Chapter 7

Hermione tried to gather the words to address the newly mentally restored Malfoy's concerns. The words to explain where they were, what they had been doing, and the logic behind the carefully researched S.P.E.R.M.I. Protocol. She needed him to know about the copious amount agonizing she had done while researching how to correct his condition, and she needed him to understand that she continually found only one solution. She meant to ask what he remembered. She intended to offer comforting sentences designed to inspire deep calm.

Instead, all of Hermione's intentions condensed down into a single, inelegant, "Whehergabatah?"

Which wasn't even a word. It wasn't even a smash of vaguely intelligible-sounding words.

But his attention had rapidly moved on to more pressing matters other than who and what his dangly bits were doing.

Draco's eyebrows drew down as he cracked his jaw and ran his tongue across his deadly, shark-like pearly whites.

"What the hell is wrong with my teeth?"

"Er." Hermione began, but Draco was still nestled very intimately inside her, and his new awareness and shock meant he was shifting rather a lot. It was, unfortunately, highly distracting.

"I can't feel my legs!" He panted in a sudden panic, his tentacles writhing and bumping against her skin,"Granger, why can't I feel my le-"

His brow scrunched again; his eyes slipped close.

"No, wait. I can feel my legs," Draco said in wonder.

"Why do I have so many fucking legs?!"

His eyes snapped to hers, continuing his rapid inventory, shock and incredulity flashing across his face before his features settled on resignation. His pallor rather green, Malfoy finally looked down at himself.

"Are those? They're… They are. I have fucking tentacles. Oh. Fuck. Me!"

Were he not still, inadvertently, sort-of doing that to her, and were Hermione not suffering from extreme nonverbally inclined embarrassment, she might have quipped that she just had, in fact, fucked 'me.'

As it stood, however, Draco was suffering from his own existential crisis, and there really was no need to point this out and make the S.P.E.R.M.I. Protocol any more of a Big Deal. Especially before she even explained to him why she'd gone to such extremes to begin with.

It seemed that the excitement was beginning to excite other certain portions of his anatomy, and the vaguely coherent portion of her brain prompted Hermione to shift her hips so that Draco's stiffening cock slipped from her channel because even if sex was the cure, now was so not the time.

Distracted as he was by his alarming anatomical changes, her maneuvering went unremarked.

But why didn't it work? Sex was supposed to cure him, right? Well, he was suddenly Draco Malfoy again, but at the same time, he very physically was not.

Unfortunately for Hermione, though she'd separated their more intimate connection, his tentacles seemingly had a mind of their own and weren't keen to release her just yet. She tried to peel them off, to no avail. They just immediately latched back.

As if suddenly remembering her, Malfoy came to a natural lull in his existential crisis and grinned at her, ogling what he could see above the water.

"Damn, Granger, how'd I bag you while I was like this? You must be kinkier than I ever imagined," Malfoy said, falling back onto a classic self defense mechanism of sly smarminess.

Which was fine. To be expected, really. She could conduct this conversation over the medical necessity of their… concourse… completely nude with an intentionally infuriating Malfoy unabashedly staring at her tits. This was just peachy.

Hermione gathered every ounce of healer-explaining-a-medical-incident-to-a-reasonably-distraught-patient aura she could muster. She was graciousness and patience personified.

She slapped a wayward tentacle.

"Ow!" he complained.

She crossed her arms over her chest, signalling that the show was over and it was time to discuss his condition like adults. Naked adults.

"Malfoy, er- Draco. Draco Malfoy," -well that wasn't awkward at all, "What's the last thing you remember?"

He spent only an instant considering, his eyes briefly glazed in recall.

"Sitting in that freezing fucking boat and stalking selkie poachers with Potter."

Right. Of course, it couldn't be easy. He couldn't just remember at least some of his time at the hospital and how much of a pain in her arse he'd been. Figuratively… and more recently literally, but the latter was a… pleasant sort of pain Hermione no longer anticipated repeating.

