Chapter Text
MARCH 19
Set between chapters 10 and 11
The headquarters of the Tonks campaign were eerily quiet as the night settled in and the hands of the clock next to the entrance door crawled closer and closer to midnight. Lily let out a loud sigh that bounced off the walls of an otherwise empty conference room after she finally finished cleaning the newly acquired gigantic whiteboard (they recently had to upgrade to the biggest size the company could offer).
Lily gathered all the folders, documents, and notebooks in her hands and headed out, turning off the lights with her right elbow as she walked through the conference room door. The majority of the lights in the main open space were out, except for the lone desk white-lamp Hannah left on by accident—not a rare occurrence—and a soft trickle of warm yellow coming from the partially closed door of Hermione’s office.
The corners of her lips twitched in a small smile as Lily headed there, not even bothering to stop by her own office first to drop off all the paperwork. She slithered through the opening in the door and managed not to open it wider, yet it still gave the slightest creaking noise that alerted Hermione to her presence.
She was momentarily rendered speechless by the sight of Hermione: even exhausted after an almost eighteen-hour workday, she still looked utterly beautiful. She sat in the corner of the couch, curled up not unlike a cat, with the sleeves of her sage green button-down rolled up to her elbows. Her heels were kicked off, lying underneath the coffee table, and Lily could see Hermione’s dark beige blazer thrown over the back of her chair out of the corner of her eye.
“I would have knocked, but then I would risk dropping a mountain of papers right outside your door,” Lily said, smiling sheepishly.
“Don’t be silly—you, of all people, don’t need to knock, and you know it,” Hermione brushed her off. “Come on in—you can just drop these on my desk.”
And so Lily did. she moved a little too fast, eager to join Hermione. When she finally sat down next to her on a too-comfy couch, she let out a loud, relieved sigh.
“Tired?” Hermione asked, and Lily turned her head slightly to the right to be able to see an understanding smile on Hermione’s features.
“I feel like somebody ran over me with their car. T wice, ” Lily groaned. Ultimately, she knew what she was signing up for when she accepted Andromeda’s offer to join her presidential election campaign, but Jesus Christ.
Hermione let out a raspy laugh, her voice exhausted after so much talking during the day.
“It was probably Nymphadora.”
Lily gasped mockingly. “How did you know? ”
“You and Nymphadora metaphorically run one another over with your cars on a daily basis,” Hermione noted, giving her a very pointed look. “If Andy let you out of her sight for longer than five minutes, the two of you would probably get rid of the metaphorical part of the equation.”
Well, Lily couldn’t really argue with that.
They shared knowing smiles in perfect unison and fell silent. If Lily had to choose what she loved the most about their dynamic, it would be this—their ability to enjoy each other’s presence in complete silence in the midst of bursts of lively conversations. Some people were like the calm before the storm—Lily distinctly remembered both Narcissa and Marlene belonging to this type—but Hermione was much more rare. to Lily, she was the calm during the storm, and that was simply priceless. Working on a presidential campaign came with too many storms and all kinds of natural disasters to count, so Lily would never take for granted each chance she got to wither a storm with Hermione by her side.
“You've got your thinking face on,” Hermione drawled. “Penny for your thoughts?”
When Lily turned to look at Hermione, she found her in a slightly different position: arms laid on the back of the couch, her head resting on top of them. She was sporting a content little smile that Lily came to associate with their daily end-of-an-exhausting-workday conversations.
“I was thinking that you’re my serenity,” Lily answered truthfully, for it never crossed her mind to lie. “Before you joined the campaign, everything was so much more hectic, you know? It wasn’t until I got to experience these past two weeks with you that I realized how much peace you bring into my days.”
“Careful, or everybody is gonna think you’re playing favorites,” Hermione teased.
Lily could only roll her eyes in response. “Honey, I guarantee you, everybody here knows you’re the favorite. Probably because you also happen to be their favorite.”
“You flatter me,” Hermione hummed. Then, she straightened out in her seat, yawning, stretching her arms as she did. as she tilted her head slightly to the right to take a better look at Lily, Hermione winced.
“Are you okay?” Lily asked, immediately alarmed. she couldn’t help it—she found herself noticing even the slightest shift in Hermione’s mood or level of comfort.
“Uhum, don’t worry,” Hermione brushed her off, but relented under Lily’s pointed gaze. “I sort of—nodded off on top of my desk during lunch break, just for twenty minutes or so. Unfortunately, that was enough to fuck up my neck and shoulders.”
