Hermione ruffled Tom's hair and gave him a playful smirk. Appreciating the big girl's touch more than she could have suspected, he scowled at her. They entered the library together.
"How was your first day of classes, Thomas?"
For most of the day, Tom had been premeditating the murder of Erebus Lestrange. The various schemes he conceived were all absurd and impracticable, and he presumed that homicide—like thievery—was not tolerated at Hogwarts. He knew he would not do it, but the fancy simply stuck in his mind like a hard bit of liquorice in his teeth. He supposed he might slaughter Lestrange as a grown-up if he ever had a weekend to spare.
"I gained forty points for Slytherin."
Hermione ruffled his hair again. Irritation ever so slightly besmirched the thrill of being touched by her; Tom did not want his finely pomaded fringe to be offset for any whatsoever reason. The big girl would not understand this, even if he explained; her tangled mess of brown locks pointed to her scatterbrain sickness as much as her big, careless arse.
"Oh my, that's rather intimidating," Hermione said with seeming seriousness. "I don't think most students have ever gotten forty in a week. God knows if Septimus Weasley's ever ended a semester with forty positive after deductions. The professors must have already told you this, but you are jolly talented, Thomas."
Tom felt a surge of warmth at the compliment but he did not know what to say. He gave Hermione a guarded grin but quickly averted his gaze so he would not look silly. It was one thing to get commended by his professors, another to get praised by the voluptuous scatterbrain. Her power over him irritated him. For a little while they continued in silence.
The library of Hogwarts was a grand place. Voluminous as a cathedral, it was furnished beautifully. Every bookshelf, desk, lamp, chair, couch, windowpane, curtain and carpet would have pleased an Italian aesthete, and everything was arranged with luxurious spaciousness. The books themselves, dark and ornately bounded, looked like they were manufactured for the nobility of some bygone century. Owing to the enchanted desktop lanterns that were dimmer yet somehow farther-reaching than muggle lamps and candles, everything was simultaneously vivid and muted; there was no darkness that did not admit colour and no colour that was not dark. Hermione was every inch a witch in this mystical scene, and the subtle fragrance of her perfume accorded perfectly with the wooden smell of the library. With her at his side, Tom felt as though he was in a dream; but he also felt a sense of returning to a home he never knew he had. However, there was one thing about the library that utterly perplexed him.
"Where is everyone?"
Hermione gave him a curious look. "It's strange, isn't it? The library's only really busy during the weekends and the last two weeks of term. One would think others would come here more often. It's such a lovely place."
Tom supposed that most students studied in their common rooms or dormitories, and suddenly wondered why it was he had failed to see the beauty of the Slytherin Dungeon the previous night. It was just as lavishly designed as the library. Then the answer, unambiguous and obvious, struck him: down in the Slytherin Dungeon he had to constantly watch his back—for hexes, insults, and spit—from his brutish dormmates as well as a small party of older students who had taken issue with his obscure parentage. In the library, the entirety of his company was the clumsily smiling fifth-year Gryffindor girls' prefect.
"Here we are," said Hermione. "The Book of Books. I figured this would be the place to start for a tour of the library."
They stood before a lectern atop which rested the largest book Tom had ever seen in his life. It was open and each of its pages was the size of a pillowcase. Both of them were blank. A quill hovered in the middle.
"Say, have you had herbology yet?" asked Hermione.
"No, our first class is on Thursday."
"I see. It'll probably be on mandrakes; at least that's how Professor Beery initiated us into the subject. Care for some pre-reading?"
"Why not?"
Hermione gave him an approving grin, then slightly bent forward to take the hovering quill. Tom cast a sideways glance at her inclined figure and clenched his teeth as a burning sensation shot up his stomach. His eyes traced the curvature of her back and fixed on her big, protruding bottom—simultaneously huge yet perfectly sized, like one would want of a barrel of smoked sausages or sack of gold coins—straining against the blackness of her robe, bobbing deliciously. Tom felt like a wolf spying a writhing fish shored on a lilypad on the surface of a nocturnal lake. He wondered how Hermione could have ever been his age—he thought of the Slytherin first-year girls and how their bottoms were all small and crooked, boylike—and meditated with amazement on the fact Hermione must have been a first-year in 1934.
