White and the Stag

\"Once upon a time,\"James said. \"That\'s how all the best stories start.\"

\"Not true. The best story, singular because there\'s only one, starts with \'Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies\' eardrops and--\'\"

\"And the longest run-on sentence in the history of recorded human I know, I know, you\'ve told me so before and I still think you\'re talking rubbish... are you cold?\"

\"Oh, you noticed?\"

\"Your teeth are chattering.\"

\"No, they\'re not, I was mocking your relentless babbling. But yes, this castle is bloody freezing. You\'d think they\'d do something about it, it\'s not like they don\'t have the power.\"

Lily\'s nightdress only came to mid-thigh and her legs were bare and cold underneath, even under the two blankets. She had her knees tucked up between their bodies and James rubbed his hand briskly up and down her calf to warm her a little. Day-old stubble prickled against his palm, and goosebumps.

\"You\'re like Braille,\" he murmured into her hair, and she made a quiet sound that was the closest he thought she dared to come to a laugh without putting up silencing charms.

\"Oh, really?\"

\"Yes, really.\"

She put her chilled fingers over his, and turned her head to look at him. Their noses bumped, and he angled his head so she could kiss him.

\"So read me,\" she said, into his mouth and around his tongue, the only warm part of the room except what he could feel from her, the low heat near his wrist as he moved his hand farther up her leg and pushed the hem of the nightdress around her waist.

\"Once upon a time,\" he said again. \"That\'s what it says there.\"

\"Where?\"

\"Here.\" He moved two fingers in a gentle arc from the round curve of one hip to halfway down her left thigh. \"And here--\" Down and around her knee, where she was ticklish \"--says, once upon a time there lived a beautiful maiden with hair as red as fire and eyes like the forest.\"

\"Fire and forests,\" Lily murmured. \"Ominous.\"

\"Ominous? Not yet.\" His finger, just the one now, traced a feather-light path behind her knee until she squirmed and he relented and brought it to the front, under her kneecap and over and all around. \"She was beautiful. Says so right here. More than any wicked queen who\'d sold her soul, more than the purest virgin in the kingdom. Most beautiful girl who ever lived.\"

Lily\'s eyes closed. \"Mmm. No she was not.\"

\"Who\'s reading this story, me or you?\"

She smiled. \"Sorry. Go on, please.\"

\"So, this girl, this beautiful girl with hair like October bonfires and eyes greener than emeralds...\"

His fingers, two again and then three and four and two again, moved up the inside of her leg and tugged at a loose bit of elastic on her knickers.

\"She was walking.\"

\"James Potter, if you \'read\' any sort of revolting comments about forests down there I swear to god I\'m going to hex off your penis.\"

She was laughing, though, and she slid her fingers through his hair and held him close and kissed him, slow and hard and hungry and then harder still when he pushed the damp cotton aside and thrust the fingers inside her and searched blindly over the slick flesh until his thumb found the part that made her hitch her breath and breathe his name like an invocation, or like a prayer.

\"Don\'t believe you,\" he said, and she laughed again, muffling the sound against her fingers and fumbling with the lowest buttons on his pyjama shirt with the other

hand.

\"No, you\'re perceptive enough to understand exaggeration, unlike that idiot friend of yours.\"

\"Do we have to talk about Sirius when I\'ve got my hand in your pants?\"

\"I\'m sorry.\"

All this in an undertone.Remus and Sirius were away for the Christmas holidays, but Peter was still across the room and it was impossible to tell when he was asleep and when he was awake because he slept so soundly he could almost be dead. It wasn\'t like it was a secret -- just because he hadn\'t told Sirius didn\'t mean that it was a secret, just that it hadn\'t yet come up in conversation -- but he\'d spent night after excruciating night listening to the others\' sexual conquests and it was just generally an unpleasant experience. Embarrassing. Not to mention the jealousy factor. This was a tangent. He brought his attention back to the subject at hand, literally, and had to cover her mouth when she let out a guttural sort of gasp.

\"Quiet! \" He felt her lips form an apology against his palm, and removed his hand.

\"Sorry,\" she said again, and planted her heels against the mattress so she could tilt her hips up, begging wordlessly for more touch and more movement and just more.

\"More story?\" he said, and she nodded. It made her hair tangle on his pillow.

\"This says that the beautiful maiden, this girl with hair spun from copper and gold and eyes stolen from the sky of some far-away world where stars are immense balls of molten jade, she was walking in the forest,\" he continued, marking punctuation and emphasis with harder touches, and softer, and faster, \"and she met--\"

\"--a stag,\" Lily said with him, and would probably have laughed, had she enough breath left.

