Did anyone get the names in the last chapter? Lydia is, of course, LSP. And her middle name 'Lorelei' is a type of violent but beautiful water spirit that lures men to their deaths. It just seemed too LSP-ish not to use. As per pureblood tradition (completely just Dumbledore though) Marceline has a boatload of middle names. Guenièvre is the Francized version of the name of the adulterous and mysterious wife of King Arthur, Sahira is an Arabic name meaning 'magic' or 'witch' and Daayani is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning 'witch' or 'supernatural being'. Learning is fun.
So, guess who got their short story published? Yup, I am officially back in the original writing game. In fact I'm going to write a second story for the anthology, I'm pretty happy with that.
As ever, much love to my readers/reviewers! You guys rock.
Content Warning: scares, foreshadowing, implied ladysexing.
...
Peppermint got Marceline out of bed at six in the morning the next day, and Bonnie had already been at her first shift of her new job for an hour by then. Apprentice Healers got the worst hours imaginable to weed out the ones who weren't serious about their commitment to the profession. In typical stubborn Ravenclaw style Bonnie considered the dropouts to be weaklings anyway, not worthy of the hallowed lime green robes of the most noble profession in the wizarding world. She had a month of five AM starts followed by a month of nights, with lectures from senior Healers in between rotations on the wards. One hour in and she was already loving it more than she'd anticipated, and that had been quite a lot.
"Excuse me, miss. Are you a Healer?"
Bonnie turned to face a frazzled looking older blonde woman with a small boy in tow who had what appeared to be chicken feathers and a beak instead of hair and nose. He looked up at her with sad eyes and let out a mournful cluck.
"Yes, I'm Junior Healer Sugar, how can I help?" she replied brightly, swelling with pride at the new title.
"Accidental magic. He wanted eggs for breakfast and this happened, I can't figure out how to reverse it. A basic finite incantatem doesn't seem to do the trick and the lady on your reception desk said to just go straight in and ask."
"Let's have a quick look then. How old are you, son?" Bonnie asked the boy, crouching down to his level and pulling her wand from her robes.
"Six." the boy clucked sadly. "I'm Zacharias Smith and I'm gonna be a Healer too."
"Nice to meet you, Zacharias. I'm Bonnie and I'm gonna fix you up, ok? It looks like you somehow managed the first part of a modified Animagus but got stuck because a chicken isn't your true Animagus form. I've seen this before, my gi- a friend of mine, she got partway stuck trying to be a direwolf. Hold still, sweetie."
He gasped as she traced a complicated pattern in the air above his feathery head. With a small pop! the boy's nose and mouth reappeared to reveal he had slender, fox-like features although the crown of plumage stubbornly remained.
"There, now those feathers will fall out over the next few days and you'll be back to your handsome self in time for the weekend. And the good news is that the animal that reflects your soul isn't a chicken." Bonnie told him happily. Zacharias beamed and blushed a little.
"It's a badger, my family are all Hufflepuffs!" he announced in a proud voice. "Bye, Healer Bonnie! Thanks!"
She watched him and his mother walk off proudly as the odd feather drifted to the floor from his little blonde head.
"Nice catch, rookie. Anyone else would have panicked and shouted for their buddy but I knew you were more competent than the rest of them the minute I saw you. So your gi- a friend is an Animagus, huh?"
It was Billy Shanley, the senior Healer Bonnie had been buddied with for her first year's training. She grinned at his praise and blushed down at her feet.
"I, um, it's kinda new. I didn't know if it was professional to out myself at work." she mumbled, blushing harder.
"I doubt anyone here cares who you're romantically involved with so long as you can heal them. As for your colleagues, well, St Mungos is known for being a queer friendly environment. So your girl's not a direwolf then?" he prodded, resting one massive hand on her shoulder with almost fatherly pride.
"Nah, she's still working on the transformation. Looks like it's some kind of bat but she hasn't gotten it completely yet. She was too stubborn to ask McGonagall for help."
"Slytherin?"
"How did you guess?"
"Proud, independent, wants to be a fierce scary wolf but is actually a cute little sky puppy?." he replied with a grin. Bonnie laughed.
"It's like you already know her!"
They spent the rest of the morning running through accidental magic reversal and scheduling her in to shadow with the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad who attended muggle incidents; Billy figured her background might be useful in smoothing over some of the more conspicuous assignments. And by the time Bonnie's lunch break rolled around she was very ready to head to the cafeteria and consume as many food shaped objects as she could find. But her way was blocked by Clive, the heavyset receptionist.
