Sweet Flattery

That thou hast her it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
But here's the joy; my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

~^~

Shakespeare was, of course, a Squib. So said his magical peers, and so said the textbooks at Hogwarts when they referred to him, which was so rare as to slip past any who weren't Muggle-born.

On her fifteenth birthday, Hermione received an antique book of Shakespeare's sonnets from an aunt. The red leather cover crackled when she opened it, the leaves felt textured and substantial, and each letter was richly black. Hermione keeps the book in a cedar box charmed for protection, but she can never bring herself to charm the book itself. The day she got it, she promised herself that she would only ever read the book if she had perfectly clean fingers and there were no messy boys around.

~^~

On an late autumn day during her sixth year, Hermione finds a note scribbled on the back of a printed sonnet and wedged between Demystifying Charms: Leviosa and Demystifying Charms: Lumos. The note reads "Tonight, 10 o'clock. The usual place." There is no signature, and the sonnet looks incidental, torn out without the last half-line. Hermione slips it into her textbook and retrieves Lumos, returns to her homework, and doesn't have time to consider the note until that night.

By the faint glow of Lumos emanating from her book bag, Hermione can read the sonnet's lines if she squints. They are bright and neat, a modern printing. That thou hast her it is not all my grief. . . Her lips move softly as she reads each iambic foot, as when she memorizes for exams, and when she reaches the final couplet she begins again.

After the third time, she turns it over and considers the handwriting. Neither a boy's scrawl nor a girl's frilly script, each letter is sharp-pointed and dark. Running her fingers over the letters, Hermione can feel where the quill pressed too deeply into the parchment.

Hermione does not like to speculate without information, so she sets down the paper beside her inkwell, quill, and parchment. She thinks about kissing Harry goodnight, but decides that he is likely asleep. Instead, she turns on her side, pulls the thick comforter up to her neck, straightens her nightgown beneath the covers, and waits.

~^~

Hermione's fingers are always ink-stained by the end of the day. Every evening, she charms them clean after bathing, so her fingertips always sting as she brushes her hair. The charm is too strong to be intended for daily use, and the chapped fingers it gives her bring Hermione an odd pleasure. She applies unscented hand lotion every morning after brushing her teeth, so that Harry will not notice, but during the night, she knows that her fingers will be rough. This fact gives her a subversive pleasure.

~^~

At 1:35 AM, Hermione lies on her side in bed, watching the curtains by the glow of Lumos. Her wand, as always, rests on the bedside table, and she does not reach for it when the door to the room opens quietly.

Five seconds later, the tip of a wand slips through the bed curtains, pointed at her head. A voice whispers "Don't make a single move." One hand darts in to snatch her wand.

"Who is it?" she whispers with all the scorn and anger she can muster at one thirty in the morning.

"Say another word and I'll petrify you." Draco Malfoy's pale, hard-angled face pokes in, and by the time he has whispered the Silencing Spells, he kneels over her and holds her wrists above her head in a sure, firm grip. As Malfoy pushes up the hem of her nightgown, Hermione focuses her eyes on the soft border between his white hair and whiter skin. She does not wince when she feels the long, lubricant-slick flesh burrow between her legs.

"You know what, Mudblood?" he spits. "One of these days, I'm going to tell Potter that I've been fucking his girlfriend. I'll tell him that every night I come in here and fuck you, and when you go to kiss him in the morning, you're kissing him with lips that cried out because of me."

He says this and many things as he pushes into her, and as she turns her head to the side, still watching the Lumos-lit curtains, she thinks about Harry and the sonnet. Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her. The line is perfectly applicable and perfectly wrong, and by the time that she has sorted through her memories of other sonnets, Malfoy has withdrawn, leaving a sticky absence behind him. The wand pointed at her head no longer trembles.

"Bloody whore," he looks at her in disgust. "I don't know how Potter can stand to touch you."

She does not answer. She thinks, instead, about the August day that she and Harry lay beside each other at the Weasleys'. They had compared their tans, discovering that they were the precise same shade of blue-veined, sunburned brown. His Seeker's fingertips were more delicate than her papercut hands, though, as Harry held her face like a glass vase and kissed her with closed lips.