James smiled. \"Too cliché?\"

\"Just a bit.\"

\"Sorry, I\'m new to reading Braille, maybe I misinterpreted.\"

She did laugh then, or came very close to it, and he smothered the sound with kisses.

\"White and the Stag,\" he said, struggling to do it because her arms were twined around his neck and she didn\'t seem to want to let him move at all. \"It\'s an old favorite. You\'re Muggle-born, you know it.\"

The bed was considerably warmer now. Funny, the things you think about and the things you notice when you\'re having sex. Her tummy growled (they\'d missed dinner) and the dampness on her underwear had cooled since being moved away from the centre of all this warmth, it felt odd and clammy against the back of his hand as he awkwardly removed the garment, and he wondered whether the rasp of his stubble against the inside of her thigh was as irritating as the rasp of hers against his bare shoulder, where the loose pyjama shirt had slid down a little way and she\'d hooked one leg over his body.

\"Can\'t read you any more,\" he said, and parted her with his fingers so he could get to the part that mattered, stubble-burn be damned. She certainly wasn\'t complaining so it couldn\'t be that bad. Her head was pressed into the pillows and her chest heaved with her shallow breaths, quick and desperate and:

\"What?\" she said, or whimpered. \"Why, what\'s wrong?\"

\"Nothing\'s wrong.\" He brushed a stray hair from his lip and propped himself up on his elbows so he could look at her. \"Just, no more goosebumps.\"

\"You\'ll have goosebumps in a minute when I curse them onto you, neverending goosebumps and pins and needles and hiccups, you bastard, don\'t stop!\"

He snorted a little sound of amusement and kissed her there again, thrust his tongue against her, hard, just twice, and then she was screaming release into a pillow and tightening her fingers in his hair hard enough to really hurt.

\"All right?\" he said, when she was done, though it was a bit of a silly, pointless question, because the lazy smile she was wearing answered better than any words in the world possibly could.

\"Perfect,\" she said, and tugged on his hair again, more gently this time, until he\'d moved up beside her and she was kissing her taste from his tongue, which always made him tingle though he didn\'t know why. Possibly because she was the first girl he\'d been with who would actually kiss him after he\'d done that.

\"No, you\'re not,\" he said, and let her suck on his lower lip for a second. \"You\'re beautiful and smart and I like touching you and you\'re my friend, sort of. Not perfect. Far from perfect.\"

Lily shrugged, languid like a cat. \"Well, so are you.\"

\"But you keep coming back.\"

\"Only because Black is too insufferable to bear for longer than three seconds, and I expect sex to last at least a little bit longer than that.\"

\"You\'ll fall in love with him one day, and where will that leave me?\" He struck a dramatic pose of anguish, slumping back against the pillows with his arm over his eyes. \"Woe. Woe and grief and utmost sorrow, whatever will I do without you?\"

\"Spend the rest of your nights masturbating into a hankie and plotting his demise, I\'m sure.\"

She stuck out her tongue and he laughed and pounced on her, nuzzling at her neck and licking away the faint traces of lingering sweat. \"Please. You\'re not that special.\"

\"Do you think if you keep saying it, it\'ll come true?\"

Things got quiet then. He just looked at her for a while.

\"I don\'t love you,\" she said finally, and settled her arms around his waist and brought her knees up and apart so he could nestle between her legs and she could press against the hardness behind the threadbare red tartan. \"Don\'t even like you very much. I\'m not in love with Black. We\'re not children and we\'re not being sent headfirst into a war splitting apart a world you and I don\'t even belong to, entirely. It\'s not happening and I don\'t love Black.\"

\"Three times,\" he said. His forehead dropped to rest against her right shoulder and he rubbed himself very gently against her and breathed slowly against her skin, adding his condensing exhalations to the tracks of his saliva and her drying sweat, almost like the way he could feel her wetness soaking through the thin fabric of his pyjamas.

\"Three times?\"

\"Isn\'t that what the fairytales say? Something about three times, you say it three times and it comes true, and-- oh.\"

\"Are you going to...?\"

\"Yes, I\'m... fuck...\"

\"It\'s okay, go on.\"

He shuddered when he came and she wiped some sweaty hair off his forehead so she could kiss it.

\"I don\'t love Black,\" she said softly. \"Third time. It\'s true now.\"

\"Is it really?\"

She fell asleep before she answered, and he sighed in resignation and watched the winter dawn turn her hair into fairytale fire.