“Want a massage? It will help with the soreness,” Lily offered, because, apparently, she was absolutely hopeless and stupid, and had zero self-preservation skills.
“You would do that?” Hermione perked up. “If you did, I would owe you for the rest of eternity. or for the rest of the week, at the very least.”
Lily let out a laugh. “Turn around.”
Hermione did turn around, immediately scooting closer. Lily began with gentle massaging of Hermione’s shoulders before moving on and tilting her head slightly forward to be able to release some tension knots in the back of her neck. It seemed to be working, judging by the content little noises Hermione made as Lily softly yet firmly kneaded at her skin.
After five or maybe seven minutes, their position shifted as if by sheer force of gravity: Hermione’s back was suddenly slumped against her chest, and Lily’s hand moved up from the back of her neck to softly scratch at Hermione’s scalp
“That's really nice,” Hermione whispered. “Don’t stop.”
“Yeah?”
Hermione hummed in agreement. “Are you enjoying it? Because I certainly am.”
Lily let out an incredulous little laugh. “I am, in fact, enjoying it very much.”
“Good.” Hermione swallowed, suddenly tensing up as if in quiet apprehension; Lily couldn’t help but frown. “Because there’s something I need to tell you, and you’re not going to like it. So it’s probably best if you are doing something you’re enjoying when I tell you.”
Somehow, Lily instantly knew who Hermione would be talking about. Hermione was indeed right—she wouldn’t like it one bit.
“What did he do ?” Lily seethed, not even trying to contain the traces of irritation in her voice. Yet, her ministrations on Hermione’s scalp still remained tentative and gentle, completely unaffected by her change in demeanor, and perhaps that was why Hermione melted into Lily even further.
“Oh, nothing much, I promise. He just—insisted that he escorts me to the gala,” Hermione muttered.
Lily could feel her wince as the words fell from her lips, because it was, in fact, a little too much from Ronald.
Lily was supposed to be Hermione’s date for the gala—for work, of course; but they planned on sticking together throughout the event, doing some networking with potential campaign donors, then stealing too much champagne from the waiters and trashing the Black campaign and Narcissa Black every chance they got. Lily had to admit that she was more than looking forward to it.
“I'm sorry,” Hermione said quietly, picking up on Lily’s line of thought. “I wish it could’ve been you.”
And oh.
To Lily, that sentence felt exceptionally loaded, full of double meanings and words left unsaid; yet she knew, instinctively, that it was much simpler for Hermione: she genuinely wanted Lily to be her escort instead of Ronald, and that was it—nothing more, nothing less.
“I wish it could’ve been me, too,” Lily whispered, and if she knew she meant something larger, grander than simply being Hermione’s escort, she chose to ignore it; hide it somewhere deep within where nobody—especially Lily, especially Hermione—wouldn’t be able to reach it.
They fell silent once again, so Lily resumed her gentle ministrations on Hermione’s scalp and listened to the younger woman’s quiet humming. She got lost in it entirely; so lost, in fact, that she didn’t hear the sound of heels on hardwood floors before a familiar voice finally reached her ears, bursting the Hermione-only bubble Lily had found herself in.
“Hey, Mione, do you need a—”
The two of them sprang apart, startled by the sudden interruption in a near-empty office. For some reason, Lily was not at all surprised to see Nymphadora on the doorstep of Hermione’s office, the door fully opened now.
“Dora,” Lily breathed out, “what are you doing here?”
Nymphadora made a show of narrowing her eyes in quiet suspicion and glancing between the two of them for twenty or thirty seconds. She found what she was looking for in one of their faces, it seemed, for she looked calmer—not as affronted—when her eyes landed back on Lily.
“Mom forgot her senator phone in her office,” Nymphadora explained with an easy, fond smile as she waved her hand with what must have been Andromeda’s senator phone. “I was picking it up when I saw that the light was on. Was pretty sure Hermione nodded off, so I thought I would offer her a ride.”
Lily fought the urge to frown in obvious displeasure. Nymphadora’s offer seemed unusually nice and would surely be much appreciated if Hermione was the only person left in the headquarters, but she wasn’t. Lily was going to offer Hermione a ride or call her an uber, but she hadn’t had a chance to do either of those before Nymphadora showed up.
“What do you say, Hermione?” Nymphadora asked, looking past Lily.