He wondered how long it took for Hermione's formless wax to become honeycomb, as to know when he could expect the girls of his year to have similarly beautiful bottoms, but then thought of the butts of other big girls—fifth, sixth, and seventh years—he had surveyed in the great hall: they were all either not plump enough or too plump, not pert enough or too pert; and supported by legs that were either too long or too short. It was only Hermione's bottom that fit the mould of Tom's arbitrary perversity; all other girls might as well have been boys. She, unaware that she was the chosen one, murmured as she scribbled something in the Book of Books. "I—need—books—on—Mandragora."
Tom watched in amazement as chunks of clear, sharp text rapidly formed on the other page. His eyes could not decide between the marvellous book and the scatterbrain's big marvellous bum; but Hermione straightened herself and pressed her finger on the book.
"You see, it lists practically every book the library has on the subject and where one might find them."
"They're almost all in the herbology section," Tom observed.
"That they are. Shall we?"
Recalling that which he had ogled at a few seconds prior, Tom allowed Hermione to lead the way. He followed her from two yards behind. In the dimness of the aisles they traversed, Tom found it somewhat difficult to discern the jiggling of Hermione's buttocks, concealed as it was under the heavy fabric of her robe; it seemed that while uniformed, the figure of her bottom would only take on its true, tantalising shape when she bent forward; but even the subtle motions of her seat engendered by her the movement of her slender legs were enough to make Tom feel ticklish all over.
After two minutes of jiggles, Hermione's bottom halted. They arrived at the herbology section. It was absurd and magnificent; the bookshelves were overrun with moss, and plants of all kinds grew out of the books they hosted. Tom wrinkled his nose as he found soil, rather than carpet, beneath his feet. The air smelled distinctly like compost, and Tom fancied he felt wind blow against him though they were nowhere near a window.
"Don't worry about the ground, it's enchanted so that your shoes won't get dirty," assured Hermione.
Tom lifted his foot to examine his sole anyway. It was spotless. Hermione giggled.
"Don't you trust me, Thomas?"
Out of the corner of his eye Tom spotted several books with 'Mandragora', 'Mandrake' and other nomenclatural variants of that plant on the lowest row of a shelf. Their greenish-brown bindings resembled tree bark covered in lichen. Tom stared at them suspiciously.
"These are our books," said Tom. He crouched down and tried to take the largest among them, but it did not budge. Then he tried to snatch it—as though it were a London gutter-rat—by surprise. It guilefully anticipated Tom's tactic. Irritated, he began to simply tug at the old tome with pure physical force, exerting more and more of his animal strength, until it suddenly gave a violent shook and made an inhuman screeching sound, unceremoniously knocking Tom to the ground.
"You should've said it would've had it at me!"
"Experience is the best teacher," Hermione laughed. "You'll find that most of the herbology books are like this. The magizoology ones are even worse, you'll see. Let me."
Hermione drew her wand and bent over. Compelled by the book's position on the shelf, she fully inclined to the floor—her head lowered and lowered, until it was parallel to her knees, and her enormous bottom protruded from her hips like a peach from an ice cream cone. Before the Book of Books Hermione's bottom was a waxing crescent; now, stooping down for the mandrake-book, she presented to Tom a full moon in all its glory. It was so large and geometrically perfect; Tom marvelled again that such an amply-enfleshed big girl could have ever been small; it seemed impossible that she could ever have been eleven, like him. Her bottom strained absolutely against her robe, like a big apricot in a tissue it was about to break. Tom's stiffy became a pyramid in his trousers. He felt like granite. He had to do something; neither on the train nor in the Great Hall had her arse taken on so glorious and primal a shape. She was murmuring incantation after incantation and would be done any minute. Tom had to act quickly. His immediate urge was to seize her buttocks like a cat grabbing a cushion, but he knew she would react poorly to such a show of passion, even though it was she who carelessly initiated him into the delights of her body. How was he to resist? But he had to play it safe. He would be subtle; his hands were not the only parts of him that could profit from her hindquarters.
Tom tiptoed to position himself right behind Hermione—breathing hard, he looked down and saw his colossal prize that could have contained his width twice, and began to inch himself closer and closer to it. Though he had not seen anyone anywhere near the herbology section, Tom could not help but examine his surroundings in every direction before every micro-adjustment of his feet—if anyone saw him, they would at once know what he was doing.
