Chapter Text
The benefit of living in a house with a dedicated bookworm, Harry mused, was that you got a meticulously maintained personal Library.
Well, you have a meticulously maintained Library if you had a Library to begin with. Harry imagined it would have been quite expensive to buy that many bookshelves, and not many people would be willing to fork over that much money on something that doesn’t factor into their life much unless they live or die by books, or are pompous enough to own a Library they don’t use just to show off.
The point is, during the war when the fidelius on Grimmauld was compromised, the Library was stripped of all of the important books and various other pieces containing knowledge of dark magic of all kinds, which is how Harry came back to the place after the war and found a Library that was almost completely bare. This didn’t bother him much, as he was sure that Sirius would have burned the whole thing down because of the content of some of those books if he had lived long enough to get the chance.
The problem with Harry’s outlook of “eh, I'll just leave it” was that Hermione Granger, his best friend of 7 years, had moved in with him. She had come back from restoring her parent’s memories and had nowhere to stay in Britain, so Harry, the unfailingly loyal best friend he was, offered to host her for as long as she desired. Which quickly became permanent as she came across an empty Library she could claim for her own use.
For the following 2 years, Harry watched as Hermione became a staple in his life, she was a constant presence in his life, and honestly? He wouldn’t have it any other way. He hadn’t realised it at the time, but all the time they both spent together in the tent alone after Ron abandoned them, had left them too used to each other’s company to live separately. They were too used to seeing each other in the mornings, and hugging one another before retiring to bed. They had built up a routine without meaning to and neither of them was scrambling to disrupt it.
Hermione seemed to take the bare shelves of the Library at Grimmauld as a personal insult and took to filling them up with all of the books that she had access to and owned. Harry was surprised when she could actually fill up a decent section. The Library was nowhere near full and was still leaning more towards empty, but regardless he was impressed that she owned that many books.
It quickly became her mission to kit out the Library as her own personal reservoir of knowledge and entertainment, Harry didn’t mind, he actually quite enjoyed seeing the shelves slowly fill up as it clearly made Hermione happy.
After the war, Harry was lost on what to do, he didn’t want to be an auror, he just didn’t see the appeal of turning what was basically the first 7 years of his life in the magical world into a career. He wanted to rest, and be normal, and have a normal career, but his prospects were extremely limited. Any job he had that was public would be swarmed by the press and the public looking to drown him in accolades, so anything in retail or anything high profile was out as a choice, leaving his options barren and his hope crushed.
Hermione didn’t seem to have this issue. Her goal to fill the Library ignited her spark for life again and she managed to find a job in a muggle bookstore as she had studied for, and tested into muggle qualifications over the summers so she could have her pick of jobs in that world, whereas Harry was limited to the magical world.
It was a year into Harry’s moping, and his birthday when Hermione bolted into their home and nearly crushed him with a pile of seven books.
Now, Harry is used to Hermione being a teensy bit fanatical when it comes to books, but this was a bit extreme even for her, and it was rarer still that she got him books for his birthday, as she knew that there was very little overlap between what she liked to read and what he liked to read, making it hard for her to pick out what he’d like.
He asked her to explain the gifts and she explained that alongside her crusade to fill the library she had been looking into the Evans family history, hoping to find some piece of his family that she could gift to him. She was well aware that practically every gift he had that related to his parents was from his dad’s side and he had nothing from his mother's side to remember her by.
Harry was surprised that she would go to such lengths for him and was touched by the thought that went into her actions. She went on to explain that in her research, she found out that his Grandparents on his Mother’s side of the family were alive and living in Ireland.
This revelation struck Harry in two ways. Firstly, he was overjoyed. He had family. Actual living breathing family. Petunia and her lot would never be family to him, and everyone from his father's side was dead and gone, so the thought that he had blood relations that were alive and (hopefully) not awful struck him dumb.