Lily whipped around, her gaze drawn to Hermione seemingly against her will. She watched as Hermione gave Nymphadora a slightly reserved yet grateful smile before she said, “Thank you, but I was actually thinking of crashing at Lily’s?”
It was a half-statement, half-question, and the letter part was certainly directed at Lily as Hermione’s warm brown eyes flickered to her. A burst of warmth, much like from sitting right by the fireplace on a cold winter day, spread through Lily’s chest as she nodded a little too eagerly.
Hermione broke into a smile.
“Oh?” Nymphadora asked, and Lily could almost hear the traces of quiet apprehension and suspicion in her voice. “I thought you lived with your boyfriend?”
Lily watched the way the light in Hermione’s eyes dimmed, her shoulders slumping at the reminder. She turned to face Nymphadora and gave her the best glare she could muster; to her credit, Dora was baffled enough to take a small step back.
“She does,” Lily replied, unamused. “But we have a lot of things to go through in preparation for the gala—coordinating the strategy for buttering up potential donors, as well as Bathilda, and working out the details of Andy’s upcoming public appearances—so we need to be back here by five in the morning.”
“And it’s convenient that Lily lives so close to the headquarters,” Hermione chimed in, keeping her voice even.
Nymphadora narrowed her eyes at them but relented.
“Whatever you say. Anyway, I will see you tomorrow,” she said. “But, unlike the two of you, I'm not a workaholic and won’t be showing up before eight in the morning.”
Nymphadora saluted them goodbye and flitted out of the office as quickly as she came in minutes ago. Hermione and Lily remained seated, and both of them held their breath as they listened to the sound of Nymphadora’s retreating steps. Only when the entry doors of the campaign headquarters opened and then closed did they breathe out in some strange sort of baffled relief.
When Lily finally risked a glance at Hermione after, she was met with a forlorn, thoughtful expression normally reserved for either anything ron-related or their strategizing sessions in the conference room.
“Hey,” Lily called out, scooting closer to her on the couch. “Penny for your thoughts?” she reached out with her right hand, softly lifting Hermione’s chin with the back of her index and middle fingers.
As their eyes met, Hermione couldn’t help but smile, yet the thoughtful look still remained.
“Nymphadora is right, you know,” Hermione muttered, catching Lily’s hand in hers and dropping it in her lap. She looked down and started fidgeting with the gold bracelet on Lily’s wrist, moving the emerald-green charm from one place to another. “I do live with my boyfriend. I just—shouldn’t I want to come home to him after a long workday? Shouldn’t I seek his company when I'm exhausted? Ask for comfort?”
“Not when his company does the exact opposite of what it should do,” Lily replied, her voice soft as feathers. “Think about it. What makes you feel better after an exhausting day at work?”
“Talking to you, spending time with you.” Hermione’s response was immediate, as if she didn’t need a single second to think about it. “I suppose, if I'm your serenity while we are working, you are my serenity when we are finally done.”
Hermione looked up to meet Lily’s eyes, and she couldn’t help but smile in response.
“Aren’t we one hell of a dream team?” Lily asked, grinning.
Hermione let out a little laugh. “That we are.”
“Okay, so,” Lily began, getting up from the couch and heading towards Hermione’s desk. “I still need to drop off this mountain of paperwork at my office and pick up some of my things, so how about we meet outside in a few minutes?”
“Works for me,” Hermione chimed in.
After a brief exchange of smiles, Lily loaded her arms with what felt like a million folders. She walked to her office, her steps unusually fast, and didn’t even bother turning on the light—by now, she knew the layout of the space she spent most of her day in better than she knew where everything was at her apartment. She put down the paperwork on her desk, deciding to deal with it tomorrow; then quickly packed her MacBook and planner in her handbag before throwing a beige trench coat over her shoulders.
Lily headed for the exit, scrambling to get the headquarters keys out of her handbag. As she stepped outside, breathing in a lungful or crisp night air, her eyes immediately landed on Hermione. She was leaning on the side of Lily's car with a content smile.
“A walk or a car ride?” Lily inquired as she turned around and locked the doors to the headquarters with practiced ease.
“A walk,” Hermione muttered, coming closer and looping her arm through Lily’s. She tugged slightly, and so they started slowly moving in the direction of Lily’s street. “I need those seven minutes of fresh air to sober up.”
“Drinking at work, Ms. Granger?” Lily teased, shooting her a sly grin. “My, my, who would’ve thought.”
