When this war is over

[rhoddlet]

Written for the RS smut challenge, but mods, please don't archive this version. I still have some tinkering to do with it and will send you the final copy by e-mail when it's done.

*

When the war is over, all of the Weasley brood survive, and they come to the Burrow for dinner every Friday. Percy sits with Ron and Ginny on one side of the table, with Charlie and the twins on the other. Mr. Weasley is still dead, though, and one week, Bill, who's supposed to be sitting in his place, arrives late. He comes in with a bang of the door and plenty of snow: it's a raging blizzard outside, and only the Heat-Preserv charm that Mum's got on the threshold keeps all the warmth from being sucked out of the room when he opens the door.

"I've got a guest," Bill says, once pulls the muffler away from his face, and unwraps the heavy black jacket. Egypt set into his bones, and he's been deathly afraid of cold ever since, so he's got a heavy wool coat and two scarves and a cap, all with heating charms on them, but when his guest comes in, a few steps behind, she's wearing nothing but a thin cardigan and a pair of khaki slacks underneath a cream robe. There's snow in her hair and eyelashes.

Mrs. Weasley howls and gives Bill a good shaking. "What do you think you're after? The poor girl is going to freeze to death!"

"She doesn't mind cold, does you, sweetheart?" he says, and Fleur smiles back at him. When Percy raises his eyes after the moment of silence for Dad, though, he finds her giving him that same smile. This time, though, it has a few more teeth and thinner lips than is really appropriate

*

"So, where did you pick her up?" Ron asks, when Bill comes back into the dishwashing part of the kitchen after dinner. Ron's been alternately eying Fleur and going red all evening, and now that she's sitting on the sofa, smiling at Mum and listening to the wireless with a profoundly bored look on her face and he's over here doing the dishes, Ron finally screws up the courage to ask Bill about her.

"I didn't." Bill reaches over Ron's shoulder to pick the last grape left in the bowl. He holds it under the water for a moment to wash the soapsud "She saw me in the Three Broomsticks when I was grabbing a bit to drink before Floo'ing back tonight, and she asked me what I was doing in a such a hurry on Friday night."

"Damn," Ron whistles, low. "You have all the luck, don't you?"

"I don't think Mum likes her much. Charlie certainly doesn't." Bill spits a grape seed into the sink. "I've all the looks and luck and eleven years on you. I left Hogwarts the year you were born, sprout, and Mum's going to have my liver out for Wednesday tea if I don't get married and started on providing her with grandkids." There was a pause. "At least I haven't told her that I'm gay to get out of my procreative duties."

Percy could feel himself reddening, but before he could really say anything, Ron said, rather uncomfortably, "Well, at least Charlie's got a real excuse."

As a man, the three of them turn to the parlor, where Charlie is sitting next to Mum and smiling rather vacantly at Fleur, at the walls of the Burrow, and at life itself.

"I fucking hate Cornelius fucking Fudge," Ron says, fiercely and violently red in the face, hands shaking a little, when they turn back to the sink. "I fucking hate him. I'm glad the Dementors got him, I'm glad. I don't care want Mum says: I'll never forgive him."

Percy has to blink hard, then, to keep from crying.

*

Fleur comes to his room that night a little after two in the morning. Percy listened to her come up the stairs from where she was sleeping on the fold-out bed while Bill had the couch, and she'd used the bathroom and flushed. Washed her hands, came out into the hallway, and was now standing in his room wearing an oversize old pair of Ginny's pyjamas.

"You want Bill. He's sleeping down in the kitchen," Percy said, trying to keep his voice crisp. "Either that, or you want Charlie, but he's sleeping in Mum's room, and she won't take kindly to you trying to fuck him." Percy pauses to try and muster as much threat as he can while he's in his nightshirt and with his hair snarled into tangles. "I won't either."

"What, Percy? You mean, Bill, the alcoholic drunkard who can't get through a family dinner without sneaking off to the garden for a drink? Or do you mean the dribbling idiot who has to be led to the bathroom by his younger brothers?"

Percy flinches as if she's actually hit him, and he's about to order her out of his bedroom when Fleur steps out of her pyjamas.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Fleur leans a smile up at him. "Fudge was my grandpere, my grandfather as you would say in English," she says, leaning over the bed while she pulls off the tee of Bill's that she wore to bed. "It was your stupid brothers who let the Dementors loose on him, wasn't it?"

