"Well, this is—"
"Disgusting? Vile? The absolute worst fucking way you can imagine spending a Saturday?"
Hermione bit into the inside of her cheek in an attempt to stifle a laugh. "I was going to say 'not as bad as I expected' but, by all means, continue being dramatic about it."
Sirius reeled backward, his eyebrows flying up into his hairline. "Not as bad as you expected? Hermione, what in the hell were you expecting if this comes as a pleasant surprise?!"
Hermione shrugged and moved into the master bedroom of Grimmauld place. The room had been sealed off for years—ever since Sirius let Buckbeak claim the space as his domain. And now that they were trying to sell Grimmauld to finally rid Sirius of his final ties to his terrible upbringing, it was necessary to clean the space.
They had been working over the last several months to unravel decades of magic that had seeped into the walls of the house. Through trial and error, the pair had discovered that it took a lot of skilled magic and some good old fashioned elbow grease to make the place presentable. Last week, for instance, they had spent four straight days working to remove the awful tapestry from the drawing room wall. After hours of unweaving all of the spells imbued into the very fibers of the thread, it remained in place. Stubbornly taunting Sirius with burn marks and twisting branches of family that overlapped far more than he was comfortable admitting.
Finally, after a particularly creative string of expletives left Sirius' mouth, Hermione left and returned with a thin, metal wedge and a large bottle of adhesive remover. She had helped her parents remove the wallpaper in their living room when she was child and remembered her father explaining that sometimes it just took brute force.
Hours of scraping later, the tapestry was gone and Hermione smirked, satisfied. Leave it to pureblood supremacists to never expect muggle tools to work.
They began sifting through the room. Pillows and blankets that had long since been shredded by hippogriff talons left piles of downy feathers on every surface. The walls were scuffed and badly gouged, bones of small rodents littered the floors, and the smell reminded Hermione of the chicken coop at The Burrow after a few days without a proper clean out in the hot July sun.
"We have a house elf…" Sirius mumbled, shoving something that Hermione expected was a pile of dried up excrement into a large rubbish bag.
"No," she said, pursing her lips as she stared at him. "We will not subject Kreacher to the abhorrent state of this room. He's only just got on good terms with you and I'd rather not go back to the way things were before."
"We pay him enough salary that I would not feel bad about it in the least," Sirius returned.
Hermione narrowed her eyes, "Just because we pay him does not mean—"
"That we can subject him to unfair work," Sirius finished the sentence in a mocking tone, a small smirk on his face. "Yeah, yeah. I know, kitten. I know."
Hermione bit back another smile, not wanting to let Sirius see her amusement with his obvious frustration at the situation. Instead, she turned around and began gathering the twisted scraps of heavy fabric that had once covered the windows but now lay scattered beneath it on the floor. She startled slightly when she felt Sirius' hand on her waist.
She looked over her shoulder and saw him staring at her, a slow, wicked smile spreading across his lips.
"You know," he began. "I could be convinced that this isn't so bad with the right motivation."
Hermione straightened, slowly pulling the large, rubber gloves from her hands and tossing them onto the dilapidated chest of drawers. "Is that so?"
"Mhm," Sirius nodded. "I mean, it was you who insisted that everyone works a little more passionately when they have incentive."
"Oh?" She closed the small gap of space between them and matched his mischievous smirk with one of her own. "Do you need some incentive?"
"I think it could be very beneficial to this project."
Hermione traced his jaw with her index finger, trailing it down his throat. Her palm flattened over his chest and slowly slid down over the taut muscles beneath his t-shirt, ending at the buckle of his belt. She rested there, the tips of her fingers dipping just under the waistband of his jeans.
"I think," she whispered, pushing up on to her toes to press a kiss below his ear. "I could be persuaded to figure out an incentive."
She nipped his earlobe before pulling away, dropping her hand back to her side. She smiled innocently at him. Sirius let out a small groan and inhaled slowly before opening his eyes to rake them over her face. Storm-cloud silver, bright and electric, just the way she loved them.
"Nope," Sirius said, ripping his own gloves from his hands. "Absolutely not."
"What do you mean—argh!" Hermione's question was cut off when Sirius surged forward, hoisting her up from the ground and throwing her over his shoulder. "Sirius! Put me down!"
"This room can wait," he said, bounding out the door and down the hall. "There's a perfectly clean bed two doors over."
.
.
a/n: a little birthday drabble written for TakingFlight48 and DebtofSkully. 3