"Miss Sugar, there's a girl asking to see you." he told her with a frown. Billy raised his eyebrows teasingly.
"I'm about to go on my break, Clive. Can it wait?" Bonnie asked.
"No, miss. She said she needs to see you, specifically. And to, uh, tell you it happened again? And you'd know what she meant. I put her in a side room, she was scaring the kids."
"A few inches taller than me, olive skin, long black hair, too much eye makeup?" she asked, already knowing the answer.
"She said you'd be expecting her." Clive added.
"She wasn't completely wrong. Ok, come on then."
Bonnie let out an exasperated sigh. Billy was a brilliant buddy and she was learning a lot from him but even he might draw the line at Marceline gate crashing her at work with stupid Animagus accidents. But what else could she do? It wasn't like he hadn't already heard the details of her partner's ongoing transformation process anyway. So with a sigh she gestured for Clive to lead the way and followed him down the hall to a small examination room. When she opened the door Marceline looked up and grinned sheepishly.
"Hey, babe. I got shtuck again." she slurred.
"You imbecile. You still haven't figured out your species?"
Marceline's face was covered in a soft down of fine black hair and her canines were too big to fit in her mouth properly, making it difficult to speak and covering her chin with little cuts and puncture wounds from where she'd tried to close her mouth instinctively. Bonnie shook her head in dismay. This far into the transformation and she was still getting it wrong? How hard could it be to figure out what type of bat she was?
"Come here, idiot. You're lucky I already practised this once today."
A moment later her girlfriend's face was back to being flawlessly beautiful. It was also leaning in suspiciously close and Bonnie was definitely not going to kiss her, not after that. Nope, not happening, not in a million years-
"My hero. My sexy hero." Marcy whispered against her lips as the kiss broke for a moment. "We could lock the door, relieve some of that Healer stress I heard so much about."
It was hard to think through the thick fog of warm arousal kissing Marceline always stirred in her but Bonnie wasn't quite that far gone that she'd lost her senses completely.
"Not a chance, Abadeer. I'm not having sex with you at work on my first day. But if you want to drop by my place tonight, my mother will be out. Come get some lunch with me?"
Marceline sighed; her day wasn't going to plan. But the lure of spending an evening alone with her beautiful girlfriend was strong, even if she had to go to some weird Muggle house for it.
"You're lucky you're so hot, nerd. Fine, I'll come by tonight. Food, then?"
...
Marceline left with a smug grin on her face long after dark had fallen. She'd barely managed to get out the back door silently before Mama Sugar had come home and she was still lacing up her boots with a subtle non-verbal charm as she retreated down the dark rows of identical muggle houses where her girlfriend lived. In truth her legs ached fiercely, that last one had been an equal mix of pleasure and pain, but it was worth it. She could have simply disapparated from Bonnie's bedroom but she'd wanted the night air to cool her skin and the thinking time that walking to a less muggle-dense area would afford her. Returning home to Hunson straight after indulging in sensual delights with her girlfriend was a guaranteed way to kill her mood and if Marceline stayed out for a while there was every chance her father would have gone to bed anyway. So she walked, taking in the new sights and sounds of the muggle world and for once wearing her happy smile openly because there was nobody else around who even knew what Slytherin House was let alone who'd judge her for any obvious emotional displays.
Bonnie's hometown was small and hilly, before long Marceline found herself leaving the outskirts behind and heading out across crop fields only slightly illuminated by the waxing moon overhead. She wasn't afraid, it was nowhere near as dark as the moor in the depths of a winter's night and she was legally allowed to perform magic to protect herself should the worst happen. Besides who'd attack her, who even knew she was there? Even still, as she crunched across the stubble of a freshly cut wheat field towards a small copse of trees Marceline felt her heart speed up just a little. Whether it was from fear or excitement she wasn't sure; she loved being out in the darkness doing reckless things. The adrenaline rush from sneaking around in the prefect's bathrooms and ambushing Bonnie with wicked nakedness would have been worth it even if she hadn't gotten her dream girl out of it too because that sort of risk taking was what Marceline lived for. The fact that she'd successfully seduced the girl she'd been crushing on for months and ended up doing the sort of breathless, intimate things her father expected her to wait until an arranged marriage for was just the icing on the cake.
Marceline froze on the treeline and whipped around, suddenly aware of the sensation of eyes watching her. Somewhere in the darkness there was someone, a human or some kind of humanoid, a magical creature perhaps, but they could see her and she could see them. She was still too close to the village to risk disapparating, a noise like a gunshot in the middle of the night out there would draw unwanted attention from the local muggles. What the hell else could she do though? Marcy stared out into the darkness with her heart hammering loud in her ears.
