"Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do, here comes the sun," Hermione sang under her breath, rocking her hips in time to the beat in her head as she shifted around the kitchen, scooping a fried egg from the pan and plating it to her left with a flourish. "And I say, it's all right." She hummed the guitar chorus under her breath, buttering a stack of toast and slicing it diagonally.
Lifting the spatula to her lips like a microphone, she swayed and sang, "Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting. Little darl—ah!" She jumped, dropping the spatula and placing her hands over her heart, trying to calm the rush of adrenaline pumping through her veins.
Sirius stood near the entrance to the kitchen, watching her with a smile, his eyes crinkled at the corners. He was still wearing his pyjamas and looked more delicious than breakfast.
"Oh my god, how long have you been standing there?" Her hands moved from over her heart to cover her face. After a few seconds, her fingers split and she peered through the gap at him in horror.
His smile widened and her stomach somersaulted at the sight. "I'd say just around here." He mimicked her earlier motions, wiggling his hips and singing, "Here comes the sun."
Dropping her hands to her sides, she tilted her head back with a groan, feeling her cheeks flush. "God, you have light footsteps."
"Sorry I startled you, Starling. I was just enjoying the show," he teased, his eyes lingering on her pinkened cheeks. Crossing the kitchen, he picked up the fallen spatula and set it in the sink.
It was just after sunrise and she was up earlier than normal, hoping to surprise him with breakfast in bed. When Sirius turned to face her, his eyes drifted lower, taking in her appearance, and she felt her face flushing. She was wearing an old Gryffindor Quidditch jersey that Harry had gifted her a few years back. After her second growth spurt, the hem barely covered her upper thighs, and it seemed Sirius had taken notice.
Trying to redirect his attention, Hermione cleared her throat and said, "I had been hoping to surprise you." She felt her shoulders sag and her lower lip protrude slightly in disappointment.
"Consider me thoroughly surprised," he replied, picking up the plates from the countertop and setting them on the table on the placemats. "As one of the nation's leading experts in horrible ways to wake up, you serenading the food doesn't even make the list, I promise you."
He pulled out her seat and she gave him a grateful smile, settling into her chair and dropping a serviette in her lap. Maneuvering around the kitchen, he collected utensils and a container of pumpkin juice with two glasses, setting the table.
"What are your plans for the day?" she asked, pouring them each a glass of juice and handing one to him as he joined her at the table.
"Thought I'd start a band," he replied before ripping off a piece of his toast and popping it into his mouth. "Do you by chance know how to play the didgeridoo?"
She speared a bite of egg onto the tip of her fork and shook her head. "I could never get the circular breathing quite right."
"Pity, we are short a didgeridoo player."
"We?"
He wiggled his brows in response, taking a long pull from his glass. "And what are our plans for tonight after you come home from work?"
Our plans. The mere concept made her smile. "Well, I'm going to the bookstore in Diagon Alley if you're interested in joining me. Robin Smith just released her latest in my favourite series, Curse-Breakers, and I'm too impatient to wait for the owls to deliver the copies this weekend."
"I think that sounds like a riveting way to spend the night."
"Yeah, okay," she snorted in disbelief, picking up the nearby shaker and adding a dash of salt to her eggs.
He tousled her hair, agitating her curls and causing her nose to scrunch. She dropped her fork and swatted at his hands, making him chuckle. "You're snarky in the morning. My alternative is babysitting Teddy. I'm not opposed, but I think Tonks is still cross with me for instigating the food fight last time."
"She said you got spaghetti stuck in their ceiling fan."
He shrugged indifferently. "War always has casualties."
"I hope you know we barely avoided an international incident with your little act of war and it was a nightmare for the diplomats to clean up. Italy does not take kindly to disrespect to spaghetti." She dipped the corner of her toast into the runny center of her egg before taking a bite.
"Well, then you should be aware that the real act of war against the Italians began long before I challenged Teddy into a contest to see who could throw a noodle the farthest. Moony didn't even use real pasta, it was zucchini!" He shuddered at the memory, as if reliving the horror of vegetable noodles.
Her eyes lifted to the ceiling in mock horror. "However did you survive?"
A smug grin slid across his lips. "When the fan is in motion, it flings the noodle farther. If you're curious, I won."
"Against a three year old."
"He has a very strong arm. It took ingenuity and solid timing to win."
