Something a little different. Not quite as heavy, as RL has been heavy enough, lately. For a prompt given by Cordelia McGonagall, because sometimes one needs prompting. Thank you, Cords, for all the things.

Their Apparition into Casualty lacks a certain elegance, Harry thinks, what with Wood's fourteen stone losing both legs at once, then slumping, then dragging Harry down with a hand about the neck. Wood's word, "elegant." Trotted out for everything, from favourite evasive rolls, to the sleek lines of the new Wischen ZS, to the decorative tooling of this season's official league Snitches. Wood yanks a bit harder, tries to right himself, and Harry catches the mediwitch's eye as he takes a knee, winces as Wood moans out another bar of "The Scotsman's Kilt" too near his ear, the tune in half-time, low and sorrowful as a dirge.

"Went head to head with a mate," Harry says to the mediwitch's side-eye, and then hopes she realizes he means this literally. Because, now that he's here and peering about and not seeing the true reason he'd volunteered to escort Wood's sorry arse, he'd rather not spend his morning recounting exactly how the whole ridiculous incident played out. He'd missed most of the build-up, anyway, being faced in the opposite direction and focused on mending the ripped palm of one of his new gloves. But the bits he'd heard, the loud bits twanging off the lockers, had all to do with Katie Bell, and Oliver being "too kaned to tend his bird," and Gaz "swooping in like a fooking, rotten buzzard." There'd been a swollen silence, and then the sound of too many things colliding, and when Harry turned to look, Gaz was sliding against the lockers, both hands tented over his nose and blood sheeting down his lips, while Oliver shuffled backward, fists still clenched, the skin of his forehead split wide like a red, toothless mouth.

All this before half past five in the a.m., and when the team Healer, after taking one look at Oliver's erratic pupils, and smelling the distillery stink still punching off him - when the team Healer said the words, "St. Mungo's", something like the sound of a tiny, brass bell had pinged, bright and clear, in Harry's head, and he'd strategically elbowed one of the reserve beaters, a big tosser named Bourke, right out of the way, arranged Wood's arm over his own shoulders, and Disapparated out of there faster than Wood could sing ring ding diddle.

The mediwitch summons a gurney, and Harry helps her help Wood to his feet while she says soft, encouraging things about personal dignity, and how it is always better to have a bit of help to sit on the gurney as opposed to quite a lot of help to roll onto it from the floor. Wood nods the short, jerky nod of a scolded child then reclines back, adrenaline-spent and drowsy, and Harry thinks about the word "dignity" as the mediwitch spells both of Wood's dangling left limbs to stay aboard so he doesn't snag on anything as they transport him to a room. The mediwitch turns her back and her full attention to moving Wood away, and Harry, stripped of his role as "altruistic teammate" must revert to "scruffy bastard with no real business hanging about the hospital," and be off, and the thought of leaving here without having seen her makes him ache, suddenly, and in strange places. Red poison darts in both shoulders, his chest, the base of his spine.

And, of course, it was barmy to expect she'd be right here, exactly when and where they arrived. It was absolutely, barking mad. But then, exceeding impossible expectations has sort of always been a forte of hers. A gift she gave, which - Harry now sees - he's come to depend upon, but has never properly appreciated.

"Sorry," Harry says, attempting to catch the mediwitch's eye one last time, "I know you're terribly busy, but...do you know when the latest cohort will be in today?"

"Cohort." Hermione's word. The one that sort of hurts when she says it, being it no longer refers to a thing of which he is a part. And it must sound like it hurts when he says it, too, because when the mediwitch turns, she appraises him top to toe with the same clinical precision she'd afford a damaged specimen laid out upon a slab.

"Right," she says, all business. "Sometimes the early ones come in between quarter after and half past six. You might try waiting by the commissary."

Harry thanks her, then thanks her again. And just when he's turning, just as he's exhaling and the odd but pleasant tumult in his chest is threading out, the cool blue antidote to the red ache from before, just as his feet start off in the other direction, Oliver's slurred "go get'er, tiger!" rings loud as jackpot cherries, bouncing off every surface of the gleaming, tiled corridor.

