Lubido Comburo Chapter 4
Title: Lubido Comburo
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Ron/Hermione
Chapter: 4
The camp bed creaked as the girl stood, and she dropped the bundle of sheet back the bed with a faint little impact. The girl's shirt just whispered against her skin as she pulled it over her head with a single, tiny static crack. The only other sound was the fabric of the shirt whipping against the iron bed rail as the girl yanked it over her head and completely unfurled her curls.
The boy's smile began to fade, and his mouth fell slack as he appeared to be closely listening to the sounds behind him.
The girl nervously fumbled with the elastic of her knickers, apparently inadvertently giving them a little snap before checking one last time to make sure the boy wasn't looking. Seemingly satisfied, the girl slid them off and stepped out of them with another little snap of elastic.
The boy might have groaned.
The girl appeared not to notice as she clambered back onto the creaking bed with her wand and mirror in hand.
After a muttered spell, the girl rested her wand and mirror by her bare hip and pushed up on her elbows. She looked quizzically down at an apparently uncooperative chestnut-colored triangle. She was reaching for it when what sounded like either a great jolt of pleasure or pain hit her. She grabbed the offending area and arched her back off the bed with a hard moan.
The boy, apparently acting on instinct alone, whipped around with his wand drawn...
...and dropped it...
...and shouted...
"I need to use the loo!"
"We don't have a loo," the girl grunted out in obvious pain.
She snapped open her eyes to see the boy on his knees, on the rug, feeling around for his wand with his eyes clenched shut. She might have thought to giggle if she hadn't been so occupied grabbing up handfuls of sheet to wrap around herself.
"To your left," she groaned quietly from her cocoon of cotton.
"Ta muchly," the boy mumbled as he located the uncooperative stick.
"Right," the boy said definitively and for absolutely no reason as he popped to his feet brandishing his wand in one hand and gripping across his eyes with the other.
"You may open your eyes," the girl said rather too formerly for someone who had just violently depilated herself in front of him.
The boy opened his eyes and asked the question while motioning vaguely toward her crotch.
"All right?"
"The charm certainly works."
"I'm just gonna… be…for a bit…"
His voice had difficulty picking an octave as he dropped both hands to the front of his denims, yet still managed to clutch his wand in a white-knuckled grip.
"Gotta go pretty bad an all…give you time…you call out to me, yeah?"
The girl seemed to interpret his meaning, and with a nod, she silently unlocked the canvas bedroom door. With hands pressed firmly to his crotch, the boy bolted from the tiny room.
"Fancy hearing you again," the black-haired boy said, though it was muffled by distance, canvas and the shushing fall of sleet.
"Hermione was snoring. Had to shut her up."
The dark-haired boy smirked.
"I'm just going out back to have a slash."
"Better put up another silencing charm, just in case it's a loud one."
"Keep your voice down, you sodding...hey, how long until your shift's done."
"You have four more hours, and I don't even want to know why you're half naked."
"It's hot in there."
"I'll bet it is."
"Piss off, you specky git."
"Piss off before you piss yourself."
"Boys," the girl whispered to herself.
The ginger-haired boy did cast a silencing charm and huffed warm breath into his hands. The sleet was falling so fast that his hair was already a powdery peach colour, and bits of frost weighed down his pale eyelashes.
He unzipped his jeans and they slid easily over his narrow, rounded arse to pool at his boney ankles. He sucked air violently through his thick, nearly blue lips as he let the temperature perform it's task. Gritting his teeth, he bent and scooped up some snow, and glaring at his flaming erection, he slapped the handful of dead shocking cold against his abdomen, trapping his burning hot cock between the freezing skin and frozen snow.
"Shitbuggerfuckinghell," he shouted to no one in particular, as his very resentful former erection slowly shrunk under the melting onslaught.
"FUCK," he screamed loudly, once more, just for good measure.
And with an expression on his face of one who wonders if, in fact, he has frozen his bollocks off, he peeled back his large, pale hand, and let the remnants of his once glorious manhood fall to sulk against his thigh.
"Next time I properly wank... No matter how much she bloody trusts me... she did the bleeding charm with me in the room...while she was fucking starkers...That's...that's inhuman... Not to speak ill of non-humans, but...
...FUCK!"
He lifted the silencing charm, his denims, and his flagging dignity and trudged back inside the tent.
He paused to clear his throat loudly outside of her room.
"Come in."
The sound of his single expletive response was cut off from the rest of the tent by her silencing spell.
The boy had stepped in to find the girl sitting with her back to the door…her bare back. She'd pulled her mass of hair over one shoulder and was holding an insufficient amount of sheet to her chest. The dimples above her bottom peeked out just above the twisted pile of sheet on the camp bed. A rather large collection of hearts marred her skin between her shoulder blades.
"Bloody fuck, I could have been Harry."
"No you couldn't have," she answered immediately.
She paused.
"You wouldn't have allowed it to have been Harry," she added more quietly.
Without letting the boy consider her answer, she continued.
"Besides, I've heard you clearing your throat for seven years now. It had to be either you or Hagrid."
The grin was audible in her voice.
"You've welcomed Hagrid home to the hut like this, have you?"
