Work Text:
Redesigning the official Ministry Robes seems like the logical thing to do.
Hermione suggests it a month after she is elected Minister for Magic. There is something uncomfortable about wearing the same old robes that haunted those same old hallways during the war, back when the Ministry was a different place and the weight of cowardice broke everyone’s back. It is an appropriate way of signalling a new era, Hermione feels, dressing up everyone in different clothes and more vivid colours.
It really seems like a good idea.
And then Pansy shows up.
“I did not make a name for myself in the world of fashion design by dressing my models in brown tweed. Do show some taste, darling,” she tells Hermione in their first meeting.
Hermione wants to tell her she didn’t become the Minister by letting other people push her around (but she doesn’t because the word darling fills her chest and blocks her throat.)
It all goes downhill from here.
This is a list of everything Hermione hates about Pansy and it goes like this:
- Her silk-dark hair that falls in waterfall sheets down to her shoulders.
- Her peach-soft hands with carefully painted fingernails that glimmer in the dull lighting of Ministry board rooms.
- Her tight satin skirts and cream silk blouses and stupidly high heels that beat like drums on the flagstone floor.
- The way she chews the end of her quill when she’s thinking.
- The way she tells Hermione she has no taste with a laugh that sounds like summer rain.
Two months into the costume redesign and Hermione’s at the end of her wit.
She’s trying to work, she’s trying to sign all the important documents and have conferences with all the important people. She’s trying to negotiate a contract with the goblins and to pass laws to protect the rights of magical beings, and all the while, Pansy is working in an office just down the hall from her, with her peach-soft skin and her satin skirts that hug all her curves. Sometimes, Hermione hears the sound of her heels just outside her door and then can’t concentrate for the rest of the day.
If Hermione’s brain was a pie chart, 35% of it would be work and the remaining 65% would be bright cherry red and labelled PANSY PANSY PANSY PANSY. Some days, Hermione thinks there would be subcategories too: Pansy’s laugh and Pansy’s hair and that time she called me love and all the reasons I want to kiss her. Those days, in the pie chart of Hermione’s brain, work makes up less than 1% of the total, just a tiny, sharp blue splinter in a sea of red.
It does not get better.
First of all, Pansy’s preliminary drawings are beautiful, and the fabrics she brings in are gorgeous, and Hermione has to add a new subcategory to the pie chart that is labelled Pansy’s incredible taste. By that time, the pie chart is a large, red circle that looks like a sun or a blood orange or a tart Rome apple.
Then, there is the Ministry Christmas Party and Hermione gets a bit too drunk and follows Pansy at a distance for half of the evening. She plays the part of a magpie, she finds all the shiny small details about Pansy and steals them for herself, storing them safely in the vault of her mind to organise and categorise at will. Things like the way Pansy holds her champagne glass between her delicate fingers, and the way she throws her head back to laugh when Malfoy makes a joke. Like the way she smiles, easy and unguarded when she’s among friends, and how excited she seems when Zabini shows her his engagement ring.
If there was a Venn diagram in which one of the set was labelled all the things Hermione knows about Pansy and the other all the thing Hermione loves about Pansy, it would be a perfect circle. If you added a third set called All the reasons why Hermione wants to kiss Pansy, the shape of it would not change.
At some point during the Christmas party, it gets too heavy, staring at what can never be hers, so Hermione goes for a walk in what she suspects is one of the larger vehicle-depots in the Department of Magical Transportation but has been charmed for the occasion to look like gardens. She’s only half-dressed for the weather, a woollen coat thrown over her golden cocktail dress, and she lets the cold bite playfully at her ankles. She hopes it’ll numb the fire-want heart of hers, the pulsating star of desire behind her ribs.
There’s something unbearable about want, Hermione muses as snow crunches underneath her feet. The gardens have been charmed with a thick blanket of it. It is the only place in the whole of London where there’s snow, the rest of it—the Muggle part of it—is damp and drab, but someone must have decided the Ministry needed snow, in spite of the staunch British tradition of wet-rain Christmases. It’s beautiful and crisp, and Hermione’s toes in her sensible black flats feel wet and cold from walking in it.
