[A/N: Thank you to Feelslikeivy and TallulahEuphemia for beta-reading this chapter! This will be the last one I post for awhile. I've only completed somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of this story, and I like to have things closer to complete before I start posting them. If you enjoy it, please give it a follow.]

Chapter 2: Unexpectedly Charming

"Let me get this straight," Sue said as they settled into their bus bench and Harry finished casting the Muffling and Notice-Me-Not Charms on them. "Instead of just taking the books and Confundusing the clerk once you determined she wasn't a threat, you invited her to lunch?"

"Exactly," Harry said. "First, of course I paid for the books! You don't want the poor girl to lose her job, do you?"

"Yes, kind of," Sue said. "She's clearly too dangerous to have any sort of book budget. Also, it's not like you'll get reimbursed for more than a quarter of that, and the damn reimbursement forms usually take three months to process."

He shrugged. "I'll eat the cost, then. I've got more money than I know what to do with now, so I might as well spend some to ensure she doesn't lose her job. Second, you're thinking about this the wrong way. How long did it take those OSP berks to hunt down copies of those books? Months?"

"Probably." Sue snorted. "That office isn't known for fast work and they're mostly elderly Purebloods, so watching them try to navigate muggle book catalogues or Morgana-forbid databases is downright painful."

"I figured as much," Harry said. "Stop thinking of her as a suspect and start thinking of her as an informant. She's a genius and clearly uncommonly good at hunting down the exact kind of books we want to find. Think of how many books we can get out of circulation with her doing all of the work for us."

Sue furrowed her brows. "That's…not a terrible idea, Harry. The boss won't give you much time for it, but if you can turn up more books on your own in the next few months than the entire Office dedicated to the project, it'll be a feather in his cap and probably help him suck away a bit of their funding in the next fiscal year."

Harry shot her a grin. "I don't have 'terrible' ideas."

"One word for you: Norbert."

He sighed. "We probably could have handled that better, true."

"You saying that is the equivalent of Merlin saying, 'I probably could have had better taste in women,' you know." Sue's grin was so loudly smug that Harry briefly worried it would overwhelm the muffling charm.

"You wound me," Harry said, placing a hand over his heart.

"Oh, you'll notice if I wound you," Susan said. "Anyway, what's this sauce you found that you're going to convince Dawlish to try?"

A grin crept across Harry's face. "It's called 'sriracha.' This time, have a camera ready."

Harry knew Sue would catch on eventually, but he was surprised he made it all the way to his fourth lunch with Hermione before Sue finally cornered him about it.

"You heard me." She plopped onto his desk and folded her arms. "You've been coming back here every Friday with a bigger smile on your face each time. Books aren't all you want out of that woman at the book stall, are they?"

"We're just friends," Harry said, hoping against hope that he wasn't blushing. "She's fun to talk to and she even makes me want to learn more. I've never had this much fun reading academic books."

"You? Read? You've got it bad, Harry. If it weren't for the fact that she sounds like the most 'muggle' possible muggle, I'd be warning you about this."

"She's definitely a muggle," Harry said. "She didn't react at all when I tried to trip her up that first time we met, and at our first lunch I tried to trip her up a few more times and she didn't take the bait. Honestly, though, she's so brilliant that it's a shame she wasn't at Hogwarts with us. She'd have been amazing in class."

Sue smirked. "Can you imagine Snape having to deal with a muggleborn witch who could actually answer all of his inane, impossible questions?"

"He would have had to ignore her." Harry chuckled at the thought. "His whole self-image was built on being smarter than his students. She'd have driven him 'round the twist."

"I would have paid money to watch that," Sue said. "In any case, though, I'm glad she's both brilliant and definitely a muggle. Now I can just tease you mercilessly about her…in private," she added hastily. "Don't get me wrong, I'm in awe that you've managed to convince Shack to pay you to go on dates with a woman and have scored three more muggle-prohibited volumes in the process. I would be a terrible friend if I screwed that up for you…but I'd also be a terrible friend if I didn't tease you about it."

Harry laughed. "Fair enough."

Their weekly lunch date (though neither of them dared speak of it as such to the other) was a firm part of Harry's life by the seventh week, and he couldn't quite keep the smile off of his face as he walked into her stall. It fell away as soon as he saw her face, though. She sat there staring at the wall, her lips resting in a frown more sad than angry.

