Chapter Text
British Ministry of Magic — Level Five — Department of International Magical Co-operation — International Confederation of Wizards, British Seats — ICW Administration & Legislation — International Magical Creatures Legislation Committees, British Seats — Allocations Office
8 Jan 2001 — 8:02 a.m.
The Monday after Harry and Luna's wedding saw Hermione in her minuscule office at the Ministry with a pile of parchment from the holiday threatening to topple over before she even sat down with her tea. She wouldn't admit to nursing a slight hangover from the long holiday leading up to the wedding, but she wouldn't admit to having cast a Confundus Charm on Cormac McLaggen in her sixth year, either, so the reader is free to make of that what they will. Delighted as she had been to see her brother (for Harry insisted on claiming her as family in a legal fashion once she admitted that her parents were and had always been beyond recovery) married and full of a joy she had never witnessed in him before, she might have wished he'd done so to someone a little less…odd. And if she imbibed a bit more than was wise in the hope that it would assist in making sense of her new sister-in-law, surely she couldn't be judged for that.
One minute before, Amos Diggory, British delegate to the ICW's Magical Creatures Legislation Committees, had tapped his pocket watch ostentatiously to demonstrate his awareness and disgust of her tardiness (one bloody minute!), a not-so-subtle reminder that she remained in his black book for (she assumed) some imagined role she played seven years ago in the death of his son. She huffed in frustration at her lot and immediately granted herself the relief of a soft groan when the top-most scroll took that as permission to roll onto the floor.
Hermione Granger was the Allocations Specialist of the British Delegation's Subcommittee for Magical Creature Management of the ICW's Magical Creatures Legislation Committees, a role she was almost certain Diggory created specifically for her, one whose duties she thought so utterly absurd that only her new sister could possibly believe them to be real. Hermione's job was to "allocate" magical creatures for "assignments" in the entirely fictional Kingdom of Andalasia, which was, according to her job description, the one she was convinced Diggory had fabricated, vital to the renewal of ambient magic across the world by facilitating the belief of Muggle children in magic of all kinds. No, really, that's what it said, she checked. Thrice. She even made Harry read it to ensure she wasn't hallucinating it back in June when she'd got the assignment.
Supposedly, this Very Important Job ensured that an entire world of fairy tales, created by the Great Storytellers of Legend (including her old friend Beedle), continued to function, sustaining belief in magic and providing Muggle-Worthy tales that even some adults would half-believe were true. These ranged from stories of the Tuatha dé Danaan and other Fae of all sorts to the very tales that Ronald once stared blankly at her for mentioning. Three weeks ago she'd actually received an assignment request for a dragon to guard a princess of Andalasia in a cursed sleep at the top of a tower. Hermione had wondered where Diggory found the time for these fantastical requisitions, especially for enough of them to pile up on her desk like this, but she'd dutifully filed the paperwork allocating a Hebridean Black to the assignment due to the breed's resemblance to a beloved childhood film. If Diggory could waste her time and talents with spurious nonsense like this entirely fictional position, she could certainly choose a dragon for the task based on a moment of nostalgia and whimsy.
She had slogged through those kind of demands for just over six months, and while she still wasn't sure if this was some prolonged hazing ritual, an attempt to sideline her from working on actual creature rights, or just an unending punishment for allowing his son to die, she had been dutiful in filing her paperwork, fictitious as it might be. Every attempt to protest her assignment or request to move laterally into something a bit more solid had been swiftly met with outrage from Diggory, his superiors, and the press with claims that she was attempting to leverage her status as a war hero to forgo her entry-level position, that she was unwilling to work her way up and demanding special treatment, usually with petty little digs about "the Brightest Witch of the Age". The first time that gem showed up, she'd hexed Ronald for both telling Rita about Remus' comment and for getting it wrong, but it was already far too late by then and she was as stuck with the snide moniker as she was her job assigning magical creatures to the land of make-believe.
She leaned over to pick up the fallen scroll, stretching her fingers out for it after her first attempt pushed it further toward the door, only to jump back with those same fingers rubbing a now-sore spot on the top of her head from the sudden, sharp introduction of the door to it thanks to a red-faced redhead in leather trousers slamming it open whilst she was bent over reaching for the bloody scroll. Idiot, she chastised herself. Are you a witch or not?
