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hp_goldenage2019-03-04 11:57 am
hpgoldenage_mod) wrote in hp_goldenage2019-03-04 11:57 am
Entry tags:
Salt and Pepper Fest: The Real Wives of Hogwarts (Ensemble; NC-17)
Title: The Real Wives of Hogwarts
Author:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
sw33tch377ypi3
Characters/Pairings: Hermione/Ron, Cho/Harry, Daphne/Adrian, Lavender/Seamus, Hannah/Neville, Padma/Anthony, Luna/Rolf, Ginny/Draco, Pansy/Surprise, Narcissa/Lucius
Rating: NC-17ish
Word Count: 4667
Content/Warning(s): AU, NEC, Les femmes d’un certain âge bucking the norms! All het couples, as prompted—please note that this does not reflect any prejudices, beliefs, or preferences on my part! Perhaps mentions of image dysmorphia, if your definition is broad and you squint. Poor attempts at writing accents.
Summary/Prompt: “All her friends complain about their husbands (still) wanting sex. She can't get enough, even after all these years.”
A/N: Darling prompter, I’ve had a bit of fun with your prompt, thumbing my nose at societal expectations for older women—I hope you don’t mind! Since you didn’t request canon pairings, I’ve also done a bit of shaking and baking. I admit I’ve devoted a bit more space to my pet ‘ship couple out of the ones featured. 😉 Immense amounts of gratitude to my beta J, who did this one in-process since I brilliantly decided to join in so late! Thank you to our mods, readers, and reviewers. You make my heart happy. XOXO
Read at AO3 or below:
Years later, no one could agree how it had begun. Hermione thought it might have been Pansy’s idea, but Pansy would always roll her eyes and scoff and claim that she would never have volunteered to spend every Saturday brunch in “such tedious company.” Each week she would vow it was her last, but then the next Saturday when Daphne called, she would find her friend ready to come along with only a mild show of protestation.
“Well, I’ve been bullied into coming—again,” Pansy pronounced with a dramatic swirl of mauve-colored robes as she took her seat at their regular table on an unseasonably warm Saturday in December. They were nearly the last to arrive, with six of their seven fellow usual attendees already around the table. Over Pansy’s head, Daphne met Hannah’s eyes and rolled her own before settling herself to Pansy’s right and reaching for a pastry from the basket in the table’s center.
Before she could bite into the apple danish, it was snatched from her fingers by Lavender, seated to her right. “You made me promise last week,” Lavender reminded her apologetically. “No white sugar until after the pictures from the first game appear.”
Daphne pouted. “Damnit. I forgot.” She sighed longingly. “What I wouldn’t give for your metabolism.”
Lavender smiled. “Trust me, you wouldn’t want what comes with it.”
Daphne blanched, her eyes automatically going to Lavender’s heavily, though beautifully, made up face, her cosmetic charms hiding not only laugh lines but also scars at her throat. On impulse, she reached out and squeezed the other woman’s hand. “I wish my hair was turning a beautiful silver like yours, too.” She gestured toward the streaks of grey in her own blonde bob. Lavender preened a bit, touching one of her silvering temples, and the awkwardness was forgotten.
“Me too,” Hermione said from across the table. Her own dark hair, pulled into a bun, was untouched but for a wide white streak that ran from just above her right brow. Her laugh lines crinkled as she smiled. “Or like Luna’s.”
“Not that you can tell,” Luna said good-naturedly, referring to the very slight difference between the pale blonde tresses of her youth and her current head of silver hair. She appeared to have gained a few more freckles in the intervening years as well, though her placid nature had left her face as unlined as a babe’s.
“I wish I had the guts to go grey,” Hannah piped up, tearing a sweet roll into quarters. Like Luna, she had a smattering of dark freckles from spending so much time in the sun, but she also had lines at her eyes, mouth, and nose. Disheartened, she paid dearly every fortnight to keep her shoulder-length hair its original spun gold shade.
“I’m not sure I would, either,” Padma said from Hannah’s left. She fingered the long, shiny-dark braid draped over her shoulder. “Nothing wrong with a little hair color.” Her lined face crinkled into a grin and her eyes twinkled.
“Or a sassy cut,” Cho declared, gesturing to her own salt-and-pepper pixie.
“Everyone should age how they choose,” Pansy said primly, and the women around her laughed. Pansy made no secret of the fact that she liberally utilized lifting and smoothing charms and had regular appointments with a top cosmetiwitch to keep her shoulder-length sable bob grey-free.
“I think you come every week just to make our twenty-something servers stutter and stammer,” Daphne said warmly, squeezing her friend’s forearm where it lay on the table.
Pansy opened her mouth to reply, when the Floo near them flared and a flash of red caught her eyes. “Finally. Now maybe we can order; I’d kill for a mimosa.”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m late again,” Ginny said, dropping her bag over the corner of the empty chair to Hermione’s left. “Can we add a chair?”
Narcissa Malfoy, who had accompanied Ginny to the table, waved an elegant hand. “Don’t be silly, I wouldn’t dream of joining you, darling. I’m certain you wish to discuss my wretched son in privacy.” She smiled broadly, making her slightly softened face and eyes light up. “I’ll sit at that little table over there, and we can go shopping after you’ve had your visit.” She bussed her daughter-in-law’s cheek and moved away.
Ginny settled into her place, stealing the uneaten portion of Hermione’s crumpet from her plate. “I had to call Cissy to get out of the house. The twins were being absolute terrors and Draco couldn’t settle them.”
“At least there’s only Freddy and Wally left at home now,” her friend said soothingly.
“Unless Ginny ends up making another announcement.” Luna raised her brows as she helped pass around the mimosas the waiter had brought.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Pansy jumped in. “I thought I was going to catch them shagging in a coat closet at our dinner party last month.”
“I would say don’t even joke about it,” Ginny said, pausing to take a sip from her champagne flute, “but the healer confirmed last week that I’m entering menopause, hallelujah!” She lifted her glass in toast and took another drink.
Cho’s mouth opened in surprise. “But you’re so young! You look so young, too. Maybe a bit tired--”
Ginny, who thanks to some combination of her pure blood and power, could have easily passed for forty rather than fifty, laughed. “Thanks, I think. You’d be tired too, if you had six children.”