Percy freezes. "What are you talking about?" he says, finally. He can feel where the moonlight's hitting him in the shoulders and the back of the neck; his skin is cooler then, since moonlight off snow is pale gray and cold.

Fleur undoes the strap on her bra and settles into bed next to him. Her breasts don't have nipples; Percy supposes you don't need them if your other form is a bird since birds don't exactly nurse their young. It's just a smooth curve of flesh. "Oh, come on, Percy Weasley. Your brother says that you're the smartest of the lot, so you've got to have figured it out. Your brothers came up with a candy, a drink or something that gave him the same Aura markings as an escaped, condemned Death Eater, they tied him down and forced him to swallow it, and then they Obliviated him and set him loose on the streets of London for Dementors to track him down. His stomach digested it before the Dementors grabbed him, and,

"Voila, as an Englishman would say in one of your dramas. No proof. But I know.

"Fudge was my grandfather. More than that, he was my godfather. He Ported over every Friday afternoon to have dinner with us and bring my sister and I toys, and now, he's locked in St. Mungo's because the Aurors, led by your brother with the charming earring, managed to arrive before he died but just after he want, ah, crazy.

"You think you're so cold, Percy Weasley. That you can lock this family shame in the back of your heart, that your older brother is just like all the other resistance fighters, that your other older brother is just another drunkard former Auror who can't find decent employment. That your younger brother will ever be more than a junior professor at Hogwarts or that your sister will be stop being the girl who failed to accomplish anything. She even failed at raising Tom Riddle. You think," Fleur says, settling closer still.

"You think you know everything about being cold, about information being power. I'm going to teach you a lesson about that, Percy." Fleur brings Percy fast to her mouth, then, lifting her lips from his and sliding her tongue out of his mouth long enough only to reach behind his head and draw his nightshirt over his head

Percy tries to pretend he's just going through the motions, that he's just pretending that this is Penny or even Oliver because Fleur's powerfully muscled for a girl, despite her small frame, but in the end, he can't push her out of his mind. They end up kneeling on the floor, Percy's face buried in that snow-bright hair, gasping and moaning as he fucks her in the ass. She's so hot inside that it burns every thought out of his mind, and Fleur even angles his hand around her to slide two fingers into her, so she's fucking herself while he fucks her. Some lesson about being cold, Percy thinks. Some lesson about not feeling anything.

Fleur gets so wet that Percy can feel it on his wrist, dripping from his hand to hers. When she comes, she does it bucking and arching and yowling so loud that not only can Molly hear it upstairs but that Bill surely can, too.

*

Fleur is gone by the morning. She leaves in the pyjamas that Ginny lent her, though she picked her clothes off the line where they were drying in front of the fire, tucked them underneath her arm, and set out across the snowy fields. Percy can see her footprints in the snow, leading in a dark little line across the horizon. Bill is standing at the door next to him. "If I'd known that she was Fudge's spawn, I never would have brought her back here," he says.

Percy looks at him for a moment.

"I'll buy you a new pair, a better set." Bill had said to Ginny that morning when they all woke up. "Unless you were terribly attached to that pair, in which case I'll go hunt her down and rip them off her back to get them for you."

"You'll do nothing of the sort," Percy had said to him then. "There's been enough ad hoc, vigilante justice in this family already."

If he'd needed proof that things really had gone the way that Fleur had said they did, if he'd needed confirmation of all his suspicions, it would have come in that the short, shocked silence afterwards.

"Well, you didn't," Percy says, later, after breakfast, when Ginny's headed back to London. He and Bill are standing in the doorway. Percy has a mug of tea in his hands -- spiced with a little lemon and steaming hot, just the way he likes it. "I don't think anybody blames you for anything."

There's another pause, then. Bill gives him a guarded look, and a silence that follows after that. There were also the lowered voices, the watchful eyes on him the rest of the morning, not just from Bill but also from the twins and in Ginny's goodbye kiss . Standing there at the doorstep, with the winter air on his face and the warmth of the Burrow at his back, the preservation charm tingling as a straight line down his skin -- suddenly, Percy realizes that he's only twenty-seven. His life, Fleur's lesson in coldness, has only just begun.