…

Forget wards and wand work - the true healing miracles seem to be happening right here at the hospital commissary. Harry stands well out of the way, watching as the dead-eyed, pale, and empty-handed auto-pilot themselves over the worn path through the double swinging doors, only to emerge minutes later, alert and cheeks hale behind paper cups of steaming liquid pressed to contented, rosy lips. Harry drains his own cup, thinks maybe it is something in the water, because today he knows her hands before he sees her face, knows the particular structure of her tendons and bones, recognizes her precise shade of chilled, pink skin.

She's cradling the book on both arms, head down, utterly absorbed. Harry's just tossed his empty and is starting in her direction when Terry Boot materializes from the crowd behind her, says, "Oi, there's a familiar face," then nudges her gently with an elbow, giving Harry that blokey, upward brow/chin lift combo, that universal "got your back, mate" signal, and Harry wonders for the second time today if he really is just that transparent.

Their gazes shift from Terry to each other at the same moment, and the way Hermione's eyes light one second then cloud the next reminds Harry where they are, sets his mouth and body bolting.

"Hey. Hey, it's alright. It's fine. Everyone's fine. I was just…" It's been weeks and weeks since he's seen her, touched her. His arms jerk forward then retreat, graceless, unpracticed on where to reach or how to navigate around the bloody enormous book she's clutched to her chest. Pockets. Pockets would be best. The practice uniform doesn't have pockets. Too late. His hands skim his hips, hang at his sides like fish on a string, clammy and twitching. "I was just here."

"Just here? Right. Whose is that, then?" She nods to the dark smear down the right side of his jersey and takes a step closer, searches his hairline for traces of blood.

"Wood's. All Wood's." Harry says, pulling his wand from his sleeve, then siphoning the stain from his jersey. "I'm sure he's fine now, though. The mediwitch from Casualty had him well in hand."

Hermione grins, her eyes finally settling on his face.

"Did she? Good. Was there a smash-up on the pitch?"

"Smash up in the locker room. Wood thought to use his own head as a bludger."

"And why would he do that?"

Harry shrugs. "Bloke stuff."

She turns her face, gives him the best vantage of her raised brow. "This wouldn't have been about a woman, would it?"

"Might have been," Harry says.

She tuts. "Ridiculous."

She's still smiling in a way, and her eyes are still on his, and he can't pin it down, this unwavering gaze. He built an immunity to her usual Scrutiny years ago, but this, this is another strain of Looking, entirely. A new, virulent species - prone to colonize and weaken soft tissues, and Harry can feel it multiply exponentially as the moment stretches, batter at his abdominal wall, wage attack in his groin, in the long muscles of his thighs, his knees. It's too much, and it's not enough, and the urge to do something rash tingles like an unspoken spell, pure intent, just beneath the skin of his fingertips. Time and place, though, he thinks, time and place. He swallows, peers down, touches her book with one knuckle. "What's this, then?"

"This." She looks down to the thing filling her arms. "This is gross anatomy. My every waking breath. The entirety of the human body, labeled and defined." She swipes a hand over the cover, an animate illustration of the circulatory workings of a bisected, skinless torso, then takes a deep breath, sighs it out.

"You don't sound so keen," Harry says. Weary. She actually sounds weary, and Harry thinks this must be a first, or, at the very least, a second, Hermione worn out on a subject of study.

"Oh, it's not that." She looks up from the book. "It's fascinating, but…" She shakes her head. "It's requisite, a foundation, and I suppose I'm just anxious to get to the practical applications. The exam is Monday, and whoever performs satisfactorily will get to move on to the next tier of study, so, hopefully..."

"Hopefully?" He interrupts, throws his head back, incredulous. "Hermione…"

"Hopefully," she continues, "next Tuesday I shall be able to say farewell to my cadaver, and finally get to work with the living."

"Oh. I can see why you might be anxious for that." How she does it, handles dead flesh and then sleeps without nightmares, Harry can't conceive. "So, the exam is Monday?"

"Yes."

"And you'll be revising all weekend?"

She cuts her eyes at him like he's mad, then smiles. "Of course."

"Maybe I could help." Pockets. He really, really wishes he had those pockets.

She shuffles a step back, looks down on her book. And he can see it coming, this thing she's taken to doing since the war, since she went one way and he another - claiming dullness, begging off from company.

"It's terribly kind of you to offer, Harry, but it's hardly exciting stuff. I'd never recommend it as a way to spend a Friday evening, if you don't have to."

"Right," he says. "Unlike all those scintillating hours you spent bent over my Charms essays. And my Astronomy charts. And the yards and yards of parchment for Potions...my Transfiguration homework..." Her teeth press into her bottom lip, and he lets up, knows he's won.