"Well, roughly a week ago, you were bitten by what we believe to have been a kraken. You went a bit feral and turned into this," she waved her hand at him vaguely, "Harry brought you in right after you were bitten, and you've been under my care since."

Draco blinked at her.

"And your care involves you strangling my cock with your cunt? Apparently, repeatedly?" Draco's smirk was sly and crooked, "Why, Granger, I feel positively taken advantage of."

Hermione blushed, suddenly furious.

"This isn't funny, Mr. Malfoy! That was never my intention! I tried to avoid-"

"Relax, Granger, I'm only joking. Go on. I was bitten, you've been shagging me for the past week to get me back to normal, just like the Mermaid Price, and I have no memory of it. What happened? Draw the short straw? Or did you volunteer?" He looked her up and down speculatively. "And we're- in the East Ballroom at my Manor? When the fuck did we get an aquarium in the East Ballroom?"

Hermione grit her teeth.

She'd somehow forgotten how frustrating speaking to Draco Malfoy could be. She almost missed the incessant screeching and rattling. But now that she knew those had likely contained actual words as well…

She focused on the most innocuous statement first, trying to organize her thoughts around his rapid fire questioning, and her inherent need to disseminate information.

"Has everyone read that stupid fairytale but me?" she complained, pinching the bridge of her nose. This was not going at all how she envisioned. "Now, if you'll just please shut up for a moment and let me explain, this will all go a lot faster."

He waved a hand for her to get on with it.

"You were in St. Mungo's until yesterday, but you were a bit of a terror, and the only healer you would let anywhere near you was me. I don't know why. You were becoming increasingly antagonistic to the other staff and needed to be moved to somewhere that could better accommodate your condition. Your mother has been very worried, and she set all this up over the past several days when it became apparent you weren't going to spontaneously revert back to normal," she said, biting her lip. His eyes were drawn down to the motion. "And I haven't been shagging you for a week. That was a… new development, today in fact, and supported by copious amounts of research."

Draco rolled his eyes. She needed him to just understand.

"I'm serious. I spent days exhaustively researching your condition, but no matter what I found it all lead back to the same conclusion, and I ultimately had no choice but to enact my S.P.E.R.M.I. protocol."

He didn't even try to hold back his guffaw at her acronym.

"Spermy? That's the acronym you come up with? Seriously, Granger? And I thought spew was bad."

"No! S-P-E-R-M-I," she enunciated each letter clearly, "Sex as a Prescribed Exercise in Reasonable Medical Intervention."

Draco sniggered.

Hermione huffed and ignored him, finally extricating herself from his persistently grabby tentacles and swimming a respectable metre away.

"Let's go back to the bit where I was in St. Mungos," Draco said, "Are you saying that despite knowing how to cure me, you put off shagging me for nearly a week? I could be stuck like this, you know."

Hermione's heart sank. Timeliness of intervention was a possibility she had considered, but had discarded until presently. He could be stuck like this forever, but she rather hoped it didn't come to that. It also made her a wee bit defensive of her course of treatment.

"I didn't have any idea how to cure you at first! Yes, all of my research suggested that sex was the way to turn you back to normal, but it just took a few days to corroborate that. I wanted to be sure before I took any drastic action," she explained.

"Right. Normal," Draco looked down at himself pointedly. "So, if sex is the cure, and I'm still like this, are you sure you were doing it right?"

Hermione sputtered, "I- I wasn't doing it wrong!"

At Malfoy's dubious look, Hermione felt the need to defend herself.

"You're at least you again and not, not screeching, or rattling, or purring at me!"

He lifted his eyebrows contemplatively.

"Have I been purring at you a lot then, Granger?" Draco purred, and his chest even did the weirdly attractive purry-rattle thing that ended in a croon.

Hermione's face flamed. She pushed further away from him, from temptation. Annoying temptation. It made her retreat easier at least.

Draco's eyes narrowed shrewdly, as he gave her a fleeting once over.

"Maybe we need to do it again, then, to be sure." He said.

