FIC: They All Float (Harry/Pansy, Draco/Hermione) Rated NC-17
Title: They All Float
Author: eucalyptus
Rating: Mild NC-17
Warnings: Swearing, some sexuality.
Pairings: Harry/Pansy, some Draco/Hermione.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine.
Author Notes: Written for bk11 whose only prerequisite was that Harry be hot, and betaed by the sublime n_o_c_t_u_r_n_e. At this point, any mistakes are my own.
Summary: The water is deep. Post-war. 2503 words.
They All Float
_ _ _ _ _
(He looks across the water and knows he’s going in.)
“You’re crazy, Potter! Do you know how far across that is?”
The boy who was a man is trying to be a boy again. He eyes the darkness ahead of him with cool determination, feeling the strength of the wind coming in off the lake.
“It’s not that far,” he says airily. “I can make it.”
There are footsteps in the sand behind him and then a hand grips his arm.
“You’ll freeze to death before then!”
“No, I can make it." He pries himself free of her painful grip and begins taking off his shirt.
It is a scene out of some coming of age story, complete with ridiculous amounts of alcohol and a group of friends too numerous for the number of beds in their rented cottage. There’s a boathouse to his right, painted cornflower blue with white trim. The paint is peeling, and it is lined with a handmade dock. The waterfront itself reaches far to the left, is punctuated every so often with cottages of varying sizes, and then it ends in an outcrop of rock and sand and perfectly silhouetted trees. And in front of him, there is sand, maybe five or six metres.
It is so windy that the trees bend towards the ground and the waves crest with angry white caps.
His wrinkled jeans that are stained with grass and dirt and ketchup join his shirt in a crumpled heap. He should feel exposed, but he doesn’t. Instead, he bends over and pulls first one shoe off and then the other, wiggling his ass in the air while doing so and grinning when Parkinson snorts under her breath.
The cottage looms dark behind them. It is nestled between scattered trees up a steady incline from where he stands, and he thinks of the blackness of the night and how his friends are going to sleep right through until morning. Maybe they’ll wake to the sight of his bloated corpse bobbing next to the sunken log. Morbid thought, that.
But he’s going to make it across. And he’s going to scream his victory until his vocal cords burst and his throat bleeds dry.
“Why do you have to do this now?” Pansy says with a half-drunken giggle, crossing her arms self-consciously.
He shrugs.
“I won’t come after you if you drown,” she blurts awkwardly, then lets out a short, high-pitched laugh that contradicts the look on her face and confuses the hell of out of him.
“So don’t.”
Pansy accepts his words without argument and huffs to herself. He pushes his wand and his glasses into her clammy hands.
“Take these,” he demands, and Pansy’s blonde hair shines in the little bit of starlight as she openly hesitates, then accepts.
(And he thinks, fuck Voldemort and his fucking obsessions. Fuck the Death Eaters and their freakishly wrong ideologues. Fuck his parents for leaving him alone to face a destiny that came and went and got him nowhere. Nowhere but here, at the foot of a cold, deep lake, the other side so far away he can’t see it in the dark and the only person bothering to find out why he’s creeping around at 3:00am is an unpredictable bear of a girl who has done nothing but follow others most of her life. But he doesn’t really think that badly of her.)
Pansy’s eyes go wide as she stares down at the objects in her hands. He ignores that her hands are trembling and gripping them so tightly that her knuckles are white.
“Oh, sweet mother of Merlin, you’re really going to do this.” Her voice is no louder than a whisper, and then he sees her reach for her wand.
(She means to stop him.)
He reacts immediately, breaking into a mad sprint for the dock before he can change his mind. Great big gulps of air, and at the very end he plants two feet and leaps into a dive, stretching out as far as possible.
The last thing he registers before the world stops is the girl screaming after him.
And then:
Shock.
Every part of his body recoils as he plunges underwater. He knows nothing but that it is so fucking cold. Colder than he expected. He can't remember what he expected. It hurts. It hurts. He must be dying.
Then he comes up for air and a short, loud gasp of agony forces its way from his lips.