"Hey," he said gently. "Are you alright?"

Hermione shook her head, as if clearing out cobwebs. "I'm fine. Sorry, you caught me spacing out."

"What's wrong?" Harry knew he wasn't great at sussing out emotions, but she might as well have been carrying an "I'm depressed" sign right then.

"It's stupid," she said.

"Oh, good," he replied.

She glared at him. "Good?"

"Exactly." Harry grinned into her glare. "Every week I come here and you're indefatigably brilliant. It would be lovely to see you be stupid every now and then to remind me that you're not that 'Sophia' goddess some of those philosophers mentioned."

"You're familiar with the Gnostics?" she asked excitedly, all traces of a frown gone.

"Just a bit," Harry said airily. Inwardly, he was both preening and making a mental note to make a "thank you" donation to the Finsbury Library for having such a good primer on muggle philosophical traditions. "Anyway, what's troubling you?"

Hermione looked down at her feet. "Well…I was just thinking that I wished we were meeting up on Sunday instead of today."

"Why?" Harry asked. "I'd be happy to switch if you can't make it today."

"No, no, I'm free today, it's just that it would be nice to have something to do on my birthday for once." She blushed. "I told you it was stupid. And pathetic. Sorry, I forgot to warn you it was pathetic, too."

Harry frowned. "What? Don't you have mates to take you out for drinks?"

"Not really." She sighed. "I skipped a couple of grades in school and completed Uni in three years. I was a lot younger than a lot of my classmates and we never really got on. Now that you mention it, I don't think anyone's ever taken me out for drinks. Sometimes I get invited to events where my entire grad class is going out somewhere, but they sort of have to invite me to those. Nobody's ever actually said, "Hey, Hermione, would–"

"You like to get some drinks this Sunday?" Harry shot her a grin.

She blushed. "You don't have to invite me just because you feel sorry for me."

"Hermione, I like spending time with you," Harry leaned forward and rested his palms on the counter in front of her, "and it's not a chore to spend some more. Let me take you out for a few drinks to celebrate your birthday."

"Are you sure it's not a bother?" Hermione asked.

"I'm positive," Harry said. "Now let's get some food and you can tell me what kind of drinks you like. I'll find you something fun that you haven't tried yet."

"That sounds lovely. Thank you, Harry," she said, and the genuine warmth and happiness in her voice banished any qualms he might have had about losing his only free evening that week.

Harry pulled out his backup wand (ten and a quarter inches, vine with dragon heartstring core, swishy) and rubbed a spot on the wood thoughtfully. Aurors often took as a backup wand the first wand they ever disarmed from a criminal, and Harry had done likewise. He'd never trust this wand, not like his own holly wand, but it worked well for him now and was good in a pinch. Its former owner would never wield it again, at least not with the hand he'd used to curse Osbeorn Savage. Harry wasn't proud of what he'd done, but both he and Oz had gone home that night and that mattered more than a drop of Gibbon's blood on his former wand.

He cast the muggle Notice-Me-Not charm over his holly wand first, then did the same over his backup. Once that was done, he slipped the holly wand into the disillusioned wrist holster in which he kept it and the backup into a similarly concealed holster that sat on his left thigh. He didn't anticipate any trouble that evening, but Moody's mantra had saved his arse during the Third Task of that bloody tournament and he'd kept up his vigilance ever since.

Now that he was properly equipped for any sort of mild to moderate trouble (serious trouble called for dragonhide armour and, ideally, lots of backup), Harry threw on a black sportcoat and started downstairs. Then he stopped, turned around, and went back upstairs to grab the correct black sportcoat the salesman had told him to wear with this particular Armani grey slacks/white shirt outfit. He had no fashion sense of his own, but he'd discovered that if you gave a salesperson a large enough order, they would make notes for you about what went with what. It worked out well for everyone, and since he'd purchased his eight-hundred thousand pound townhouse outright with the Quidditch bonuses he'd saved, he didn't have a whole lot else to spend his money on besides carry-out food, anway.

Camden Market was conveniently not far from his home in the Angel neighbourhood, and Harry spent almost as long walking to the Tube stop as he did on the Tube to his destination. Hermione was just closing up shop for the evening when Harry threaded his way through the few remaining shoppers that late on a Sunday and knocked politely on the side of her stall.