The second way it struck him was with the most seething rage he had ever felt in his life up until that point. Dumbledore had lied. This wasn’t a new discovery but the effects of this particular lie filled Harry with such an all-consuming rage that you could feel the magic pooling in the air. ‘Only living relative’ his arse. He put him there knowing how he would be treated. He put him there instead of with his grandparents because he knew that Petunia was on the outs with Lily and would treat any of her children with the same contempt she held for Lily.
Dumbledore knew. Worse, he didn’t just know, he did it on purpose. His entire childhood was orchestrated by the man he had looked up to for a large portion of his life.
He was lucky Hermione was there. The crushing hug she provided him with grounded him in reality and stopped his wild magic from destroying the whole house. His magic had been wild ever since he got rid of the Horcrux. A large portion of his magic had been contained to prevent it from damaging him and now that it was gone it was like he had gone his whole life only using half his body and all of a sudden was free to use it all. He was now one of the ten most powerful wizards in the world and the only reason he wasn’t first is that the other wizards on the list would take offence at being ‘dethroned’ so they were just collectively known as the 10 most powerful without any rankings within that to prevent easily bruised egos from starting wars.
With Hermione’s hands in his hair and whispering comforting words in his ears he came back to reality and slumped back into his chair. Hermione continued to explain the gifts. She had gotten in contact with his Grandparents and asked them if they would be willing to visit for Christmas and if they had anything of Lily’s they could send over for Harry’s birthday.
Harry was in luck, his Grandparents had actually been told by the conniving old bastard that he had passed away with his parents and were ecstatic to find out he had survived, they agreed to visit for Christmas and sent gifts ahead for his birthday that Hermione would give to him as a present from all three of them, which led to what the seven books in his lap actually were.
As it turns out, his Mother had kept diaries throughout her years at Hogwarts and up to her wedding, those seven books were those diaries. Hundreds of stories from when she was eleven all the way up to her wedding a few years after school.
Harry was already on the verge of tears at finally having a connection with his mother but Hermione just had to go one step further. He could always trust her to go above and beyond for him. She pulled out the last item that they had sent ahead and all of the air left his lungs. It was a small velvet box. He knew what it was before he even opened it.
Inside the box was a small intricate ring, it was gold and the metal was twisted around itself to look braided, at the top of the ring, the braids split off in a pattern reminiscent of two antlers intersecting with a small gap between the two, inside of which a moderately sized, but gorgeous emerald, was nestled. The emerald was the colour of his eyes, the colour of his Mother’s eyes.
Silently he took the ring and felt compelled to wear it, he slipped it on the ring finger of his right hand and a wet sob escaped as he saw it fit perfectly. He had always been short and skinny, thanks to his upbringing. Still, now, looking at his mother's wedding ring situated on his hand, providing him with a physical link to her memory, he found he didn’t mind it as much anymore, instead of it being a negative, it now just meant his hands were the same size as his Mother’s, yet another precious link to her that he had been starved of all these years.
He clung to Hermione that day, they rarely let each other go. He would never forget what she had done for him that day, she had been important to him before, with her role in the war and as his best friend but now he couldn’t help but think of her as a part of his life. He couldn’t see his life without her constant presence and after that day he just knew he could never let her go. He didn’t know what his feelings were exactly, but they were too strong not to have her around.
The diaries of his Mother proved to be much better than he could have ever imagined. Not just because he was finally learning who she was as a person besides what the teachers would say, ‘perfect student, a dab hand at charms, extremely pretty and loved by many’, but because he got an insight as to what she enjoyed about magic and what she liked to learn, and found they weren’t too dissimilar to his own.
For example, they both initially went into potions excited, thinking it would be a lot like cooking. Where Lily was different from Harry, though, was that she got a teacher who was worth more than the dirt they stood on. Where Lily was nurtured in where potions was different from cooking and where it was the same, Harry was berated for existing and never told where to look to correct mistakes.