He smiled at her back as he took a step toward her.
"Lucky stonking bastard," he said with the next step.
"No wonder he's so sodding cheerful all the time," he said closing the distance between them.
The boy sat behind her on the camp bed with an exaggerated bounce. He seemed to know she was still smiling.
"Enough about your half-giant bit of rough, we've got…"
"Ron!"
The girl whipped around to face him, and his eyes momentarily flitted to her rather noticeably heaving chest through it's threadbare covering.
"What?" He said the word with absolute confusion.
"Well besides being a perfectly rude thing to say, you're implying I'm somehow Hagrid's social better and…"
"You're angry at me about that comment, because I'm disrespecting his half-giant heritage?… Really?!"
The girl looked a bit less full of righteous anger.
"I wasn't being fucking racist…or… or classist. You do realize that I have been - all my life - and I am until this very fucking day…bloody, fucking skint. AND, I am, in fact, currently being hunted like a bloody animal… not to disparage animals….Shit, Hermione, I was just trying to get a rise out of you."
He continued after a gulp of air.
"I tell you what… from now on, I'll call Hagrid your 'bit of alright.' Better?!"
"Yes, actually," the girl answered rather curtly as she smacked her cloud of hair against his face, and she turned her back to him once more.
She leaned forward to pick up her shirt. The boy seemed distracted by the line of little bumps that ran up, and indeed were, her spine. The rounded crease at the top of her arse that might have just fit the boys thumb, eased into view. The boy shook his head with his eyes closed, and opened them to find the girl's hair disappearing into a shirt.
"What are you doing?"
"If you can't focus on anything other than laughing at me, perhaps we should stop for tonight," she said rather primly.
"Stop, please."
The girl froze. The boy had moved more quickly than a cat and had two handfuls of her shirt against her two elbows lifted above her head.
The sheet was on the bed.
The boys concave, heaving stomach was pressed against the girl's naked back.
In absolute silence, he slipped the shirt up out of her reach, and lowered her arms to her sides, as if the girl had forgotten to do so. He placed his large hands on both her shoulders and dragged them down both of her arms, just grazing at the soft skin beyond them. The girl threw back her head against his chest and shook, as he held on and shut his eyes.
Several seconds later, the girl seemed to come out of a trance and grabbed a bundle of sheet to her chest. The boy apparently took this as a sign, and slowly peeled himself off the girl's back to reveal a perfectly lovely expanse of heart-free skin.
The room was filled with nothing but the sounds of their breathing for what seemed like a long time.
The boy spoke first.
"Did that finish it? Are they gone now?"
"No," she answered very quietly.
"Damn it," the boy answered just as softly.
The girl looked as if she might cry.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you," she said thickly as she swiped her knuckle beneath her eye.
"I'm only sorry for you...that...that you have to put up with more of this," the boy said with a suddenly miserable look on his face.
"Yes, it's good of you to 'put up with' this, too," the girl said with evident bitterness.
The boy reached out and pulled back gently on her left shoulder apparently trying to convince the girl to turn and face him. After a moment of pause, she did. Her eyes were red, and she would not meet his gaze.
"M'sorry for whatever it is I've done. I'm trying to be careful and not..."
The girl looked up at him, and the boy closed his eyes.
"And not take some sort of advantage of you."
"You haven't taken advantage of me."
He looked into her earnest eyes..
"Yeah, I have, but I won't...I swear that I won't again."
After a pause, he spoke again.
It feels like I've spent my whole bloody life making you cry."
He gave the girl his best attempt at a smile.
"I've been meaning to quit. No time like the present, I s'pose."
With that the boy swept a thumb under each of the girl's eyes. He sat rubbing his thumbs into his hands... he and the girl just staring at one another. Finally, the girl broke the spell.
"I think you'd better be on your knees for the last bit."
"All right," the boy answered nearly involuntarily as he slipped off the camp bed and crawled awkwardly over to between her sheet-draped knees.
They were almost exactly eye to eye.
"I forget how very tall you are sometimes," the girl said with what might have been amusement or appreciation.
"I don't see bloody how," the boy said as if she'd inadvertently hit some nerve.
"Every fucking pair of trousers I own has that little fucking line of less faded cloth at the bottom where Mum let them down for me. I couldn't just be the youngest of six brothers, I had to be the bleeding tallest, too."
"Couldn't she just have used stretching charms?"
"Yeah, but they wear off, don't they?
The boy looked rather miserably at the sheet across her knees. The girl bit her lip.
"Let me see them," she said rather abruptly.
"These terrible trouser bottoms that I've never noticed...let me see them."
The boy shuffled around and finally chose to sit fully down on his arse and cross his long legs in his lap. Picking at the frayed bottoms of his trousers, he ran a finger down a faint line between more and less faded denim near the hem.
"But you can hardly see that," the girl said a bit too cheerfully.
"Yeah?"
The boy still toyed with the fabric. The girl moved a bare foot to nudge against his knee.
"Oi!"
Both the girl and boy snickered at her use of word.
"Yes?"
The boy answered whilst smiling up at her.
"I like you tall. It suits you. I can't imagine you any other way. When I say I forget how tall you are, I mean that I forget how short I am by comparison."