"Shouldn't I get a say how I collect on this debt you're repaying?"

"As long as you say me, you, and revising 'the entirety of the human body' tonight - sure." It flops out of his mouth, just like that, far greasier than he'd intended. He blinks a few fast blinks then opts to play it off, smiles as the skin melts from his face.

Hermione snorts, lips quirking up at the corners.

"Alright, then, if you insist. Seven, at my flat. You bring the take-away, though. And no meat, please. I'm off meat at the moment." Then she's on her tip-toes, book corner jabbing into his chest, the touch of her lips so near his ear as to leave him shivering, every follicle puckered, every fine hair erect.

…..

If asked to put a point on it, a black dot with "START" blocked across in big, white letters, Harry would map it back to last December, back to Platform 9 ¾ , and the sight of Hermione's bare fingers disappearing into Ron's giant, gloved paw. "Paw." Harry's own word, then, and none too kind. An epiphanic whip-crack of a word that had sent him straight back to Puddlemere's deserted pitch for a long fly and a good, hard think.

Which hadn't helped at all, in hindsight. Empty hands and prickling sense memories weren't things to be thought through or flown away from. And now, nigh on a year later, he sits at her tiny table, her books and parchments stacked around their half-empty soup bowls, his hands still tingling, paralysed by the pleasure chemicals bubbling through his hindbrain at the sight of her pacing, telling him all she knows about the spinal cord.

"A tubular bundle of nerve fibers extending from the foramen magnum and continuous with the medulla…" she recites. The life-scale model she's conjured glows in the corner, floats, cool white and willowy, a primal creature born at the bottom of the sea. Nerves, she'd said, the adult human body has literally miles of them. Branching, forking, radiating. Thousands of open receptors spidering through the skin, all seeking stimuli.

Her word, "seeking." Harry hopes she meant it just for him in some way. An oblique reference to what he does on the pitch, or maybe…maybe something else. Maybe something she wants. One of those somethings he forbids himself to ever play through in his head. One of those somethings that still seem to crop up anyway in his dreams - still-frames of hands and flushed skin and curls, detailed, bold-bright.

He shifts backward in his chair, exhales, drags his eyes away from her mouth. One of these diagrams must be gruesome enough to stem this abrupt shuttling of blood, and his gaze casts about over things labeled "caval and azygos systems" and "hip joint" and "descending tracts", only to land on an image of the inner structure of the neck - exposed bones and muscles stretched long as the head tips, offertory, to bare the underside of the jaw. A pose so please, take this, Harry can't help the animal noise lodged low in his throat.

"Pardon?" She says, takes a step toward him.

"Oh." He looks up, coughs, grasps the back of his neck with one hand, flexes the bicep to redirect blood flow. "Nothing."

"You...you growled."

"Did I?"

He did, like a street mongrel defending a shank bone, and yet she's still sauntering his way, transmitting that same, infectious thing as in the hospital corridor.

"Are you alright? Fighting to keep awake, yet?" She smiles, rueful, then sighs and vanishes the model from the corner. "I told you - this is all really quite..."

"Fascinating," he finishes. "'Fascinating' was your word, if I recall. And I reckon it is. Even if most of it's miles over my head."

"I did say that, didn't I, 'fascinating.'" She's beside him now, hip canted into the corner of the tiny table. She runs her finger along the illustration in the book beside her, caresses - actually caresses, Harry notes - the strip of thin red lines making up a curve of muscle connecting jaw to collarbone. "I suppose it couldn't hurt to review the basics, though, now that you mention it. A lesson, perhaps. Reinforce what I know by teaching you. Show, instead of just tell. That is if you're up for it, of course…a practical study of the simpler systems…"

Her eyes drift back to his, and for a second he's a little lost in their depths, caught up mapping constellations in the reflection of the faerie lights wrapped around the potted rosemary she keeps in her kitchen - a lioness, stalking, an orchid in full bloom, a wild-haired maiden mounted upon a rearing stag.

"Right. Let's do that," he says, quick and low, less an agreement than a demand. Hermione cocks a brow and straightens, shoulders and spine shifting to their sternest posture. A ready taskmistress with a rosebud mouth. This close, she smells of dark, tangled forest - green, and wet, and witchy.