Sensible black flats. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Hermione is all sensible black flats and earth brown tweed when Pansy is sky-high heels and sequined silk. How can Hermione expect someone like Pansy to look at her twice when Pansy catches stars and sews them onto dresses and all Hermione is is boring, boring, boring.
If Hermione were a number she’d be four or eight or twelve. She’d be even and reliable, the kind of number that’s hardworking and useful and that lets itself be neatly divided and multiplied. The kind of number everyone takes for granted and never thinks twice about.
Pansy, on the other hand, Pansy would be the square root of two; she’d be Pi or the Golden ratio. She’d be something unexplainable and mysterious. Something important and wonderful and always just out of grasp.
The first snowball lands just below Hermione’s left shoulder blade. She turns around fast, too fast. She slips and falls onto the snow.
The second snowball flies over Hermione’s right shoulder, narrowly missing her.
Pansy’s standing on the cobbled path that runs down the entire length of the garden with stupidly high heels and a snowball in her hand. She’s giggling, of all things, and the golden light pouring out of the bay windows shines like a halo around her waterfall-hair.
The third snowball hits Hermione square below the hairline, in the middle of the brow. And Pansy giggles again.
Hermione pushes herself to her feet, gathers snow in her hands. Her sensible black flats let her run faster than Pansy’s silver leather heels and soon, there is snow on Pansy’s waterfall hair, and she’s tugging at Hermione’s cape, and they tumble into the snow, laughing, laughing, laughing.
Imagine a graph. The x-axis is labelled how much Hermione hears Pansy’s laughter. Now, imagine the y-axis, running all the way from the bottom to the top of the paper. It is labelled how deeply in love with Pansy Hermione is. If such a graph existed, and if Hermione were to draw a line, it would only ever go up and slightly to the right.
The title of the graph, Hermione decides, would be: “Oh. Fuck.”
“Let’s make snow angels,” Pansy says when they’ve finally strewn all the peals of their laughter into the cold, crisp, starry darkness. They’re lying on the ground, almost touching, in a heap of drenched cheap polyester lamé and luxurious silk velvet. Hermione can feel Pansy’s breath on her neck and the pulsating star of ruinous want behind her ribs. She knows if she turns her head now, she’ll be done for. She knows Pansy will look gorgeous, even with her hair mussed up and snow on her coat.
“We’ll catch death if we stay outside,” Hermione says instead, “We should go and get ourselves inside. Maybe do a warming charm. A drying one, too.”
“We think of Maths as something abstract, that we can’t see or touch, but they’re really all around you,” Hermione’s mother once said, crouching down in front of the garden hedge with Hermione on her knee. “If you have a string of numbers starting with zero and one where each new number is the sum of the two preceding ones, we call it Fibonnaci’s sequence. Look, you can see it in snail shells or fern leaves. It makes beautiful things, don’t you think?”
Hermione only knew how to count to ten on her plump little fingers then, and she did not understand how sums worked at all, but she looked at the hard shell in her small hand and decided numbers meant that things were beautiful even though she couldn’t quite make sense of them.
Lying in the snow with Pansy, Hermione thinks of Fibonacci’s sequence, because Pansy is beautiful, and because she waits a second to push herself to her feet, then another, then two, then three and five. There is beauty in imagining time spiral on itself infinitely if she doesn’t let herself remember that she can’t stay here forever with her fingers almost touching Pansy’s shoulder and Pansy’s breath on her neck.
“See, this is why I told Draco I didn’t want to join you outside,” Pansy whispers, “you’re smart and you’re the freaking Minister for Magic, and I’m just a silly girl whose best claim to fame is that she makes pretty dresses.”
Hermione stops counting.
