featherxquill (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
featherxquill) wrote2005-12-19 12:21 pm
featherxquill) wrote2005-12-19 12:21 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: An Unexpected Understanding
Title: An Unexpected Understanding
Rating: R
Warnings: HBP Spoilers
Pairing: Rita Skeeter/Minerva McGonagall
Summary: Following the funeral, Minerva agrees to allow Rita to interview her. The result is something neither woman would have expected.
A/N: For the Rita Skeeter Fuh-Q-Fest at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ritaskeeter_. Dedicated to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
ledivinemarquis because she wins at internets, and life, and saucy ideas, and a great many other things ;).
An acid green quill snapped in her thin fingers. Grief made her ruthless and desperate.
“It’s been years since I’ve been in here.” It was not reverence in Rita Skeeter’s voice but excitement, as her eyes fixed on Albus’ sleeping portrait and she surged forward to get a better look, lifted her fingers as if to caress canvas.
Minerva’s voice was a whip crack. “Don’t touch it.”
A head of blonde curls twisted and the smile died on the woman’s lips at the sight of her shredded feather in cat’s claws. Minerva let it fall to the floor.
“If you want to do this, you’re going to have to do it my way.”
A pencilled eyebrow arched in challenge, and she half turned, folding her arms and peering over one shoulder at Minerva.
“Really. And what are your terms?”
“I want you to stand at the desk and face the wall. You’re not to look at me.”
Rita scoffed as though to protest, but Minerva cut her off.
“Do you want this interview or not?”
Rita said nothing. She didn’t need to. A feverish desire was etched in every line of her face, every angle of her body, as though it had set her very skin afire.
“So I thought. The desk, then.” And Minerva leaned back against the window frame; curling hands around protruding wood and letting her fingernails dig into it.
For a moment Rita’s eyes flashed daggers as deadly as the poisonous words that so often dripped from her quill, but a moment later she had stepped up to Albus’ desk like a schoolgirl waiting for an absent Headmaster. She spread taloned fingers and laid her hands palms down on the desk, leaned forward a little and shifted in her black ensemble, forcing the fabric to mould against the lines of her body, and Minerva’s eyes to travel over her back and down over hip and the swell of buttocks to the seamed stockings that traced her legs in perfectly parallel lines.
It was obscene. Obscene that black mourning wear should cling to the form so. Obscene that her nails were a violent shade of purple, and that she was draping herself over the Headmaster’s desk before the stones of his tomb were cold.
“I see you’ve not added any personal touches to the place yet. No tartan wall hangings. No scratching post.”
“You shut your mouth.”
“I thought you were going to give me an interview if I stood at the desk like a good little girl.”
“Not if you disrespect Albus Dumbeldore, I won’t.”
“Fond of him, were you?” She let her head fall back against her shoulders, staring up at the ceiling. Lacquered curls bobbed and twisted. Minerva ignored the question and it’s slithering undertone.
“I’m moving my collection of taxidermed beetles in tomorrow.”
Instantly Rita’s head snapped around, that lithe body went tight. Voice like a whip. “Did Granger tell you that?”
“No.” Minerva pushed herself off the windowsill and strode over to Rita, reached up and gripped the back of the woman’s head in one hand, then gave it a violent twist back to face the wall.
“I figured it out myself, though it doesn’t surprise me that she’s cleverer than you.”
“Little bitch blackmailed me for a year.”
Minerva was suddenly aware that she had not moved away, that she had withdrawn her hand but not lowered it, but anger flared then, made irrational by everything else writhing inside her, and in an instant her fingers were back in Rita’s hair again, twisting violently, and she’d stepped forward and pressed her body against Rita’s back to give herself better leverage to pull.
“Don’t insult my students.” Her voice a deadly hiss.
There had been a moment of shock visible on the profile of Rita's face, but she overcame that quickly, and then she was pressing herself back against Minerva and chuckling.
"Were you this rough with Albus?"
It was bait, and Minerva knew it, but she bit anyway. “You need to learn some respect.”
Respect for the dead, for wounds unhealed, for the lengths to which a person could be pushed before they snapped.
Grief made her ruthless and desperate.
“Are you going to teach me some, Minerva?”
“Don’t presume to call me by my Christian name. And yes.” Her hand came down hard on Rita's backside.
Rita gave a gratifying little squeak of surprise, and a pleasure shot through Minerva that was both hot and dangerous. It was like her blood had finally turned to acid, like the tears that still remained unshed had turned her veins poison, and here was a way to rid herself of it. Like a tiny bit of grief tingled out through her fingers with Rita’s cry, and left her. Gone.