"You are a bit of a runt. I didn't want to mention it."
She shoved him again with her foot as he chuckled.
"Don't tease me or my half-giant suitor with have to defend my honour," she said with mock formality.
"That's right," the boy said laughing. "And I saw you having a gander at Grawp as well. You do fancy them tall, don't you?"
The girl smiled into her lap and answered softly.
"I do."
The girl ventured a glance at the boy who was still looking pleasantly at her. She gave him a forced little smile.
"I think you're actually the right height, just now, as you're sitting there. Can you move a bit closer until your legs are under the bed?"
The boy pushed up on his big hands and long arms, and awkwardly shoved himself forward until the girl had to spread her knees widely to accommodate him.
The boy’s ribs were pressed against the bed, and he stared eye-level at the girl's fisted hands clutching the sheet.
"Before you..."
The boy placed his large palm over the girl’s hands.
"Before you do that, I just... I know you've maybe never shown...to a bloke...It's not my business if you have..."
"I haven't."
The boy gulped.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry it has to be this way for you."
"I'm not."
With that, the girl shifted her hands under his palm, pressed the sheet into his open hand, closed her eyes, and reached down to grip the edge of the bed on either side of her hips.
The boy looked as though he'd been handed the more unpleasant end of a blast-ended skrewt. As he stared dumbfounded at the back of his own trembling, freckled hand, for what might have been a minute, the girl began to squirm and slipped her hand up to surreptitiously scratch the middle of her chest.
The boy blinked. And shut his mouth. And swallowed rather loudly. And lowered his hand to her lap. And opened his mouth again... in absolute awe.
His hand rested on her thigh, his fingers rubbing in rhythmic little circles into the loose sheet as if he were completely unaware of what his body was doing.
His face was nothing short of beatific...like he'd just awoken to all his seventeen year's worth of Christmas mornings at once. His gaze was something like worship as he placed his palm against her painfully thin, rash-covered stomach, and slowly he eased it upwards, over her ribs, until his thumb and little finger were nestled under her two breasts, and his three other fingers grazed the base of her throat.
The girl gave a hard shudder and gasp in air.
The boy did, too.
Her eyes flew open.
"Fuck... I felt it, too, Hermione."
The girl suddenly broke out in goosepimples, and the boy seemed transfixed for an instant as her pale pink nipples clenched into impossibly rigid peaks. Then, she gave a hard shivering gasp, and began violently shaking.
"Hermione!"
The girl didn't answer. Her eyes rolled back, and she looked as if she might faint, or had already done so.
The boy grabbed the girl by the waist pulling her off the bed, into his lap, and up against his chest. With one arm firmly clutching the quaking girl straddling his lap, he stretched his other long arm to yank two wool blankets from camp bed. He released her long enough to wrap the both of them in two thicknesses of wool, and to cast a heating charm before he tucked both his arms back under the blankets to hold her. The girl was already slick with a cold sweat, and the boy seemed to suddenly realize that she'd stopped breathing.
"Hermione, you've got to wake up."
The boy leaned forward to tip the girl from his shoulder to his arm as he cradled her head like and infant's. He pressed the tip of his wand to her sternum.
"Rennervate!"
"Please, Hermione!"
"Rennervate!"
"Goddamnit Hermione, if you don't wake up this fucking instant, I'm dragging your bare arse out to Harry to get him to help you!"
"R..Renn..."
The boy’s tears ran down the girls face, and he seemed unable to repeat the spell correctly.
"You... wouldn't dare...show my arse to Harry. It's too tempting," the girl wheezed out through a coughing fit.
"Oh fuuck me," the boy laughed out in a shaky sigh.
"Fuckmeyou'realive," he repeated like a litany as he pressed a kiss into the sweaty ringlets stuck to her clammy temple.
"Of course I am," she croaked back at him with a weak smile.
"What the fuck happened to you just now?"
"I don't know, Ron...."
She coughed again, and the boy wrestled his bare arm and wand from under the blankets to accio a metal cup from across the room.
"Tergeo...aguamenti," the boy said softly before dropping his wand to the rug and bringing the cup of water to the girl's lips. She drank several sips before she could continue.
"I think it must be the curse... fighting to remain in my system," the girl said in a very, weak voice. "Perhaps it's designed to protect itself from eradication."
"Do you think it is...you know...eradicated?"
She blinked sleepily and smiled at him.
"I love it when you use multi-syllabic words," she said groggily rubbing her cheek into his sweaty bicep.
"Hey, hey you..."
The boy patted the girl's cheek gently.
"Let's keep awake, yeah?"
"But I'm suddenly so tired," the girl whinged.
"After...I promise, you can sleep all day. Hell, you can sleep all week. I'll take all your watches."
He lifted the girl's chin until her gaze met his.
"Hey, Hermione," he said gently. "After, yeah? I'll let you rest after we've cured you."
The girl's eyes widened as if she'd only just realized she was mostly naked in his arms.
"Right...sorry...absolutely, Ron," she said blinking rapidly. "Please help me sit up," she added quietly. "I don't think I can do it on my own at the moment."