Cho threw up her palms. “Please don’t curse me. Three is plenty.” She drank from her own glass and then blushed. “But Harry hasn’t called time on—you know—that.”
“Oh my, someone call the papers,” Lavender giggled. “The Minister of Magic and The-Boy-Who-Lived are still doing it!”
Cho groaned. “Once he tried to convince me to do it on my desk during lunch! We are fifty-one years old!”
Hermione bit her lip. “Ron’s the same, really. I mean, I thought by this age we would have slowed down, but…you know.”
“You know?” Pansy repeated, derisively as Ginny covered her own ears with exaggerated gagging sounds. Pansy rolled her eyes. “Gryffindors.”
“Hey,” Ginny said, pointing a manicured finger at her husband’s best friend, “we’ve been listening to that for forty years. Not to mention, you married one!”
“Yes, well.” Pansy averted her gaze and finished off her mimosa, then motioned across the dining room for a refill. “That’s completely different. I’m convinced he was missorted.”
The other ladies laughed.
“Anthony is still a randy bugger,” Padma admitted. “I don’t think it’s ever less than three nights a week.”
“You’d think they’d be tired,” Daphne responded in a sympathetic tone. She handed her still-full mimosa to Pansy and took a sip of black coffee. “Even pushing the team as hard as they’ve been the last month to prepare for the opening of the second half of the season, Adrian would still like to have sex every night.” She sighed.
“At least he probably showers first,” Pansy snorted. “I can’t tell you—”
“I feel your pain,” Hannah giggled. “Of course, spending all day in the greenhouses isn’t likely to be as stinky as quidditch, but it gets awfully…hot.” She glanced around and leaned in. “Nev has insisted on having on off atop the planting bench…more than once.”
Hermione grimaced. “All that dirt? And my back wouldn’t be right for a week.”
Hannah bit her lip and nodded. “Yes…so annoying.”
“That’s nothing,” Lavender moaned. “There must be something about the odours of smoke and booze that turns Seamus on, because at the end of a long night he’s hard as granite. Last week he actually chased me around the bed!” She paused, then smiled and shrugged. “Not that I ran as quickly as I could have.”
Luna looked pensive. “Aren’t men supposed to reach their sexual peak much earlier? One would think they’d be rather disinterested by now. Last month I missed getting a picture of a fluttering corcalampsis because Rolf chose an inopportune moment to put his hand up my skirt.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Padma said, patting her hand. “I missed my favorite show on HGWT once for the same reason.”
Cho sighed. “I suppose it’s part of the burden of being a heterosexual woman,” she said solemnly.
Ginny looked over to where her mother-in-law sat, peacefully sipping tea and reading a novel. She put down her own glass and leaned forward. “I have to say, I feel a bit bad complaining about my husband wanting sex all the time. Can you imagine being Cissy’s age? Especially married to Lucius, who is all about propriety. I bet they haven’t even slept in the same room since Draco was conceived.” She cut another sympathetic glance Narcissa’s way. “You know how some purebloods are.”
“That is sad,” Hermione said in a thoughtful tone. “We really ought to be thankful that we still have passionate marriages.”
“Not too passionate,” Hannah said quickly. “I mean, it would be nice if those—those randy beasts would let us be sometimes.”
“Of course,” Hermione said, nodding.
All the other women murmured their concurrences, sneaking glances at Narcissa Malfoy, wondering if there would ever be a time when their unions would become completely sexless.
X
“I’m home,” Hermione called, dropping her purse on the mantel after stepping from the Floo. Busy brushing powder from her blue jumper, she didn’t sense another presence until she’d been grabbed about the waist and spun to press up against a hard body. “Ron! I—”
“I missed you.” He buried his nose in the side of her neck and inhaled deeply, like he was vastly comforted.
She laughed breathily. “I was only gone a couple of hours!” She raised her arms as he began tugging up her jumper. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! What if Rose or Hugo try to Floo? And, we’re in the living room!”
Ron tugged off his half-moon spectacles and tossed them down atop his wife’s discarded top with a crooked grin. “They won’t. And, good. We won’t have to move to listen to the news later.”
As Hermione laughed again and wriggled out of her skirt, she reminded herself to seem duly long-suffering the next week at brunch.
X
Ginny was rinsing the conditioner from her hair when she heard the large, glass door on the shower open and close. Suppressing a smile, she turned her head to peer over her shoulder with an arch look as she squeezed the excess water from the titian strands. “Excuse you?”
Grinning, Draco ducked his head under the water, wetting his silver hair as he grabbed the bottle of scented shower gel she preferred. “You don’t mind,” he purred confidently, tugging her back against his aroused body and running his sudsy palms beneath and over her breasts before tweaking her nipples.
Ginny hummed and arched, deciding that she really didn’t. As her husband lifted her against the tile so that she could wrap her legs around his hips, she felt a brief pang of sadness that this was one thing she couldn’t share with her friends. Draco drove home, and the guilt dissolved beneath pure pleasure. Perhaps if the twins took a long enough nap, there could be two things.
X
Cho closed the last folder in her stack and grimaced, tugging off her reading glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. She was tired, but confident that she knew every detail of the four proposals being presented before the Wizengamot on Monday. She tilted her head down and stretched her tired shoulders.
A sudden kiss to the exposed nape of her neck startled her, and she leaned back and looked up at her husband. Harry’s bright grin was very white against his surrounding grey beard as he placed a perfect cup of tea down on the table within her reach. “All done, Minister?”
Cho puckered and accepted as kiss before responding. “All done! Thank goodness, I don’t think I could have read one more brief!”
He arched a brow and chuckled, then leaned down to whisper in her ear. Cho shivered, goosebumps racing across her skin. “That’s a shame, because I have some briefs you could handle.”
Despite herself, Cho giggled. “That was terrible.” But she felt her breaths coming quickly, and she knew her eyes were dilated with interest. She ran her fingertips along his bristly jaw.
“Did you want that tea?”
She swallowed at his tone. “I’m not that thirsty,” she whispered.
A moment later, the tea vanished, papers tossed to the floor, and Cho herself spread upon the table like a feast for her husband, she thought to herself that she couldn’t understand how all her friends had lost interest in having sex with their husbands. Of course, she reminded herself as he shoved his glasses atop his head nestled his face between her thighs, none of them were married to Harry Potter.
