Work Text:
The knock comes just as the quaint aluminum clock on Hermione’s desk strikes five.
“Just a—just a moment, please!” she calls out, frantically collecting the scattered sheets of parchment she’d been poring over, reading and rereading, trying to mentally catalogue the various footnotes and addendums and rambling tangents scribbled in the margins. A new letter. Postmarked from Luxembourg, dated two days earlier, with a host of mysterious, frankly ominous scorch marks tracked across the bottom half of the last page.
Another knock comes, a bit quieter, less confident.
She fumbles for her wand, sending the hastily bundled stack of parchment flying over to her bag, and then drops her forgotten quill, swatting a stray feather aside before it can get stuck in her hair. She stands up, too, slipping her feet back into her flats, wiggling her hips to smooth her skirt down, banishing an empty teacup and the remnants of a lemon-poppyseed muffin to the cupboard next to the lone, narrow, partially shuttered window.
“Alright,” she says, clearing her throat. Sniffing imperiously. “Come in.”
After a brief pause, the door creaks open, and an unfamiliar man steps forward.
He’s older than her, late-twenties or early-thirties, maybe, dark-haired and russet-skinned and the kind of skinny that makes him look taller than he probably is, long-limbed and angular—his cheekbones are prominent, his eyes a warm shade of hazel, more brown than green, and his lips are pink and full and slightly parted, edges curling up, like he’s either preparing to smile or so used to actually smiling that his face is just stuck that way, perpetually approachable, perpetually friendly, perpetually pleasant.
He’s fidgeting with the beat-up leather satchel hanging from his shoulder, bony knuckles going white and then pink and then white again around the strap, and there’s a nervous energy about him, a frenetic buzz, a dash of noticeably distracting intensity, that makes her think of a pair of opposite-poled magnets quivering helplessly in a shoebox in one of her primary school classrooms.
“Hello,” the man greets her, and his voice is deeper than she was expecting. Lower pitched. His throat bobs as he swallows, teeth grappling with his bottom lip, like he’s physically biting back the urge to say something else. Something embarrassing, judging by the flush she can see creeping beneath the rumpled collar of his shirt. “Hermione Granger?”
Hermione blinks, startled to realize that she hasn’t been blinking for the better part of a minute. Her own cheeks abruptly feel very, very warm. “Um, yeah—yes,” she answers, tossing her head, lifting her chin, irritably plucking at the front of her blouse, at the absolutely asinine little cluster of pink chiffon rosettes that always seem like they’re right on the verge of falling off. “I am. What can I do for you?”
“Oh,” the man says, looking flustered, “I didn’t—it’s . . . I’ve been in touch about some permits, recently? And, um, much less recently, as well,” he hurries to add, flashing her a charming albeit vaguely self-deprecating grin. “I don’t have an appointment or anything, I just thought to—or, I hoped to—”
“Who have you been in touch with?” Hermione interrupts, gaze darting, unbidden, to the otherwise nondescript middle drawer of her desk. It’s locked, both with magic and without, and the polished brass keyhole gives her a conspiratorial wink whenever it catches the overhead light. “From the department, I mean. I don’t really work with permits anymore, but I’m sure there’s someone around who can help.”
The man furrows his brow, but his smile doesn’t fade. “You don’t . . . work with permits? For magical creatures?”
She pauses, her own brow furrowing. “No. I haven’t for nearly six months. My focus is more on code compliance now. Protective services, creature welfare, all of that.”
He glances at the nameplate on her desk, tongue curling over his teeth, and then stuffs his hands into his trouser pockets, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. They’re well-worn, travel-dusty, utilitarian brown leather, dried mud flaking off the messily double-knotted laces—work boots, she thinks with a curious glimmer of unease. Hiking boots. Outdoor boots.
“So,” he says slowly, scrubbing at the stubble on his jaw, “you’re—you’re definitely Hermione Granger, and you definitely don’t work with permits for magical creatures.”
“That’s correct.”
He grunts, mouth quirking oddly. “Interesting.”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s that?”
She frowns. “Have we met?”