"Speaking of, I hope you're proud of yourself. It took me nearly ten minutes to find the toaster this morning. Even Accio Toaster didn't work because of the duct tape."
"I am proud."
Hermione strolled through the aisles of the quaint bookstore, her fingers grazing along the spines as she scanned the titles. Every few steps she paused, retrieving a book from its spot on the shelf and flipping through the pages. A stack floated behind her, including the fifth book in the Curse-Breakers series.
This was her favourite shop in all of Diagon Alley and she tried to visit at least once a month. The storeowner knew her by name and often set aside new arrivals for her in anticipation of her trips. In the corner of the shop, there was a set of plush chairs in a nook where she had enjoyed many hours of reading.
Sirius navigated through the aisles with her, occasionally straying to look at a display or book on his own. He had added two books to her floating stack when her back was turned, as if she wouldn't notice the height increase.
Even though they had been in the shop for over an hour, he had not complained once. If anything, he seemed to like watching her as she chewed her lower lip and skimmed through the texts. He was a more considerate shopping companion than Harry or Ginny who tended to whine every few minutes rather than let her peruse in peace.
Through a gap in the bookcase, she caught a glimpse of sandy-blond hair. It was styled to the side in a familiar way that brought back a flood of memories, and her breath caught in her throat.
Securing the book back into the gap on the shelf, she reflexively dove behind the nearest display, crouching down and hoping it covered her telltale curls. Her pulse went wild under her skin as she heard his footsteps grow closer. It had been nearly a year since she last saw him.
Flashes of painful memories ran through her mind in sequence—straight blonde hair, an arched back, and the sound of skin on skin.
The bedcovers Hermione had purchased for their bed, skewed about under their sweating, tangled bodies.
Shouted expletives, burning tears, the look in his eyes as he begged her to stay. "She meant nothing!"
The frantic apology from the other witch—"I'm so sorry, I had no idea! He said he was single."
Hermione swallowed.
"Not that I mind some mischief, but what are you doing?" Sirius mused quietly, leaning against the display with his arms crossed over his chest and watching her with a glint of affection in his eyes.
Her eyes widened as she waved her hand in a frantic motion and hissed, "Get down! He'll see—"
"Hermione?"
Her eyes clenched shut at the sound of his voice. She silently counted to three in her head, releasing a slow breath before opening them. Pulling a thick book from the bottom shelf, she stood and held it in her hands, as if she had been down there for a purpose.
As if she hadn't been hiding.
She had no idea what book she was about to purchase, let alone what section she was in.
"Cormac!" Her voice strained and raised in a cheery manner that she hoped sounded carefree and not at all mortified. She saw Sirius tense, his eyes tightening as they flew from Cormac back to her.
When Cormac stepped closer to embrace her—as if their shared past wasn't murkier than the Black Lake—she instinctively stepped away before he could touch her.
His lips turned down, eyes scanning her critically from head to toe and pausing on her plain flats. He had always asked her to wear heels. 'All the other witches at work wear heels,' he had told her. 'Why don't you ever try for me?', he would ask. Insecurity flooded her veins and she found herself tugging at her periwinkle blouse with white polka-dots, wishing she had dressed up more for the outing.
When she had imagined the first time she saw him after the breakup, part of her always hoped that her outfit would leave him salivating in her wake, dripping with regret.
"How...How are you?" she asked, her voice lilting higher than usual while her fingers tightened on the book, knuckles turning white under the force of her grip.
Sirius' head tilted slightly to the side as he observed them in turn, dissecting each non-verbal clue their body language revealed.
"Great, just received a promotion at work. We won the Lanington case last month." Cormac's mouth curled into a half smile, half sneer. He straightened the knot on his tie, still dressed in a full suit from the office.
"That's...lovely," she struggled to get the words out, trying desperately to sound casual. "I know how hard you worked on it over the past few years."
With his nose turned upwards, Cormac's eyes flicked to Sirius and back to Hermione. "Well, it was only a matter of time. You know me, I always get what I want. Always."
From the corner of her eye, she saw Sirius shift so he was slightly in front of her. An alarm sounded in her mind. The look on Sirius' face as he glared at Cormac told her that no matter the small talk, he was not going to have a cordial conversation with her ex-boyfriend.