As a result, his Mother excelled at potions, and he despised it. As he read about his mother’s experience with the class though, he felt more and more drawn to relearning it, and with his Mothers’ notes on how she learned where potions differed from cooking, he finally felt like he had the starting point he should have had in first year.
Over the course of that second year, Harry decided he would fix his potions knowledge. He bought the books his mother mentioned, he tried the experiments she detailed that showcased why certain ingredients react in certain ways, and why a certain number and direction of stirs affect potions. He even started to intuitively understand how to make certain potions just by knowing what effects each ingredient had. The more he learned the happier he was since, in a way, it was like his Mum was teaching him potions. Not only that, following her recounting of her education helped him improve his potions ability far better than he ever was with Snape’s textbook, which, amusingly, actually was more like a collaborative effort between Snape and his Mum. She passed on revisions that she learned to Snape and he found some of his own and noted them down in the textbook.
Eventually, he got so good that he decided that he felt like he had found something he wanted to do, he would follow this trail of passion that he found and start his own owl-order potion business. He could make potions and sell them under a company name, which would give him anonymity. He even contacted Fred and George (Fred thankfully was just in a coma due to injuries and woke up a few months later) and set up a contract where he took over the brewing for some of the prank products in exchange for his stock in the company, he was now their sole potions provider and no longer a silent partner in the business. They were hesitant at first and wanted to keep him on as a partner but after a few provided potion examples turned out better than their previous provider they jumped at the chance to improve their products.
All of that in a whirlwind of two years and life had settled down. Hermione had slowed somewhat in her quest to fill the Library as she was very close to succeeding and wanted the last hundred or so books to be ‘worthy’, whatever she meant by that and Harry continued his potions supply contract and owl-order business, both doing well.
The only downside to this arrangement was that Harry had an abundance of free time as most of the potions he was brewing had very long brew times and not enough actual active potioneering going on, so his job was to basically just let a small room full of cauldrons simmer for hours on end.
This left him with two options for spending his time. He could either try to invent new potions or he could read.
Given the fact that the leading cause of death in the potions business is labelled as ‘an experiment gone wrong’ Harry chose to read his days away. Which was lucky, considering his much-adored best friend had spent the better part of a year trying her hardest to fill the Library in his house.
Harry had assumed the Library would be kitted out in all sorts of textbooks and studies, educational, philosophical, and scientific, with tomes about all forms of esoteric magic, knowing Hermione. That was all there of course, but Harry was surprised to find that that was only one section of his new Library. He had expected her to use it as her own personal book storage but it seemed like she was determined to make it an actual functional Library, it even had a fiction section, much to Harry’s delight.
For most of the day, on any given day, Harry could be found in the Library, resulting in much teasing from Hermione. Many times he had heard her remark that if only she knew to tempt him with The Chronicles of Narnia to get him into the Library back in school, then she might have been able to strong-arm him into a decent education sooner. Harry didn’t mind the ribbing, it made Hermione happy, so he was happy.
It was bound to happen eventually, but Harry got bored of regular fantasy or sci-fi books. He had caught up on all the young adult novels he had missed out on and felt like he could do with something that had some substance, some realistic romance would be nice.
He knew that his friends would take the piss out of him if he was caught dead reading romance novels but eventually, you just run out of things to read that are in your regular bubble.
It only took him a month of reading romance to discover erotica books. Now, he had never even considered that you could have sex scenes in books but once the discovery was made it quickly became a guilty pleasure and he devoured all of the erotica books that were contained in the Library. He would also admit that he would blush sometimes when he remembered all of these naughty stories had been personally curated by Hermione. Did she get the same thrill reading them as he did?
It didn’t matter, because soon he was dejected to find no more erotica in his Library. He had run through it all in the course of reading day-in-day-out.
That was, until he came across a section he’d never seen before, it was one of the last empty bookshelves left in the Library but there was something curious about it. There was a haze over one of the shelves, like a distortion in reality and it clicked for him what it was, a disillusionment charm on the contents of the shelf.