X
Lavender was startled by the chime of the clock. She’d let time get away from her, she mused as she set her book aside. Seamus would have just closed up The Three Broomsticks and she liked to help him take care of the chores so that he could get home earlier.
Stepping from the Floo into the pub, she was a bit surprised not to see her husband wiping down the bar, as was his routine. She walked around the dark wooden structure to the opening where employees could access the area behind, intending to start the job herself. Instead, she found Seamus laying on a palette of thick quilts and fluffy pillows surrounded by candles and wearing just his pants. She blinked.
Seamus rubbed a hand over his steel grey buzzcut and grinned. “Feelin’ adventuresome?” He reached out a hand.
Laughing, Lavender settled beside him on her knees. “What’s all this, then?”
“Thought we might have a bit o’ fun, since it’s waxing gibbous tonight.” He handed her a full goblet.
Lavender’s eyes widened. She’s completely forgotten! Tomorrow night she would be…incapacitated. She glanced in her goblet and then took a large sip of the wolfsbane wine, wishing for a moment that things were different.
Her slight melancholy must have shown on her face, because Seamus tugged the glass away and set it aside with his own before pressing her back against the blankets. “Ah, acushla, I’ve an animal passion for ye, darlin’,” he murmured, as he began to unbutton her shirtwaist.
She smiled against his lips and wrapped her arms around her husband’s neck, feeling a little sorrier for her friends and a lot less sorry for herself.
X
Hannah bit her lip and looked over at her husband again. She was supposed to be trimming dead leaves from the singing roses, but her husband was shirtless and glistening, his long white hair pulled back, his muscles straining as he dug up offshoots of the nonvenomous curling tentanculus to pot. She put down her wand and slinked up behind him to wrap her arms around his middle and slip her fingers into his greying chest hairs.
Neville chuckled. “I’m all sweaty.”
Hannah nuzzled behind his ear and slid her hands down, finding and rubbing his cock through his trousers as it began to awaken.
Neville groaned and dropped his shovel, pressing her hand down with one of his and reaching his other around to palm her bottom. “Again?”
“Potting bench?” she murmured, nibbling his earlobe.
“My back wasn’t right for a week the last time,” he husked, squeezing her arse. “Ride me here on the lawn.”
And, feeling a bit smug that she had something her friends didn’t, Hannah did.
X
Daphne waited until most of the crowd had dispersed before making her way down from the stands and across the pitch toward the fieldhouse where Adrian’s office was. Scores were barely kept during a scrimmage, but as this one was meant to prepare Falmouth for their second half opener against Puddlemere next weekend, and she rather hoped that her husband’s pep talk might have gone long.
Unfortunately, he was behind his desk, the sunlight streaming through the window behind bouncing off his shiny bald head and the silver whistle around his neck. He looked up when he heard the door shut behind her, and grinned.
“I do believe the blues beat the reds,” he said, referring to the team colors the players wore for the game against themselves, “so it’s time to pay up, Daph.”
Daphne sighed and slumped, running a hand through her bob. “Surely this would be better at home?”
Adrian shook his head, rolling his chair out from behind the desk and settling in with his hands behind his head, the picture of relaxation. His grin widened. “Nope. Right here.”
Daphne mock-glared. “I hate you.”
“You love me. Stop stalling.”
With a groan, she took off her outerwear and tossed it to the floor, leaving her in a snug grey and white muggle-style cheerleading uniform. “I feel ridiculous. I am too old for this and my arse is way too big for this.”
Adrian’s eyes were hot as they roved over her. “You look bloody fantastic. And you arse is perfect.”
Somewhat mollified and drawing in a deep breath, Daphne began to wriggle. “Give me an F—”
She never made it to the other letters, and she thought that the “F” might as well have stood for something else entirely as Adrian bent her over his desk and pushed into her from behind. It was a shame she couldn’t tell that joke to her friends, but she didn’t want them to feel badly.
X
Padma smiled as she finished reading the owl from her sister and looked at the photographs she’d sent. Parvati had married a German man named Dieter, and they’d raised two children just outside Berlin. Her daughter and son were both married themselves, and Farhana had just given birth to her first child, which meant that Padma was a great-aunt. She watched her tiny great-nephew yawn hugely, scrunching up his face and then settling with a sigh before the loop began again. Padma’s heart twinged a little.
“We can go visit them,” Anthony said from over her shoulder, and she turned to look at him over the back of the sofa. She smiled a bit sadly.
“I’d like that. It will be nice to hold a baby again.” She sighed, looking around their beautifully and expensively appointed living room. “It’s just sometimes I wonder…”
He walked around and settled next to her. “I do, too. It isn’t too late, you know. If you’ve changed your mind.”
Padma leaned against him and turned slightly, combing her long fingers through his shaggy, silvering dark hair. “You didn’t want children, either.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “No, but that pales in comparison to my desire to make you happy.”
With a renewed confidence that the perfect life they’d made together was exactly what she had wanted and what she would always want, she swung her leg over to straddle Anthony’s lap. “You can make me happy right now,” she purred, and as her mouth came down hard against her husband’s, she knew without a doubt that—unlike her friends—she wasn’t missing a thing.
X
“Luna, my dear,” Rolf Scamander said excitedly, rushing into the magically expanded room of their home where they housed their smaller beloved creatures, “Grandfather has sent a package—a violet ashwinder egg under stasis!”
Luna pushed her notes away and settled back onto her stool. “Oh, how lovely!”
“Isn’t it?” He carefully placed the container on the table in front of her. “Another darling ashwinder for our collection. We must write the boys once it’s born so that they can suggest a name.”
Luna smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “If they choose a good one, perhaps we should also let them name the baby.”
Rolf nodded. “Of course dear, they should defin—” he paused, then swallowed. “The—The what?”
Luna reached up and patted his cheek. “At least you didn’t ruin my picture of that fluttering corcalampsis for nothing.”
Her husband’s eyebrows shot up. “Nothing? Nothing!” Wrapping an arm around her waist, he hauled her off her stool and then hoisted her into his arms. “Nothing, she says,” he muttered as he stalked toward their bedroom. “I’ll show you nothing…”
Luna giggled as her Rolf undressed her tenderly, thinking that at least she’d have one secret she could reveal at the next brunch.