Feeling like his chest has imploded in on itself, he furiously treads water for warmth and registers the painful jackhammering of his heart. The cold seems to have permanently winded him. He looks out across the lake to gauge the distance, away from shore to where he imagines the opposite side is. His motor control is nowhere to be found as his limbs freeze until he can no longer feel them. But somehow they still hurt. Everything hurts.
(And he’s still going to go for it.)
“Harry!”
He looks back, and he’s ten metres away from the dock and he sees Pansy at the very edge of it all. She’s got her hand half over her mouth and is relentlessly twisting the hem of her shirt.
“I-I’m f-f-f-f-fine…” he groans as loud as he can, his voice carrying over the water. “G-g-gonna go a-a-across.”
(Does he care if he drowns before he reaches the other side?)
“You’re a shitty swimmer!” Pansy screeches, her voice carrying on the wind.
He starts to swim anyway.
(Yes, he cares. Harry Potter is owed every single day of the next fifty years. Because how could he have made it through everything he's been through without fighting for some tomorrow? He's not about to stop caring about life now. So this isn't about anything complicated. He's just drunk, and he didn't bother thinking too hard about it. And in some tiny part of him, it feels good to do the kind stupid reckless things teenagers have always done, not because he has a death wish, but because he can.)
Good feelings or not, the water is rough. He doesn’t respond to Pansy's screams, can’t respond, because she’s right. He is a rotten swimmer. He doesn’t remember being this terrible during the Triwizard Tournament, but that might have been the effect of the gillyweed.
The waves swell, rise and drop again, and he remembers that people can drown in two feet of water.
(Dudley always got private swimming lessons in the summer. He remembers watching Dudley through the glass of the viewing room, waddling around in swim trunks two sizes too small and stretched tight across his fat ass. And Dudley would have snot smeared across his face by the end of his lesson, and he’d flick it at Harry or wipe it on his clothes. But Harry didn’t really care about learning to swim back then, even though he wasn’t allowed to anyway. He would have settled for learning how to float. And maybe then, he could have just floated away, away from the Dursleys and the broom cupboard under the stairs.)
He swims and swims and swims but makes little progress. The water is choppy and his legs are tight and heavy and tired. And he’s trying to pretend he isn’t swallowing water with every other stroke. He’s trying not to gasp for breath through the stitch in his side. He’s trying to keep going. The first feelings of panic are hitting him, but he ignores them because he’s still going for it.
“Haaarrrrrry!”
Pansy’s voice now carries tinny on the wind. Switching to breast stroke, he gets a huge mouthful of water and coughs. Before he can catch his breath, he takes in another mouthful of water and it makes him feel like he’s going to vomit. The waves rise in front of him again, crash over his head before he can take a breathe, and now he has to fight for the surface.
It feels like a lifetime before he breaks through, immediately overcome by great big choking coughs. He hears Pansy shriek once more, a hysterical note to her voice. He manages get a breath in and starts to search for her dark form on the dock. And he spots her just in time to see her pulling her clothes off.
“N-nn-n--”
He can’t get the words out. He can barely breathe. It is dark and it is cold and he might be drowning and for fuck’s sake, no, Pansy!
(He looks across the water at her and knows she’s going in.)
She does.
He swears inwardly when he sees she’s not a good swimmer herself. He is physically unable to say it aloud, but she’s jumped in after him, and it gives him the burst of adrenaline he needs to swim back.
When they meet halfway, she wildly throws her arms around his neck and lets him take her weight. He can feel some warmth from her near naked body clutching his as she frantically pushes herself up, as far as she can from the water thrashing around them. Grunting, Harry has to increase his efforts to maintain height at the water's surface. He kicks twice as fast and twice as hard, then he pushes her around him onto his back and slowly starts swimming.
(How many people has he saved now?)
“F-f-f-fucking ba-ah-astard,” she stammers into his ear.
“W-what a-about y-y-you?” he slurs back, the waves sloshing around them.
He bypasses the dock and takes them into shallow water until they can touch bottom, and they stumble out on buckling legs. He has never felt the weight of gravity like this. Shaking badly, Harry falls to his knees, flops onto his back, gasps for breath, and finally feels the scratch of sand beneath him.