There! On the other side of the small band of trees she could just make out a pale face staring at her. Was it human? Something else? For a moment she hesitated, panicking because of all those stupid late night horror stories Lydia had told her over the years about vampires stalking beautiful young women at night and falling on them in the darkness. But, they preferred virgins, right? And she wasn't a virgin, for certain. Unless they didn't count what lesbians did, and now was not the time to call out into the darkness to that distant figure and ask exactly what they considered to be a loss of virginity. Wait, where had they gone?
Marcy whirled as fresh terror gripped her and all at once the only thing in her head was to get away, fly, get airborne-
She didn't even realise it was the first time she'd managed the full Animagus transformation or that she'd finally gotten it right, she was too terrified to notice anything except her arms shrinking to delicately leathered wings and hearing becoming so acute it was painful to focus on the distant rumble of traffic from the muggle roads. Then she was away, skittering through the night with her wings beating frantically as she soared haphazardly over fields and rows of little square muggle houses until she reached the one she was looking for. As a flying Animagus Marceline knew she was supposed to take her time learning how to move in the air to avoid injury but there was no time, the vampire might be right behind her and she could imagine with terrified clarity exactly how it would feel for needle sharp teeth to pierce the side of her neck. Finally she saw Bonnie's house up ahead and a human shape moving behind the dully illuminated curtains. Marceline didn't wait to find out who it was, who else would be in Bonnie's bedroom anyway? She just flung herself at the open window and burst into the room with a terrified chitter that was drowned out by a woman's scream. For half a second Marceline wondered what the hell had happened to Bonnie to age her thirty years in the half hour or so since she'd left the first time, before realising who the shrieking woman must be. Oops.
...
"BONNIBEL SUGAR THERE IS A GIANT BAT IN YOUR BEDROOM! GET IN HERE AND EXPLAIN! IF THIS IS SOME MAGIC THING-"
"Mum, what the hell? It's almost one, what are you yelling for? I- Marcy?"
Yep, there was a giant bat on her bed and only one reasonable explanation.
"You named it?" her mother shrieked in horror. She wasn't fond of things that flew after being attacked by a pet parrot as a child and bats of any variety freaked her out. Which could only ever have been improved by the bat suddenly exploding upwards into a freaked out looking girl wearing outlandish clothes.
"Hello Mrs Sugar, I'm a friend of Bonnie's from school. Mind if I crash out here for a little bit? Pretty sure I was being stalked by a vampire out there, and uh, I don't think they can come into your house without permission, so-"
"It's a joke, Mum. She's joking. Vampires aren't real, it's fine, don't worry. I'll handle this, I'm sorry you got a fright. Everything's fine. This is Marceline, we were in the same Charms class." Bonnie cut in hurriedly. Her mother was staring between them with her mouth open.
"Right. Ok. Of course. A bat-witch from your Charms class at wizard school just came into my house to prank you about vampires. Ok. Yeah, makes sense. I'm going to bed." Mrs Sugar announced helplessly before backing out of the room and retreating to her own bedroom.
"Oops. I think I broke your mum." Marcy observed. Next second she shrank back in instinctive fear as an enraged redhead rounded on her.
"What the hell, Marceline? You can't just turn into a bat and fling yourself at my window until someone lets you in! Then come in here, shouting nonsense about vampires, of all the stupid things! That was like, the opposite of how I wanted you to meet my mother!"
"I was scared! There was a legit vampire out there and now I'm its prey and it's gonna come try to turn me! Aren't you even a bit concerned that your girlfriend might-"
"Shut up!"
"Alright, woah, calm down! So I take it your mother doesn't know you play Seeker on Team Queer then?"
"No, she does not. It was enough of a shock for her when a nice witch from the Ministry turned up on my eleventh birthday and informed her I was a witch too and I could go to magic school, how do you think she's going to react to finding out I'm-"
"Bonnie? Why was mum shouting?"
They both whipped around at the new voice from the doorway. There was a little boy maybe about twelve years old wearing pyjamas covered in dragons and rubbing his eyes sleepily as he looked at them. Then he stared harder at Marcy's face and frowned in recognition.
"Hey, I know you! You're that mean Slytherin Chaser girl, you bully my big sister!" he announced angrily.
"Neddy, no, we're friends. This is Marceline, she's gonna be hanging out with me some from time to time. And Marcy, this is Neddy, my little brother." Bonnie explained.
"I'm a Ravenclaw too." the boy announced proudly. "Bon, what's Team Queer? I didn't think you played Quidditch."