"Then if you'll stand just here, please, we'll do the skeletal system." She moves two slow steps back, brandishes her wand. "Shall we start at the bottom and work our way up? I'll keep it to the nursery school version this first go round." She says, gives a little wink to Harry's put-on glare. "Ready, then? Phalanges…metatarsals…"

A low-watt tingle in his toes, then through the arches of his feet. And maybe he hadn't been ready, exactly, having imagined a more hands-on, outside-the skin approach, but this, he has to admit, is quite interesting, too. He looks at the ceiling, tries to imagine the words writing themselves there in her script as she speaks them, only he can't seem to focus on anything but this feeling she's spelling into his tissues, its fair approximation of the same pin-prick neediness as in his hands. It builds up inside him, from his ankles, along the outside of his shins, then inside, then around his kneecaps, then up his thighs, and he only realizes he's lost track of her voice when he hears the obvious upturn of her mouth around the word, "pelvis," has to mask his full-body shudder with a quick shuffling of feet.

"Is this how they teach all the new healers?" he asks aloud, then to himself thinks, And if so, how are you all not shagging each other blind after lessons?

"It's more a method of my own making," she answers, then, interpreting his hngh noise as invitation to carry on, says, "spinal column…" And, oh, that's...that's really something, that is. Like gripping his broom in both hands and flying a fast, straight climb into a midnight sky. Behind him, she says, "scapula...," then, "ribs…" Through the buzz of pleasure, he can feel her steps through the floorboards, circling back until she's in front of him, again, standing face to face. "Clavicle…, " she says, then, "ster…sternum..."

He waits, breath held, for the touch of her magic over his heart, looks down when it doesn't come to find her wand hand sinking.

"You know...you…" she says, takes a step back. "You were sort of my first patient."

Yawning emptiness where she just stood, and the tinge of awful in her voice. Her gaze is fixed on his shirt, right where the breastbone would be underneath, and it all comes back, a black lead ball clunking into the pillow fluff she's spun in his gut.

The night he checked out on her.

The night she was the only one around to draw the bad things from his skin.

...my first patient.

True. But not how she thinks.

She'd been there, tending his hurts, from the start. And even if she doesn't recall, Harry can't let it pass without reminding her he does.

"Yeah," he says, raises his right hand to see the spidery, white words - to show her. "Murtlap."

She blinks, memories recalibrating as she stares at the back of his fist. Her head tilts, her lips part. Her brow smooths, and it's like a dark veil dissolving, like pink, dawn light warming her face.

"Yeah," she repeats, softly. "Murtlap."

She glances over the table, then, lays her wand in a page gutter dividing two slick lungs from a pulsing, red bulb of a heart. Three steps forward, and now she's well into his space, empty-handed, witchy scent rising, catalysing the alchemy in his gut - dead-weight lead bubbling into a flocks-worth of fluttering gold wings.

Her fingers graze his hand where it hangs at his side, thumb finding the pale line of letters, stroking across it once, slow and light, then swiping back over the ridges of tendon and bone, reading how he's put together under his skin. Her fingers are exactly as warm as what he'd made up in his mind to remember, and through the dusky fuzz she's brushed up in his brain, Harry begins to wonder what comes next, and is their lesson over, and had she ever craved to touch him the way he has craved her touch, when she coaxes his hand to open against hers, drags her fingertips over his palm, and quietly utters the word, "metacarpals..."

"Proximal phalanx...," she says, eyes fixed to his, fingers sliding down the underside of his own. "Middle phalanx…," she says, "distal…" The fleshy pads meet, his on hers, four pulsing points of contact. Harry crooks his fingertips to capture her there, a little bit of stay, and it's not until that moment, when they all begin to fall away, that he sees the myriad questions hidden in her gaze: Do you…? Can we…? Am I…?

He almost tells her everything, then - about his Seeker's dreams, and all the midnight flights afterward. About "START" points, and the spasms in his own flesh every time he watched her hands land somewhere on Ron. It's all right there, a breath hung in his throat. But then her fingertips come to rest on the inside of his wrist, and he knows he doesn't have to say a thing when Hermione's clever enough to count it out for herself - want,want,want,want pounding through his veins at one hundred beats per minute.

"Ulna…," she says, fingers traveling, and then, "radius…," with a roll of her thumb. Her eyes fall from his, and Harry watches her watch herself touch him, watches the tip of her tongue wet her lips and the colour rise in her cheeks as her palm slides over the contours of his upper arm. "Humerus…," she trembles out, then, "clavicle…."