Hermione looked to see who it was, gave him one of her usual close-mouthed smiles (she'd explained a couple of lunches prior that she'd always been self-conscious about her large front teeth, though Harry couldn't see why), and blushed prettily.

"Oh, Harry," she said, and something about the way she said his name made his heart beat a little faster, "I didn't know you were going to dress up. I'm just wearing my usual work outfit." As usual, Harry thought she was underselling herself a bit. She was wearing a well-fitted black pencil skirt, white blouse, and a crimson wool pea coat to ward off the September chill. Something about the coat seemed a little large on her, as if she'd purchased it second-hand and it didn't quite fit, but she was so small-framed to start with that any coat would be liable to swallow her up.

He shrugged. "This is just how I dress. You look fine just the way you are, you know. More than fine, really. You look great. Not that you don't always look great." As soon as he finished that last stupid sentence, he clamped his jaw shut and decided to shut up until he could avoid making a fool of himself.

"Now you're just exaggerating." She stuffed her notebook into her purse, stepped out of the stall, and pulled down the garage-like door to seal it up for the night. "After dealing with some of the customers today, though, I'll take any compliments I can get."

"I'm sorry you had to work on your birthday," Harry said.

"There's nothing for it," Hermione replied. "With thirty hours a week here and a small stipend from my grad program, I can just barely scrape by with a studio apartment forty minutes away. I could save some money if I went in on a larger place with some roommates, but I can't focus with other people around and I'm not the best roommate."

"Do you throw too many loud parties?"

She stuck her tongue out at him. "Very funny. No, I think it's more that I have trouble with other people being loud or not following rules. Fundamentally, I'm just no fun."

"I was pretty 'fun' in high school," Harry said as he offered her his arm, "but these days I've discovered how nice quiet is. I'm glad I have my own place, too. So, would you like to know where we're going?"

Hermione took his arm and thought for a moment before answering. "Yes, so no."

"Um…I'm sorry?" Harry hadn't been hit so hard with the verbal equivalent of a Confundus Charm since Luna had left on her epic honeymoon/creature hunting trip with Rolf Scamander a few months before.

As they walked, she explained, "I'd like to know, but I realised a few years ago that I'm too obsessive about planning everything. I trust you to take me somewhere nice, Harry, so I'm just going to try to relax and enjoy letting someone else plan things for me for once."

Harry gave her arm a squeeze and tried not to blush. "I hope you'll like it."

"I have no doubt at all," Hermione replied.

Once they'd boarded the Tube, Hermione sat down to Harry's right, stretched, and sighed. "I love Camden Market, but leaving it always feels good now because I know I'm done with work for the day."

"I know what you mean," Harry said.

"That reminds me," she said, "where do you work? I just realised this morning that after all of our lunches I still had no idea."

"Uh…that was intentional on my part." Harry scratched the back of his head awkwardly. "I'm in law enforcement and I can't really talk about what I do."

"Oh." She stared at him for a moment.

"I'm sorry," Harry said instinctively. "I'm not trying to make myself sound glamorous or anything. It's mostly boring work at a desk. I just can't talk about it."

"No, I believe you," Hermione said softly. "It's just…you said 'mostly boring,' Harry. What about the rest of it?"

"That part…um…is very not boring."

She closed her eyes and tentatively placed her left hand over Harry's right. "Listen to me, please," she said. "I really enjoy our time together, but I've enjoyed time with other people, too, and they've all eventually left me behind. And that's–"

"I'm not going–"

"I'm not finished," Hermione said tightly, and Harry shut up. "Anyway, that's OK, really, it is. I've known for a long time that I can be a bit much, even if I've never figured out how to stop, and I don't have any right to your time. It's just…I've never asked anyone this before, but please don't ghost me. I promise I won't get clingy or guilt-trip you if you tell me you never want to see me again, but please just let me know. I don't want to think it's because of… your job."

Harry didn't know how to respond to that, so for a minute or so he didn't and let the muted rattle of the Tube car cover the silence.

"I'm sorry," Hermione eventually said. "I shouldn't have–"

"Not at all," Harry said. "I just…it's kind of nice to have someone worried about me. I was thinking about how I'd never noticed I missed that until you said something. A few of my friends worry about me, I guess, but they don't really say it in so many words and most people think I'm some kind of bloody superhero or something. It's nice to hear someone say the equivalent of, 'Hey, I'm worried about Harry doing that dangerous thing,' rather than, 'Oh, Harry will be fine doing the dangerous thing.' Is that weird?"