The girl was twisted across his lap half straddling him and half cradled in the crook of his left arm. He eased her up to properly straddle his lap and steadied her with a hand on her blanket-covered shoulder.
The girl lifted a weak arm and began pulling at the blanket covering her chest. His hand closed over hers.
"You should stay warm. We'll suss out something to..."
"Help me sit back on the bed, Ron."
The boy nodded, but looked utterly unsure as he slid the ends of blankets off his shoulders to overlap on the girl.
"Can you hold tight around my neck?"
"I think so."
The girl relaxed into his chest as she twisted her forearms out from under the blankets, and leaning her head against his, she hugged him around his neck very tightly. The boy chuckled against her.
"Well, I can't see a bleeding thing except for your hair, but I won't drop you... if I can help it. Feel free to hex me with anything but this bloody curse if I do. I don't fancy a randy Draco Malfoy having to cure me."
"You aren't supposed to be making me feel more ill," she mumbled into his overly-long hair.
"I knew you were the jealous type," he said under his breath.
Grabbing two fistfuls of blanket at her hips, the boy tugged the girl's pelvis against his stomach.
They both took in a sharp breath. The boy spat out a mouthful of hair. With a voice that sounded tinged with strain, he spoke.
"Lock your feet together behind me."
The boy groaned as she shifted her legs over his hipbones, pulled him in tightly with her heels, and fastened blankets and bits of cold skin against his body.
Biting his lip, the boy leaned back on his arms, unfurled his legs beneath the camp bed, dug in with his heels, and gave an undignified few shuffling hops backward on his arse...biting his lip harder each time his arse hit the floor and the girl hit his pelvis.
Finally clear of the bed, the boy wrapped his two large hands around the girl's bottom and hoisted her up as he clambered to his knees and finally to his feet. He gently deposited her on the bed in a seated position, and slipped his hands from between arse and mattress. He backed away to stretch before assuming his cross-legged, sitting position at her knees.
"Well, that was simple," she said with laughter in her voice.
He smiled at her hands.
"Yeah, a real doodle."
"Thank you."
"What, for lifting an ickle thing like you?"
"For everything."
"Don't mention it."
"I probably won't."
The boy gave her a sad smile.
"Can't blame you for that."
A few moments passed and the boy took a bit of blanket in his hand. He looked up to the girl's face and she nodded.
"If you feel anything the least bit…wonky, tell me. You had me scared shitless back there. Let's not do that
again, yeah?"
"I will."
"Promise?"
"Yes, Ron, I promise. I'll tell you anything I'm feeling."
"Right then."
The girl slipped her eye's shut as the boy parted the blankets over her chest. He was careful to keep the thick wool covering over her arms and lower body. There was a void of smooth, pale skin exactly where his hand had touched her earlier, but a mass of enflamed, infected-looking hearts of all sizes covered nearly the entirety of her chest and stomach. They were so closely packed over her heart that they merged into a solid, raised mass.
The boy still looked at her as if she were the lovliest thing he'd ever seen.
He brought both hands to her waist, his thumbs gently ghosting over her navel. He nudged the tip of his thumb inside.
"It only tickled a bit," the girl explained after her sharp breath of air.
"Just being thorough," he answered rather cheekily.
Wrapping his long fingers around most of her depleted waist, the boy ran his hands up her torso, slowly taking in one rib at a time until he paused tucked just beneath her breasts.
He swallowed thickly.
And took back his hands.
He placed both palms high on her chest, fanning his fingers over her shoulders, and dipping his thumbs in the hollow at the base of her throat. He spread his hands out to her shoulders and ran his fingertips back down her too prominent collarbones. He wiped a warm palm down each of her sides, just grazing the curve of her breasts. He rubbed back up her sides and under both arms, and she squirmed under his touch.
"You know what that twitch was about," she said with amusement as she lifted an eyebrow over her still closed eyes.
"I do," he said smiling and tickled her again.
"Stop. It's not fair to tease me like that," she said laughing with mock indignation.
Her breasts bounced at him.
"No it's bloody not," the boy sighed out in return.
"Are you still all right?"
The boy had asked the question while absently tracing an invisible line from between her breasts down to her navel.
The girl shivered, and her skin stippled with gooseflesh.
"What's that," the boy asked with concern.
"You know what that is," she answered in a very small voice.
Her nipples tightened into taut little nubs.
The boy's knuckles stilled against her stomach.
"M'sorry. My fault," he said quietly.
"Your hands are so warm," she said rather dreamily.
"Yeah?"
"They always are."
The boy studied her face.
"Do you want to stop a bit and warm up?"
"No, it's all right. Go ahead."
The boy dropped his gaze to the only portion of the girl's torso that wasn't free of the curse. He blew warm air into his hands and placed them both just below the swell of her breasts. Lifting up and taking on the weight of both soft mounds, he cupped them entirely in his hands, and sat completely transfixed for a moment before he seemed to realize his task literally at hand. He slowly moved his fingers, gently kneading her flesh and feeling for the ridges of the rash to dissolve away.
The girl was taking in air in sharp gasps and blowing it out again in soft little sounds, but the boy didn't question her condition. He seemed utterly distracted by the fact that the hearts would not fade.