Malfoy spits on her, the wetness soaking through the nightgown and chilling her left breast. "You're disgusting. Good thing you won't remember what happened - I'm looking forward to seeing Potter's face when I tell him about you."

He points the wand and whispers Obliviate, stupefy. Hermione wants to spit back at him, but instead, she gives in to the sweet, soft darkness.

~^~

Hermione does not know when Malfoy first started to come to her. One night, she had been writing a letter to her parents before she fell asleep, and the inkwell, lid tightly shut, rested beside her wand. When she woke to Malfoy that night, and he told her how often he had come, she slowly and secretly opened the inkwell, dipped in the tip of her pinkie, and wrote one word on herself, small and smudged. One word.

The next morning, Hermione read the word on her skin, and she remembered. She spent the day in the library, researching his spells and devising counterspells, so that she would never forget again. She never told Harry, and she has decided that she never will.

At first Malfoy was cautious with his words, mostly insults about Harry and Muggle-borns and Hermione, but as the weeks passed, he began to say other things. Assignments he was having trouble with. Plans to ridicule Harry. Ways to sneak around Filch. His father's boasts about Voldemort's return.

Every night Hermione clenches her fingers tightly together and closes her eyes and listens. Sometimes she thinks about how careless Malfoy has become, so confident that she can write unsigned notes to Dumbledore, and he never guesses how the Headmaster found out. Those notes are, she tells herself, the reason why she keeps listening.

~^~

In the morning, before Arithmancy, Harry notices the sonnet resting on her books. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him pick it up, but she continues to read over her homework for mistakes.

"Did you write this?" he asks, a few minutes later.

"Of course not - haven't you heard of William Shakespeare?"

"Well, yes, but we haven't ever studied him at Hogwarts. What's this here for?"

She shrugs, slides her homework into her bookbag, and wraps her arm around Harry. "I found it between two books in the library. Do you recognize the handwriting on the back?"

He flips it over, and she sees him shiver suddenly and bite his lower lip. "No- no," he says, and because he's lying she knows who it is.

Hermione's stomach clenches, and she thinks desperately about how much she loves this boy, how very important he is. She thinks about the clock at the Weasleys', and how, if Harry was on it, his hand would be on "lost," and she would be trying to find him.

Hermione closes her eyes, and when she speaks, her voice is calm. "It's probably years old, anyway. Let's get to class, Harry. Oh - by the way, where were you last night? I thought that you wanted me to look over your Transfiguration essay."

"Oh, right, I'm terribly sorry about that - I decided I wanted to make a few changes before I showed it to you, so I thought that maybe you could look at it today instead?"

"Of course," she says, and something inside her is hurting terribly because he never answered her question, and she knows the answer. Hermione hugs him tightly and suddenly, and she thinks back to the sonnet again. And yet it may be said I loved him dearly. Her eyes rest on her pillow, and in the morning sun, she can see the glint of one white-gold hair on the crisp linen.

~^~

A month after she began dating Harry, he found her eating dinner with Lavender. They were giggling together about boys, because Hermione and Lavender only understand each other when they talk about boys. That particular evening, they were discussing whether any of the Slytherins were dateable. Hermione argued that they were untrustworthy on principle, and therefore undateable. Lavender giggled, turning a deep pink, and said that she'd make an exception for Timothy Nott.

When Harry walked up, Lavender shot Hermione a mischievous grin. "So, Harry, what do you think - cutest Slytherins?"

Hermione glared at her, hiding her own smile at the blush that crept up Harry's cheeks. Before she could elbow Lavender, though, he mumbled something.

"Ooooooh, what was that?" Lavender's eyes perked open.

"I just said that Malfoy usually looks nice. Not that I would - well, you know." Hermione saw him squirming and drew him away sympathetically, shooting warning eyes at Lavender.

"Oh, Harry, Lavender's just being Lavender," she soothed him as they sat down at the other end of the table. "It's just girl talk."

He nodded then, and she saw something in his eyes that she didn't recognize, and that fact alone, after six years of watching those eyes, unsettled her. "You know what I meant, right?" he asked over-earnestly. "I mean, he's a Slytherin, and he's a boy, and that would be gross, and I'm dating you, and I really like you, right Hermione?"