"No." Hermione looked him straight in the eyes. "I think that's human. If you don't mind me asking, what do your parents think of your career?"

He shook his head sadly.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "Do you have any other family?"

"Just my godfather and his partner," Harry said. "They…it's a long story. They worry about me in their own way, but they both looked up to my father, who was also in law enforcement, and I think sometimes they forget I'm not him. They have…worries of their own, too."

She squeezed the hand he'd momentarily forgotten she'd been holding. "I'm sorry for their troubles, too, then. And thank you."

He raised an eyebrow at her quizzically.

"For whatever it is you do out there, I mean."

"Oh. You're welcome, I guess. Sorry, I'm also not used to being thanked." At least, not for something he'd done. He got thanked all the time for something his parents had done, which somehow never stopped hurting. "I'm probably the one who should be thanking you for believing me. If some random bloke invited me out for drinks and told me he had some secret law enforcement job, I'm not sure I'd be so trusting."

"You hardly count as 'random' any more, you know." Hermione shot him another one of her tight-lipped smiles. "Besides, I've known from the day we met that you did something dangerous."

"Wait, you have?"

"When you first walked into my stall, you moved and watched people almost like you were a lion or some other kind of big cat. It's not just your muscles…I mean, you do have those…it's not just those, though. It's your whole attitude. That night, I wondered if you might be in the mob because you dress so well, but after our first lunch I knew you couldn't be."

"Oh, good," Harry said. "I'd rather nobody thought I was in the mob. How did you know, though?"

"You make me feel safe," she said, as if stating a fundamental truth of the universe. "If you habitually hurt innocent people, I don't think you could project that benign aura."

He had to smile at that, which seemed to make her blush for some reason. "I'm glad," he said. Before he could continue, though, the conductor called out "Warren Street."

"This is us," Harry said as he rose to his feet. Somehow, he and Hermione still had hold of each other's hands, so he used that to help her up. He led her out of the Tube station and a block and a half away before stopping at a small public house and inn. He gave the hostess his name and they were seated immediately on a cozy little terrace on the second floor. Fake ivy wound its way up the walls around them and a few strategically placed heat lamps warded off the late September chill.

"This is charming!" Hermione said as soon as the hostess left them. "Thank you for going to the trouble of getting us a terrace table, too."

"Oh, good," Harry said. "I picked it because it's nice, but it's not so fancy that either of us will be self-conscious or so loud that we can't hear each other. Well, not too loud out here, anyway. Inside it's bedlam if it's more than three-quarters full."

"An excellent choice, then." She looked over the menu. "I know it's late, but I never get to eat much in the way of dinner on late shifts. Would you mind–"

"Of course not! Feel free to get an entree, but I'll probably just get some dumplings or something to munch on."

"Dumplings…you found me a pub that serves Asian food? Thank you! That's a rare combination."

"I hoped you'd like that," he said.

Harry ended up getting a mixed platter of dumplings for them to snack on, and Hermione got the wok-fried chicken with rice as a main, and they shared a bottle of rosé wine to accompany it. Afterward, neither of them felt quite done, so they each had a glass of cognac to finish off the night. Overall, it was a brilliant evening, at least until they stood up at the very end of it.

Hermione promptly sat right back down. Hard. "Oh, dear," she said. "I don't think I've ever had that much to drink in one sitting."

"I didn't even think about that," Harry said. He was fine, though he probably wouldn't want to drive or apparate until he'd sobered up a bit more. "I'll escort you home."

"I can't ask you to do that," Hermione said.

"You're not," Harry said. "I'm not putting you in a cab alone in this condition, much less the Tube." He held out his arm. "Come on, let's get you home."

She took it gratefully and allowed him to pull her to her feet. "Thank you."

"It's really no trouble, I promise you." He couldn't very well tell her about apparition, which made this sort of thing tremendously easier. The cab ride would even give him time to sober up enough to apparate. He asked the hostess to call them a cab and took Hermione outside to await it.

Drunkenness manifests differently for each individual. As it happened, Hermione was among those drunks who could speak properly even when they were completely hammered, and as a result she was even harder to haul out of the restaurant than he'd anticipated. A little manoeuvring got her safely in the cab when it arrived, though she needed a bit of help buckling in as they drove off.