She summoned the scroll and then flicked her wand to close the door, frowning at the man whose fists clenched apparently at just the sight of her. Already he'd drawn enough attention with his dynamic entrance that several of the secretaries in the open office space were gawking — or possibly staring at his bum. Given that she was guilty of the latter from time to time, she couldn't even judge them for that, but she wasn't inclined to have whatever sent Charlie Weasley storming into her office in London, half a continent away from where he ought to be, overheard.
"Where's my dragon, Granger?" he demanded, voice harsh and not at all like the cheerful and kind man that she'd chatted magical creatures with on a handful of occasions over the years.
Hermione blinked rapidly, struggling to understand why he was asking her such an absurd question. If he had a problem with poachers, surely he could speak to someone with a real job actually helping magical creatures?
Apparently, that response, or lack thereof, was inadequate. "My dragon, Granger. Where. Is. She?"
"Which dragon am I meant to know the location of?" she snapped, any patience she might have had destroyed by being barked at. She was slightly hungover and nursing a sore head for more than one reason now, and patience had never been one of her few virtues.
"My dragon," he repeated, slowly articulating each syllable like she was somehow the one speaking nonsense. "The one you allocated without even bloody asking my permission three weeks ago. Where is she?"
Allocated…oh, this was a bridge too far.
"I've not allocated anything, Charlie, and certainly not one of your precious dragons. I cannot believe you've agreed to play along with this nonsense!" She couldn't keep all of the hurt out of her voice at him taking Diggory's side, truthfully. She knew he thought he owed the man for introducing him to his mentor when he was a child and thus being indirectly responsible for his current position, but she'd believed him to genuinely respect her as a fellow advocate for magical creatures.
"Do I look like I'm playing?" That…that was very nearly a growl.
"No," she admitted, "but as I have no authority to allocate your dragons, I can't imagine why you thought I'd appreciate you barging in like this to mock me, either."
"'No authority'? Granger, you're the Allocation Specialist, for Merlin's sake! Your signature was on the bloody form that was in her paddock!" And now he was shouting at her. Lovely.
"Charlie," she said, taking a deep breath and hoping he'd do the same, trying rationality, "my job is literally something Diggory made up to get me out of the way. You have to know I can't actually take one of your dragons anywhere. Now, really, I don't know why you've agreed to participate in this ritual humiliation of me when I thought we were at least friendly acquaintances, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave before I call the Aurors."
"I'm going to call the bloody Aurors if you don't tell me where the hell my dragon is," he shouted. "This is the third one you've 'allocated' without so much as a by-your-leave and I'm not putting up with it any longer! The others at least showed back up on time!" He paced her office, making it seem much smaller as his fury radiated off him, pressing upon her, making the air more difficult to breathe.
Or maybe it was just that he was so very beautiful even in his anger. Almost a full head taller than she was with broad shoulders and thickly muscled arms, his dishevelled curls loose around his ears, his blue eyes bright and scorching as the hottest part of any fire, he looked rather like an angry demigod come to wreak justice, and she was far from unaffected by the sight. So far from unaffected that she rather forgot what had him so up in arms in the first place, actually, until he cleared his throat, arms crossed over his chest, a disgusted glare pointed at her.
Right. His dragon. The one she supposedly allocated in her role as Allocations Specialist for the British Delegation of the ICW. Her completely made-up role allocating magical creatures to the fictional Kingdom of Andalasia. Right. That dragon.
She still couldn't believe he was playing along with this, and doing so convincingly. If she didn't know that her job was a joke, both cosmic and practical, she'd actually believe that she'd somehow transported his dragon with her useless forms and hadn't returned it properly. She really had expected better from him, and her disappointment manifested the same way most of her negative emotions did: cold, cutting wit.
"Well, Weasley, if your dragon was allocated to guard the Princess of Andalasia, then I'd assume that's where you'll find it. I'm sure the International Portkey Office will be happy to arrange your transportation there and back. I've got more fictional problems to solve, so you'll have to forgive me for not offering an escort. Please, don't let the door hit you on the way out."
She pointedly pulled a scroll off the top of the stack and unfurled it, staring hard and mostly unseeing at yet another absurd request (a dwarf? Where was she meant to find one of those? Let alone seven?) dismissing him without another word. The effect of which was ruined when he ripped it from her hands.
"I want my dragon, Granger," he snapped. "I'm not leaving until you summon her back from this assignment."