Finally, Tom's stomach pressed into Hermione's bottom. The immediate pleasure of the impact made him want to kiss her everywhere. He held himself taut and sucked in his breath for a moment, to see if she would react. She did not. He clenched his teeth to suppress a moan and released a laboured breath. The feeling was exactly what he wished for—the exact ticklish bliss that she had induced in his waist on the Hogwarts Express. It was even better, for the lower stomach was more nervously proximate to the genitals than the waist. Tom's crotch, trembling as Hermione's bum pressed on his stomach, felt like it might burst to release a hundred flesh-coloured butterflies at any moment.
Mad with desire and self-disgust that compounded this desire, Tom pressed even further forward so that Hermione's vast bottom actively rubbed against his stomach, like a pair of tomatoes shedding themselves against a cheese-grater. Every second contained an hour of bliss, and Tom prayed for the mandrake-book to persevere against Hermione for eternity. The moist scent of the enchanted soil and lichen simultaneously deepened and fulfilled his appetite. Even though he was only a clothed little boy standing suspiciously still behind a clothed bent-over big girl with an even bigger but still clothed bottom, Tom felt himself every bit a stag in heat slaking itself upon a large, complacent doe.
His pleasure suddenly ceased. Hermione stood up and, with a victorious smile, presented Tom with the moss-covered book. It was quite still.
"Thank you very much," he murmured.
He held the book aloft his crotch to hide his stiffy of reinforced steel. His entire body tingled from Hermione's warmth, her softness, and the pattern of her posterior flesh—there had been something particularly ticklish about the way each of her buttocks sank into her crack and sprang out of them so seamlessly, like a canyon with no sharp edges, that obeyed not the physics of Earth but those of Heaven or Hell—and Tom wanted more. He did not know whether Hermione's bottom contained the remedy for his desire for it, but he was glad to pursue his infinite hunger for the moments of infinite pleasure to be gleaned therein.
"The old potions section," Hermione introduced, as they arrived in an aisle with particularly battered books. "It's mostly rot, the new potions section has better recipes for the same potions. But sometimes you'll want a second opinion."
Hermione proceeded to show Tom the new potions section, and then a dozen various other sections of the library. In most sections she liked to fetch at least one book she either had fond memories of or considered integral to her education—the two were not mutually exclusive, nor always the same—and whenever the book was in a low shelf, she would stoop and Tom would fasten his stomach onto her big arse and grind his teeth as to not whimper in pleasure. He appreciated the tour Hermione gave him for more than carnal reasons; she did talk about her books with intelligence and passion; but Tom could not say he wanted her erudition more than her gigantic backward member. Realising this, he began to resent his want for her again. His lechery clouded his judgement, and he suspected he might never be able to read in the library without thinking of her bottom. His resentment turned into hate; hate for her who initiated him into this perfect, forbidden ecstasy. Hate for her who was unaware that she sent trembling shivers to the very core of his being. Finally, Tom's antipathy turned on himself. He wondered whether he was possessed by a demon—for how else could he desire with his whole body and soul the dirtiest part of an unremarkable fifteen-year-old girl with buckteeth, tumbleweed for hair, and a propensity to talk too fast?
"Most history of magic books aren't very good. There's no distinction between history and fable in the magical world as we have in the muggle world. No one knows whether there was one Merlin or two Merlins, and whether in the case of the latter they were brothers or cousins. We only know that he—or both of the brothers or cousins or whatever—was brilliant. Why? No one can say. Splendid, isn't it?"
A frightening possibility came to Tom's mind; that he liked Hermione for more than a mere portion of her anatomy, that perhaps he liked her—as a girl in spirit and flesh—with an affection of a little brother for their caring big sister. Yet he knew well that no loving little brother would secretly ravish their big sister like this. While Hermione stooped forward in search of a book on human transfiguration and Tom traced a gentle finger up and down the cleft of her bottom—he could feel the fleshly delineations on either side—he wondered whether any other boy had secretly ravished her like he did. When she set her mind on anything to do with books—reading them, finding them, talking about them—she became a disembodied, oblivious angel; one saw this by the frenzied look that came into her eyes. Tom then realised it was a certainty that some sly Gryffindor cad had touched Hermione—his Hermione, his dear scatterbrain—at some point or another. The idea made him murderous.