X
“I’m in the living room,” Pansy called distractedly as she heard the pop of apparition from the kitchen. There were sounds of the refrigerator opening and bottles clanking. “Rosamund says all the food at university is dreadful,” she said, laying aside the owl from her eldest daughter. She picked up the other two, written on identical parchment. Likely Garland had already used all his and had mooched some off his sister again.
A shaggy, dark head was thrust suddenly over her shoulder, and Pansy grimaced. “You’re all sweaty.”
Her husband laughed. “Yer welcome.” He pushed his damp face into the side of her neck. “Didnae want tae wait tae use the locker room.”
Pansy rolled her eyes. “You’re dripping on the letters from your children.”
Oliver tilted his head back, taking a swig from the icy bottle of water he held. “Go’n then, tell me.”
“Garland says the usual, you’re the best quidditch coach ever, you’d better beat Adrian’s team on Saturday because he bet Emmeline Pucey fifteen sickles that you would, etc. Oh, and he lost twenty points for Slytherin for putting a rubber spider in Lola’s cauldron during potions.” She sighed. “He’s seventeen. I can’t understand why he’s so incorrigible.”
Her husband laughed and nibbled at her nape. “He’s yer son, Parkinson.”
Pansy arched her throat to give him room to work, though she huffed. “Do not try to pin this on me. I was mysterious and sneaky and gossipy. I didn’t carry around disgusting muggle insects.”
“Arachnids,” he mumbled. The water bottle had disappeared somewhere, and he began to work on the buttons of her blouse. “Jessamine?”
“Is in love. Again.” She murmured with pleasure as Oliver worked his hand into the cup of her bra.
“Ah, tae be sixteen.”
“Now, her I take full credit for.”
He snorted, stroking his calloused fingertips over her nipple. “Nae a chance. My girls’re Gryffindors through and through.”
Pansy tossed the letters aside and turned, arching up onto her knees. She wrinkled her nose. “You still smell, Wood.”
“Ye smell it, but if a tree falls in the forest…” he waggled his brows.
“Oh god, you are a father,” she muttered, grabbing the back of his tee-shirt and pulling it over his head. She ignored his grumbling as she wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Ye really mind, eh?” he said with a derisive smirk, pulling her closer despite her show of whinging. “How was yer ladies’ lunch?”
Pansy rolled her eyes. “Dull. Apparently, none of them like having sex anymore and they won’t say fuck.”
“They won’t say what?”
“Fuck.” Pansy ran her palms down over Oliver’s bare chest, headed toward the fasteners of his trousers.
“Sorry, what was that?”
Pausing, she looked up into his face. His expression was perfectly polite, but his dark eyes were laughing at her. She narrowed hers.
“FUCK!”
“That’s what I thought ye said,” he growled, then gently grabbed her face to pull her, laughing, into a kiss. “I accept.”
Pansy rolled her eyes again and made a show of being quite inconvenienced by their move to the bedroom, but once her husband was buried deep inside her with his powerful hands gripping hers tightly against the pillow and she was just as sweaty as he, she admitted to herself that she wouldn’t give up her particular Gryffindor and his lustful ways for anything in the universe—but that was a secret she’d take to her grave.
X
Narcissa hummed as she removed her diamond pendant and earrings and tucked them into the jewelry box on her little vanity table. The framed pictures beside it caught her eye, and she smiled as she settled further into her velvet perch. There was one of Draco as a small boy on his first broom, hovering happily only about six inches above the ground and waving wildly at Lucius, who was taking the photograph. The next was a shot of Draco and Ginevra on their wedding day, defiant and yet radiant and grinning. The rest were of the children, four boys and two girls, the six beloved grandchildren who had given them a second life. There was a picture of the twins as babies, chubby and drooling; one of Penny when she’d lost her first tooth; Tommy next to the Hogwarts Express just before he’d left for his first year; Billie in pigtails being held in a pair of disembodied arms she knew belonged to her husband; Danny in front of the hoops his first year on the Ravenclaw quidditch team. Not a constellation among them. Their son and daughter-in-law had forged their own path, as Draco had announced they would both on the day he refused to sign the marriage contract Lucius had presented to him and on the day they announced Ginevra was expecting for the first time. In the end, it had broken her husband—in the very best way.
She reached up and began pulling the pins from her hair, grimacing at the tugs on her arthritic wrists. She tilted her head down to reach the pins in the back, only to feel her hands grabbed and pulled over her head. Her shoulders relaxed as she straightened, and she smiled as her husband pressed kisses into her palms and then took over the task for her.
“I missed you today,” she sighed as she carefully rubbed the soreness from her fingers. “Your meeting ran long.”
“It would have gone on longer still, had I not put a stop to it and told them the rest could wait until Monday,” Lucius said with a mild growl. He placed his handful of pins in the silver bowl on her table. “I told them I was going home to my wife.” He’d already divested himself of his robes and shoes, and he yanked his shirttails from his trousers as he stepped away.
“They’re just enthusiastic, darling. It’s a very worthy cause.”
Lucius exhaled heavily as he dropped his shirt to the floor. “Undoubtedly. But there are some things a man shouldn’t have to sacrifice in the name of charity.”
Narcissa rose and went to the bed, pulling back the duvet and arranging the pillows the way she had for fifty-five years. She pushed her silver hair over her shoulders to tumble down the back of her dark blue silk wrapper and peered coyly at her husband from the corner of her eye. “Oh? And what things are those?”
Lucius had removed his trousers and socks and was left only in silk pants and the black ribbon binding his dark grey braid. He gripped her waist in his hands and tugged her back against him. “Don’t tease, my pet,” he cooed, kissing her temple.
She smiled. “Oh, but darling, I have it on good authority that we don’t even share a bedroom any longer!” At his puzzled look, she related what she’d overheard earlier that day. Lucius gaped.
“Well I bloody like that,” he gritted. Herding his laughing wife toward their bed, he said, “Let’s just test that theory, shall we?”
Minutes later with his wife on his fours begging for more after each bone-rattling thrust, Lucius paused and leaned over her to breathe hotly in her ear.
“Perhaps I should take it easier on you, my sweet, given your advanced age and all.” He reached around and located her clitoris with an ease born of familiarity, and she keened.