Why would Hermione hide books? Harry would have left it well enough alone and not tried to invade her privacy but honestly, if she didn’t want them found they wouldn’t be in the library they both used, she would have kept them in her room in her extended bag where she knew he’d never venture without explicit permission.
He dispelled the disillusionment charm on the shelf and a row of neatly organised notebooks made themselves known. Tentatively, he reached out and picked up the first one, all the way on the left and opened it.
It was written by Hermione alright. He’d recognise her handwriting anywhere, he spent enough time staring at her essays for help it’s impossible he wouldn’t. He perused the book trying to figure out why they were hidden. For all appearances, it seemed like Hermione was trying her hand at writing novels in her spare time. Harry didn’t know why she’d want to hide that. The final clue it was indeed her writing was the pen name that was written in each of the journals. Jane Doe.
It was an in-joke between them that if Hermione ever wanted anything published by the bigoted ministry she’d need to use a false name, Harry had a burst of inspiration and made a play on her middle name, using the moniker used for unknown individuals or people who wished their identity remain private, it seemed she had taken that to heart and made it her pen name for her writing. That still didn’t answer why she wanted to hide her writing, though.
The answer was actually pretty simple and came within the next few pages. He couldn’t believe his eyes and was putting up a valiant effort not to simply burst into laughter.
Hermione wasn’t just writing any old story.
She was writing erotica.
Not only that. It was awful . Well, Harry mused, awful was a bit of a strong word. The prose was simply beautiful, Hermione really had a way with words, describing settings and characters with an ease and grace that would have your regular authors green with envy. No, the issue wasn’t with her writing, the issue was the sex scenes.
Harry was well aware the both of them were virgins, they never really had time for romance with the war and Voldemort lurking, and whatever budding feelings Hermione might have had for Ron crashed and burned in 4th year when they discovered Charlie had warned Ron about the dragons and he had said nothing. So the both of them were thoroughly inexperienced, but that didn’t explain why the sex scenes she wrote were so bad
She had been the one to curate the erotica that Harry had been indulging and all of those had been masterfully written to cultivate desire and arousal in the reader and could be delightfully teasing, or downright shameless depending on the tone of the scene and their word choice reflected this.
Hermione’s work, however, sounded like it was written by a sheltered thirteen-year-old who was embarrassed by vulgar language, with how she seemingly refused to use anything but vague euphemisms to refer to genitals.
His grin kept getting wider and wider the more he read. She was never going to live this down, he decided, this was just too funny to leave alone.
His reverie was broken by a gasp to his right, looking over he was met with none other than the subject of his musing, his best friend Hermione.
She was turning a considerable shade of red with her eyes darting back and forth from the book in his hands to his smirk and he could physically feel her desire to sink into the floor and be taken by the void rolling off her in waves.
“So… ‘Jane Doe’ is it?” He asked, humour lacing his tone
The only response he got was for Hermione to let out a pained groan as she looked to the ceiling as if asking for some kind of divine intervention
“Listen,” Harry began, “I’m not judging you, I’m just having a bit of fun at the fact that you’re actually writing erotica, and I’m fully content to just leave you to things, however, we need to have a talk.”
“A talk!?” Hermione repeat incredulously
“More like an intervention, really. You see, I think you genuinely have an insane amount of talent for writing, but the one issue here is your word choice.” He stated
“What’s wrong with my word choice?” Hermione demanded
“Really, Hermione? You have to ask? ‘He took out his mighty sausage…’ ‘She caressed the folds of her orchid coquettishly’ Hermione, this is sex, not dinner with a side of gardening, for the love of Merlin, please use sexier language.” Harry replied, trying his best not to dissolve into laughter as he quoted directly from her book.
“Oh, and I suppose you’d be a connoisseur of sexy language wouldn’t you?” Hermione bit back
He could tell he might have touched a nerve with his teasing, but still, it was funny so he wasn’t too worried. He could either try to do something to pull her out of whatever defensive tizzy she’d gotten herself worked up in, or he could just wait it out.