It was only a twenty-minute ride from the pub to Hermione's apartment near midnight on a Sunday, and both of them felt awkward enough about talking in front of a stranger that they spent the time in silence. Unfortunately, she hadn't really sobered up much by the time they arrived, so Harry gave the cabbie a twenty, threw Hermione's right arm over his shoulder, and half-carried her out of the cab.

Her studio was up a flight of stairs from the front door of the small brick building, but she was so light that he had no trouble hauling her up the stairs. Once they got to the top, she fumbled with her keys a bit before she managed to unlock her door. As she put them back in her large handbag, her hand brushed his left hip and her eyebrows shot up.

"Why, Harry," she said, "is that a magic wand in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

Before he could stop her, she plucked his backup wand out of its holster and stared at it for a moment. "Damn," she said, frowning.

A beautiful drunken muggle stealing a wand he had specifically hidden with a muggle Notice-Me-Not charm was so far outside of what a mildly intoxicated Harry was capable of processing that he just stood there as Hermione opened her door and stepped into her apartment.

"You might as well come in," she said. "I mean, it's a terrible mess, but it's such a good metaphor for my life that it almost seems a shame to clean it."

Harry stepped into her nice, if spartan, studio apartment and looked around. There was a tiny kitchen off to the left, a claustrophobic bathroom directly in front of him, and a room with a light-colored wooden floor, a bed, dresser, and desk to his right, while at the foot of the bed stood a bookshelf that stretched nearly all the way to the ceiling. A thirteen-inch TV/VCR on the desk was the only concession to entertainment in the room other than books. The bookshelf was crammed full of books, and more piles of them sat on the desk, the dresser, and most of the floor. Before he could stop himself, he said, "You rented this primarily for that bookshelf, didn't you?"

"You know me so well." She flashed him a huge, beaming smile as she closed the door behind him. It was really quite lovely, leaving Harry all the more confused about why she was so self-conscious of her teeth. "Hey," she said, "before I offer you coffee or…um…'coffee,' this weird stick you're carrying reminded me of something."

"Wait," he said, fighting down a blush from how she'd emphasised "coffee," but she shushed him before he could decline any and all types of "coffee." He really just wanted to get his wand back and get out of there before she did anything she might regret.

"I'll just be a moment," she said. "I admit I'm terribly curious about why you're hauling around a stick, but it's so convenient that I'm just going to ponder the coincidence later. You see, I found a poem a few days ago. It was a terrible poem, but that's not the point. I mean, a really dreadful poem. The poet wouldn't know a proper pentameter if you hit him with this stick."

Hermione gently bonked Harry on the head with the wand to demonstrate. "The important thing was the information in the poem, though. He was describing a process that I initially thought was just metaphorical, but the more I thought about it—and I had a lot of time to think about it during my shifts, I might add—I realised it might be literal. And it fit, do you know that?"

"What fit?" Harry asked. Drunk Hermione was funny, but even harder to follow than normal Hermione and that was not a low bar.

"The poem, I mean," she said. "It fit into everything. Spinoza, Malebranche, Erasmus, even Newton and Pascal. I think what they were describing was some way of using intangible energies of some sort to effect changes from the metaphysical into the physical." She paused. "Am I really drunk, or do I talk like that all of the time? I think I've been in grad school too long. An-eee-way, where's that book?"

Harry watched, bemused, as she rooted around in one of the piles on her desk and pulled out a book that looked like it was hanging only by the memory of glue and was probably worth a decent fraction of a month's rent in that place. "Here we go," she said. "I left some notes on my bookmark. Once you extract all the flowery language, what the poet is really telling you to do is quite specific. I think I've even managed to get the pronunciation right based on the rhymes in the rest of the poem, assuming of course that I still remember my pre-Johnsonian pronunciation rules from Uni." She paused again. "You're smiling. Why are you smiling?"

"I've never had quite so clear a window into your head before," Harry said. "It's a brilliant place. Brilliant, but scary."

Hermione blushed. "That's a new descriptor for me, but I think I like it. So, where was…right, the method I found in the poem." She held out his wand and aimed it at a pen on her desk. "Let's see here…swish and flick."

Before Harry's inebriated brain could process what he was hearing and seeing, she held out the wand, did a tight little swish-and-flick motion, and, with improbably perfect pronunciation, said, "Wingardium Leviosa."