“Don’t—be silly,” Narcissa managed, her words broken by a throaty moan as Lucius rotated his hips. “You know how purebloods are.”
Author:
Characters/Pairings: Hermione/Ron, Cho/Harry, Daphne/Adrian, Lavender/Seamus, Hannah/Neville, Padma/Anthony, Luna/Rolf, Ginny/Draco, Pansy/Surprise, Narcissa/Lucius
Rating: NC-17ish
Word Count: 4667
Content/Warning(s): AU, NEC, Les femmes d’un certain âge bucking the norms! All het couples, as prompted—please note that this does not reflect any prejudices, beliefs, or preferences on my part! Perhaps mentions of image dysmorphia, if your definition is broad and you squint. Poor attempts at writing accents.
Summary/Prompt: “All her friends complain about their husbands (still) wanting sex. She can't get enough, even after all these years.”
A/N: Darling prompter, I’ve had a bit of fun with your prompt, thumbing my nose at societal expectations for older women—I hope you don’t mind! Since you didn’t request canon pairings, I’ve also done a bit of shaking and baking. I admit I’ve devoted a bit more space to my pet ‘ship couple out of the ones featured. 😉 Immense amounts of gratitude to my beta J, who did this one in-process since I brilliantly decided to join in so late! Thank you to our mods, readers, and reviewers. You make my heart happy. XOXO
Read at AO3 or below:
Years later, no one could agree how it had begun. Hermione thought it might have been Pansy’s idea, but Pansy would always roll her eyes and scoff and claim that she would never have volunteered to spend every Saturday brunch in “such tedious company.” Each week she would vow it was her last, but then the next Saturday when Daphne called, she would find her friend ready to come along with only a mild show of protestation.
“Well, I’ve been bullied into coming—again,” Pansy pronounced with a dramatic swirl of mauve-colored robes as she took her seat at their regular table on an unseasonably warm Saturday in December. They were nearly the last to arrive, with six of their seven fellow usual attendees already around the table. Over Pansy’s head, Daphne met Hannah’s eyes and rolled her own before settling herself to Pansy’s right and reaching for a pastry from the basket in the table’s center.
Before she could bite into the apple danish, it was snatched from her fingers by Lavender, seated to her right. “You made me promise last week,” Lavender reminded her apologetically. “No white sugar until after the pictures from the first game appear.”
Daphne pouted. “Damnit. I forgot.” She sighed longingly. “What I wouldn’t give for your metabolism.”
Lavender smiled. “Trust me, you wouldn’t want what comes with it.”
Daphne blanched, her eyes automatically going to Lavender’s heavily, though beautifully, made up face, her cosmetic charms hiding not only laugh lines but also scars at her throat. On impulse, she reached out and squeezed the other woman’s hand. “I wish my hair was turning a beautiful silver like yours, too.” She gestured toward the streaks of grey in her own blonde bob. Lavender preened a bit, touching one of her silvering temples, and the awkwardness was forgotten.
“Me too,” Hermione said from across the table. Her own dark hair, pulled into a bun, was untouched but for a wide white streak that ran from just above her right brow. Her laugh lines crinkled as she smiled. “Or like Luna’s.”
“Not that you can tell,” Luna said good-naturedly, referring to the very slight difference between the pale blonde tresses of her youth and her current head of silver hair. She appeared to have gained a few more freckles in the intervening years as well, though her placid nature had left her face as unlined as a babe’s.
“I wish I had the guts to go grey,” Hannah piped up, tearing a sweet roll into quarters. Like Luna, she had a smattering of dark freckles from spending so much time in the sun, but she also had lines at her eyes, mouth, and nose. Disheartened, she paid dearly every fortnight to keep her shoulder-length hair its original spun gold shade.
“I’m not sure I would, either,” Padma said from Hannah’s left. She fingered the long, shiny-dark braid draped over her shoulder. “Nothing wrong with a little hair color.” Her lined face crinkled into a grin and her eyes twinkled.
“Or a sassy cut,” Cho declared, gesturing to her own salt-and-pepper pixie.
“Everyone should age how they choose,” Pansy said primly, and the women around her laughed. Pansy made no secret of the fact that she liberally utilized lifting and smoothing charms and had regular appointments with a top cosmetiwitch to keep her shoulder-length sable bob grey-free.
“I think you come every week just to make our twenty-something servers stutter and stammer,” Daphne said warmly, squeezing her friend’s forearm where it lay on the table.
Pansy opened her mouth to reply, when the Floo near them flared and a flash of red caught her eyes. “Finally. Now maybe we can order; I’d kill for a mimosa.”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m late again,” Ginny said, dropping her bag over the corner of the empty chair to Hermione’s left. “Can we add a chair?”
Narcissa Malfoy, who had accompanied Ginny to the table, waved an elegant hand. “Don’t be silly, I wouldn’t dream of joining you, darling. I’m certain you wish to discuss my wretched son in privacy.” She smiled broadly, making her slightly softened face and eyes light up. “I’ll sit at that little table over there, and we can go shopping after you’ve had your visit.” She bussed her daughter-in-law’s cheek and moved away.
Ginny settled into her place, stealing the uneaten portion of Hermione’s crumpet from her plate. “I had to call Cissy to get out of the house. The twins were being absolute terrors and Draco couldn’t settle them.”
“At least there’s only Freddy and Wally left at home now,” her friend said soothingly.
“Unless Ginny ends up making another announcement.” Luna raised her brows as she helped pass around the mimosas the waiter had brought.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Pansy jumped in. “I thought I was going to catch them shagging in a coat closet at our dinner party last month.”
“I would say don’t even joke about it,” Ginny said, pausing to take a sip from her champagne flute, “but the healer confirmed last week that I’m entering menopause, hallelujah!” She lifted her glass in toast and took another drink.
Cho’s mouth opened in surprise. “But you’re so young! You look so young, too. Maybe a bit tired--”
Ginny, who thanks to some combination of her pure blood and power, could have easily passed for forty rather than fifty, laughed. “Thanks, I think. You’d be tired too, if you had six children.”
Cho threw up her palms. “Please don’t curse me. Three is plenty.” She drank from her own glass and then blushed. “But Harry hasn’t called time on—you know—that.”