Malfoy prowled closer, eliminating the scant space between them. A metre was nothing.

And then the spicy, salty scent of him came back in full force. Hermione doubted that he even knew he was manifesting what were surely kraken pheromones. She felt her blush creeping lower, stupendously red, caught between embarrassment and the utterly enticing memory of the most explosive sexual encounters of her life. With him. Draco Malfoy. When he was barely Draco Malfoy at all. The enormity of everything overwhelmed her all at once.

"I can't do this." she mumbled, heart thumping so loudly in her chest she thought it might explode.

And then Hermione swam away as though her life depended on it.

"Where are you going? We're having a conversation!" He called after her.

"Nope." She shook her head and swam harder.

"Granger, you're being ridiculous. Come back!"

He tried swimming after her, but for once in her life, luck was with Hermione Granger, because mentally restored Draco Malfoy had yet to fully master his new-to-him tentacled limbs.

Unluckily, he seemed to swiftly be getting the hang of them. He was gaining on her. She needed to escape and now were the only thoughts reverberating through her head.

" I- need! To think!" She squeaked in a rush, apparating herself, buck naked, and a good thirty gallons of water straight into her living room. She landed wetly on her rump.

"Ow." Hermione absently rubbed at her abused tailbone before gingerly picking herself up off the floor.

It was a testament to how desperately she had wanted to get away from the situation that she managed to apparate without her wand. Which was still somewhere in the former ballroom. Along with her bag. And half of her kraken books.

Hermione's mind pinged from worry to worry, but she couldn't very well go back for them now. She hadn't lied; she needed to think. She needed a new plan, and perhaps an entirely new protocol. Or maybe she didn't. She didn't know, and not knowing what to do next was not a state of being that she accepted gracefully.

Hermione took a deep breath. She needed to go over the facts.

She had tried to think of everything. None of her research said anything about what would happen when the affected witch or wizard turned back to normal. She had wrongfully assumed it would happen all at once: he'd turn back to normal, legs and memory and all, once the magic had run its course. Just as he had transformed to begin with, but in reverse.

Clearly, that was not the case.

And now she had stranded him- cognizant but not cured.

Hermione swiped a hand down her face, the guilt already settling like a stale cauldron cake in her stomach.

Though she had panicked and run away, there was only one cure she had found, and she knew no more research would likely change that. The fact that it had begun to work was evidence enough. As of yet, she could not allow herself to even consider the alternative that this was as cured as he was going to get. Besides, her research didn't support that conclusion.

He was right. They needed to try again.

Anxiety prickled at the back of her neck.

She would have to go back and have sex with Draco Malfoy while he was completely aware of everything that they were doing. Which was an utterly despicable way to think of it.

She'd never remotely intended to take advantage of him, but in some ways, his amnesiac self was much easier to deal with. And it had been simpler to rationalize treating him when he couldn't be a complete prat about it. She'd been counting on being able to gloss over the specifics of the S.P.E.R.M.I. Protocol with a fully human Malfoy, along with an implicit understanding that there would be no additional sex, kinky or otherwise.

She had not been the least bit prepared to have an unspecified amount of sex, kinky or otherwise, with Draco Malfoy, in his right mind, but not in his completely right body. But she would have to. Because Hermione Granger did not leave jobs half finished.

She narrowly held herself back from intentionally banging her head against the nearest hard surface.

Hermione took a practiced series of deep breaths. She vanished the water seeping into her floors. A shower was in order. And some food. Before, Draco had sweetly offered her fish at several points, but she had rightfully declined, even if watching him eat had been a strange fascination.

She set out to complete her tasks blankly, her mind whirring under the surface.

When she was showered and fed, her outlook didn't feel quite so dire. It was simply the natural progression in his healing progress. She hadn't been prepared for this turn, but she could compartmentalize like she should have been doing this whole time.

Her patient still needed her help, she still needed her wand and bag, and she wanted to get this whole situation behind her. The sooner, the better. She could manage a few more awkward and less than ideal encounters to set Malfoy back to rights. Then, she could, hopefully, never see or speak to him again.

