BERTIE BOTT'S EVERY FLAVOUR BONKS
Zonko's joke shop in Hogsmeade was unusually packed. The proprietors were doing business hand over fist, so to speak. They had huge grins, and bulging pockets.
Harry, pockets full of his end-of-seventh-year celebration money, pushed to the front of the crowd. He didn't know what was being sold, but thought he should have some. Would he never learn, after the great Year Six Alcoholic Owl fiasco? He thought he'd never get the bird poop off his underwear. Not to mention all the pseudo-letters he had to send to get his hands on an owl. Very embarrassing, and no wonder Hedwig was acting a little snooty, still.
"Ten galleons' worth, please," he said to the man behind the counter.
The man waggled an eyebrow, but obediently handed over a brown paper package. Harry paid his money and fought his way out of the shop. He was immediately followed by Ron, who had hung back. That splurge at Diagon Alley last term left him penniless, but rich in purple lame dress robes. Never ever mix butterbeer and Hagrid's home brew.
"What'd you buy now?" Ron asked, grabbing at the paper bag.
"Dunno," said Harry and opened it.
He withdrew a wad of tissue paper, and then a selection of cardboard tubes. They were sealed at both ends and came in many colours, one to match Ron's new dress robes. Ron picked up the purple one and popped one end. A heavy smell of iodine hit their nostrils as Ron withdrew…something. It was small, shiny, crackly, and resembled a pair of frilly girls' knickers, so they presumed. Hogwarts' girls were renowned for either wearing none at all, or granny undies. They smelled of iodine. Along the waistband was [printed, in white, vanilla writing: BERTIE BOTTS' EVERY FLAVOUR UNDERPANTS.
Ron took a hesitant lick. "Ugh, it IS iodine!" he said, and tossed them on the ground.
Harry looked glumly at the other tubes. Edible undies. Nine more pairs. What the hell was he going to do with them? Then he reflected he had not yet bought Hermione a birthday present. He shrugged. Now he had.
Hermione looked at the clumsily wrapped present. "It's the thought," she insisted to herself. 'The thought. Oh hell, it's the contents!" She ripped open the wrapping and nine gaily coloured cardboard tubes spilled into her lap. Harry shifted uncomfortably.
"Hope you like them," he muttered, blushing.
Hermione looked at her present. Cardboard tubes. Definitely the thought. No, no thought at all had gone into this. Try for motive. Nothing discernible there. What had Harry been thinking? 'Hermione's eighteen and every eighteen year old woman needs cardboard tubes'. Fantastic.
She smiled weakly at him. "Thanks," she muttered, and gave another half-hearted grin at Ron, who had given her a laptop quill and parchment set. Well, it beat last year's de-gnoming kit, but not by much.
The boys looked pleased with themselves. She liked their gifts. They were off the hook for another year – literally. After last year's de-gnoming kit, and the bottle of home brew, Hermione had enspelled them both to hang from the battlements by their dress robes.
They galloped away. Exams were over, studies finished, and it was simply a matter of waiting for results to be announced before the summer holidays began. While years 1-6 slaved over hot cauldrons, Year 7 whooped it up and made general nuisances of themselves. Except for Hermione, who was all ready doing a correspondence course in Chaos Magic, where you made things happen by not thinking about them. Just yesterday she'd deliberately not thought about pink elephants and resultant mess on the third floor staircase gave Filch a coronary. Mrs Norris was now caretaker, and quite fascist about human hair in her food.
Hermione noticed one of the tubes, a dark green, had partially opened. She smelled something minty. She ripped open the tube, hoping to find After Dinner Mints. She withdrew a pair of Crème de Menthe edible undies.
She blanched. Edible undies. She hoped to all gods it wasn't the thought that counted, after all. Good grief! Even the de-gnoming kit was better than this, even though it didn't work and she was still plagued with gnomes in her shower. They get everywhere!
Hermione pushed all the tubes off her lap and stared at them. Nine pairs of edible underpants. Gods only knew what flavour those ochre ones were! Still, these mint ones smelled nice. She looked around. No one in the common room. She tasted them, and hiccupped. Definitely Crème de Menthe. Straight. They felt smooth and cool, the way Crème de Menthe might feel trickling over her skin.
She looked around again. No one was here. The common room was deserted. Gryffindors were either frantically studying in the library, sweatily taking exams, or off faffing around Hogwarts. It was an easy matter to slip the knickers on under her uniform. Yep, they felt smooth, cool and deliciously minty. The coolness spread whenever she moved.
