him a bit past upright, just until his lips touched hers.
After the kiss, she shook her head without withdrawing, letting her lips brush over his with the motion. “You’re bathing me, lover. Coddling me like I’m your little lost lamb.”
He smirked, which was unfairly devilish and sexy on him, always. “You are, darling. But you’re also just so ba-a-a-a-a-aaad.”
She sputtered in mock-indignation and splashed at him, laughing, and he took one shocked look down at his sopping chest before growling and leaping, fully-clothed, into the tub with her.
Hermione shrieked in protest as he landed over her, his hands immediately finding all the places she was ticklish as she squirmed to evade and struggled to breathe through her laughter. He, meanwhile, heedless of his tight black trousers and chrome-studded belt, settled in with a continued growl as he nipped at her neck, using his size and weight to arrange her limbs for maximal access to all her most vulnerable areas. She, meanwhile, saw no way to free her hands and prevent unwelcome pot shards but to throw the teacup and saucer up and over her head, unable to breathe for laughing.
His grin pressed to her neck and he played at gnawing on her there, eliciting squeals and squeaks while, somewhere, porcelain shattered with a soft, almost musical sound. The tension started to seep from his body as he nuzzled her.
Then, suddenly, her hands were urgently working at his belt buckle.
He pulled back from her neck, arching one eloquent brow as she smiled guilelessly up at him - all while racing to dispatch of fastenings and pulling his ever-eager cock free.
He considered hesitating a moment, having meant it about going easy today, but after a look into her vulnerable, wanting eyes, he decided against it.
They gazed at each other as he sank slowly into her from where her hand had guided him to her gate. His agonizingly unhurried push eked slowly forward, unrelenting through their moans, until he reached the depth at which she gave a little shimmy to help herself stretch around him, her head falling back, her lower lip finding its way between the flash of her teeth.
His eyes half-lidded, he grasped her hips and braced his feet, soggy motorcycle boots and all, and rather than immediately starting the slosh, achingly pushed another inch… two… farther.
“Gods,” she moaned, her head lolling from one side to the next, as he watched the pale column of her neck arch and strain with great masculine satisfaction, feeling himself pulse and swell inside of her.
She looked up, pinned there upon his largesse, her inner walls groaning around the increasing thickness of him. “You,” she panted, “are too big for your britches, you naughty, naughty puppy.”
He smiled, letting her every breath, every flutter of her lashes, her every shiver of delectation wash over him as he savored the giddy rush of blood away from his head and into the crux of her. “You,” he murmured low, his eyes raking over her, “look so fucking good on me, I’ve decided to quit trousers altogether.” After one more leisurely grind of his hips into hers (and another feminine whimper, another inch demanded of her), he began to unhurriedly pull himself back. “I want,” he breathed, letting the ridge around the tip of him tease at her entrance as she squirmed, “for you to be barely painted on, love - I see how you love it when you’re straining at your every sinful fucking seam.” He gritted his teeth then, a harsh breath rasping through him as he thrust back into her, pulling her hips ponderously, inexorably down his length. His teeth closed on her shoulder without conscious intention as he finally seated himself fully again, listening to a groan creak from her throat.
She sank all her thought into the feel of him, losing herself in the stretch of his entry and willing her limbs limp with surrender.
It took a moment for him to relax his jaw, kissing the bruise he’d bitten into her skin as he pulled slowly back again, his exhalation billowing from him at the torturous pace. “You poor, indecent thing, you,” he hissed through his teeth, thrusting into the clench of her again, relishing the curious friction of driving into her under water. “Am I too big for you, too?” he rumbled, finding her unfocused eyes with his again, taunting.
She lifted her face to look back at him, reveling in his utter mastery of the movements of hips, relishing how her cunt struggled to encompass him, his pace ensuring that each reentry felt like that first breathtaking stretch. With a thrill she realized that, with his every inward thrust, a lump formed in her throat - making her feel like he was spitted through her so deep that the tip of his wicked, blessed shaft would at any moment skate up through her throat and along her tongue. She imagined relishing the taste of it a moment before she she could answer him.
“Yes,” she rasped as he finally ebbed from her, “yes, you are, and I can’t get enough.” Her head lolled back again on his next thrust forward, pressing deliciously into her cervix and compressing everything within her down until she was certain her very lungs had given way to make room. And again. And again, before she could muster the wherewithal to flex the straining muscles of her core around him, prying her eyes open to watch him grit his teeth at the ache. “You’re my cocky, cocky boy,” she breathed, letting herself surrender to his slowly increasing speed, his still shatteringly-comprehensive thrusts. “Ruin me for everything else, Sirius,” she whined, hands grasping at the tub’s edge to steady herself as he started to dash himself against her, hard and faster. “Godric, if we die together in the explosion, I’ll go with a smile on my lips and haunt this place with you forever.”