(continued in Chapter Five)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Ron/Hermione
Chapter: 4
The camp bed creaked as the girl stood, and she dropped the bundle of sheet back the bed with a faint little impact. The girl's shirt just whispered against her skin as she pulled it over her head with a single, tiny static crack. The only other sound was the fabric of the shirt whipping against the iron bed rail as the girl yanked it over her head and completely unfurled her curls.
The boy's smile began to fade, and his mouth fell slack as he appeared to be closely listening to the sounds behind him.
The girl nervously fumbled with the elastic of her knickers, apparently inadvertently giving them a little snap before checking one last time to make sure the boy wasn't looking. Seemingly satisfied, the girl slid them off and stepped out of them with another little snap of elastic.
The boy might have groaned.
The girl appeared not to notice as she clambered back onto the creaking bed with her wand and mirror in hand.
After a muttered spell, the girl rested her wand and mirror by her bare hip and pushed up on her elbows. She looked quizzically down at an apparently uncooperative chestnut-colored triangle. She was reaching for it when what sounded like either a great jolt of pleasure or pain hit her. She grabbed the offending area and arched her back off the bed with a hard moan.
The boy, apparently acting on instinct alone, whipped around with his wand drawn...
...and dropped it...
...and shouted...
"I need to use the loo!"
"We don't have a loo," the girl grunted out in obvious pain.
She snapped open her eyes to see the boy on his knees, on the rug, feeling around for his wand with his eyes clenched shut. She might have thought to giggle if she hadn't been so occupied grabbing up handfuls of sheet to wrap around herself.
"To your left," she groaned quietly from her cocoon of cotton.
"Ta muchly," the boy mumbled as he located the uncooperative stick.
"Right," the boy said definitively and for absolutely no reason as he popped to his feet brandishing his wand in one hand and gripping across his eyes with the other.
"You may open your eyes," the girl said rather too formerly for someone who had just violently depilated herself in front of him.
The boy opened his eyes and asked the question while motioning vaguely toward her crotch.
"All right?"
"The charm certainly works."
"I'm just gonna… be…for a bit…"
His voice had difficulty picking an octave as he dropped both hands to the front of his denims, yet still managed to clutch his wand in a white-knuckled grip.
"Gotta go pretty bad an all…give you time…you call out to me, yeah?"
The girl seemed to interpret his meaning, and with a nod, she silently unlocked the canvas bedroom door. With hands pressed firmly to his crotch, the boy bolted from the tiny room.
"Fancy hearing you again," the black-haired boy said, though it was muffled by distance, canvas and the shushing fall of sleet.
"Hermione was snoring. Had to shut her up."
The dark-haired boy smirked.
"I'm just going out back to have a slash."
"Better put up another silencing charm, just in case it's a loud one."
"Keep your voice down, you sodding...hey, how long until your shift's done."
"You have four more hours, and I don't even want to know why you're half naked."
"It's hot in there."
"I'll bet it is."
"Piss off, you specky git."
"Piss off before you piss yourself."
"Boys," the girl whispered to herself.
The ginger-haired boy did cast a silencing charm and huffed warm breath into his hands. The sleet was falling so fast that his hair was already a powdery peach colour, and bits of frost weighed down his pale eyelashes.
He unzipped his jeans and they slid easily over his narrow, rounded arse to pool at his boney ankles. He sucked air violently through his thick, nearly blue lips as he let the temperature perform it's task. Gritting his teeth, he bent and scooped up some snow, and glaring at his flaming erection, he slapped the handful of dead shocking cold against his abdomen, trapping his burning hot cock between the freezing skin and frozen snow.
"Shitbuggerfuckinghell," he shouted to no one in particular, as his very resentful former erection slowly shrunk under the melting onslaught.
"FUCK," he screamed loudly, once more, just for good measure.
And with an expression on his face of one who wonders if, in fact, he has frozen his bollocks off, he peeled back his large, pale hand, and let the remnants of his once glorious manhood fall to sulk against his thigh.
"Next time I properly wank... No matter how much she bloody trusts me... she did the bleeding charm with me in the room...while she was fucking starkers...That's...that's inhuman... Not to speak ill of non-humans, but...
...FUCK!"
He lifted the silencing charm, his denims, and his flagging dignity and trudged back inside the tent.
He paused to clear his throat loudly outside of her room.
"Come in."
The sound of his single expletive response was cut off from the rest of the tent by her silencing spell.
The boy had stepped in to find the girl sitting with her back to the door…her bare back. She'd pulled her mass of hair over one shoulder and was holding an insufficient amount of sheet to her chest. The dimples above her bottom peeked out just above the twisted pile of sheet on the camp bed. A rather large collection of hearts marred her skin between her shoulder blades.
"Bloody fuck, I could have been Harry."
"No you couldn't have," she answered immediately.
She paused.
"You wouldn't have allowed it to have been Harry," she added more quietly.
Without letting the boy consider her answer, she continued.
"Besides, I've heard you clearing your throat for seven years now. It had to be either you or Hagrid."
The grin was audible in her voice.
"You've welcomed Hagrid home to the hut like this, have you?"
He smiled at her back as he took a step toward her.