"No, I don't come to the library with them often. Septimus never comes to the library because 'you can't talk there'. By that he means you can't be a slobbering berk making an impression of a trumpet. I've come here with Balthasar a few times, but he only ever goes to the history of magic section. Very silly, isn't he? Balthasar's one of the few people in the castle who actually likes Professor Binns, even if he himself has no historic sense. All his judgments about history are rather queer. Not some of them, all of them. That doesn't stop them from being charming. I don't think he takes himself very seriously—that's how he's charming. I fancy you to take yourself very seriously, Thomas—oh, that's not a bad thing! Many Gryffindor boys would profit from your example."
Tom began to hate every other boy who had ever come into contact with Hermione, even if they were innocent of any lewdness. His jealousy became so intensely painful to bear—he knew not why—that it seemed to match his pride; Septimus Weasley and Balthasar Ball became villains in his mind of the caliber of Erebus Lestrange. He was surprised at himself, and began to wonder what it all meant. Did he really like Hermione that much? Did he love her? No, what a silly idea—they hadn't known each other for more than a few days. Yet Tom had to know whether he truly liked the big girl for more than her big bottom, and set his imagination to work to this end.
He imagined being a sorcerer of dreadful power, like that Grindelwald fellow everyone spoke of in hush, excited tones, and locking Hermione in a tower so that he could have his way with her and her silly bottom whenever he wanted. There was so much he would be able to do. He would force her to rub her naked bottom on his bare stomach. He would pee into the cleft of her bottom. But she could cry, and so the idea was horrible. He could not stand the notion of Hermione being miserable because of him. He needed her to be free. Sick animals were no good. He needed her and her big arse to be healthy and full of cheer. She happily showed him the library because she was either oblivious of his lechery, or secretly appreciative of it—in either case her liberty was not violated. Tom could only violate Hermione if she was not violated.
Was that love, or just greediness that incidentally wished her welfare? Tom had no idea. Relationships with other human beings frightened him. He could not understand them. He never had a friend, and did not see the purpose in what the public lauded as 'fraternity' when he had more to offer most people than they had to offer him. Yet Hermione offered him a whole lot more than he offered her—she shared both her bottom and her bountiful well of knowledge with him plentifully—perhaps she was being what one called 'charitable'. Tom had always regarded charity as stupid and dishonest; it was something grown-ups did to clear their conscience. Was Hermione using him to clear her conscience? Tom did not know. She made him at once suspicious, resentful, and thrilled beyond all human measure.
The last section of the library was the Restricted Section. It was cordoned off by a red rope that sent you flying back if you touched it without a pass.
"Can you keep a secret, Tom?" Hermione whispered, though there was no one around.
"Of course."
"Don't tell anyone I let you in here."
Hermione took her prefect badge off her collar and pressed it to the red rope. To Tom's amazement, the rope disappeared.
"Can all prefects do that?"
"Yes. I suspect because the professors want us to know more … vicious sorts of magic than the student populace at large. It helps us keep control, should serious discord ever arise."
The Restricted Section somehow seemed older than other parts of the library. Its aisles were narrower, its bookshelves more austere, and the self-lighting candle holders intermittently found on the shelves were positively mediaeval. The shelves themselves were wildly uneven in height; and the taller ones among them looked like they had been replicated lengthways over and over again. The higher the shelf, the less organised the arrangement of the books; some had horizontal and vertical stacks haphazardly intersecting each other, resembling piles of firewood. Adjoined to the front of each aisle were presumably portable ladders that would enable students to access the higher racks of the shelves.
It was such at ladder that Hermione pointed her wand at to draw to one of these elongated shelves. It skid to her in a beeline; with another motion of her wand she negated its movement and fixed it firmly against the bookshelf. Then, she climbed it.
"Your ladder looks unsteady."
"Oh don't worry Thomas, Professor Bright himself reenchants these ladders every summer. You could place them on a sewing needle and they'd support the weight of a troll."