Though the brief time they'd shared before he came back to himself would likely set the bar for her sex fantasies for the next century. And beyond that, she'd liked that versio-

Hermione tried to force her mind to go blank as she took the long way back to her to the Manor- involving several floo calls, a miffed Narcissa, and a temporary direct floo connection.

She stood before the unnecessarily massive ballroom doors, and after several minutes, finally pushed one open. Her heart was in her throat as one foot tread behind the other. It was silly. She had no real reason to be nervous or apprehensive. And yet…

Her steps thudded up the staircase, signalling her arrival, if he hadn't noticed to massive door opening. He probably had. It was the anticipation of the unknown, she thought. Hermione didn't like to have unknown variables.

It was probably why she'd been single so long, at this point. She never was good at accounting for other people's feelings. Or sometimes, her own. And feelings really were the worst kind of unknown variables out there.

Particularly because she was having them. Had been having them. Might unfortunately continue to have them, even after her patient was healed and had long forgotten about her awkwardly intimate healing methods. Because feelings didn't always make sense.

She had to keep herself from stalling once she'd reached the top of the stairs. She would see this through. She was Hermione Granger, and failure, anything less than excellence, really, was not an option.

Hermione found Draco on the beach, in a large, white claw-foot tub, sitting under a newly conjured coconut palm and sipping a piña colada- complete with a little tooth-pick-and-paper umbrella. She recognized the books stacked haphazardly in the sand. The arm not nursing his cocktail rested idly on the side of the tub. One tentacle held one of her research books. Another helpfully flipped to the next page. The rest writhed.

"You know, this text says we should be sating my lust as often and enthusiastically as we can. And yet here I am: still tentacle-y and unsated. Told you that you were doing it wrong."

His tone was wry but bordering on acerbic. Hermione froze, her mouth dry. He was angry.

"I-"

"Come back to finish the job, then?" Draco asked glibly, finally looking up at her.

She didn't know what he saw in her face, but Draco groaned.

"Fuck. I didn't mean that. You don't have to- I mean obviously, you don't have to- do anything you don't want to do."

"I didn't say I didn't want to," Hermione said in a rush before her courage abandoned her again. "I just needed to… think for a bit."

Because in her mind, everything would resolve all at once, not in stages. Finding reality jarringly different had sent her into a blind panic.

Draco dropped the half-empty glass in the sand and ran a hand through his hair, the motion utterly incongruous with this form that had been screeching and rattling at her for the past week.

"This isn't what I'd planned," he said plaintively, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyeballs.

She could relate. Flying by the seat of her pants, for lack of a better word, sucked.

"I was trying to take things slow and get to know you first, let you get to know me, and now, this has gone and cocked everything up."

Hermione's head snapped up.

"What?"

She must have misunderstood him.

"Wait. Me? Why were you trying to get to know me?"

Draco clenched his jaw, looking away. Those sharp shark teeth bared in a grimace.

Her mind rapidly flipped through every speck of interaction she could think of.

Is that why he had started coming to pub nights? To get to know her? Did he- had he wanted to date her? But he'd been coming around for months. He'd never given her any indication.

Sensing a response wasn't forthcoming, she spoke again.

"I thought you choosing me as your… healer was completely random. I was the first person not threatening you or holding you down. And I thought. I thought that was why."

She wasn't a threat. That was why he'd chosen her. Because obviously, that had to be it.

Draco didn't like her. Draco had never liked her.

But things, little things, began clicking into place.

"Of course not!" He shouted, glaring at her, "It would have been you. Regardless."

Her head felt like it was imploding, her ears rang, her heart gave a stuttered gush.

Draco clenched his jaw, again looking determinedly away.

"But obviously you don't want me. You've made that abundantly clear. You're only doing this out of some misplaced sense of obligation. Don't bother, Granger," he said, waving the book in front of him. "I'll find another way. Please see yourself out."