“In person? Not that I’m aware of, no.” His smile stretches a fraction wider, a slyly, fondly amused slant to it. “A bit ahead of you in school, wasn’t I?”
And that—
“I’m sorry,” Hermione starts, a little impressed by how calm she sounds. There’s a faint ringing in her ears, like her thoughts are racing just quickly enough to clink together as they rattle around her brain, and her palms are—damp. Sweaty. “What did you say your name was?”
“I’m Rolf,” he says, easy as anything, like he hasn’t been exchanging increasingly personal, increasingly flirtatious letters with her for weeks, for months, like he isn’t standing in the middle of her exceedingly well-organized office with messy hair and a peeling sunburn and a chewed-up muggle pen sticking out of his corduroy jacket pocket, “Rolf Scamander. I just got in, you know, and I was going to ask you about a permit for a—well, it doesn’t matter, he’ll be alright in his box for the—”
“What,” Hermione bleats, stumbling backwards, knees weak, and plopping down on the edge of her desk. “You’re—how—when—no, of course you are. Of course you are.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and takes a deep, steadying, only semi-hysterical breath. This is fine. This is fine. This isn’t even the third most embarrassing thing to happen to her this week. “Rolf. Rolf Scamander. Hello. It’s—it’s quite lovely to finally meet you.”
He grins again, posture relaxing. “Sure is. Even if you aren’t going to get me a permit for the—”
“Do not finish that sentence.”
“Why not?”
“Because—because,” she says, flapping her wrist. “Because I am a selfless and responsible public servant.”
“A selfless and responsible public servant in search of . . . plausible deniability?”
“Just—tell me it’s at least not fire-breathing?”
“What’s not?” Rolf asks innocently.
Hermione sighs. “It is absolutely fire-breathing, then.”
He licks his lips, hitching his satchel higher up on his shoulder, and takes a couple of not-quite casual steps forward. “Well,” he drawls, “I have it on good authority—from a permit-issuing representative of this very department, actually—that not all fire-breathing creatures are technically illegal to have in one’s possession when one is re-entering the country, so.”
“I think you’ll find that technically is the operative word, there.”
“Oh, is that why you underlined it so many times?”
Hermione huffs out a laugh, breathless and strangled and sincere enough that it punches through her chest a bit—and the silence that follows is comfortable, unhurried, even as it drags on with a lingering swell of expectation.
Of anticipation.
“You know,” he says, shrugging one shoulder, “I didn’t really care about the permit. It was just an excuse to come see you.”
Hermione raises her eyebrows. “And now?”
“Now what?”
“Now that you’ve seen me,” she teases, a flutter of excitement, of certainty, taking flight in the pit of her stomach. “And confessed your appalling indifference to magical law enforcement, which, by the way, we’ll really have to discuss at a later—”
“I’d like to take you to dinner,” Rolf blurts out, almost immediately wincing, like he’d intended to phrase it differently. Better. “Or—coffee. Tea? Whatever you prefer, or—don’t prefer, I suppose, I’m not pressuring you to—”
“Yes,” Hermione says. “Yes, I’ll go to dinner with you.”
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens. “Yeah? Well, what about coffee?”
“I believe you promised me tea, too, actually.”
“That’s three separate dates, if I’m doing my math right,” he says, cocking his head to the side. “Could we possibly go for four?”
She presses her lips together, valiantly suppressing a smile. “Ambitious.”
“Optimistic.”
“It is important to set goals,” she concedes. “Admirable, even.”
Rolf chuckles, taking another step forward, studying her, his expression rapidly cycling through a long chain of seemingly unrelated emotions—logical to him, she guesses, meaningful to him, like the jumbled web of names and dates and thought fragments scrawled in the margins of all his letters, everything enigmatically interwoven and interconnected, strung together by a multitude of criteria that she only ever understands after the fact, after she’s already figured out the point he was trying to make.
“It isn’t fire-breathing,” he eventually murmurs. “For the record.”
Hermione drums her fingers against the bend of her elbow. “It isn’t?”
“No.” His smile is crooked, a little off-center, so much different than she always pictured it, imagined it— “It’s fire-dwelling.”
She finds she can’t quite help but to smile back.