“Oh my, someone call the papers,” Lavender giggled. “The Minister of Magic and The-Boy-Who-Lived are still doing it!”
Cho groaned. “Once he tried to convince me to do it on my desk during lunch! We are fifty-one years old!”
Hermione bit her lip. “Ron’s the same, really. I mean, I thought by this age we would have slowed down, but…you know.”
“You know?” Pansy repeated, derisively as Ginny covered her own ears with exaggerated gagging sounds. Pansy rolled her eyes. “Gryffindors.”
“Hey,” Ginny said, pointing a manicured finger at her husband’s best friend, “we’ve been listening to that for forty years. Not to mention, you married one!”
“Yes, well.” Pansy averted her gaze and finished off her mimosa, then motioned across the dining room for a refill. “That’s completely different. I’m convinced he was missorted.”
The other ladies laughed.
“Anthony is still a randy bugger,” Padma admitted. “I don’t think it’s ever less than three nights a week.”
“You’d think they’d be tired,” Daphne responded in a sympathetic tone. She handed her still-full mimosa to Pansy and took a sip of black coffee. “Even pushing the team as hard as they’ve been the last month to prepare for the opening of the second half of the season, Adrian would still like to have sex every night.” She sighed.
“At least he probably showers first,” Pansy snorted. “I can’t tell you—”
“I feel your pain,” Hannah giggled. “Of course, spending all day in the greenhouses isn’t likely to be as stinky as quidditch, but it gets awfully…hot.” She glanced around and leaned in. “Nev has insisted on having on off atop the planting bench…more than once.”
Hermione grimaced. “All that dirt? And my back wouldn’t be right for a week.”
Hannah bit her lip and nodded. “Yes…so annoying.”
“That’s nothing,” Lavender moaned. “There must be something about the odours of smoke and booze that turns Seamus on, because at the end of a long night he’s hard as granite. Last week he actually chased me around the bed!” She paused, then smiled and shrugged. “Not that I ran as quickly as I could have.”
Luna looked pensive. “Aren’t men supposed to reach their sexual peak much earlier? One would think they’d be rather disinterested by now. Last month I missed getting a picture of a fluttering corcalampsis because Rolf chose an inopportune moment to put his hand up my skirt.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Padma said, patting her hand. “I missed my favorite show on HGWT once for the same reason.”
Cho sighed. “I suppose it’s part of the burden of being a heterosexual woman,” she said solemnly.
Ginny looked over to where her mother-in-law sat, peacefully sipping tea and reading a novel. She put down her own glass and leaned forward. “I have to say, I feel a bit bad complaining about my husband wanting sex all the time. Can you imagine being Cissy’s age? Especially married to Lucius, who is all about propriety. I bet they haven’t even slept in the same room since Draco was conceived.” She cut another sympathetic glance Narcissa’s way. “You know how some purebloods are.”
“That is sad,” Hermione said in a thoughtful tone. “We really ought to be thankful that we still have passionate marriages.”
“Not too passionate,” Hannah said quickly. “I mean, it would be nice if those—those randy beasts would let us be sometimes.”
“Of course,” Hermione said, nodding.
All the other women murmured their concurrences, sneaking glances at Narcissa Malfoy, wondering if there would ever be a time when their unions would become completely sexless.
“I’m home,” Hermione called, dropping her purse on the mantel after stepping from the Floo. Busy brushing powder from her blue jumper, she didn’t sense another presence until she’d been grabbed about the waist and spun to press up against a hard body. “Ron! I—”
“I missed you.” He buried his nose in the side of her neck and inhaled deeply, like he was vastly comforted.
She laughed breathily. “I was only gone a couple of hours!” She raised her arms as he began tugging up her jumper. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! What if Rose or Hugo try to Floo? And, we’re in the living room!”
Ron tugged off his half-moon spectacles and tossed them down atop his wife’s discarded top with a crooked grin. “They won’t. And, good. We won’t have to move to listen to the news later.”
As Hermione laughed again and wriggled out of her skirt, she reminded herself to seem duly long-suffering the next week at brunch.
Ginny was rinsing the conditioner from her hair when she heard the large, glass door on the shower open and close. Suppressing a smile, she turned her head to peer over her shoulder with an arch look as she squeezed the excess water from the titian strands. “Excuse you?”
Grinning, Draco ducked his head under the water, wetting his silver hair as he grabbed the bottle of scented shower gel she preferred. “You don’t mind,” he purred confidently, tugging her back against his aroused body and running his sudsy palms beneath and over her breasts before tweaking her nipples.
Ginny hummed and arched, deciding that she really didn’t. As her husband lifted her against the tile so that she could wrap her legs around his hips, she felt a brief pang of sadness that this was one thing she couldn’t share with her friends. Draco drove home, and the guilt dissolved beneath pure pleasure. Perhaps if the twins took a long enough nap, there could be two things.
Cho closed the last folder in her stack and grimaced, tugging off her reading glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. She was tired, but confident that she knew every detail of the four proposals being presented before the Wizengamot on Monday. She tilted her head down and stretched her tired shoulders.
A sudden kiss to the exposed nape of her neck startled her, and she leaned back and looked up at her husband. Harry’s bright grin was very white against his surrounding grey beard as he placed a perfect cup of tea down on the table within her reach. “All done, Minister?”
Cho puckered and accepted as kiss before responding. “All done! Thank goodness, I don’t think I could have read one more brief!”
He arched a brow and chuckled, then leaned down to whisper in her ear. Cho shivered, goosebumps racing across her skin. “That’s a shame, because I have some briefs you could handle.”
Despite herself, Cho giggled. “That was terrible.” But she felt her breaths coming quickly, and she knew her eyes were dilated with interest. She ran her fingertips along his bristly jaw.
“Did you want that tea?”
She swallowed at his tone. “I’m not that thirsty,” she whispered.
A moment later, the tea vanished, papers tossed to the floor, and Cho herself spread upon the table like a feast for her husband, she thought to herself that she couldn’t understand how all her friends had lost interest in having sex with their husbands. Of course, she reminded herself as he shoved his glasses atop his head nestled his face between her thighs, none of them were married to Harry Potter.
