A/N: Welcome back, and welcome to part TWO of The Trouble with Wanting! (That's right, this random one shot that I came up with is now a multi-chapter, multi-part story.) I mentioned at the end of the last chapter that there would be a couple of important notes on this one, and I won't be making a liar of myself yet.
Very important note number one: We are going to be altering the structure of this story a little bit. While there will still be a number of chapters that can be read as standalone one shots or drabbles, the majority will be following a more continuous, ongoing plot as we progress. Given the feedback that I've received thus far, most of you should be cool with this.
Very important note number two: Over on the red and white website that shan't be named, I added a certain warning concerning the depiction of underage sexual activity that will occur in the not-too-distant future. Though the format is different over here, the point stands; Hermione is sixteen-and-a-half years old, and Fred is seventeen, soon to be eighteen. They are going to be doing things that sixteen-and-a-half-year-olds and seventeen-soon-to-be-eighteen-year-olds do. If that doesn't vibe with you, please feel free to pretend that this story ended with part one and exit the ride to my left. Please DO NOT leave hateful comments about it because I am giving you ample warning.
Get it? Got it? Good.
Now let's get this show on the road.
oOoOoOo
Located in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry boasts seven stories, one-hundred-and-forty-two staircases, eleven towers, eight greenhouses, four courtyards, four common rooms, a library, a quidditch pitch, a boathouse, a dungeon, and several hundred acres of rolling grounds.
Bearing that in mind, it stands to reason that such a sprawling edifice would feature an incalculable number of dark corners, deserted passageways, empty classrooms, and vacant broom cupboards into which a person, or perhaps two people, might slip unnoticed.
In the weeks following the commencement of the year 1996, Fred Weasley and Hermione Granger found every single one of them.
oOoOoOo
5 March 1996
One rainy Tuesday evening near the end of winter saw Harry and Ron sitting at a table in the common room, playing gobstones for sweets. Ron had just won a pumpkin pastie, which he wasted no time in consuming, while Harry looked around curiously at their assembled housemates.
"Where do you suppose Hermione is?" he asked, not spotting her among the OWL and NEWT students hunched over their textbooks on the other side of the room.
"Dunno," Ron said through a mouthful of pastry cream and shrugging. "Library?"
"Yeah, probably," Harry sighed as he idly peeled the wrapper off of a sugar quill. He sucked on it for a moment before asking, "Has she been acting a little strange lately?"
"I mean, yeah, more and more as the term gets on. Figured it's just exams though, right?"
"I guess so," Harry agreed again, though he didn't seem entirely convinced. "I just worry she's running herself into the ground with all of the revision schedules and study tables."
"I know," Ron said, before adding thoughtfully, "You don't suppose she's got another time-turner, do you?"
"No. No, she'd tell us."
"Just as well; Sirius and Buckbeak aside, I think that thing did more harm than good. Though the other night she got back to the common room five whole minutes after curfew. Her face was all red, and it looked like she'd been pulling her hair by the roots." He began setting the gobstones up again, shaking his head pityingly as he did so. "Poor lamb, OWLs might just kill her."
oOoOoOo
"I have to go," Hermione laughed, Fred's nose brushing a sensitive swath of skin below her ear and making her shiver. She tried, admittedly half-heartedly, to extract herself from their embrace for the second time that evening. "I'm meant to meet Hannah for prefect rounds in a half hour, and I have to go back to the common room first!"
"Mmhmm, rounds, very important…" he muttered distractedly, clearly not invested in the safety and sanctity of Hogwarts' corridors. His teeth grazed her earlobe and she made a sound that had her grateful for the silencing charm they'd placed on the vacant classroom.
Despite her protests, she shifted her hands to wrap in the fabric of his robes near his collar and pulled him away from the wicked things he was doing to her throat and back up to her mouth.
They were both rumpled and flushed, hands wandering over hips and shoulders, knotting in hair and grappling in a futile attempt to get closer together – a feat that, by all means, was not possible. At least, not in their current state of dress.
"I – I have to –" she stuttered against his lips, to no avail. He bent and wrapped a hand around the back of her knee before suddenly hitching it up and onto his hip, and the thought completely vanished.
Things hadn't progressed much beyond some rather impassioned snogging in the two-odd months they'd been seeing one another, perhaps a bit of light groping on occasion as well. But there, pressed against her lower stomach, was incontrovertible evidence that Fred was more than ready to… progress.