Looking like a drowned kitten, Pansy starts tiredly smacking his arm.
“W-what the h-hell, Harry. Do y-you…have a death…wish?”
He stares up at the blanket of stars, seeing the tops of trees at the fringe of his vision. A wave of emotion hits him and he tries to believe it’s because alcohol makes him emotional. “Maybe. I don’t know. Why do you care?”
She scrambles upright in the sand. “Fuck you!” And he’s surprised enough to turn his head to look at her, really look at her, and her eyes have a watery shine to them.
“Pans…” he whispers, his voice raw. “Come here.”
She struggles to hold on to her anger. “N-no.”
He tries again, and this time she caves in, crawls atop him, and presses the full length of her body against his. Her heat warms them both as she murmurs that she hates him against his neck.
(And he’s running on instinct so much these days that it is easy to let it take over right now.)
As their breathing calms and their heartbeats slow, he slides his tongue up the side of her face and into her mouth. She tastes like lake water. And their breathing grows erratic and his heart pounds all over again, but this time it’s not from exposure to the cold. Her gasps come hot against his neck, and he softly palms the curve of her ass, rolling her on top of him. There are so little clothes between them that it is only natural that they do this. He lets Pansy stay on top because he doesn’t mind allowing her some control, because he’s Harry Potter and it’s what he does. More than that, he’s dead tired. It feels good to let someone else do all the work.
He groans into her neck when he comes, feeling like a drug addict after a particularly good hit.
Afterwards, feeling breathless and sweaty, they giggle to each other about how much sand has crept into their nooks and crannies. And they can feel the cold night air again, so he goes to gather his things only to find his wand and glasses missing from the dock.
“They fell in,” he accuses, staring down at water that is as black as the night.
"Shit." Pansy grins wickedly.“You shouldn’t have thrown them on the dock like that.”
“You threw them," Harry frowns. "Not me.”
Pansy has always been the kind of girl who can amuse herself. She snickers with a shrug. “My word against yours, isn't it?"
The smile disappears from her face as she contemplates the water. “The current might take them downstream, you know. Imagine, Harry Potter’s glasses, sitting at the bottom of a lake for the rest of time?”
“And what then?” he asks.
“Then they’d be lost. Like us.”
“Like we all are,” he murmurs in agreement.
So she whispers two accio spells, one after the other, and rescues his belongings with a little bit of magic. The two objects fly out from beneath the water to her waiting hands.
They walk up the trodden path to the cottage porch, ignoring the moths wildly smacking themselves against the yellow lightbulb over the door. Together they slip inside and pick their way over sleeping bodies to the back room.
White linoleum countertops overflow with empties and ash trays, and he and Pansy squeeze themselves into the small twin bed their group, this improbable group of friends, drew straws for. The bed is in its own room, and the room doesn’t have a door.
(This is his first time staying at a cottage. This morning he got up on his water skies on the first try, the first try. Tubing is brilliant and reminds him of flying. There is a certain appeal to store brand "mystery meat" hotdogs when cooked over a fire. The bugs out here are bloody disgusting. And that silly little war that actually wasn’t silly or little? It’s over now. That’s why they’re here. They’re taking their lost youth back. And they sure as hell have the right to it.)
As Harry begins to feel the pull of his dreams, he thinks about the depths of the dark water and knows it will be warm and blue and crystal clear in the daylight. And it makes him feel like he is floating, so he pulls Pansy up close against him and let’s sleep come.
Tomorrow he will remember what happens next with the same confused elusiveness of a dream, and somehow he will know the difference. The floorboard on the other side of the room creaks with the weight of footsteps. Whispered words are exchanged so quietly that he knows he is not meant to hear them:
“Do you want to go for a walk?”
And the even quieter, breathy response:
“Okay.”
He cracks open bleary eyes to peer across the cottage and catches Malfoy and Hermione slipping silently out the door, heading down towards the lake. They’re not dating, just like he and Pansy, but Malfoy is holding her hand and maybe they want to be a little bit reckless.
(They’re lost, just like he is. And it’s okay, because he knows they’re going in.)