Lavender was startled by the chime of the clock. She’d let time get away from her, she mused as she set her book aside. Seamus would have just closed up The Three Broomsticks and she liked to help him take care of the chores so that he could get home earlier.
Stepping from the Floo into the pub, she was a bit surprised not to see her husband wiping down the bar, as was his routine. She walked around the dark wooden structure to the opening where employees could access the area behind, intending to start the job herself. Instead, she found Seamus laying on a palette of thick quilts and fluffy pillows surrounded by candles and wearing just his pants. She blinked.
Seamus rubbed a hand over his steel grey buzzcut and grinned. “Feelin’ adventuresome?” He reached out a hand.
Laughing, Lavender settled beside him on her knees. “What’s all this, then?”
“Thought we might have a bit o’ fun, since it’s waxing gibbous tonight.” He handed her a full goblet.
Lavender’s eyes widened. She’s completely forgotten! Tomorrow night she would be…incapacitated. She glanced in her goblet and then took a large sip of the wolfsbane wine, wishing for a moment that things were different.
Her slight melancholy must have shown on her face, because Seamus tugged the glass away and set it aside with his own before pressing her back against the blankets. “Ah, acushla, I’ve an animal passion for ye, darlin’,” he murmured, as he began to unbutton her shirtwaist.
She smiled against his lips and wrapped her arms around her husband’s neck, feeling a little sorrier for her friends and a lot less sorry for herself.
Hannah bit her lip and looked over at her husband again. She was supposed to be trimming dead leaves from the singing roses, but her husband was shirtless and glistening, his long white hair pulled back, his muscles straining as he dug up offshoots of the nonvenomous curling tentanculus to pot. She put down her wand and slinked up behind him to wrap her arms around his middle and slip her fingers into his greying chest hairs.
Neville chuckled. “I’m all sweaty.”
Hannah nuzzled behind his ear and slid her hands down, finding and rubbing his cock through his trousers as it began to awaken.
Neville groaned and dropped his shovel, pressing her hand down with one of his and reaching his other around to palm her bottom. “Again?”
“Potting bench?” she murmured, nibbling his earlobe.
“My back wasn’t right for a week the last time,” he husked, squeezing her arse. “Ride me here on the lawn.”
And, feeling a bit smug that she had something her friends didn’t, Hannah did.
Daphne waited until most of the crowd had dispersed before making her way down from the stands and across the pitch toward the fieldhouse where Adrian’s office was. Scores were barely kept during a scrimmage, but as this one was meant to prepare Falmouth for their second half opener against Puddlemere next weekend, and she rather hoped that her husband’s pep talk might have gone long.
Unfortunately, he was behind his desk, the sunlight streaming through the window behind bouncing off his shiny bald head and the silver whistle around his neck. He looked up when he heard the door shut behind her, and grinned.
“I do believe the blues beat the reds,” he said, referring to the team colors the players wore for the game against themselves, “so it’s time to pay up, Daph.”
Daphne sighed and slumped, running a hand through her bob. “Surely this would be better at home?”
Adrian shook his head, rolling his chair out from behind the desk and settling in with his hands behind his head, the picture of relaxation. His grin widened. “Nope. Right here.”
Daphne mock-glared. “I hate you.”
“You love me. Stop stalling.”
With a groan, she took off her outerwear and tossed it to the floor, leaving her in a snug grey and white muggle-style cheerleading uniform. “I feel ridiculous. I am too old for this and my arse is way too big for this.”
Adrian’s eyes were hot as they roved over her. “You look bloody fantastic. And you arse is perfect.”
Somewhat mollified and drawing in a deep breath, Daphne began to wriggle. “Give me an F—”
She never made it to the other letters, and she thought that the “F” might as well have stood for something else entirely as Adrian bent her over his desk and pushed into her from behind. It was a shame she couldn’t tell that joke to her friends, but she didn’t want them to feel badly.
Padma smiled as she finished reading the owl from her sister and looked at the photographs she’d sent. Parvati had married a German man named Dieter, and they’d raised two children just outside Berlin. Her daughter and son were both married themselves, and Farhana had just given birth to her first child, which meant that Padma was a great-aunt. She watched her tiny great-nephew yawn hugely, scrunching up his face and then settling with a sigh before the loop began again. Padma’s heart twinged a little.
“We can go visit them,” Anthony said from over her shoulder, and she turned to look at him over the back of the sofa. She smiled a bit sadly.
“I’d like that. It will be nice to hold a baby again.” She sighed, looking around their beautifully and expensively appointed living room. “It’s just sometimes I wonder…”
He walked around and settled next to her. “I do, too. It isn’t too late, you know. If you’ve changed your mind.”
Padma leaned against him and turned slightly, combing her long fingers through his shaggy, silvering dark hair. “You didn’t want children, either.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “No, but that pales in comparison to my desire to make you happy.”
With a renewed confidence that the perfect life they’d made together was exactly what she had wanted and what she would always want, she swung her leg over to straddle Anthony’s lap. “You can make me happy right now,” she purred, and as her mouth came down hard against her husband’s, she knew without a doubt that—unlike her friends—she wasn’t missing a thing.
“Luna, my dear,” Rolf Scamander said excitedly, rushing into the magically expanded room of their home where they housed their smaller beloved creatures, “Grandfather has sent a package—a violet ashwinder egg under stasis!”
Luna pushed her notes away and settled back onto her stool. “Oh, how lovely!”
“Isn’t it?” He carefully placed the container on the table in front of her. “Another darling ashwinder for our collection. We must write the boys once it’s born so that they can suggest a name.”
Luna smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “If they choose a good one, perhaps we should also let them name the baby.”
Rolf nodded. “Of course dear, they should defin—” he paused, then swallowed. “The—The what?”
Luna reached up and patted his cheek. “At least you didn’t ruin my picture of that fluttering corcalampsis for nothing.”
Her husband’s eyebrows shot up. “Nothing? Nothing!” Wrapping an arm around her waist, he hauled her off her stool and then hoisted her into his arms. “Nothing, she says,” he muttered as he stalked toward their bedroom. “I’ll show you nothing…”
Luna giggled as her Rolf undressed her tenderly, thinking that at least she’d have one secret she could reveal at the next brunch.