She nodded and put her arm around him, and they ate the rest of dinner together quietly. That night, on a scrap of parchment, Hermione wrote Harry - Malfoy - ??, tucked it into her writing journal as a bookmark, and did not forget about it.

~^~

In the evening, Hermione bathes as usual, but this night she does not charm the ink off her fingertips. Once she has braided her wet hair and pulled on her plain cotton nightgown, she turns out the lights, sits on her bed, opens her inkwell, draws the bed curtains closed, and pulls up the hem of her gown. With sure, steady fingers, Hermione writes.

That thou hast her it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved . . .

She feels the nib biting through her skin in tight, stretched lines, and part of her mind wonders whether she will have to use another scar-removing charm. The rest of her focuses on each word, mouthing it as she draws each curve and angle, dipping in for more ink before the quill begins to run empty.

The ink has been charmed to dry quickly; Hermione flips her braid back over her shoulder, straightens her nightgown, and buries herself under the covers. The cotton sheets feel prickly against her shaved legs. Hermione waits.

Tonight, she counts seconds, and she does not lose track. At 2,238, the door opens. At 2,243, his wand pokes through the bedcurtains, and they exchange the familiar litany. At 2,265, he is crouched on her bed, his wand tip poking painfully into her collarbone, and at 2,267, he sees the sonnet.

14 lines, neatly written from the base of her breasts to the elastic of her knickers. She watches his face calmly, sees it slide from confusion to understanding to anger to fear, and a delicious, cool relief pools in her stomach, sliding along the trails left by the quill: relief that he knows she knows. About Harry. About him. About them. About his father's plans.

Malfoy stares at her and if she did not loathe him, she would pity him.

Hermione does loathe him, however, so instead she pulls her wand from beneath her pillow - her real wand, not the one she leaves every night on the stand - and points it at him. She has thought about this moment all day, but until her lips move she does not know what she will say. "If you ever touch him again, ever, then on Merlin's grave I will hex you until you scream for death, and then I will wipe your memory and do it all over again." She meant to say it calmly, but she fails.

Draco holds perfectly still, then backs out of the bed and runs to the door, his feet thudding against the stone tiles.

Hermione reaches under her gown and feels the letter-scars. In the almost-darkness, she hugs herself and wishes now that she could charm him to forget everything.

~^~

Hermione knows that Shakespeare was not a Squib, any more than she loves Malfoy. She knows this because, in her hands, each of his words has power - power to watch, power to protect, power to understand - and when she feels the nib of her quill running across her skin, she feels his magic pulsing through her fingertips. She knows this because his words are a thousand times more powerful than the mundane, everyday chatter between her and Harry and Ron, and sometimes, she thinks that she has forgotten how to truly speak anything else.

No one knows about the ways she uses his words, not even Harry. Harry would not understand, because Harry is a Gryffindor, and hiding your secrets in inked letters is not a bold, courageous, Gryffindor thing to do. Once Hermione thought that she was Gryffindor and not Ravenclaw because she is "brave at heart," but nowadays she usually decides that the Sorting Hat knew the way she looked at that scruffy, uncertain boy with broken glasses on the Hogwarts Express. She saw him and he wasn't the Boy Who Lived, and he wasn't perfect, and he wasn't a hero: he was a scared orphan. Hermione had spent the summer reading stories about brave witches who saved the world, and she decided right there on that train that she was going to save Harry, even if it was from himself.

~^~

Lying on the bed that Malfoy left, Hermione holds the sonnet in one hand, crumpled. She thinks about the word "disclosure," and she wonders whether Malfoy even noticed the sonnet on the back of his note, whether it mattered at all to him. She wonders whether he will tell Harry why he's stopped their meetings, and if he does, whether Harry will hate her for it. Dimly, she feels angry at herself for letting Malfoy see.

2,721, 2,722, and Hermione realizes that she is still counting unconsciously, and she has to tell herself to stop saying each number. She thinks about each week of waking up with nightmares and an ache between her legs, telling herself that she would rather endure it than let him have Harry. She thinks about Shakespeare and all of his words. Her words.

When Hermione closes her eyes, the lines on her stomach are an indistinguishable, stinging blur. Only one word stands out by repetition, each careful letter brightly glowing: love.

She does, she repeats in her head. She does.