"For God's sake, Charlie, I don't know why you're doing this but it wasn't amusing when you hit me with my own bloody door and it's not any more amusing now! I know I'm the laughingstock of the entire ICW but I didn't expect you to be this cruel." Oh. Oh, no. Her voice — it came out far too thick, her eyes stinging, and she blinked them closed to try to hold it back, but her humiliation was complete when the first tear slipped down her cheek. Because of course that's what today needed, Hermione crying in her office like she was still twelve and not twenty-one.
Without another word, he stomped out of her office, slammed the door behind himself, and left her with a burning face leaking tears and snot and a sense that the day was only going to go downhill from here.
She conjured a handkerchief to deal with the part of the problem she could easily manage and focused on her anger at Charlie for playing along with Diggory's cruel joke to push back further tears; anger was at least familiar, and something she could forge into steel and will. She knew she hadn't made many friends in the upper echelons of the Ministry or the ICW, that much was apparent by the way no one, not even the few people she once would have considered allies, protested that her involvement in magical creature rights ended when her temporary appointment to the Wizengamot did. She was able to take some pride in achieving a handful of rights and protections for house elves on an international level by championing them fiercely in the immediate aftermath of the Battle, but it was mostly the Hogwarts elves choosing to fight without orders that wrung those few concessions out of the Ministry, which then apparently shamed the ICW into following suit. But it was Amos Diggory, Head of the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures at the time the reforms went through, that had gotten the dragon's share of the credit and the seat at the table, both literal and metaphorical, that went with that credit.
Which left her here, in a ridiculously small office doing ridiculous fake allocations of magical creatures in a ridiculous made-up job, leaving her feeling bloody ridiculous. She'd forgone the offers from every other department, including an intriguing one from the Head of the Department of Mysteries, because she wanted to help magical creatures. She would have been content working in Diggory's old department, changing policy and enforcement of laws, challenging poorly written ones all the way to the Wizengamot, where she'd already proven, or thought she had, at least, her ability to carry her point through and affect change, but the potential to do the same on the international level had been a temptation akin to putting a Firebolt in the hands of a third year Gryffindor and telling him not to take it out for a spin. Irresistible.
And this was where she ended up, with everyone around her acting like she was doing incredibly important work while she knew they had to be laughing at her behind her back! Fairy tales, for Merlin's sake! She could be researching Time Travel in the Department of Mysteries right now and she was stuck pretending to assign magical creatures to jobs in Neverland whose descriptions read like a casting call for fairy tale villains!
And…not to make it sound like it mattered to her on the same level as the rest of it, but Charlie Weasley had just shown her that he still saw her as a silly, gullible little girl, after all.
She sniffled and scolded herself, harshly. It didn't matter. He didn't matter. Why did she care if he hadn't really meant those kind, encouraging words when he'd found her curled up on the window seat under the stairs to the Burrow's second floor last summer when she'd lost the election to the Wizengamot after her temporary appointment ended? What did it matter if Charlie Bloody Weasley thought she was as much of a joke as the rest of the magical world, after all? She sighed, and straightened her spine, summoning the scroll back from where he'd thrown it before storming from her office.
It wasn't like he — or the rest of the magical world — was wrong.
She might be a joke, but she refused to wallow about it. She'd always been good at managing the things she couldn't change, even if she never quite got to the acceptance stage of it. This was just another of them.
Charlie was in the lift to hopefully vent to Percy for a few minutes despite being fully fucking aware that the Grecian reserve would freeze over before Percy would take his side in any disagreement he had with Hermione when the full weight of what she'd said wormed its way through the layers of frustrated, disappointed anger that he'd used to insulate himself from his ridiculous fascination with Hermione Bloody Granger to get through the confrontation and get Lottie back.
He'd been in the Burrow's garden a few days before the World Cup telling Bill how his mentor, Old Drustan, put Fudge, Crouch, and Dumbledore over a barrel to temporarily lift the ban on dragon keeping on British soil so the handlers assigned to the nesting mothers wouldn't be killed trying to transport their clutches from Romania to Scotland when he'd felt eyes on him and caught the unruly curls that indicated he was finally going to meet the friend that Ronnie and Ginny had written so much about.