*
[Edited so as to avoid accusations of plagiarism: The nipple-less breasts are gacked from Katherine Kerr. Snow in eyelashes from Cassie Claire, and a certain turn of phrase from RAE-T.]

Comments

[salazaar.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. Glad you learned my lesson: THE ASS-FUCKING IS WHAT MAKES IT ART.

Just kidding: this is lovely, although the ending feels a bit rushed ... I fear I didn't understand it entirely.

[rhoddlet.livejournal.com]

ASSFUCKING = ART, MAN.

Re: the ending. Fuck. Yeah. I just sort of ran out of inspiration for the end, but I guess that would be a good place to explain and clarify Re: the lack of clarity, though I'm not sure what I fucked up -- the general gist is that Arthur Weasley is dead, Charlie Weasley is an idiot, and with the exception of Percy, all of the other ones are flaming failures, but they they manage to get revenge on Fudge. Fleur shows up, fucks Percy and makes him complicit in the conspiracy but alienates him from his family, and leaves in a terribly intellislash way. Would explaining just how Fudge got Charlie to be an idiot help clarify?

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

Would explaining just how Fudge got Charlie to be an idiot help clarify?

It might, yes.

The rushed ending (I felt it too) bothers me more than the clarity problem, though. I had inferred ;)

I like it alot, apart fromt he remarks up. I really do. Fleur as Fudge's grand-daughter - and her coldness and the ahole alieneation. I like.

oh, another thing: grand-père (rather than granpere or whatever) =D

[rhoddlet.livejournal.com]

Had problems getting the accent to transfer properly, but I am a complete idiot who cannot type.

As for the ending -- I've already expanded it some from the version that Nef and Salazaar commented on, so if you don't mind, where does it start to feel rushed?

Re:

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

Actually, rushed is too big a aowrd - and I like most of the last paragraph a lot (the charm-line, ginny's kiss). I think I just dislike the last sentence, and that's what feels... contrived, maybe, I don't really know.

It's not that I don't like 'definite' last sentences, 'caus I usually do, but this one come mayve a bit too early - or its rythm doesn't suit me, or something.

I'm pretty useless at explaining my problem, right? Sorry...

[nefeleo.livejournal.com]

I am always speechless after I read your work, so I never comment, but I wanted to just this once.

...

Even with the ending being a tad rushed, it was gorgeous. How do you manage to describe such horribly painful things in a way that makes them beautiful? You write the worst human acts possible in a way that makes me ache, rather than be disgusted. The ass fucking-makes it art, but Rhoddlet makes it GOOD art.

Yes I am a drooling fangirl. I apologize.

[rhoddlet.livejournal.com]

*loves on you and your brilliance, tinkers with ending* Is it better now?

[nefeleo.livejournal.com]

yes, it was easier for my head to wrap around. but don't ask me, i can't write at all!!

<3 <3 <3

...I love that he stands half within the preservation charm, by the way. Mmmm. Metaphor.

[thessamunga.livejournal.com]

No nipples. NO NIPPLES. I'm feeling highly disturbed.

<3 this. Percy is so adorable, even when ass-fucking. There's nothing better to do than to love a Percy Weasley. And I love the Bill-ness, too. Gah. I'm just a sucker for Weasleys, and Rhoddlet-fics.

[thegraybook.livejournal.com]

Snow in eyelashes from Cassie Claire.

*heee heee hee*

*gigglecollapse*

Drat, that put the useful feedback commentary right out of my head. I liked the nippleless breasts. I don't much care where they were gacked from. Strangely, I now want to have sex with Bill. Was that intentional?

[thessamunga.livejournal.com]

Doesn't everyone want to have sex with Bill? *blinks*

[chiriko.livejournal.com]

i really liked it. i liked the voila bit, it sort of helps remind you of so-very-french!fleur from gof. and having her be the granddaughter of fudge seems like something jkr would have done. tricky, tricky, tricky.

[ex-marvolo22.livejournal.com]

[ravenchel.livejournal.com]

Ass fucking = Art is my new catch phrase.

Some of my favorite lines: Egypt set into his bones; few more teeth and thinner lips than is really appropriate; Some lesson about not feeling anything

Etc, etc I like it all. Though I really need to stop reading these hetsmut challenges. They make my ideas seem less and less cool.

<33333

[altricial.livejournal.com]