“I’m in the living room,” Pansy called distractedly as she heard the pop of apparition from the kitchen. There were sounds of the refrigerator opening and bottles clanking. “Rosamund says all the food at university is dreadful,” she said, laying aside the owl from her eldest daughter. She picked up the other two, written on identical parchment. Likely Garland had already used all his and had mooched some off his sister again.
A shaggy, dark head was thrust suddenly over her shoulder, and Pansy grimaced. “You’re all sweaty.”
Her husband laughed. “Yer welcome.” He pushed his damp face into the side of her neck. “Didnae want tae wait tae use the locker room.”
Pansy rolled her eyes. “You’re dripping on the letters from your children.”
Oliver tilted his head back, taking a swig from the icy bottle of water he held. “Go’n then, tell me.”
“Garland says the usual, you’re the best quidditch coach ever, you’d better beat Adrian’s team on Saturday because he bet Emmeline Pucey fifteen sickles that you would, etc. Oh, and he lost twenty points for Slytherin for putting a rubber spider in Lola’s cauldron during potions.” She sighed. “He’s seventeen. I can’t understand why he’s so incorrigible.”
Her husband laughed and nibbled at her nape. “He’s yer son, Parkinson.”
Pansy arched her throat to give him room to work, though she huffed. “Do not try to pin this on me. I was mysterious and sneaky and gossipy. I didn’t carry around disgusting muggle insects.”
“Arachnids,” he mumbled. The water bottle had disappeared somewhere, and he began to work on the buttons of her blouse. “Jessamine?”
“Is in love. Again.” She murmured with pleasure as Oliver worked his hand into the cup of her bra.
“Ah, tae be sixteen.”
“Now, her I take full credit for.”
He snorted, stroking his calloused fingertips over her nipple. “Nae a chance. My girls’re Gryffindors through and through.”
Pansy tossed the letters aside and turned, arching up onto her knees. She wrinkled her nose. “You still smell, Wood.”
“Ye smell it, but if a tree falls in the forest…” he waggled his brows.
“Oh god, you are a father,” she muttered, grabbing the back of his tee-shirt and pulling it over his head. She ignored his grumbling as she wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Ye really mind, eh?” he said with a derisive smirk, pulling her closer despite her show of whinging. “How was yer ladies’ lunch?”
Pansy rolled her eyes. “Dull. Apparently, none of them like having sex anymore and they won’t say fuck.”
“They won’t say what?”
“Fuck.” Pansy ran her palms down over Oliver’s bare chest, headed toward the fasteners of his trousers.
“Sorry, what was that?”
Pausing, she looked up into his face. His expression was perfectly polite, but his dark eyes were laughing at her. She narrowed hers.
“FUCK!”
“That’s what I thought ye said,” he growled, then gently grabbed her face to pull her, laughing, into a kiss. “I accept.”
Pansy rolled her eyes again and made a show of being quite inconvenienced by their move to the bedroom, but once her husband was buried deep inside her with his powerful hands gripping hers tightly against the pillow and she was just as sweaty as he, she admitted to herself that she wouldn’t give up her particular Gryffindor and his lustful ways for anything in the universe—but that was a secret she’d take to her grave.
Narcissa hummed as she removed her diamond pendant and earrings and tucked them into the jewelry box on her little vanity table. The framed pictures beside it caught her eye, and she smiled as she settled further into her velvet perch. There was one of Draco as a small boy on his first broom, hovering happily only about six inches above the ground and waving wildly at Lucius, who was taking the photograph. The next was a shot of Draco and Ginevra on their wedding day, defiant and yet radiant and grinning. The rest were of the children, four boys and two girls, the six beloved grandchildren who had given them a second life. There was a picture of the twins as babies, chubby and drooling; one of Penny when she’d lost her first tooth; Tommy next to the Hogwarts Express just before he’d left for his first year; Billie in pigtails being held in a pair of disembodied arms she knew belonged to her husband; Danny in front of the hoops his first year on the Ravenclaw quidditch team. Not a constellation among them. Their son and daughter-in-law had forged their own path, as Draco had announced they would both on the day he refused to sign the marriage contract Lucius had presented to him and on the day they announced Ginevra was expecting for the first time. In the end, it had broken her husband—in the very best way.
She reached up and began pulling the pins from her hair, grimacing at the tugs on her arthritic wrists. She tilted her head down to reach the pins in the back, only to feel her hands grabbed and pulled over her head. Her shoulders relaxed as she straightened, and she smiled as her husband pressed kisses into her palms and then took over the task for her.
“I missed you today,” she sighed as she carefully rubbed the soreness from her fingers. “Your meeting ran long.”
“It would have gone on longer still, had I not put a stop to it and told them the rest could wait until Monday,” Lucius said with a mild growl. He placed his handful of pins in the silver bowl on her table. “I told them I was going home to my wife.” He’d already divested himself of his robes and shoes, and he yanked his shirttails from his trousers as he stepped away.
“They’re just enthusiastic, darling. It’s a very worthy cause.”
Lucius exhaled heavily as he dropped his shirt to the floor. “Undoubtedly. But there are some things a man shouldn’t have to sacrifice in the name of charity.”
Narcissa rose and went to the bed, pulling back the duvet and arranging the pillows the way she had for fifty-five years. She pushed her silver hair over her shoulders to tumble down the back of her dark blue silk wrapper and peered coyly at her husband from the corner of her eye. “Oh? And what things are those?”
Lucius had removed his trousers and socks and was left only in silk pants and the black ribbon binding his dark grey braid. He gripped her waist in his hands and tugged her back against him. “Don’t tease, my pet,” he cooed, kissing her temple.
She smiled. “Oh, but darling, I have it on good authority that we don’t even share a bedroom any longer!” At his puzzled look, she related what she’d overheard earlier that day. Lucius gaped.
“Well I bloody like that,” he gritted. Herding his laughing wife toward their bed, he said, “Let’s just test that theory, shall we?”
Minutes later with his wife on his fours begging for more after each bone-rattling thrust, Lucius paused and leaned over her to breathe hotly in her ear.
“Perhaps I should take it easier on you, my sweet, given your advanced age and all.” He reached around and located her clitoris with an ease born of familiarity, and she keened.
“Don’t—be silly,” Narcissa managed, her words broken by a throaty moan as Lucius rotated his hips. “You know how purebloods are.”