A/N: I was crying, so I felt like doing some Christmas shopping. Bought this from the caverns of my brain.
This, my friends, is an experiment. Loonynamelass does not write smut. She does, however, write her friends Christmas presents. (See last year's, which is probably less offensive & more Christmassy: It's All in the Presentation, for Casunny123).
Are these statements contradictions? Or are do they merely employ some Shakespeare-worthy equivocation?
So, here is my rebuttal to Harry Potter fanfiction that is M-rated or NC-rated for explicit sexual content. Enjoy!
Hermione was quite anxious about her wedding day. Most people are, she rationalized. It was perfectly normal to be so high-strung about the whole affair.
Ron had a simpler way of putting it to his frazzled fiancé. "You're Hermione. I love Hermione, so it's fine by me that you're still Hermione getting married, because apparently I'm supposed to marry you and I refuse to marry any non-Hermione Hermiones."
Okay, so his way wasn't exactly simpler.
What really made Hermione turn that fiery shade of red –to rival her bridegroom's, in fact –was the fact that her main concern lay not in the wedding and the various traps for buffoonery that it lay for her occasionally bumbling to-be-spouse, but rather what came after.
The honeymoon.
She felt a bit let down at the lack of… well, build-up to it. She had expected her first date –or rather, some date further down the line -to push for more than she was ready for or, rather, more than she was used to. Yet, no matter how hot and heavy their snogs got, there was no attempt by Ron to go any further… She hated to be taking into all of that masculine-male-instigator bull, but she was just the teensiest bit shy about such matters.
Meanwhile, Ron certainly wasn't shy about anything else –it was just that one topic that they never seemed to broach.
Hermione saw none of these apprehensions reflected in Ron as the day drew closer, and so she put, or at least tried to put, her mind at rest. What would come would come.
One jolly, laugh-filled wedding later, the husband and wife made their way up to their wedding suite, he still drunk with pride, she feeling her own drunkenness wear off as they neared the door without a mention of it.
Finally, they were inside. Hermione made her decision –as soon as the door closed, she was kissing him, slow and long, and it was going well. She managed to push him onto the bed in a non-awkward way and, from feeling his arms and legs and lips respond, gathered the courage to try to begin undressing him.
Ron, slow-witted as he once seemed in comparison to her, made the connection and pushed her away from him –gently, only by a few inches. "Are you trying to," there was a pause as his justifiably distracted mind searched for the word, "consummate this?"
Hermione blushed fiercely, and Ron laughed a bit at her for it. She finally said: "Yes –I mean, aren't we supposed to, on our wedding night?"
"Well, yeah, but… Are you a witch or not?" He smiled as the exact wording fell from his tongue so perfectly, this decade later. "Do you really intend to do this the muggle way?"
"…The muggle way? Er, why not?"
"Well, I mean, I don't really have anything against it, it's just rather primitive. I'm not being a pureblood supremacist or anything, I swear," he added quickly, flustered at this conversation's turn. "I mean, there are just all of these risks if you… You know, diseases and pregnancy. I mean, my parents -" Here he made a face. " –were open to trying it, with Dad being Dad and all, and, well, look how they ended up. I'm sure they love us, but I'm also pretty sure that we weren't all potion-prompted." Suddenly, although appearing quite robustly healthy just moments ago, he let out a very odd cough, one that seemed to say something like "Fred'n'George," but such a notion is simply ridiculous speculation.
"Oh." This made sense to Hermione, but the usually comforting hand of logic was accompanied by a rush of I. Have. No. Idea. What the fuck he is talking about.
"Babbity Rabbity?"
"What?"
"That's what you look like. Your face, when you were looking at those kid stories that Dumbledore got you ."
"Ron, I… I don't know any other way." Hermione started, a bit upset at this upset in her orderly world. Someone call the angry weather of Macbeth, the divine king is dead. Rather defensively, she added, "When was I supposed to learn? You wizards have no sex-ed.; my parents told me about the 'old-fashioned' way before I came, prepping me for all sorts of sights and shagging… oh, don't look like that!" Ron was having a decidedly wicked time trying to picture twelve-year old Hermione, considerably higher-strung than twenty-four year old Hermione, being ready for "all sorts of shagging." Hermione smacked him slightly, easily, as they were so close to each other.