He'd pictured a girl that matched Ronnie's description of a nightmare, honestly, one he'd been told by all of his younger siblings at least once was a plain sort of girl, and while he'd grant that her teeth were in need of a Healer's attention and she could manage her hair better, he'd been unexpectedly caught by the frizzy, bushy curls, the fathomless eyes, and the faint pink that stained her cheeks every time her eyes drifted over to the broomshed where he and Bill stood. She wasn't plain in the least, and he had to wonder if his brothers were all blind. Oh, she wasn't beautiful, not yet, but give her a few years to finish growing into that strong, stubborn jaw, the straight nose with just a hint of a snub at the end, those wide-set eyes, and she'd turn heads, a fact which he'd only been able to determine because Hermione Granger had been eyeing them both up and had very obviously appreciated what she'd seen. He'd made a joke of it with Bill before Ginny dragged her over to meet them, but he'd still been impressed at how she'd kept her cool, a tart, crisp little, "Charmed," her only reply to Ginny's exasperated introductions. Her bushy eyebrow had gone up as if to say she wasn't in the least impressed by her friend's older brothers despite Charlie having caught her eyes drifting to his arms and Bill's arse more than once since she'd stepped outside. It made him want to see what it took to rattle her.
Bill had shaken her hand, given some polite, perfunctory platitudes about meeting her, and that eyebrow only crawled closer to her hairline, as if she hadn't believed a word of it but she'd play along for politeness, and Charlie had taken it as a challenge, because of course he did. He never could leave well enough alone, after all, never could resist poking dangerous things with whatever was nearest to hand, which was why he'd taken her hand and brought it to his lips for a brief moment, shooting her a little wink alongside a cheeky grin.
She'd giggled.
And Charlie? Well, he'd felt about ten feet tall and impervious to spell fire, since everything he'd ever been told about Hermione Granger indicated that she didn't giggle for anyone or anything.
Ginny hissing, "Really, Hermione? Really? That's all it takes to turn you into Lavender? A bit of a wink and a smile?" as she dragged her friend away was just confirmation.
Bill had rolled his eyes, told him not to tease the poor girl too much in a tone that said he knew he couldn't stop him, and then warned him that it might come back to bite him in the arse one day.
Charlie had shrugged it off, saying he'd probably made the girl's day, and turned the conversation back to the work he'd been doing on the old Hebridean Sanctum, putting her out of his mind until he'd caught those bushy curls amongst all his siblings during the First Task a few months later. He'd shot her another wink and smile, grinned when her giggle carried across the stadium to him, and hadn't thought much about her until Bill had written a year and a half later that Ronnie and Ginny had been injured at the Ministry, and, oh, by the way, Hermione might not survive the night.
His reply had been barely legible, he was sure, but by the time Bill's had crossed Europe, she was out of danger, Ginny was fully healed, and Ronnie would be fine, too, just a few scars.
They'd spoken about magical creatures a handful of times between that summer he'd come home for the World Cup and two years later when he'd come home for Bill's wedding and all hell had broken loose, but it was the summers since that saw him considering if maybe Old Drustan was right and it was time to hang up the dragonhide and find a girl to settle down with. And, well, if he had a specific girl in mind, it wasn't anything but a hazy idea that maybe, maybe, if she wasn't seeing anyone when the time came, maybe. Someday.
That's all it had ever been, a someday, a maybe, one he'd never spoken of to anyone, not even Bill. That was why it was so bloody frustrating to find a MTC-4562 Allocation of Magical Creature for Temporary Assignment form in place of a Ridgeback six months ago with her signature on the bottom. No one in the family had written that she'd been assigned to the Allocations Office. It was a bloody prestigious posting, one that indicated the ICW expected the appointee would be one of the permanent delegates to the Creatures Legislation Committee, potentially even elected Head of it in the future, and one he didn't think had ever been given to a Muggleborn before.
Which was why he'd been so disappointed at the callous disregard she displayed allocating his dragons without a word of warning. No, she wasn't required to ask, of course, but he'd had a higher opinion of her respect for magical creatures as thinking, feeling beings than that. The least she could have done was sent a note asking which of the beasts would be best for the specific allocation! And then to act like she didn't know why he was there after she'd done it a third time and hadn't even followed up to ensure that Lottie made it back!
But riding the lift to Percy's office on Level One, all that she'd said finally hit him; he'd run from the sight of her crying because of him, but he'd still been furious at her, and more than a bit disappointed that she'd gotten power over magical creatures and used it so callously. But she didn't believe in it. She thought it was some practical joke.
"Bloody, buggering, fuck," he muttered, ignoring the glare a witch in the plum robes of the Wizengamot shot him at his language. He needed to see Percy. Fuck, he'd probably need Percy, Dad, Bill, and the bloody Minister, at this rate.
How did a woman that clever manage to be that bloody thick?