Sirius’s shirt was drenched with sweat even above the water line, her words doing nothing to moderate the kindling fuse within. “Out with a bang?” he panted, one arm looping tight around her waist so he could relish the soft skin of her stomach sliding over his hard muscles as they bunched and stretched. He somehow managed to lift her mouth to his without drowning them in the tumult of the water, the growing maelstrom framing their congress as if nature and physics and the goddamn sea itself bowed to something so primal and powerful as this. Every drop of his blood wanted to rush to her, to push and pump and please her, and he grew lightheaded and half vicious in his ministrations as she started to cry out with every inward crush. “No,” he panted, “no, I put you together again, vixen.” He panted, not slowing as she scream-sobbed in satiation, bowing under and bearing down on him, the squeeze of it pulling him headlong toward his end. “I swear I will destroy you so thoroughly you will weep for it, Hermione,” he gasped out, reaching a crescendo, “only to come together in my arms and beg me to do it again, if we live together instead.”
“Sirius!” she wailed, caught off guard as she lurched, spasming hard around him again. Still breathless from the first time, this climax ripped through her, harder, actually lifting him on the convulsive arc of her back, making his vision go white as…
“Hermione!” he screamed, yanking her hips down over him fathoms deep as he flew apart, the promised detonation searing through them both.
❧
Sirius must have somehow carried her to the bed, because Hermione woke still damp with a towel tangled around one leg and his arm thrown over her, much later.
She blinked back to consciousness, slowly taking stock of herself and what had just happened. The thrill still echoed and pulsed in every strained inch of her exquisitely used body, and as she let herself relive the memory, the intensity of it so consuming that she almost came again just thinking of it.
Didn’t hurt that he had, at some point, divested himself of his sodden clothes, and the beloved landscape of his body stretched out before her voracious eyes.
She looked over his frustratingly perfect face, which even in sleep turned to her. An involuntary shiver traversed her shoulders while she grappled with the miracle of him, of them, of this thing more precious than magic itself they had together.
She knew she lived and died by being what was needed. He, though, by some alchemical marriage of who he was and who he worked to be, had somehow become what she needed. Sirius, she realized, uniquely among all the people she had ever loved (with the possible, very different exception of Minerva), gave her a great deal more than he took. Some of that was by his nature, but more of it he chose.
It was terrifying.
“It’d shut down the school, y’know,” he mumbled softly, not opening his eyes.
Hermione shook herself from her thoughts and smiled softly, pushing an errant lock of damp hair out of his face. “Oh? What would?”
He smacked his lips sleepily and she thought for a moment she’d lost him to Morpheus again, but a few seconds later, he said. “Us. Dying from explosive intercourse and haunting Hogwarts.” One of his eyes barely slitted open. “This would be no fit place for children, after that.”
She was dragged suddenly across the sheets as the arm thrown over her became a tight cinch around her waist. His eyes opened marginally as her face came to a stop scant inches from his. “If you think Peeves is bad, the spectre of us, working inexorably through the little red book?” He shook his head, tsking. “You’re not wrong that sexual education is sorely lacking in the curriculum, darling, but it would all too quickly become much more sorely rampant.”
A breath hissed out of her mostly closed lips before she started to laugh, clearly trying not to - and failing.
His eyes fully opened as he regarded her with curiosity. “Eh?” he asked, rolling over top of her as she dissolved in hysterics, framing her face with elbows planted in the mattress. “What’s this, then, you?”
She shook her head, struggling to speak through the laughter. “I can’t… I can’t tell if you’re ludicrous, brilliant, hysterical, or some of each, but dammit, Sirius, your repartee gets me so hot so fast it’s absur-”
She gasped as he rolled into her still-wet cunt without warning, smirking at her.
A few deep snaps of his hips and the occasional glimpse of his smug mouth later, she hazily remembered speech. Well, sort of.
“Fuck,” she panted, rocking with him and finding herself hypnotized by the flex of his shoulders, a curl of his hair bouncing off his neck. “You’re right,” she breathed, struggling to angle her hips for him, straining to widen the spread of her thighs and kick the towel away. “And I'm burning all your trousers.”