"Lucky stonking bastard," he said with the next step.
"No wonder he's so sodding cheerful all the time," he said closing the distance between them.
The boy sat behind her on the camp bed with an exaggerated bounce. He seemed to know she was still smiling.
"Enough about your half-giant bit of rough, we've got…"
"Ron!"
The girl whipped around to face him, and his eyes momentarily flitted to her rather noticeably heaving chest through it's threadbare covering.
"What?" He said the word with absolute confusion.
"Well besides being a perfectly rude thing to say, you're implying I'm somehow Hagrid's social better and…"
"You're angry at me about that comment, because I'm disrespecting his half-giant heritage?… Really?!"
The girl looked a bit less full of righteous anger.
"I wasn't being fucking racist…or… or classist. You do realize that I have been - all my life - and I am until this very fucking day…bloody, fucking skint. AND, I am, in fact, currently being hunted like a bloody animal… not to disparage animals….Shit, Hermione, I was just trying to get a rise out of you."
He continued after a gulp of air.
"I tell you what… from now on, I'll call Hagrid your 'bit of alright.' Better?!"
"Yes, actually," the girl answered rather curtly as she smacked her cloud of hair against his face, and she turned her back to him once more.
She leaned forward to pick up her shirt. The boy seemed distracted by the line of little bumps that ran up, and indeed were, her spine. The rounded crease at the top of her arse that might have just fit the boys thumb, eased into view. The boy shook his head with his eyes closed, and opened them to find the girl's hair disappearing into a shirt.
"What are you doing?"
"If you can't focus on anything other than laughing at me, perhaps we should stop for tonight," she said rather primly.
"Stop, please."
The girl froze. The boy had moved more quickly than a cat and had two handfuls of her shirt against her two elbows lifted above her head.
The sheet was on the bed.
The boys concave, heaving stomach was pressed against the girl's naked back.
In absolute silence, he slipped the shirt up out of her reach, and lowered her arms to her sides, as if the girl had forgotten to do so. He placed his large hands on both her shoulders and dragged them down both of her arms, just grazing at the soft skin beyond them. The girl threw back her head against his chest and shook, as he held on and shut his eyes.
Several seconds later, the girl seemed to come out of a trance and grabbed a bundle of sheet to her chest. The boy apparently took this as a sign, and slowly peeled himself off the girl's back to reveal a perfectly lovely expanse of heart-free skin.
The room was filled with nothing but the sounds of their breathing for what seemed like a long time.
The boy spoke first.
"Did that finish it? Are they gone now?"
"No," she answered very quietly.
"Damn it," the boy answered just as softly.
The girl looked as if she might cry.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you," she said thickly as she swiped her knuckle beneath her eye.
"I'm only sorry for you...that...that you have to put up with more of this," the boy said with a suddenly miserable look on his face.
"Yes, it's good of you to 'put up with' this, too," the girl said with evident bitterness.
The boy reached out and pulled back gently on her left shoulder apparently trying to convince the girl to turn and face him. After a moment of pause, she did. Her eyes were red, and she would not meet his gaze.
"M'sorry for whatever it is I've done. I'm trying to be careful and not..."
The girl looked up at him, and the boy closed his eyes.
"And not take some sort of advantage of you."
"You haven't taken advantage of me."
He looked into her earnest eyes..
"Yeah, I have, but I won't...I swear that I won't again."
After a pause, he spoke again.
It feels like I've spent my whole bloody life making you cry."
He gave the girl his best attempt at a smile.
"I've been meaning to quit. No time like the present, I s'pose."
With that the boy swept a thumb under each of the girl's eyes. He sat rubbing his thumbs into his hands... he and the girl just staring at one another. Finally, the girl broke the spell.
"I think you'd better be on your knees for the last bit."
"All right," the boy answered nearly involuntarily as he slipped off the camp bed and crawled awkwardly over to between her sheet-draped knees.
They were almost exactly eye to eye.
"I forget how very tall you are sometimes," the girl said with what might have been amusement or appreciation.
"I don't see bloody how," the boy said as if she'd inadvertently hit some nerve.
"Every fucking pair of trousers I own has that little fucking line of less faded cloth at the bottom where Mum let them down for me. I couldn't just be the youngest of six brothers, I had to be the bleeding tallest, too."
"Couldn't she just have used stretching charms?"
"Yeah, but they wear off, don't they?
The boy looked rather miserably at the sheet across her knees. The girl bit her lip.
"Let me see them," she said rather abruptly.
"These terrible trouser bottoms that I've never noticed...let me see them."
The boy shuffled around and finally chose to sit fully down on his arse and cross his long legs in his lap. Picking at the frayed bottoms of his trousers, he ran a finger down a faint line between more and less faded denim near the hem.
"But you can hardly see that," the girl said a bit too cheerfully.
"Yeah?"
The boy still toyed with the fabric. The girl moved a bare foot to nudge against his knee.
"Oi!"
Both the girl and boy snickered at her use of word.
"Yes?"
The boy answered whilst smiling up at her.
"I like you tall. It suits you. I can't imagine you any other way. When I say I forget how tall you are, I mean that I forget how short I am by comparison."
