Hermione Granger and the Theft of Magic

Chapter 2: Unexpectedly Charming

[A/N: Thank you to Feelslikeivy and TallulahEuphemia for beta-reading this chapter! This will be the last one I post for awhile. I've only completed somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of this story, and I like to have things closer to complete before I start posting them. If you enjoy it, please give it a follow.]

"Let me get this straight," Sue said as they settled into their bus bench and Harry finished casting the Muffling and Notice-Me-Not Charms on them. "Instead of just taking the books and Confundusing the clerk once you determined she wasn't a threat, you invited her to lunch?"

"Exactly," Harry said. "First, of course I paid for the books! You don't want the poor girl to lose her job, do you?"

"Yes, kind of," Sue said. "She's clearly too dangerous to have any sort of book budget. Also, it's not like you'll get reimbursed for more than a quarter of that, and the damn reimbursement forms usually take three months to process."

He shrugged. "I'll eat the cost, then. I've got more money than I know what to do with now, so I might as well spend some to ensure she doesn't lose her job. Second, you're thinking about this the wrong way. How long did it take those OSP berks to hunt down copies of those books? Months?"

"Probably." Sue snorted. "That office isn't known for fast work and they're mostly elderly Purebloods, so watching them try to navigate muggle book catalogues or Morgana-forbid databases is downright painful."

"I figured as much," Harry said. "Stop thinking of her as a suspect and start thinking of her as an informant. She's a genius and clearly uncommonly good at hunting down the exact kind of books we want to find. Think of how many books we can get out of circulation with her doing all of the work for us."

Sue furrowed her brows. "That's...not a terrible idea, Harry. The boss won't give you much time for it, but if you can turn up more books on your own in the next few months than the entire Office dedicated to the project, it'll be a feather in his cap and probably help him suck away a bit of their funding in the next fiscal year."

Harry shot her a grin. "I don't have 'terrible' ideas."

"One word for you: Norbert."

He sighed. "We probably could have handled that better, true."

"You saying that is the equivalent of Merlin saying, 'I probably could have had better taste in women,' you know." Sue's grin was so loudly smug that Harry briefly worried it would overwhelm the muffling charm.

"You wound me," Harry said, placing a hand over his heart.

"Oh, you'll notice if I wound you," Susan said. "Anyway, what's this sauce you found that you're going to convince Dawlish to try?"

A grin crept across Harry's face. "It's called 'sriracha.' This time, have a camera ready."

* * *

Harry knew Sue would catch on eventually, but he was surprised he made it all the way to his fourth lunch with Hermione before Sue finally cornered him about it.

"You heard me." She plopped onto his desk and folded her arms. "You've been coming back here every Friday with a bigger smile on your face each time. Books aren't all you want out of that woman at the book stall, are they?"

"We're just friends," Harry said, hoping against hope that he wasn't blushing. "She's fun to talk to and she even makes me want to learn more. I've never had this much fun reading academic books."

"You? Read? You've got it bad, Harry. If it weren't for the fact that she sounds like the most 'muggle' possible muggle, I'd be warning you about this."