Hermione rolled her eyes. “I did not mean sobering up in that way—and don’t pretend you don’t have four different stashes of whiskey right next to your desk.”
Lily didn’t need to feign surprise at that one.
“How do you even know that?” she asked, her jaw hanging open in utter disbelief.
Hermione smirked. “Believe it or not, Nymphadora told me where I could find it on my first day.”
“I'm gonna kill her,” Lily groaned.
“Now, murdering your boss’ daughter sounds a little counterproductive to me,” Hermione quipped, “so I would strongly advise against that. But you do you.”
Hermione shrugged with feigned nonchalance, and the two of them burst out laughing not even two seconds later. As if drunk on laughter and smiles, as well as too exhausted from their too-long workday, Hermione leaned into Lily’s side even more, as if afraid her legs would give out any second. Lily ignored the tiny little flutter in her chest and made sure to keep a strong hold on Hermione’s hand.
It didn’t take them long to Lily’s place—as Hermione commented, she was, indeed, a genius for renting out an apartment so close to the headquarters for the duration of Andromeda’s presidential campaign. To Hermione’s utter despair, the lift was out of order, so the two of them were forced to carry their heels as they climbed the staircase to the fifth floor.
By the time Lily unlocked the door to her apartment, Hermione was half asleep to the point of almost face-planting into Lily’s ’Welcome Home!’ doormat. Thankfully, Lily was there to grab her wrist and tug.
Their bodies collided, and Lily effectively ended up being pressed to a now-closed door. She let her heels drop to the floor along with her apartment keys. The charms on the silver-colored keychain she brought from Italy last year gave a loud clank as they hit the hardwood floor, suddenly startling Hermione.
Lily hummed quietly, settling her hand on Hermione’s waist and snaking her other hand on Hermione’s stomach, somewhat afraid Hermione would topple over and end up sprawled on her living room floor.
“If I didn’t know you better, I would've thought you were, in fact, drunk,” Lily muttered, slowly sitting Hermione down on the edge of her bed.
Then, she headed to her closet, opening a drawer and finding a spare comfy t-shirt and shorts for Hermione to sleep in. She was just fishing for a pair of spare underwear and socks—just in case Hermione’s feet got cold during the night—when Hermione’s words had effectively frozen her in place and time.
“Just tired.” Hermione yawned. “Is that the guest room? It smells different. Like you.”
Lily was glad that her back was turned to Hermione, for it was impossible for the younger woman to see the blush coloring Lily’s cheeks. Granted, even if they were facing each other, Hermione would have probably been too tired to notice much of anything—apparently, anything other than the smell permeating Lily’s bedroom.
“And what do I smell like?” Lily inquired, unable to hold back the traces of curiosity that laced the gentle syllables of every uttered word. She held her breath, waiting in quiet reverence.
“Like apples or pears in winter, fresh and crisp—no, actually, like lilies in spring. or a little bit of both,” Hermione mumbled. The words were followed by a quiet thud ; as Lily cast a quick glance over her shoulder, it became clear that staying in a vertical position was clearly too much for Hermione—she ended up falling backward, spread out on Lily’s bed.
“It's my perfume,” Lily explained, putting the makeshift pajamas by Hermione’s side. “And no, it’s not the guest room—the bed is not made there, so you’re going to spend the night in my room.”
Hermione opened her eyes just a crack.
“And you?” she asked, confused.
“I'm gonna make the bed and then sleep in the guest room,” Lily explained, letting the corners of her lips twitch in a small smile. “I should go, and you should sleep.”
“No!” Hermione rushed to say, suddenly alert. She sat up, startling Lily, and grabbed her wrist; her touch was soft yet firm. “It’s your bed. Don’t go. Stay. Let's share it.”
Lily allowed herself the luxury of looking into Hermione’s unfocused chestnut-brown eyes as she caressed the underside of her wrist.
“You’re so sleep-deprived that a passerby would think we were heading home from a bar , not from an office,” Lily chastises. “So forgive me for taking everything you say with a grain of salt, Ms. Blood Alcohol Concentration of At Least 0.05 Percent.”
Hermione gave her a slightly suspicious side-eye. “But I didn’t drink alcohol today.”
Lily let out a soft exasperated sigh, choosing to ignore a surge of warmth spreading through her chest like wildfire at the image in front of her.
“There are numerous studies done on the topic,” Lily explained. “Moderate sleep deprivation produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication.”