Hermione cleared her throat and looped her arm around Sirius', resting her hand on his bicep. "Right. Well, we'd best be going. The hair regrowth potion guides are covered in the section to your right under health. I do recall how concerned you were with your rapid balding—"
"What the fuck is wrong with you? It's thinning, not balding," Cormac hissed, his eyes darting around to see if they were overheard.
She felt Sirius' bicep tense and noticed his hand was clenched into a fist.
A growl rumbled low in Sirius' chest and Hermione began tugging on his arm, attempting to guide him to the register so they could pay and leave.
He didn't budge.
Cormac gestured at Sirius with a dismissive flick of his wrist. "And this is supposed to be the rebound, I presume?"
Her spine straightened and she released Sirius' arm as a strangled sound, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, bubbled up from her throat. "The rebound? It's pathetic you thought that farce of a relationship was significant enough to call for a rebound."
His eyes burned into her with a harshness she had once thought him incapable of and he jerked his chin towards Sirius. "Is he deaf or something? It would make sense. I don't know how else he'd stand listening to your shrill little voice without wanting to Avada himself."
"Gods! I don't know what I ever saw in you, you arrogant arsehole! You'd be lucky to be half the man Sirius is! He's the best man I know, he's good, and he's kind, and he's unfallably loyal—something you know nothing about!" She shoved the book haphazardly on the shelf, knocking several over in the process. Clenching her hands into fists, she felt her nails digging crescent shapes into her palms. "If anything I don't deserve him, so you can fuck off back to your little hovel of slags and pray you don't forget to use a venereal disease prevention spell—though it'd be better for humanity if your cock fell off now before you had the chance to procreate."
The longer she spoke, the redder Cormac's face became until a single vein in his temple protruded, anger flowing off of him in waves. "You think you're so mighty but you'll come crawling back, and when you do I might just take pity on you. Perhaps I'll invest in a muzzle, it'd be fitting for a bitch—"
Sirius made a noise that Hermione did not recognise. In one fluid movement, he stepped in front of her, raised his fist, and slammed it against Cormac's face with a horrifying crack. Blood gushed from Cormac's nose as he collapsed backwards into a bookcase before landing on the hardwood floor.
"Mother fucking shitbag twathead fuckface wanker!" Sirius snarled in a single breath, his chest heaving as he shook his hand back and forth in the air, trying to lessen the sting from the punch.
A pitiful whimper came from the bloodied wizard on the floor, now curled up in a fetal position with his hands covering his head in a protective stance.
The books, which had been floating with Hermione, fell to the floor. She dragged Sirius out of the shop before her mind even registered the groaning mess of blood and tears on the floor that was her ex-boyfriend.
"Oh my god, Sirius." Hermione picked up her pace as they hurried down the alleyway. He inspected his knuckles while they walked, using the bottom of his shirt to wipe Cormac's blood away. "I can't believe you hit him."
Sirius was still fuming. He massaged his bruised knuckles and his face contorted in something she could not place; he looked almost ill. "I can't believe you dated that cuntpuddle fuckwit."
Despite herself she gave a faint smile. "Are you quite done?"
"Cumwipe, tosspot, cuntflaps." He exhaled deeply, as if the release of words were therapeutic. "I'm done." A beat passed before he added, "No, wait, fucktrumpet. Now I'm done."
Her heart skipped as she processed what had just occurred.
He was protective of her.
The thought made her toes curl and her stomach flip.
"Are you okay?" Sirius stopped mid-step and pulled her to the side of the alleyway, allowing others to pass by while they talked. His tone was filled with concern, his eyes searching her up and down as if making sure she wasn't harmed.
"You could get in so much trouble." She leaned against the brick wall next to them, her legs suddenly feeling unsteady.
As the adrenaline wore off, her hands began to tremble. Her mind began to race at all of the ways Cormac could use the assault to get revenge and to hurt Sirius. The world felt short on oxygen and she pulled a ragged inhale of air into her lungs, bending over at the waist as she gasped for more.
Sirius said something low and comforting, but she couldn't hear it over the static noise in her ears. He helped her stand up and wrapped an arm around her waist to balance her. Leaning into the touch, she looped her arms around his shoulders and nuzzled into his neck. The scent that clung to his clothes grounded her and her heart rate began to slow when she focused on the sensation of his fingertips dragging slowly through her hair.
"Are you okay?" He leaned back, raising his hands to cup her cheeks.
The worry in his eyes made tears blur her vision.