Fermat’s last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. It is called Fermat’s theorem because, in 1637, Pierre de Fermat speculated about it in the margin of Arithmetica, noting that the proof was too large to fit the margin. He never wrote the proof down.
For years, the theorem lay uncracked, although many tried their hands at it. Then, when Hermione was fifteen years old, it was finally solved. Hermione was fascinated by it, by what it must have felt like to finally find the proof, to finally write it down and test it out and realise: it works. You’ve done it. You’ve solved it.
Then, she’s in the snow with Pansy, and they’re almost touching (almost touching, almost touching) and Pansy says all those words in her pain-damp voice, and Hermione thinks she might understand it now.
Hermione takes a sharp breath in. It’s all or nothing, now. She turns her head, and Pansy’s staring at the sky with the snow all around her, and she looks like an angel or a dream, like something Hermione could never have, except she can. She can. Hermione can hardly believe it.
She moves her hand to the left, just slightly, and touches Pansy’s shoulder.
Pansy startles, then tenses. She doesn’t move, she doesn’t breathe. Hermione’s cold-ice fingers find her neck, her ear, the silk-softness of her waterfall hair.
Pansy lets out a small, shaky breath when Hermione’s hand comes into contact with her warm skin.
“Hermione,” she whispers.
“Pansy,” Hermione whispers back, and suddenly, they’re kissing.
There’s snow in their hair and on their hands, and they’re lying in the Ministry gardens, mere feet away from the party, and neither of them cares at all because they’re under the twinkling lights and the starry sky, and because they’re kissing, oh they’re finally, finally kissing.
“I didn’t think I stood a chance,” Pansy admits when they’re huddled together in the Ministry’s kitchen, one set of fingers clasped around a warm cup of cinnamon tea and the other one interlaced with Hermione’s. “You’re so smart, you’re so far out of my league. I always thought you found me very frivolous, with all my concerns for fabric choice and colour, when you spend the entire day talking about serious issues with important people.”
It’s late, and the party’s almost over. The house-elves have left them with a pot of tea and a plate of Christmas cookies, and they’re all alone, sitting on a table and looking at each other like one might look at an avalanche or a snowstorm, with awe and disbelief and admiration all at once.
“I didn’t think I stood a chance,” Hermione confesses back at her. “You’re so beautiful and capable, and I’d have dressed everyone in brown tweed given half the chance. I always thought you found me terribly dull and awfully plain, with my black flats and disaster hair.”
“Your hair is splendid,” Pansy says and kisses her again. It’s a short thing of a kiss, it tastes of newness and freedom, and Hermione leans into it because she finally can.
“Never let anyone tell you otherwise,” Pansy adds when they break apart. “You’re so beautiful, Hermione. You walk into that office every day with those sensible shoes of yours and not a hint of makeup on your face, and you’re still the most gorgeous thing in this entire building. I watched you through every meeting, you have no idea. And I’ve wanted you, oh I’ve wanted you. You can’t imagine how bad.”
Hermione thinks about her own incandescent want, about how unbearable she found it. She’ll tell Pansy about it, later, when they’re lying in bed, soft and satiated and so happy they could burst, but sitting in that kitchen, not entirely certain that the whole thing isn’t a dream, she doesn’t find the words.
“If you were a number, you’d be the square root of two,” she tells Pansy instead. Pansy kisses her again.
“Come home with me,” Pansy whispers into the shell of her ear when both their cups are empty and cold, and all the biscuits have been eaten. “I don’t want to let go of you yet.”
“Yes,” Hermione replies. “Yes.”
If Hermione were a number, she’d be the tiny little two of the squared symbol. Unassuming and plain, yet strong enough to make negatives into positives, strong enough to make others so much more than they are.
And if Pansy was the square root of two, together they’d be the only number to be both prime and even.
It’s a beautiful number, Hermione thinks. It’s the number of outcomes of a coin toss, and the number of roots in a quadratic equation, and the number of love-filled hearts between the two of them.