Bonnie sighed and cast a glare at Marceline who was still sprawled on her bed. The Slytherin got the message loud and clear; this is your fault.
"Neddy, come in and close the door. I'm gonna tell you something really important and I'm not ready to tell mum yet, so I don't want her to hear. Can you keep a secret?" she asked him in a gentle voice. He nodded and shut the door, coming to sit at the other end of the bed to Marceline and eyeing her like she might bite.
"Ok, so, you know how you like Pesephone Fortescue and want to ask her to Honeydukes with you next year?"
"Bonnie, shut up! Why don't you just take out an ad in the Daily Prophet and tell everyone?"
"Listen, I'm only bringing it up because I want you to understand. I like girls, too. Marceline is my girlfriend."
"And the Fortescues are a super good family to marry into, her uncle has that ice cream parlor in Diagon Alley. Free ice cream for life." Marceline added with a winsome smile. Neddy just stared at her.
"So you... you, kissed my sister?" he asked in horror.
"Yes, I did. Many times."
"Neddy," Bonnie interrupted before they could continue that line of conversation, "do you disapprove?"
He stared at them both, face scrunched in thought and eyes wary like he expected them to yell 'Surprise! Got you!' at any second. Both women held their breath, waiting to see what the boy said. Finally he shook his head.
"No, I don't disapprove. She's really pretty, Bon. I see why you want to kiss her. But you," he fixed Marceline with what he probably thought was a threatening stare,"you be good to my sister or I'll hunt you down and make you sorry you were born."
"Deal." Marceline replied breezily. "You, uh, care to swear an Unbreakable Vow on that? A gentleman like yourself must be as good as his word, right?"
"Sure, how do we do it?"
"No. Neddy, no Unbreakable Vows, what the hell? Marcy, stop messing with my brother, he's just a kid." Bonnie told them both, frowning at them. It was unnerving to see her brother and her girlfriend bonding over freaking her out, more so when they both turned matching innocent expressions to her.
"Bonnie, can I ask you something about your girlfriend though?" Neddy asked.
"I'm sitting right here, you could ask me directly." Marceline told him. Neddy shrugged.
"Ok then. How do you do sex with two girls? Because mum gave me The Talk before I went for my first year at Hogwarts and she didn't say anything about how to do it without any boy parts."
Marceline's grin grew wide and just a touch malevolent. Bonnie had a premonition that if she wanted to keep Neddy onside about her secret relationship then she'd need to intervene very quickly.
"We don't, women can't have sex without a man involved. We just cuddle and kiss." she told him hurriedly.
"But-"
"No more questions, Neddy. Go to bed, it's really late."
One day, Marcy reflected, little Neddy was going to find out his sister lied to him. And she'd know when that day was because suddenly the boy wouldn't be able to look her in the eye. She grinned to herself as he sloped reluctantly away to his own bedroom. Sometimes Bonnie was downright Slytherin.
...
It wasn't the way Bonnie had wanted to introduce Marceline to her family home, crammed onto the single bed in her childhood bedroom while her mother slept in the room next to theirs and her little brother was right across the hall asking inappropriate questions about their sex life. But she had to admit, it was pretty wonderful to drift off with her arms wrapped tight around her girlfriend even if she'd had to run a little interference and tell her mum they were having an impromptu girly sleepover. She was on the wrong side of awake when a thought struck her and she shook the snoring woman in her arms.
"Hey, Marcy." Bonnie whispered. "Wake up. You did the transformation, I know what kind of bat you are."
"Huh?"
"I know what kind of bat you are and why you had so much trouble getting the final stages of the Animagus right. You're Pteropus giganteus. The Indian Flying Fox. I knew I'd seen that sort of bat before, I bought some books once you started getting bat wings."
"Bullshit! I'm a terrifying vampire bat!"
"No, look. Accio Bats Of The World! Lumos! There, that's you!"
Marceline sat up and stared in horror at the picture illuminated by her girlfriend's wand light. The dark brown leathery wings were the same, the fuzzy pointed face and long ears were so familiar even though she was certain she'd never seen them before in her life. Dammit, she was a fucking flying fox.
"Motherfucker." Marceline whispered. "Why am I a fruit bat? What the hell?"
"I still think you're terrifying." Bonnie grinned. Marceline glowered at her.
"is it actually a biological necessity for you to suck the fun out of everything for me?" she asked sulkily.
"Aww, don't pout. You're cute, why is it surprising that your Animagus form is cute too? Why are bats stigmatised as being creepy anyway? Look at you, you're fluffy and adorable. Like a teeny little fuzz dragon but instead of breathing fire you squeak and snuggle. My little sky puppy."