Everything is swollen - time, sounds, the light, his skin, his heart. Hermione's fingers, both hands, now, skim the day's stubble dotting the curve of his lower jaw. "Mandible…," she says, thumbs rubbing crescents on his chin. And she doesn't seem put off, but Harry wishes he'd thought to shave after practice. Wishes he'd been bothered, made an extra effort for her. I didn't know, he wants to say, I wasn't sure...but when he parts his lips to speak, he's suddenly struck dumb as her middle fingers stroke volts into the points of bone beneath his earlobes. "Mastoid process…," she says, moving closer, pushing into his hair, her touch stilling at the curve of his skull.

She can't see her hands anymore, so she looks at his lips, instead. Harry's own hands pulse, hang fisted at his sides, total self-denial being the only viable form of restraint.

"Occipital…" she whispers, eyes flicking up to meet his - now, or never? - and Harry finally bends, breaks, his mouth slotting with hers before she can stretch to meet him halfway.

He steps into her, then, hands loosed, seeking, searching out all the things about her his eyes weren't built to see. Delicate bones and a limbre spine, the throb of her heartbeat against his own chest, how she's constructed to curve into one perfect handful of flesh after another.

Drive and instinct. Noise and heat. He seems to have had his eyes closed for a very long while, and somehow they've ended up in the kitchen, his glasses in the sink, Hermione perched on the counter, nipping that point of bone beneath his earlobe and scrabbling at his belt. Harry wants to commit every second to memory, every goose-bump he raises opening her cardigan, every brush of her knuckles, the sound of their breath bouncing off each other's skin. It's simply not possible, though, not in this state between Doing and Wanting. Not when the way they're touching makes him want everything at once - to fly, and cry, to fuck her in a cocoon of red sheets, to lay against her, pink and sweat-damp, his hot, prickly face buried in the curve of her neck, eyes closed, just breathing…

Hermione draws her fingers down the bare skin of his back, sucks his tongue the same languid way he's known her to suck the occasional toffee, the glassy tip of a sugar quill. "Savouring" would be the right word, like he's her after-dinner sweet, and Harry slows his frenzied groping, rests his hands at her hips, digs his fingers into the seams of her jeans and, for a few seconds, holds tight.

This, he'll remember. This, and her little smile at the Snitches patterning his shorts. The way she rolls her arse cheeks up from the counter, one, then the other, so he can pull away knickers and all. How they both look down to watch, heads touching, when he finally pushes himself inside her. Her hair everywhere, in his hands, his mouth. The clunk-thunk of his belt buckle against the cabinet doors. How when she leans into him then reaches below where they join, when she cups him where he hangs with the warm cage of her hand, she lays a kiss on his shoulder, gives him two things at once.

Miles, he thinks, as her whisper, his name, tickles his lips. Miles, as her grip tightens around the back of his neck, her thighs to his waist. Thousands of open receptors seeking, as his fingers slip through her sweat, as she arcs forward in one big clench, nails digging, lips parted, breath caught, eyes on his, setting him off, willowy tendrils, a fusion of white, their miles and miles of nerves an infinite tangle, his and hers, lighting up, blowing out, a mutually sustained systemic short-circuit.

He holds her face, finds her mouth, sags against her as his knees finally give. A few drawn out kisses and then they're just leaning, temples together, her breath uneven, hot against his ear. Harry closes his eyes, grins to himself over her shoulder, thinks he likes the sound of her loads more than Wood's song from this morning. This, he could listen to all night - Hermione, spent and panting, sighing out the tail-end of a little laugh.

"I like your Snitches," she whispers, grinds a staggeringly filthy hip-roll against his groin and snaps the waistband of his shorts to the back of his knee with her toe. Three things at once. Harry wraps his arms tight around her, smiles silently at her word-play, at the sudden, queer sting behind his eyes, wonders since when is he so easily overwhelmed.

"Is that the correct anatomic term?" he whispers back, nudges her hair with his nose to make way for his lips. She tips her head, offertory. Please, please, please, take this, and Harry finds her pulse with his tongue, breaks into chills at the stroke of her fingertips low on his spine.

"Probably not," she says, locking her ankles behind his back. "But you're an incredibly helpful study aid, and I've got all weekend to revise."

.fin.

Thanks for reading!