"You are a bit of a runt. I didn't want to mention it."
She shoved him again with her foot as he chuckled.
"Don't tease me or my half-giant suitor with have to defend my honour," she said with mock formality.
"That's right," the boy said laughing. "And I saw you having a gander at Grawp as well. You do fancy them tall, don't you?"
The girl smiled into her lap and answered softly.
"I do."
The girl ventured a glance at the boy who was still looking pleasantly at her. She gave him a forced little smile.
"I think you're actually the right height, just now, as you're sitting there. Can you move a bit closer until your legs are under the bed?"
The boy pushed up on his big hands and long arms, and awkwardly shoved himself forward until the girl had to spread her knees widely to accommodate him.
The boy’s ribs were pressed against the bed, and he stared eye-level at the girl's fisted hands clutching the sheet.
"Before you..."
The boy placed his large palm over the girl’s hands.
"Before you do that, I just... I know you've maybe never shown...to a bloke...It's not my business if you have..."
"I haven't."
The boy gulped.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry it has to be this way for you."
"I'm not."
With that, the girl shifted her hands under his palm, pressed the sheet into his open hand, closed her eyes, and reached down to grip the edge of the bed on either side of her hips.
The boy looked as though he'd been handed the more unpleasant end of a blast-ended skrewt. As he stared dumbfounded at the back of his own trembling, freckled hand, for what might have been a minute, the girl began to squirm and slipped her hand up to surreptitiously scratch the middle of her chest.
The boy blinked. And shut his mouth. And swallowed rather loudly. And lowered his hand to her lap. And opened his mouth again... in absolute awe.
His hand rested on her thigh, his fingers rubbing in rhythmic little circles into the loose sheet as if he were completely unaware of what his body was doing.
His face was nothing short of beatific...like he'd just awoken to all his seventeen year's worth of Christmas mornings at once. His gaze was something like worship as he placed his palm against her painfully thin, rash-covered stomach, and slowly he eased it upwards, over her ribs, until his thumb and little finger were nestled under her two breasts, and his three other fingers grazed the base of her throat.
The girl gave a hard shudder and gasp in air.
The boy did, too.
Her eyes flew open.
"Fuck... I felt it, too, Hermione."
The girl suddenly broke out in goosepimples, and the boy seemed transfixed for an instant as her pale pink nipples clenched into impossibly rigid peaks. Then, she gave a hard shivering gasp, and began violently shaking.
"Hermione!"
The girl didn't answer. Her eyes rolled back, and she looked as if she might faint, or had already done so.
The boy grabbed the girl by the waist pulling her off the bed, into his lap, and up against his chest. With one arm firmly clutching the quaking girl straddling his lap, he stretched his other long arm to yank two wool blankets from camp bed. He released her long enough to wrap the both of them in two thicknesses of wool, and to cast a heating charm before he tucked both his arms back under the blankets to hold her. The girl was already slick with a cold sweat, and the boy seemed to suddenly realize that she'd stopped breathing.
"Hermione, you've got to wake up."
The boy leaned forward to tip the girl from his shoulder to his arm as he cradled her head like and infant's. He pressed the tip of his wand to her sternum.
"Rennervate!"
"Please, Hermione!"
"Rennervate!"
"Goddamnit Hermione, if you don't wake up this fucking instant, I'm dragging your bare arse out to Harry to get him to help you!"
"R..Renn..."
The boy’s tears ran down the girls face, and he seemed unable to repeat the spell correctly.
"You... wouldn't dare...show my arse to Harry. It's too tempting," the girl wheezed out through a coughing fit.
"Oh fuuck me," the boy laughed out in a shaky sigh.
"Fuckmeyou'realive," he repeated like a litany as he pressed a kiss into the sweaty ringlets stuck to her clammy temple.
"Of course I am," she croaked back at him with a weak smile.
"What the fuck happened to you just now?"
"I don't know, Ron...."
She coughed again, and the boy wrestled his bare arm and wand from under the blankets to accio a metal cup from across the room.
"Tergeo...aguamenti," the boy said softly before dropping his wand to the rug and bringing the cup of water to the girl's lips. She drank several sips before she could continue.
"I think it must be the curse... fighting to remain in my system," the girl said in a very, weak voice. "Perhaps it's designed to protect itself from eradication."
"Do you think it is...you know...eradicated?"
She blinked sleepily and smiled at him.
"I love it when you use multi-syllabic words," she said groggily rubbing her cheek into his sweaty bicep.
"Hey, hey you..."
The boy patted the girl's cheek gently.
"Let's keep awake, yeah?"
"But I'm suddenly so tired," the girl whinged.
"After...I promise, you can sleep all day. Hell, you can sleep all week. I'll take all your watches."
He lifted the girl's chin until her gaze met his.
"Hey, Hermione," he said gently. "After, yeah? I'll let you rest after we've cured you."
The girl's eyes widened as if she'd only just realized she was mostly naked in his arms.
"Right...sorry...absolutely, Ron," she said blinking rapidly. "Please help me sit up," she added quietly. "I don't think I can do it on my own at the moment."
