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Terry Boot looked bored as he waved his wand before Hermione, checking for compulsions. "Here for Weasley again?" Before she could answer, he had the wand signature registry box in front of her. "Wand here, please."
She arrived at Percy's office door quickly; there was little foot traffic on this floor, given that A-category contracts tended not to need looking at very often. She knocked three raps before pressing the slightly ajar door further open. "Percy," she called, "I need into Archival A-28. Could I borrow you?"
He made a noise indicating she should enter; she found him behind his desk, glasses slipped halfway down his nose in a way that made her want to pull them off his face altogether. His gingery curls were tied back in a bun today, the overall effect quite academic.
"Hello, Hermione," he said drolly, though he was smiling. "I'm doing well, how are you?"
Hermione laughed. "I'll be doing better once I'm in Archival A-28, thank you."
"Just a mo'." He scribbled a few last notes on a piece of scratch parchment before closing the file he'd been working on. Dragon-skin boots stepped out from behind his desk and he closed his door securely behind them as they left.
When she needed archival access, she always made sure to ask Percy. He was quite pleasant company.
But today he was eyeing her sidelong, looking like he was working out how to phrase something. "Mum's been asking after you," he said finally.
Hermione huffed. Percy was usually quite pleasant company. "You can tell her I'm fine—" she rolled her eyes— "and still as selfish as ever."
He grimaced. "It's not selfish to want to be happy," he said, more earnestly than Hermione expected. She raised her brows over a tight smile. "Don't let her get to you."
She didn't have anything to say to that, and he didn't press her.
Dim red light suffused the cramped space of Archival A-28; A-category archives housed the oldest documents in the building, including the Gringotts gold standard contract the Ministry was attempting to rework. (The goblins always requested Hermione as one of the Ministry's barristers; whether this was as punishment for her wartime activities or with the knowledge that she would fight viciously for their side, she wasn't sure. Perhaps both.) Many measures were taken to prevent damage to the more fragile pieces, from layered protective shells from humidity and temperature shifts to keeping lights low-energy to minimize interactions with the arithmantically optimized lattice wards.
When the heavily spelled wooden door clunked shut behind them, she paused to let her eyes adjust. No matter how many times she visited, the deep red cast of the light made everything seem ethereal and strange, from the glow of her blouse to the way Percy's curls glinted something closer to crimson than usual. A painting of a wooden dining table looked almost sepulchral, the abandoned feast upon it seeming morbid.
Hermione hunted efficiently for the original gold standard document, quickly locating the seventeenth-century cabinet. In the dim protective light, she could see the shimmering preservation charms wrapped around each document. It only took her a moment to find the correct drawer, which was larger on the inside to allow for the individual pages to lie side by side rather than stacked on top of one another.
Percy waited patiently as she duplicated the contract twice, then skimmed the contents of her copies before magically stamping them with the bronze Archival seal, verifying that they were accurate representations of the original. He began to tell her something as she slid the drawer closed, and—
An alarm sounded. It seemed to pass by her ears and enter her mind, her bones, and Percy seemed similarly affected. A tidy Ministry voice echoed that the building was on lockdown due to an assassination attempt against the Minister.
Percy's head thumped against the door. "Third time this month."
Hermione whipped her wand sharply and her duplicate contracts zipped into her briefcase. "One more time and I'll kill Harry myself," she grumbled. When Percy raised a brow, she frowned. "I could take him."
He just smiled. "You could, and then you'd end up in Azkaban, and where would I be?"
As expected, the doors were magically sealed for the lockdown. If they were anywhere but high-security Archival, they could have Apparated out of the room and at least sat somewhere more comfortable while the latest madman was arrested downstairs, but no, of course the seventeenth-century contracts needed as much security as possible.
From past experience, they guessed it would be at least half an hour until they could leave. Inconvenient, but, "At least the company's decent in here," she said, and Percy smiled warmly again.
They pulled a pair of stools from under the narrow reading table and settled side by side, backs to the table so they faced the open room. The brief fall of quiet was easy, but talking to Percy was easy, too, and soon they were carried away.