"Shut up or I will make you forget how to speak." Marcy growled. In the gloom of weak wandglow Bonnie wasn't sure if she was joking or not but she was curious to see exactly what Marceline had in mind so with an impish smile she reached out and slid a hand under the other woman's borrowed t-shirt.
"Is my little sky puppy sulking?" she teased. "You know what Indian Flying Foxes eat, right? Mostly they find nectar rich flowers and use their long, dextrous tongue to lap the sweet sugar right out. They're very resourceful with their mouths."
"That is possibly the worst come-on I've ever heard. Are you trying to get me to go down on you right here in your tiny bed in your mother's house? With your little brother across the hall innocently thinking we're just cuddling like a pair of friendly nuns in here?"
"Yes, yes I am. I mean, they're not in the room with us, right?"
"You're incorrigible, Sugar."
"And you talk too much. You know it's rude to keep a lady waiting."
It was rude, Marcy reasoned. And she wasn't going to let anyone accuse her of being rude, not when she had her pureblood dignity and honour to uphold. Besides sliding her girlfriend's panties down and off and feeling the way slim fingers wrapped into her hair when her lips made contact was her favourite thing in the world to do. As little as she wanted to admit it the redhead might have a point about her Animagus and their dexterous tongue because if the flying foxes loved the flower's nectar half as much as she loved her girlfriend's own sweetness then really she could live with that being her animal form. It was always over too quickly for her and as much as her urgent pulse wanted to her back away and receive some attention in return she allowed the redhead a second or two to catch her breath before pressing her face back into warm, welcoming flesh and indulging herself again. This time was even quicker and it was hard for Bonnie to keep her gasps quiet; as much as Marceline would have loved to keep going all night she was quickly learning her girlfriend's limits and allowed herself to be gently tugged back up the bed once the shivering body beneath her stilled and the grip on her hair loosened.
"I love doing that." Marcy whispered into the darkness around lazy, messy kisses.
"Mm, no complaints here." Bonnie whispered back with a sated grin. "Maybe you should come tuck me in more often."
"Maybe you should move out of your mother's house and we can get someplace we don't need to whisper. You know you've got to be careful using magic around here until your brother's Trace breaks so it's not like you can even use a silencing charm on the door. I can help you find a place, somewhere away from these vampire-infested woods and all those vile little muggle houses-"
"Or you can shut up and stop insulting my culture. And take your panties off, I'm still too worked up to deal with your bullshit."
Obliging Bonnie seemed to be turning into something of a habit and Marceline couldn't really say she minded at all. Especially not when her wonderful girlfriend left her equally breathless and mind blown a few minutes later then didn't even allow her a second or two to recover in between, just kept going with her incredible mouth until Marcy was forced to cram a pillow over her face to avoid making too much noise.
"Marcy?" Bonnie whispered again when their hearts had both calmed into a regular rhythm and they'd kissed and stroked through their respective afterglows.
"Nerd?"
"Why are you so scared of vampires?"
She sighed and pressed her face forward into Bonnie's hair, breathing in her scent and trying to think of a way to explain that didn't make her sound ridiculous.
"It's dumb. When I was a kid my mum died one night and I'd just been reading a book about vampires and... Daddy told me she had a heart condition we didn't know about and it just stopped beating. He found her in the garden next morning, lying just like she was asleep. But for some reason my dumb seven year old brain thought a vampire had killed her, even though I know there's barely any in Britain anymore. And then on my very first night in the Slytherin dorms back in first year Lydia told this stupid ghost story about a vampire girl who didn't know what she was until she woke up with blood around her mouth and all her friends were dead. And I thought, what if I'm the vampire? What if I killed my mum and didn't even know? It's dumb, like I said. But I was a kid and I was scared."
"You're not a secret vampire." Bonnie told her confidently, hugging her tighter.
"I know. I'm a fruit bat. But something was definitely out there in the woods watching me."
"Probably a ghost. Those woods are famously haunted, I bet they were just curious about you. The pub in the village is even called The Headless Highwayman, we're famously haunted here. Mum thinks that's why me and Neddy have magic, we moved here just before she got pregnant with me."
"Yeah, probably just a dumb ghost trying to frighten me." Marcy agreed tiredly. In the warm embrace of her girlfriend with the rhythmic tick of a clock on the wall and soft sheets wrapped around her it was very difficult to remember how real that terror of the undead had been earlier in the night. Marceline fell asleep soon after and her dreams were untroubled by fangs or blood sucking of any kind.