The girl was twisted across his lap half straddling him and half cradled in the crook of his left arm. He eased her up to properly straddle his lap and steadied her with a hand on her blanket-covered shoulder.
The girl lifted a weak arm and began pulling at the blanket covering her chest. His hand closed over hers.
"You should stay warm. We'll suss out something to..."
"Help me sit back on the bed, Ron."
The boy nodded, but looked utterly unsure as he slid the ends of blankets off his shoulders to overlap on the girl.
"Can you hold tight around my neck?"
"I think so."
The girl relaxed into his chest as she twisted her forearms out from under the blankets, and leaning her head against his, she hugged him around his neck very tightly. The boy chuckled against her.
"Well, I can't see a bleeding thing except for your hair, but I won't drop you... if I can help it. Feel free to hex me with anything but this bloody curse if I do. I don't fancy a randy Draco Malfoy having to cure me."
"You aren't supposed to be making me feel more ill," she mumbled into his overly-long hair.
"I knew you were the jealous type," he said under his breath.
Grabbing two fistfuls of blanket at her hips, the boy tugged the girl's pelvis against his stomach.
They both took in a sharp breath. The boy spat out a mouthful of hair. With a voice that sounded tinged with strain, he spoke.
"Lock your feet together behind me."
The boy groaned as she shifted her legs over his hipbones, pulled him in tightly with her heels, and fastened blankets and bits of cold skin against his body.
Biting his lip, the boy leaned back on his arms, unfurled his legs beneath the camp bed, dug in with his heels, and gave an undignified few shuffling hops backward on his arse...biting his lip harder each time his arse hit the floor and the girl hit his pelvis.
Finally clear of the bed, the boy wrapped his two large hands around the girl's bottom and hoisted her up as he clambered to his knees and finally to his feet. He gently deposited her on the bed in a seated position, and slipped his hands from between arse and mattress. He backed away to stretch before assuming his cross-legged, sitting position at her knees.
"Well, that was simple," she said with laughter in her voice.
He smiled at her hands.
"Yeah, a real doodle."
"Thank you."
"What, for lifting an ickle thing like you?"
"For everything."
"Don't mention it."
"I probably won't."
The boy gave her a sad smile.
"Can't blame you for that."
A few moments passed and the boy took a bit of blanket in his hand. He looked up to the girl's face and she nodded.
"If you feel anything the least bit…wonky, tell me. You had me scared shitless back there. Let's not do that
again, yeah?"
"I will."
"Promise?"
"Yes, Ron, I promise. I'll tell you anything I'm feeling."
"Right then."
The girl slipped her eye's shut as the boy parted the blankets over her chest. He was careful to keep the thick wool covering over her arms and lower body. There was a void of smooth, pale skin exactly where his hand had touched her earlier, but a mass of enflamed, infected-looking hearts of all sizes covered nearly the entirety of her chest and stomach. They were so closely packed over her heart that they merged into a solid, raised mass.
The boy still looked at her as if she were the lovliest thing he'd ever seen.
He brought both hands to her waist, his thumbs gently ghosting over her navel. He nudged the tip of his thumb inside.
"It only tickled a bit," the girl explained after her sharp breath of air.
"Just being thorough," he answered rather cheekily.
Wrapping his long fingers around most of her depleted waist, the boy ran his hands up her torso, slowly taking in one rib at a time until he paused tucked just beneath her breasts.
He swallowed thickly.
And took back his hands.
He placed both palms high on her chest, fanning his fingers over her shoulders, and dipping his thumbs in the hollow at the base of her throat. He spread his hands out to her shoulders and ran his fingertips back down her too prominent collarbones. He wiped a warm palm down each of her sides, just grazing the curve of her breasts. He rubbed back up her sides and under both arms, and she squirmed under his touch.
"You know what that twitch was about," she said with amusement as she lifted an eyebrow over her still closed eyes.
"I do," he said smiling and tickled her again.
"Stop. It's not fair to tease me like that," she said laughing with mock indignation.
Her breasts bounced at him.
"No it's bloody not," the boy sighed out in return.
"Are you still all right?"
The boy had asked the question while absently tracing an invisible line from between her breasts down to her navel.
The girl shivered, and her skin stippled with gooseflesh.
"What's that," the boy asked with concern.
"You know what that is," she answered in a very small voice.
Her nipples tightened into taut little nubs.
The boy's knuckles stilled against her stomach.
"M'sorry. My fault," he said quietly.
"Your hands are so warm," she said rather dreamily.
"Yeah?"
"They always are."
The boy studied her face.
"Do you want to stop a bit and warm up?"
"No, it's all right. Go ahead."
The boy dropped his gaze to the only portion of the girl's torso that wasn't free of the curse. He blew warm air into his hands and placed them both just below the swell of her breasts. Lifting up and taking on the weight of both soft mounds, he cupped them entirely in his hands, and sat completely transfixed for a moment before he seemed to realize his task literally at hand. He slowly moved his fingers, gently kneading her flesh and feeling for the ridges of the rash to dissolve away.
The girl was taking in air in sharp gasps and blowing it out again in soft little sounds, but the boy didn't question her condition. He seemed utterly distracted by the fact that the hearts would not fade.
(continued in Chapter Five)