He looked like an art piece in the red lighting, she thought. The way he gestured lent him a kinetic energy, a dark splotch of spelled ink on the edge of his broad palm catching the light in the same dynamic way as the dark opalescent dragon-skin boots on his feet.
It didn't take long for her to give into her anxious curiosity and ask, "You said your mum's asking after me?"
"Yes." Percy groaned and the sound of it stirred something odd in Hermione. "I think it's habit at this point, you know? Just pick something and pick at it. She does it even when Ron isn't there, like—well," he said ruefully, cutting himself off. "I wish she'd stop with the prodding and all. She means well, but it's—" He huffed. "We're not children anymore."
Hermione couldn't argue with that. She leaned back a bit to take in the man that he'd grown into, a far cry from the Head Boy she'd near-idolized at Hogwarts. He'd grown up since the war, too. He weighed his decisions differently, she knew, had learned from his regrets.
He hadn't forgiven himself, she knew that too, from late nights over cheap bottles of wine.
But he didn't wallow in it, either. She'd wallowed for a while, but even when they hardly knew each other he'd shown up and pulled her up and made sure she kept walking. Her parents never forgave her for taking their memories, and she never forgave herself, but Percy forgave her.
And she forgave Percy. Maybe that was where things had started to go wrong with Ron.
Percy had been one of her best friends, this last almost-decade. When she started in the Minister's office fresh out of Hogwarts, he took her under his wing, and they'd stayed in touch even after both transferred out of the department within the year.
Her mind drifted to a function from the early days, some charitable event or other. She couldn't remember the details, but she remembered Percy.
Despite their growing camaraderie, she'd still thought him a bit of a stiff, but watching him work the room she found he was actually excellent at it. He knew names, faces, spouse's names, pet causes. Asked after children and sick mothers. He was in his element in a way she'd never quite seen before, and she wondered if his family would believe her if she told them—then batted the thought away with a pang in her chest.
A well-meaning Padma Patil made small talk with Hermione near the biscuits. She asked after Ron, asked Hermione how Ron was doing, if they were still getting—so she hadn't heard. And in the split second it took Hermione to decide how to answer, Percy appeared beside her and folded himself into the conversation before it could even begin. "Ms. Patil, hello! You're still in Magical Creatures, right? I have a quick question about…"
He hadn't even glanced Hermione's way, and when Padma took her leave and left the two of them standing side-by-side, he murmured, "I'll just do another lap," and walked away with his back straight and his head high. He waved to someone from the Austrian contingent and she fought a laugh, recalibrating her idea of him for what felt like the millionth time.
She found herself smiling again as her eyes flitted over his face now, taking in the way his freckles almost seemed to fluoresce and the crinkle that came with the narrowing of his eyes as he stared back at her.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked quietly, and she realized she hadn't spoken in a long while.
"You," she said without thinking. "You're right. We're not children anymore."
The silence was deafening, then. His head tilted slightly and she forced her breathing to stay steady. He was looking at her like he misinterpreted something like this before and was being careful not to do it again.
He moved first, but infinitesimally. She moved faster. Their lips met and in this lurid red glow even a chaste kiss made her heart race. A breeze kicked up around them, barely more than a flutter, but it was enough of a loss of control over her magic for Percy to pull back enough to tease her. "I can't believe you did that."
Hermione couldn't bring herself to feel embarrassed. "Shut up."
He leaned forward and captured her lips again, kissing her deeper this time, and she let herself get lost in it. She wondered how she'd ever missed that this was inevitable. One of her hands drifted up to rest on his cheek and she was satisfied to find that he was flushed hot under her touch.
Suddenly she was much closer to him, pulled in by desperate touches at the base of her neck and the center of her back. She gasped in surprise and Percy's tongue followed the line of her own as he took advantage, the kiss turning heady before she'd quite caught her breath.
She didn't realize that she'd nearly crawled into his lap or where his hands had moved until the still life painting revealed itself to be a portrait, its occupant gasping at the scandal of it all. "Really?" the bishop demanded as she extricated herself from a wildly grinning Percy. "This is the third time this month!"
They lost it laughing, then, and fell back into one another, driving the bishop away once again. And if when the lockdown lifted they took longer than necessary to get back to work, well, it wasn't as if the contracts were going anywhere.