_ _ _ _ _
END
Comments and constructive criticism is much appreciated!
Author: eucalyptus
Rating: Mild NC-17
Warnings: Swearing, some sexuality.
Pairings: Harry/Pansy, some Draco/Hermione.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine.
Author Notes: Written for bk11 whose only prerequisite was that Harry be hot, and betaed by the sublime n_o_c_t_u_r_n_e. At this point, any mistakes are my own.
Summary: The water is deep. Post-war. 2503 words.
They All Float
_ _ _ _ _
(He looks across the water and knows he’s going in.)
“You’re crazy, Potter! Do you know how far across that is?”
The boy who was a man is trying to be a boy again. He eyes the darkness ahead of him with cool determination, feeling the strength of the wind coming in off the lake.
“It’s not that far,” he says airily. “I can make it.”
There are footsteps in the sand behind him and then a hand grips his arm.
“You’ll freeze to death before then!”
“No, I can make it." He pries himself free of her painful grip and begins taking off his shirt.
It is a scene out of some coming of age story, complete with ridiculous amounts of alcohol and a group of friends too numerous for the number of beds in their rented cottage. There’s a boathouse to his right, painted cornflower blue with white trim. The paint is peeling, and it is lined with a handmade dock. The waterfront itself reaches far to the left, is punctuated every so often with cottages of varying sizes, and then it ends in an outcrop of rock and sand and perfectly silhouetted trees. And in front of him, there is sand, maybe five or six metres.
It is so windy that the trees bend towards the ground and the waves crest with angry white caps.
His wrinkled jeans that are stained with grass and dirt and ketchup join his shirt in a crumpled heap. He should feel exposed, but he doesn’t. Instead, he bends over and pulls first one shoe off and then the other, wiggling his ass in the air while doing so and grinning when Parkinson snorts under her breath.
The cottage looms dark behind them. It is nestled between scattered trees up a steady incline from where he stands, and he thinks of the blackness of the night and how his friends are going to sleep right through until morning. Maybe they’ll wake to the sight of his bloated corpse bobbing next to the sunken log. Morbid thought, that.
But he’s going to make it across. And he’s going to scream his victory until his vocal cords burst and his throat bleeds dry.
“Why do you have to do this now?” Pansy says with a half-drunken giggle, crossing her arms self-consciously.
He shrugs.
“I won’t come after you if you drown,” she blurts awkwardly, then lets out a short, high-pitched laugh that contradicts the look on her face and confuses the hell of out of him.
“So don’t.”
Pansy accepts his words without argument and huffs to herself. He pushes his wand and his glasses into her clammy hands.
“Take these,” he demands, and Pansy’s blonde hair shines in the little bit of starlight as she openly hesitates, then accepts.
(And he thinks, fuck Voldemort and his fucking obsessions. Fuck the Death Eaters and their freakishly wrong ideologues. Fuck his parents for leaving him alone to face a destiny that came and went and got him nowhere. Nowhere but here, at the foot of a cold, deep lake, the other side so far away he can’t see it in the dark and the only person bothering to find out why he’s creeping around at 3:00am is an unpredictable bear of a girl who has done nothing but follow others most of her life. But he doesn’t really think that badly of her.)
Pansy’s eyes go wide as she stares down at the objects in her hands. He ignores that her hands are trembling and gripping them so tightly that her knuckles are white.
“Oh, sweet mother of Merlin, you’re really going to do this.” Her voice is no louder than a whisper, and then he sees her reach for her wand.
(She means to stop him.)
He reacts immediately, breaking into a mad sprint for the dock before he can change his mind. Great big gulps of air, and at the very end he plants two feet and leaps into a dive, stretching out as far as possible.
The last thing he registers before the world stops is the girl screaming after him.
And then:
Shock.
Every part of his body recoils as he plunges underwater. He knows nothing but that it is so fucking cold. Colder than he expected. He can't remember what he expected. It hurts. It hurts. He must be dying.
Then he comes up for air and a short, loud gasp of agony forces its way from his lips.