Time for a brisk walk around the Quidditch pitch, she thought. She left the remaining tubes in the common room, her mind temporarily minted over.
Professor Macgonagall entered the Gryffindor common room, ostensibly checking for wayward students, but really to remind Hermione that exams were over and could she please return all seventy two library books. One shouted 'yippee' did not a celebration make.
Macgonagall rolled her eyes at the untidy mess on the common room table. She idly picked up a deep blue cardboard tube, and pocketed it. She planned to whip it out at the weekly dorm meeting and whinge to her House about cleanliness being next to wizardliness. The cardboard tubes were really quite badly made. The top came off and Macgonagall found herself surrounded by a fresh ocean breeze. It stirred memories of her post-graduate studies on Circe's Island in the Mediterranean. Ahh, the warm balmy nights. Ahh, the warm balmy men. Any wonder her patron goddess was Aphrodite.
She pulled the contents out of the tube. Now, they brought back memories. Good thing she was of the no-knickers brigade at Hogwarts. She put on her ocean undies and they port-keyed her to the Constantinople College of Tantric Witchcraft. She was most surprised to find Blaise Zabini and Susan Bones all ready there, both wearing ocean undies themselves, Susan's half eaten off. Macgonagall suspected that somewhere back at Hogwarts Jack Sprauncey had a mouthful of edible underpants, but little else.
Macgonagall clapped her hands.
"Girls," she said. "Let me show you around, maybe play you a sound. You both look like you're pretty groovy."
Ginny Weasley complained that she didn't like chocolate that much. Draco Malfoy sighed.
"They might not be chocolate, Ginny," he said.
"Well, I don't want to think what other flavour they might be," she said, eyeing up his edible g-string. She shook her head. "Absolutely not. I'm not going to do it."
Draco tugged on her leash. "You're being a bad pussy," he said. "If you don't obey, you'll get none of the other."
Ginny's eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Draco," she whined.
Draco was adamant. "I'm sure they're chocolate," he wheedled. He saw the look on her face and relented, quickly changing to another g-string.
Ginny hoped to hell that the yellow was Benedictine, and not anything else.
The Bertie Botts company reported an upsurge in sales and an unprecedented profit. Maybe now they could go ahead with financing BERTIE BOTTS EVERY FLAVOUR WANDS. They could get a mass marketing campaign started at Ollivander's. Nothing spices up magic like a floo-powder flavoured wand. They could get the Spice Girls to promote them. "If you wanna do some magic, you better get with these wands."
Ron and Harry wondered why there were so many new and peculiar smells on the breeze. Surely they could get fresh air down by the lake, but no. They sat near some rustling bushes, only to be asphyxiated by a mixture of camphor and ammonia. Was someone killing moths and making nylon at the same time?
Pansy Parkinson and Padme Patil staggered from the bushes, waving their hands in front of them. Padme saw Ron stretched out on the ground.
"You know," she said to Pansy by way of conversation. "I'm sorry I didn't pay more attention to Ron at the 4th year wizard's ball."
Pansy shrugged and wandered off, determined to change her white knickers for something more appealing and less noxious.
Padme found it easy to straddle Ron. He was unconscious, after all. He woke to find Padme tickling his chest. The smell of camphor hung in the air. Harry was still out for the count. Padme reached down and unbuttoned Ron's fly. She licked her lips. Yum, strawberry coloured jocks. She dove. Urk, they tasted of washing powder.
Hermione was on her fourth circuit of the Quidditch pitch and seriously considering Accio-ing one of the new vibrating brooms to her. The Pearlhead 2000. Designed for the witch in mind.
"Accio Pearlhead!" she muttered.
Something sped across the Quidditch pitch, straight for someone's head.
"Duck!" she yelled. The broomstick turned into a large yellow and black duck and quacked comprehensively all over….ah, shit, no. Snape.
Snape mastered this indignity and transfigured the duck first of all into a roast dinner, and then into the Pearlhead 2000, which still smelled of stuffing.
He stormed over to Hermione.
"Miss Granger," he said. "What is the meaning of this? Thirty points from Gryffindor. You could have killed me." He glared. "And stop thinking 'I should be so lucky'. Forty points from Gryffindor."
"I'm sorry, Professor. I-"
Snape took a deep breath, paused, sniffed again, stared at Hermione. She tried to suck the mint smell back into her, but her blush made it all the more obvious. Layered under that was another smell. Crème de Cacao. She couldn't help it. She glanced in the direction of Snape's groin. She'd never bothered to look there before, except that strange Potions accident with the Growth Hormones. She could see now that all the Shrinking Salve in the world hadn't completely solved the problem. Unless that was all him. A series of silver fly buttons rode over an impressive bulge in Snape's trousers.