It was when he was debating between the two of his options that a wicked idea formed in his brain. An idea he wouldn’t be caught dead trying with any other woman but her. Normally, he was pretty shy due to being pretty heavily sheltered firstly by the Dursleys scaring off any friends, and then by his fame building a barrier between him and genuine connection.
But she was different. She knew him and he trusted her with his life. He was confident around her. That confidence was the foundation behind this particular insane idea
“Not quite… but you forget that I spend most of my time reading in here… it just so happens I was reading your delightful hand-picked erotica collection. Now… I may be inexperienced but I do know what I like as a reader. So tell me, Hermione, what sounds sexier to you?” He asked her as he let out a breath and assumed his character
Walking up to her and getting close and personal he started to talk.
“Oh, Hermione, you have no idea how much I've dreamt of you. I’ve been kept up at night with thoughts of that derriere of yours and what it might feel like to slide my man-meat into your delicate and saturated love tunnel” he breathed out, his tone desire incarnate and in stark contrast to the words he was using.
He took great delight in the physical cringe that washed over Hermione’s face, she knew it was her own words thrown back in her face and she was coming to terms with just how much of a turn-off they were.
“No? Then perhaps a change of vocabulary is in order, hmmm?” He grinned
From the look on Hermione’s face, he could tell she was bracing for whatever he was going to come out with next and he was determined to crack her calm facade once more. For the first time in his life, Harry Potter was attempting to arouse Hermione Granger.
“Oh, Hermione,” he moaned, desperately trying to contain his smirk when he saw her cheeks redden and her breath quicken. “Fuck, you have no clue what you do to me, what your body does to me. So many nights I’ve been kept up with thoughts of you. That pert arse I'd love to lose myself in, those cute tits that make me hate the robes you wear because they hide them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pictured what it would be like to see you touch yourself, stroking your fingers over your wet cunt for me, moaning my name and begging for my hard cock.” He finished his monologue, hoping that his tone was suitably exaggerated to communicate that he wasn’t revealing any actual fantasies of his (he very much was)
He locked eyes with Hermione and a whimper escaped her mouth, he allowed himself a victorious smile and she gave a bashful smile in return, conceding his point
“Fine. I see your point. I can’t just completely change the way I write sex, though. I’ve written so much already that it’s a habit at this point. Do I just give up on erotica then?” She asked worriedly, leading Harry to question just how attached to this particular hobby she was.
Harry considered the question for a moment, he definitely didn’t want her to give up on something she so clearly loved doing, just because she developed a bad habit, nor did he want to discourage her by giving her any work that would distract her from the aspects she actually enjoyed about it. He went over what he knew about the erotica he had read and tried to see if he could pick up a solution and suddenly it came to him. The perfect solution, a solution that may just be fun for them both in the end.
“I’ll be your editor.” He said simply.
“What?” She shot back
“It’s simple, we can slowly go over what you’ve written and I’ll correct the word choice to be a bit more… spicy, shall we say. There’s no issue with the scenes themselves it’s just your sexual descriptors lack the tone you want. So, I correct them and get to read your works, and you get to learn alternatives for the words you use and can use that list when writing new works. This way, you don’t have to do more work in correcting your works and I get to read them, it’s a win-win!” He said excitedly
He could see the cogs turning in her head as she looked over his proposition, if he was honest he hoped she didn’t put that much thought into it and just accepted. He desperately needed an excuse to hang out with her more and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. The fact that he got to read erotica written by his best friend was just a cherry on top, because there was no way a situation like that wasn’t going to be absolutely hilarious.
It took surprisingly long for Hermione to come up with her answer and Harry was getting more anxious by the second. He was on the verge of just telling her that it was just a badly timed or badly worded joke when she gave her answer.
“Sure. I trust you. What’s the worst that could happen?”