Feeling like his chest has imploded in on itself, he furiously treads water for warmth and registers the painful jackhammering of his heart. The cold seems to have permanently winded him. He looks out across the lake to gauge the distance, away from shore to where he imagines the opposite side is. His motor control is nowhere to be found as his limbs freeze until he can no longer feel them. But somehow they still hurt. Everything hurts.
(And he’s still going to go for it.)
“Harry!”
He looks back, and he’s ten metres away from the dock and he sees Pansy at the very edge of it all. She’s got her hand half over her mouth and is relentlessly twisting the hem of her shirt.
“I-I’m f-f-f-f-fine…” he groans as loud as he can, his voice carrying over the water. “G-g-gonna go a-a-across.”
(Does he care if he drowns before he reaches the other side?)
“You’re a shitty swimmer!” Pansy screeches, her voice carrying on the wind.
He starts to swim anyway.
(Yes, he cares. Harry Potter is owed every single day of the next fifty years. Because how could he have made it through everything he's been through without fighting for some tomorrow? He's not about to stop caring about life now. So this isn't about anything complicated. He's just drunk, and he didn't bother thinking too hard about it. And in some tiny part of him, it feels good to do the kind stupid reckless things teenagers have always done, not because he has a death wish, but because he can.)
Good feelings or not, the water is rough. He doesn’t respond to Pansy's screams, can’t respond, because she’s right. He is a rotten swimmer. He doesn’t remember being this terrible during the Triwizard Tournament, but that might have been the effect of the gillyweed.
The waves swell, rise and drop again, and he remembers that people can drown in two feet of water.
(Dudley always got private swimming lessons in the summer. He remembers watching Dudley through the glass of the viewing room, waddling around in swim trunks two sizes too small and stretched tight across his fat ass. And Dudley would have snot smeared across his face by the end of his lesson, and he’d flick it at Harry or wipe it on his clothes. But Harry didn’t really care about learning to swim back then, even though he wasn’t allowed to anyway. He would have settled for learning how to float. And maybe then, he could have just floated away, away from the Dursleys and the broom cupboard under the stairs.)
He swims and swims and swims but makes little progress. The water is choppy and his legs are tight and heavy and tired. And he’s trying to pretend he isn’t swallowing water with every other stroke. He’s trying not to gasp for breath through the stitch in his side. He’s trying to keep going. The first feelings of panic are hitting him, but he ignores them because he’s still going for it.
“Haaarrrrrry!”
Pansy’s voice now carries tinny on the wind. Switching to breast stroke, he gets a huge mouthful of water and coughs. Before he can catch his breath, he takes in another mouthful of water and it makes him feel like he’s going to vomit. The waves rise in front of him again, crash over his head before he can take a breathe, and now he has to fight for the surface.
It feels like a lifetime before he breaks through, immediately overcome by great big choking coughs. He hears Pansy shriek once more, a hysterical note to her voice. He manages get a breath in and starts to search for her dark form on the dock. And he spots her just in time to see her pulling her clothes off.
“N-nn-n--”
He can’t get the words out. He can barely breathe. It is dark and it is cold and he might be drowning and for fuck’s sake, no, Pansy!
(He looks across the water at her and knows she’s going in.)
She does.
He swears inwardly when he sees she’s not a good swimmer herself. He is physically unable to say it aloud, but she’s jumped in after him, and it gives him the burst of adrenaline he needs to swim back.
When they meet halfway, she wildly throws her arms around his neck and lets him take her weight. He can feel some warmth from her near naked body clutching his as she frantically pushes herself up, as far as she can from the water thrashing around them. Grunting, Harry has to increase his efforts to maintain height at the water's surface. He kicks twice as fast and twice as hard, then he pushes her around him onto his back and slowly starts swimming.
(How many people has he saved now?)
“F-f-f-fucking ba-ah-astard,” she stammers into his ear.
“W-what a-about y-y-you?” he slurs back, the waves sloshing around them.
He bypasses the dock and takes them into shallow water until they can touch bottom, and they stumble out on buckling legs. He has never felt the weight of gravity like this. Shaking badly, Harry falls to his knees, flops onto his back, gasps for breath, and finally feels the scratch of sand beneath him.