"It would only be a day's lesson, and then everyone would be shagging left-and-right. It's really simple. I'll show you." Ron got up and stood at the side of the bed, rummaging in his coat pockets for something. For a silly split second, Hermione's mind jumped to the thought that he was pulling out a condom. Instead, of course, he drew his wand. "Er, this might be a bit disarming," he warned awkwardly. "Merlin, Hermione, I didn't expect you to not be miles more prepared for this than I was."
"Quit rubbing it in, would you?" Here they were, at their most blissful, bickering and wed and young. "Ron, before you stick some spell into me I demand to know what it's meant to do!"
"Well, you said you know about sex, right?" Ron, as he spoke, was evidently attempting to recall an incantation. "It's still that. The only difference is that it's not in the way you're used to. Ready?"
"Wait." Hermione leaned forward and snogged him a bit more… okay, quite a bit more. Finally, a bit disheveled and emboldened (and randy), she nodded, and Ron, after a few moments, picked up his wand from where it had clunked to the floor. With only a small, slightly sharp inhalation from him to indicate that he had indeed cast, she started to feel the spell in her.
"Generally, you return the favor," Ron said gently to her, and, though she was a bit occupied, she nodded, eager to learn. "It's really not any specific word to think or anything… It's just instinctual."
She would have said "makes sense," but she was having considerable difficulty gathering her voice at the moment and instead merely drew her own. As Ron trembled under her as-usual-excellent-spellwork, it registered that this symbiosis, as it were, was how it was meant to be.
And so, in this way that, just as most wizard duels are life-threatening but slightly incredibly boring, was both entirely satisfying to them and entirely unerotic to most standard voyeurs (there will always be exceptions in discussions of this nature), Hermione and Ron shared this first blessing of marriage.
A/N: Well, there you have it. Were you expecting smut? Well, if it makes you feel any better, Hermione was, too. It can at least be noted that she was considerably pleased with the end result anyway, so I s'pose you still end up worse off. (Pst: I am a little sorry about the intentionally misleading summary, but it was necessary for the spirit of it all.) (I am also a little sorry about the general slowness, and about wimping out a bit near the end.)
My logic is pretty well explained above, but I guess I just want to augment that a mite by going over/presenting it anew. JKR makes no mention of smut, and the whole series exists on a level of pervasive PG-13-ness*, on intimacy at least. Some people have pointed this out as rather unrealistic but necessary deletion to portray the plot effectively and still cater to the audience who might deserve the plot but not necessarily any sort of excessive realism. In this, my take is basically that, rather than assume things to be the way they are in the Harry Potter-verse because its fiction, perhaps their entire society can exist on this "level of pervasive PG-13-ness." Also, maybe I'm easily put off, but in smut I just have a hard time trying to see these beloved characters as being in character when they're acting so differently from how I'm used to seeing them (Arguably it may be the case that I have yet to read good smut, but we'll leave that for a later conversation). Sexual identity can be a lot of person, especially in the whole coming-of-age arc we see here.
*Sorry for random MPA reference. I'm just not that British, if it wasn't apparent in the eleven hundred words you just read of mine.
*Admittedly, there is one point where Harry might be having some sexy dreams about Ginny, as he said something like "He was very glad Ron could not see" them, but considering, A, how little incitement Ron needs to get upset about his sister's endeavors with the opposite sex, and B, Harry's decidedly muggle background in such matters, my case can still exist.
You can probably tell from my other writings (drabbles especially), that I don't usually envision wizarding world intimacy in these terms, but this still is what I'd like to call "the most canon of them all!"
And, if nothing else, be assuaged that this was a Christmas present to a few friends of mine who are a bit bent on smut (specifically yaoi for some of them), who I'll refer to here as Obi-Wan, Kadaj, Ellen (her second mention in my Christmas fics, of which there are two!), and Hagrid.
Please review if you liked it or were pleasantly surprised or if this was addressed to you as a gift. If you didn't like it and want to scurry back to your smokin' smut, then by all means, I don't want to slow you down.