She tried not to think about Snape naked and erect. She shut her eyes and determined to think about pink elephants. Snape gasped. Hermione peeked. Bloody Chaos magic. Snape was indeed, naked and erect, except for his Crème de Cacao boxer shorts. They were transparent, except for the Bertie Botts logo, placed tactfully along the crotch.
Maybe these correspondence courses were better than she first thought. Snape had a lean body lightly dusted with dark hair. His pubic hair was as long as the hair on his head, silky, smooth, and parted tastefully on the left. Hermione thought determinedly of anything but her own frizz of pubic hair. Chaos magic again, for there it was, on display as her clothes folded themselves neatly on the ground.
Hermione felt herself levitated onto her back. She could see no wand, except for Snape's own. He grinned wolfishly.
"Next time, take the correspondence course on Arousal magic," he advised. "So much more handy."
Snape ran his tongue up Hermione's leg, skipped the lusciousness between, and skimmed down the other leg. She shivered against him, and his hands held her firmly around the waist, not allowing her movement. She was indeed mint-flavoured when he reached her centre, and he bit gently into the underpants, tore them, swallowed, and pushed his tongue against her. She jolted. She now knew for certain that you couldn't tickle yourself but someone else sure could.
He was insistent, lapping at her again and again until she squirmed. Finally,he let her go long enough to allow her to scramble under him. She tasted his Crème de Cacao and licked him clean before taking him into her mouth. Filling, but not full of calories.
His body covered her, his warmth attractive given the ground was cool and the grass damp. She felt herself push up into him, wanting his weight on her. His arms snaked around her hips, pulling her up further into his face. She took more of him into her mouth and held him tight. Neither had any leverage, and both liked the entrapment.
They smelled like a Grasshopper cocktail.
Harry woke up and quickly decided to fake further unconsciousness. Padme and Ron were doing something complicated that smelled of ammonia, and required the use of seven bulrushes and a fish net. The merpeople had risen to the surface and were staring gob smacked. Harry thought if he were very still and quiet, they wouldn't notice him and want him to hold the net. He'd done enough of that sort of thing anyway. Why exactly did Professor Sinistra have that obsession with fish?
Professor Macgonagall left Blaise and Susan in the company of a strange group of transvestites. They seemed perfectly happy, if a little confused. They were the only ones in white underthings(and ocean undies).
The backstreets of Constantinople were a delight, full of memories, and finally, there was the famous Abdul and his many camels. Abdul was always looking to off-load his used camels, but Macgonagall knew what she wanted. Abdul had a white camel, only driven by a little old harem on Sundays. She could see herself cruising Hogsmeade, hair down out of her bun, Ray bans in place, side saddle on the white camel. Saturday nights, racing Dumbledore on his broom down the main drag. Picking up Snape outside the Shrieking Shack and driving him for hours, just to have a cool-looking guy beside her. Fluffy dice hanging from the camel's ears. Hogwarts Graffiti: rock on.
But there was no way she was going to surrender her ocean undies to Abdul. She smiled, coquetted, and finally put the leg-lock curse on him to get what she wanted. She mounted the white camel and rode the streets of Constantinople, pausing only to load a six pack of Arabic youths into the boot.
Ginny threw off the leash and used it to tie Draco to the bed. She pounced.
"Now," she said, waggling a rainbow teddie in Draco's face. "Dessert. Open wide."
"Mmmph nurkle wurgly poff," said Draco.
Crabbe and Goyle sighed. When would it be their turn? They thought they'd get the teddie to themselves. Damn.
Mrs Norris yowled and shot through the castle, a set of catnip-flavoured underpants on her head. Her tail was bushed and her ears back. Where the hell were the Animagi when you needed them?
Dusk crept through Hogwarts. Hermione complained about the chill and Snape condescended to allow them to move to somewhere more comfortable and warm. She hoped no one noticed them in front of the fireplace in the Great Hall, although it was drawing on towards dinner time, and several house elves had given them funny looks and sniffed the Grasshopper scented air.
Macgonagall apparated into Hogsmeade, and from there made a grand entrance on her magnificent white camel. She forbore to ignore dinner and went straight to the Gryffindor common room.
"Out you get, boys," she commanded, and pointed to the remaining cardboard tubes, left over from Hermione's birthday.
The air was full of jasmine, chocolate, orange, toothpaste, broccoli and head polish. It was going to be a long night.
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