Looking like a drowned kitten, Pansy starts tiredly smacking his arm.
“W-what the h-hell, Harry. Do y-you…have a death…wish?”
He stares up at the blanket of stars, seeing the tops of trees at the fringe of his vision. A wave of emotion hits him and he tries to believe it’s because alcohol makes him emotional. “Maybe. I don’t know. Why do you care?”
She scrambles upright in the sand. “Fuck you!” And he’s surprised enough to turn his head to look at her, really look at her, and her eyes have a watery shine to them.
“Pans…” he whispers, his voice raw. “Come here.”
She struggles to hold on to her anger. “N-no.”
He tries again, and this time she caves in, crawls atop him, and presses the full length of her body against his. Her heat warms them both as she murmurs that she hates him against his neck.
(And he’s running on instinct so much these days that it is easy to let it take over right now.)
As their breathing calms and their heartbeats slow, he slides his tongue up the side of her face and into her mouth. She tastes like lake water. And their breathing grows erratic and his heart pounds all over again, but this time it’s not from exposure to the cold. Her gasps come hot against his neck, and he softly palms the curve of her ass, rolling her on top of him. There are so little clothes between them that it is only natural that they do this. He lets Pansy stay on top because he doesn’t mind allowing her some control, because he’s Harry Potter and it’s what he does. More than that, he’s dead tired. It feels good to let someone else do all the work.
He groans into her neck when he comes, feeling like a drug addict after a particularly good hit.
Afterwards, feeling breathless and sweaty, they giggle to each other about how much sand has crept into their nooks and crannies. And they can feel the cold night air again, so he goes to gather his things only to find his wand and glasses missing from the dock.
“They fell in,” he accuses, staring down at water that is as black as the night.
"Shit." Pansy grins wickedly.“You shouldn’t have thrown them on the dock like that.”
“You threw them," Harry frowns. "Not me.”
Pansy has always been the kind of girl who can amuse herself. She snickers with a shrug. “My word against yours, isn't it?"
The smile disappears from her face as she contemplates the water. “The current might take them downstream, you know. Imagine, Harry Potter’s glasses, sitting at the bottom of a lake for the rest of time?”
“And what then?” he asks.
“Then they’d be lost. Like us.”
“Like we all are,” he murmurs in agreement.
So she whispers two accio spells, one after the other, and rescues his belongings with a little bit of magic. The two objects fly out from beneath the water to her waiting hands.
They walk up the trodden path to the cottage porch, ignoring the moths wildly smacking themselves against the yellow lightbulb over the door. Together they slip inside and pick their way over sleeping bodies to the back room.
White linoleum countertops overflow with empties and ash trays, and he and Pansy squeeze themselves into the small twin bed their group, this improbable group of friends, drew straws for. The bed is in its own room, and the room doesn’t have a door.
(This is his first time staying at a cottage. This morning he got up on his water skies on the first try, the first try. Tubing is brilliant and reminds him of flying. There is a certain appeal to store brand "mystery meat" hotdogs when cooked over a fire. The bugs out here are bloody disgusting. And that silly little war that actually wasn’t silly or little? It’s over now. That’s why they’re here. They’re taking their lost youth back. And they sure as hell have the right to it.)
As Harry begins to feel the pull of his dreams, he thinks about the depths of the dark water and knows it will be warm and blue and crystal clear in the daylight. And it makes him feel like he is floating, so he pulls Pansy up close against him and let’s sleep come.
Tomorrow he will remember what happens next with the same confused elusiveness of a dream, and somehow he will know the difference. The floorboard on the other side of the room creaks with the weight of footsteps. Whispered words are exchanged so quietly that he knows he is not meant to hear them:
“Do you want to go for a walk?”
And the even quieter, breathy response:
“Okay.”
He cracks open bleary eyes to peer across the cottage and catches Malfoy and Hermione slipping silently out the door, heading down towards the lake. They’re not dating, just like he and Pansy, but Malfoy is holding her hand and maybe they want to be a little bit reckless.
(They’re lost, just like he is. And it’s okay, because he knows they’re going in.)
_ _ _ _ _
END
Comments and constructive criticism is much appreciated!