Hermione blinked once, then twice, looking up at Lily as if she had just told her penguins can fly. It took everything in Lily not to burst out laughing right that instant.
“Can you say that again but… slower?”
“Thank you for proving my point,” Lily smirked.
“Technically, you didn’t. I lied. I stole some whiskey from your secret stash while you were still stuck in the conference room,” Hermione informed her. The exhaustion, it seemed, was put on the back burner and briefly replaced with an incredibly adorable sort of smugness.
Lily let out a fond laugh.
“And my initial point was—you’ve had very little sleep lately, and your brain is so tired that it feels just the way it would feel after a few alcoholic drinks. Your decision-making abilities are not at its finest right now, especially if we add that whiskey into the mix, so I'm gonna spend the night in the guest room.”
“There's this person who slept slept with me when my alcohol concentration level was much, much higher than 0.05, so don’t worry about it,” Hermione brushed her off. “It’s—it’s your bed. You’re entitled to it.”
Her words, however, had the opposite effect.
“Hermione,” Lily started, careful as if not to spook her, “did you mean to tell me that you were—taken advantage of when you were intoxicated?”
Hermione blinked once, then twice, as if she wasn’t sure of the answer herself.
“No, I mean, yeah. But it’s neither here nor there. Also totally unrelated to our conversation.”
“Was it him? ” Lily could barely force the words out, yet was ready to applaud herself for how well she managed to contain her fury. While she remained calm and collected on the outside, soft and gentle with Hermione like usual, on the inside, she burned with thinly veiled rage even at the tiniest possibility of—of—
“What? No, Lily, no, it’s not—it’s not Ron, I promise. It was years ago, when I was still studying at Stanford, and it’s in the past, okay?” Hermione rambled, suddenly much more alert than she had been in the past twenty minutes.
She tugged on Lily’s wrist that she still held loosely in her grasp, and Lily obliged, sitting down next to Hermione.
“It’s just—don’t go. Stay. It’s your bed.”
Lily frowned. “Does that mean you want to sleep in the guest room?”
Hermione let out an exasperated breath that bordered on being an annoyed groan.
“No, that’s not—I mean that I want you to stay . In this bed. Where I will also sleep,” Hermione explained, her words sharp and existent, accompanied by distracted fidgeting with the emerald-green charm on Lily’s bracelet.
“What do you—“ Lily started, yet the realization dawned on her before she could finish the question. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh, ” Hermione mocked, not unkind. “It's just—at my place, I sleep in the same bed with the person who makes it a point to mention how disappointed he is in me first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. I would just like to, to—to feel—“
Hermione gestured wildly with her free hand, as if the feeling she was speaking of was so all-encompassing she couldn’t possibly put it in the confines of any language. Lily smiled oh so softly, suddenly so full of the same all-encompassing, inexplicable feeling. They sat in silence for a while, simply looking at each other as a quiet sort of understanding settled between them.
“There is a spare toothbrush under the sink,” Lily spoke up, clearing her throat. She freed her hand from Hermione’s grasp and stood up, instinctively straightening out tiny wrinkles on her black slacks. “I will go fetch our chargers while you get ready for bed.”
And so she did; and if her hands were trembling as she fumbled for two identical chargers inside both of their bags, she chose to ignore it. As she passed by the kitchen, she grabbed two bottles of water before heading back to the bedroom. She deposited the water on both of the nightstands, put their phones to charge—it wouldn’t do them any good to sleep past their five in the morning alarms—and took her favorite set of comfy pajamas
As Lily registered the tell-tale sound of running water in the shower coming from the master bathroom, she headed for the guest room, silently thanking Andy for insisting that the guest bathroom should always be fully stocked. She brushed her teeth, took a quick shower, and changed her clothes, unable to stop the content little sigh that slipped past her lips as soon as the soft cotton of her oversized yale t-shirt settled against her bare skin.
She came back to her room to find Hermione shifting her weight from one foot to another in some sort of penguin-like way as she stared at the queen-sized bed in front of her.
Lily smiled. “You can pick any side you want. It doesn’t matter much to me.”
Hermione broke into a smile and hurried to the left side of the bed. It wasn’t long before both of them were settled comfortably, ready to catch the four-something hours of sleep that night—the most they could afford.
And despite the fact that Lily fell asleep on the right side of the bed for the first time in decades, it would be the best night of sleep she had in weeks.