After completing a short stint of mental acrobatics, she decided that if he wouldn't let her leave, again, not that she was trying all that hard, then she would indulge her curiosity a bit. As his tongue traced the curve of her bottom lip, Hermione took the hand that was still coiled in the collar of his unbuttoned robes and raked her nails slowly down his chest, then across his abdomen, and finally over the buckle on his belt.
In her time with Viktor there had been some inadvertent bumping, and she had a thorough understanding of male anatomy in a theoretical application, but she'd never done anything quite so brasen or practical.
Fred, distracted with her mouth, hadn't fully realised where her hand had ended up, but when she steeled herself and very lightly trailed her fingertips over the erection straining against his trousers, he inhaled sharply.
"Bloody hell," he gasped – or perhaps "yelped" was a better verb. His hips jerked forward, pushing him more fully into her hand for a brief second, and she had the sudden urge to reach her other hand between her own thighs to relieve the building tension there. Not a new compulsion by any means, but one she'd only ever seen to privately.
No such luck, though; Fred immediately stepped back and let her leg fall away from where it was hooked around him. Hermione leaned into the wall she'd been pressed against, breathing hard and feeling more than a little satisfied with herself. It wasn't often that one surprised Fred Weasley, after all.
"Okay, maybe… maybe we should take a time out."
She just nodded, completely distracted by how he'd felt in her hand — warm and impossibly firm. Though she lacked much of a point of reference, he seemed rather sizeable by her estimation.
Fred extracted his wand from the pocket of his robes and skillfully conjured a familiar tan sofa, the very same they'd used several dozen times in such sequestered settings. He sat down and, after just a second, Hermione joined him. Rather than sit beside him, hip-to-hip, she settled with her back against the arm and draped her legs across his lap.
Not every stolen encounter was spent scrabbling at one another, as enjoyable as that was, and this was a position they'd taken to when they were both otherwise occupied with reading or studying.
He started tentatively, his Adam's apple bobbing around a nervous swallow. "We should probably discuss, uh, physical stuff, yeah?"
"Yes, that would undoubtedly be for the best," Hermione agreed quickly. Despite being a little intimidated about crossing that line with someone, she trusted Fred implicitly. Furthermore, she heard her mother in the back of her head, saying to her two years prior when she was home for summer: If you're thinking about doing it, you should at least be able to talk about it.
"Are you a…? That is to say, have you ever…?"
"Had sex?" Hermione mercifully finished for him, arching a brow and twisting one side of her mouth up into a smirk. Fred let out a slightly embarrassed laugh, but nodded, clearly grateful that the proverbial ice had been broken. He relaxed a bit against the back of the sofa and ran his hand along her calf familiarly. "No. Honestly I haven't done much beyond what we've done. Have you?"
Fred shook his head and she realised that, though she'd been expecting him to say yes, she was inordinately grateful that he hadn't. Not because she resented his abstract sexual history, that would be juvenile and prudish, but purely because it put them on more level footing.
"No." His cheeks flushed a bit further than they already had, but he gamely held her gaze. The vulnerability of it rattled her a little, but it also gave her a bizarre sense of privilege. Fred admittedly had a bit of a swaggering public persona, a confidence about him. He was just shy of notorious for it around the school, and in this sort of openly honest moment, she felt as though she'd been gifted a backstage pass to the most incredible circus on earth. "I've done more than what we've done, other stuff, but I've never had sex."
"Oh. Okay, brilliant. That's… that's good to know."
He must have interpreted her thoughtfulness as something that it wasn't, because he quickly expounded, "I'm not opposed though. I just… I mean, I realised nearly a year ago that you were the one that… Anyway, there wasn't anybody serious before, and there definitely hasn't been anyone else since."
She smiled at the sentiment of the statement, disjointedly expressed as it might have been, and nodded in what she hoped was a reassuring way.
"I'm not opposed either, but maybe we could try some of that 'other stuff' first?"
Fred nodded in return and offered an easy, reassured grin, tinted with just a little anticipation. There was a beat of silence and then his eyebrows suddenly and dramatically dropped. He looked back at her with a flicker of alarm.
"Did you – you didn't mean now, right?"
Hermione snorted inelegantly and straightened up, removing her legs from his lap.
"No, I did not mean now." She got off the sofa and cast a smoothing charm on her robes, praying that her hair wasn't too mussed. "I have rounds, and you're ten minutes from being out past curfew."
She crossed back, slinging her bag across her shoulder, and leaned over him with one hand braced beside him on the back of the sofa. He craned his neck slightly, capturing her lips in a parting kiss. Rather than pull away after though, she dithered, smirking against his mouth, and said quietly, "For the time being, I'll leave you in what I'm sure are your own very capable hands."