"Fuck." He pulled her back against his chest and she felt so safe in his embrace. "I knew two seconds into that interaction that I was not leaving the conversation without drawing blood."
"Sirius, what if he—"
"Don't worry about me, not for a second, okay? If he comes back to fight, then I can take him, and if he tries anything else, then I can afford the lawyers. Love, you are worth more than every Knut and Galleon in my entire bloody vault."
Before she could talk herself out of it, she brushed her lips against his cheek, the trimmed hair of his beard prickling against her lips.
She felt him exhale when she tucked back into him, fingers curling around the soft fabric of his shirt.
"Thank you," her voice muffled into his shoulder. "Cormac's a real wanker."
Sirius let out a sound of incredulity. "That's an understatement."
Hermione told herself to pull away.
The seconds beat in her head with her heartbeat.
She swallowed, wondering how long she could get away with maintaining the embrace.
A bolt of electricity danced through her veins as she noticed that he was still holding on to her too. Hermione was pushing her luck—she'd never held Harry or Ron like this, or for this long. She leaned back, briefly noting how his hands tightened their hold before releasing.
He turned and guided her down the street, hand ghosting her lower back. Once they were halfway down the street, Hermione realised he had called her love. He had never done that before.
Her eyes drifted to the ice cream parlour in front of them. Sirius followed her gaze and grinned, taking her hand in his and pulling her across the cobblestone alleyway.
"I thought you wanted to shop," she argued, but didn't object when he opened the door for her.
"I am shopping. I'm dangerously low on my ice cream supply."
Five tasting spoons and two scoops of ice cream later, they were sitting on a bench just outside the shop, enjoying their frozen treats.
"I can't believe you got vanilla." Hermione took a lick of her rocky road, savouring the taste of chocolate as it melted on her tongue. "That's the most basic of all ice cream flavours."
"Excuse you, this is a classic. You're just trying to divert the conversation to my fantastic taste in ice cream so you can avoid talking about your terrible taste in wizards."
"I hope you know that I didn't let him off easy."
She caught Sirius staring at her lips as her tongue darted across to catch the melting ice cream. "What did you do? Hide his favourite books before leaving?"
"Nope. I work more subtly than that."
"Yes. Subtle. With a fleet of trained attack birds, for example," he offered with a teasing smile. "Nothing says subtle like the Queen of Hippogriffs, savior of Hippogriff kind."
"Exceptions," she waved it off, biting into the edge of her sugar cone with a crunch. "Through no intervention of mine, he was suspiciously impotent for six months after we broke up."
Sirius halted with his cone halfway up to his lips and winced, shifting his legs together. "Shit. Remind me never to get on your bad side."
"He's decently bright, so I'm sure he made the correlation. I just knew he'd be too proud to admit having the problem in the first place, and therefore couldn't accuse me of causing it." She shrugged, twisting the cone as she licked the base of the scoop before it melted onto her hands. "It was the least I could do after he left me practically homeless."
"I can't believe Remus and James didn't tell me that twatwaffle was the reason you were out of a flat." His face hardened in the same way it had earlier. She reached down to squeeze his hand gently before releasing it, watching how his expression shifted just from her touch.
"They didn't know. I was nervous to tell them that I was moving in with a wizard after only a couple months of casual dates because I thought they'd say I was moving too quickly—which I was—and then a week after I moved in, I found Cormac in bed with a witch from his work. I signed a lease for the first flat I could find which ended up being awful, and I left as soon as the year was up." She looked down at the ground, kicking a nearby rock with the toe of her shoe. "They knew I had been seeing someone but I told them it didn't work out between us. It wasn't a complete secret; Harry and Ginny knew what happened."
"What? Why didn't you tell James and Remus? I thought you told them everything."
She gave him a pointed look. "You think I tell my overprotective adoptive magical fathers about my love life? You broke Cormac's nose and maybe his jaw too."
"Arsehole deserved it."
Hermione worried her lip between her teeth, fighting back a smile as they stood up to leave. "He really did. Also, cuntflaps? Fucktrumpet?"
He coughed back a laugh, guiding her with his hand on the small of her back as they turned a corner back towards the public fireplaces. "Yeah, I uh, got a little carried away back there. I honestly think I blacked out for a moment."
"If you ever bring this up, I'll deny it, but it was really satisfying to see you smash his smug face in."
There was a renewed skip in his step as he beamed. "It was, wasn't it?"