She stopped on the third rung atop which she could browse the fourth highest shelf. Tom, already behind her by instinct, looked at her shapely figure in the air with his heart thrashing against his chest. He beheld the backside of an angel suspended on a ladder down from heaven. On ground level, the vertical midpoint of Hermione's bottom had often found itself on Tom's belly button; now it was aligned precisely to his nose. Tom had fancied pressing his face against Hermione's bottom several times throughout the night, but had judged it too precarious because while his stomach was a smooth, soft sheen, the contours of his face would certainly rouse Hermione to awareness of his perversity.
But a new ruse came to him. Touch was only one of the many senses he had indulged with her. Hermione's arse, just half a yard from Tom's face, protruded enough to give it that extraordinary cushion-like contour which made his blood boil. He would have liked to lie on it like a pillow. By instinct he looked left and right though he knew no one else was in the Restricted Section, then slowly inched himself forward. His face was six inches from that big, globular piece of liquorice; then three inches, then two, then one.
All he could see was the blackness of her bulbous, enrobed bottom; one mound for his left eye and another for his right; both for his mouth and nose. He was ready to taste it. Clenching his fists and straining his stiffy, Tom closed his eyes and took a deep, deep whiff. He opened his eyes. He was disappointed; there was nothing in his nostrils but the scent of her perfume. He tentatively looked up and saw the enormous girl still engaged in her work. He had to get closer. Nudging his face ever-so-slightly forward—he was as delicate and precise in his movements as he was at Wool's when he opened his door to sneak out after curfew—his nose and mouth were now less than a quarter of an inch from grazing against the cleft between Hermione's buttocks. He wildly inhaled again, and this time immediately reaped the aromatic fruits of his devilry.
The scent was metallic and meaty—somewhere between an old sixpence found on the floor in a crowded market in London and a pink porcelain pitcher full of thick, hot gravy—consummated by a sour, vinegary odour that somehow exemplified everything of the dirty and restrained aspects of girlishness. An aura of warmth made this delicious stink all the more enchanting; though no part of Tom actually touched the big girl, the heat of his arse radiated against his face as if it were a quarter of an inch from the underside of a big warm bowl of soup. The entirety of his line of sight was this protuberant prize; he had to look up every few seconds to ensure Hermione was still engaged in her distraction. He hoped she would never find what she was looking for. He hoped the whole world would be nothing more than the pair of them, little boy and big girl, in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library.
Desire fed itself; the more Tom drew in the musky savour of Hermione's behind, the more he wanted to draw in more; he sniffed and whiffed with increasing zeal and his stiffy strained harder and harder against the tense fabric of his trousers. He felt the desire to pee in an ineffably pleasurable way. Hermione's cleft was right beneath his nose; if he were a little more reckless, he would have licked it, bitten it, kissed it, as to gain her divine stench in his own mouth where it would gestate like a gum-ball.
"Thomas?"
Tom's heart skipped a beat. Hermione's voice was fraught with unease. He immediately fell backward and crashed into the bookshelf behind him. The frontal side of his body, especially his gooseflesh-engulfed face, itched all over from enormous pleasure he had derived from Hermione in the last hour, and the prospect that this pleasure might be over once and for all, for the rest of his life, made him suddenly hate her—she did not understand what she would deprive him of. It was her fault for carelessly arousing him on the Hogwarts Express. She had initiated him into the sin; the least she could do was keep him in her thrall.
"Why weren't you at breakfast today?"
Tom's shoulders slackened in relief. Hermione had not discovered his lechery, or did not care about it. He was in love with her again.
"I was reading my transfiguration textbook," he murmured. "I wanted to get a head start."
"Oh, Thomas. Studiousness is a virtue, but don't you know that you have to eat to grow big and strong? A wizard has to take care of his physical organs."
Hermione descended the ladder and yawned. Standing up, Tom realised that his lechery had come to an end for the day. An enchanted stonework clock on the wall told him it was nearly nine o'clock—he had spent three hours playing with his favourite toy in the world. That was enough; he was content with the future expectation of more. More soft, pulpy warm touches; more warm, girlish odours. He straightened his robe and clenched his thighs so that his stiffy would not stick out so egregiously. The book in Hermione's hand was a small, vividly purple brochure.
"The Book of Passages." She handed the book to Tom. "It's a map of secret passages and rooms in Hogwarts. It won't have all of them, of course—it won't even tell you how to enter most of them—but I'm sure you'll make the most of it, Mister Forty-Points-for-Slytherin."