A moment later, tight black skirt was being rucked up over hips. She wore black lace panties that only half covered ass and screamed I want to be fucked, and Minerva thought whore, and her hand laid another stinging slap that left a red blemish on creamy skin.
Rita’s fingers arched and scratched at the desk, and Minerva hit her again. And again. One hand fisted in the fabric of her top, pulling against her and holding her up, and the other thrashed her bared ass with merciless abandon.
She could hear Rita’s moans as if from far away, see the wetness dampening her panties, but it wasn’t about that. It was about the fire in her fingers, the red welts rising on pale skin, the release of this demon in her blood. The way her hand tingled and her mind swam and the beast inside her formed of grief broke lose and roared fury. There were hot tears on her cheeks that she’d not cried before, but she hardly felt them through the fire in her blood.
“Oh Merlin.” It was Rita, and it was a voice hoarse with desire, but full of something else less defined. “He’s watching.”
And Minerva’s head twisted, and he was. When their eyes met, there was something in them that held a glimmer of the power he’d had in life – a weight in that gaze that asked her whether she knew what she was doing, or what she was turning herself into by doing it, and then Albus Dumbledore melted from his portrait like a disappearing ghost.
The world came crashing back, then. Minerva released a gasping Rita to fall upon the desk, and she moved aside to grip it with one hand herself. Breath rushed in and out of her in hot, quick bursts. Blood still raced through her like something potent and unstable, but the adrenalin was gone. Gone out of her into the redness of Rita’s cheeks, gone into her breathless gasps as she collapsed onto the desk, holding herself up with elbows.
Minerva hated herself. Hated the loss of control, hated the way her hands were shaking. She lifted the one that gripped the desk, and found she was steady enough on her feet, but then her hands shook more, and she covered her face with them. Took a deep, steadying breath that hardly steadied her at all.
When she unlaced her fingers, Rita had turned her face up and was looking at her with an expression Minerva had never thought to see on her face. Interest. Concern. Surprise. Not the fake or predatory kind, but something else.
“That wasn’t about desire, was it?” The voice she spoke in didn’t belong to the sharp-witted journalist, but some other person with rounder edges that Minerva didn’t know Rita had within her.
“No. I don’t suppose it was.”
“It wasn’t about sex.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t even about power, was it? Not really.”
It took Minerva a moment. “No.”
Minerva had always been the kind of woman who judged quickly. When she’d first seen Rita Skeeter, with her manicure and her crocodile skin bag and her venomous quill, she’d seen someone who understood little and cared less. Someone only interested in her own desires, and not caring who she destroyed to fulfil them.
She seemed to see Rita through a different pair of eyes in that moment. Here was a woman who had an extraordinary understanding of people, who knew how to get inside their heads or under their skin, who knew what they wanted and how to give it to them. Who knew what they had to offer and how to take it from them.
A woman who was pushing herself up, then, and turning, sliding against the desk to sit with a slight flinch. Pushing herself along so she was level with Minerva, whose eyes had not left her. She reached out with two long fingernailed hands, and they turned Minerva’s face toward her even as a stockinged leg curled about the Headmistress and pulled her close.
Then Rita’s lips were against Minerva’s and Minerva suddenly knew that a woman like Rita, capable of such a ruthless determination, was also capable of a fierce, possessive passion. It was a dominating kiss, and Rita’s hands were hot against Minerva’s cheeks. When it broke apart, Rita did not let go.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been so honest with me before.” It was a breath with weight, rather than a voice.
“I didn’t say anything epic.”
“It wasn’t what you said.”
Breasts pressed hard together, a lean body against a full one.
Minerva didn’t know why it was important, then, when they were both so breathless with what had passed between them, but it was. “We were never lovers, he and I.”
“I never really thought you were.”
Rita’s lips quirked just slightly into a smile. And it seemed she knew, that she had read all Minerva didn’t know how to say in the flickers in her eyes.
Knew it wasn’t that Minerva didn’t love Albus Dumbledore, just that she’d never been attracted to men. Knew that she hated the insinuations not because she found the idea repugnant, but simply because it wasn’t true. Rumours like that made the beautiful friendship she’d had with him into something else – they suggested that such a powerful alliance could only be forged through romantic ties, and ignored the fact that they’d been powerful, intelligent individuals that worked well together and respected each other – like minds, not romantic attachment.
Never mind that he’d also been one of the few people who did not judge her in some way for her sexual preference.
Rita seemed to understand all that, as her eyes twinkled and she scraped fingernails lightly over Minerva’s cheek.
Minerva’s hand fell against Rita’s knee, and she trailed fingers over silk stockings warmed by the skin beneath. Traced little circles on the inside of a knee, slid up under skirt to the point where stockings ended and skin began, felt lace under her fingers, and damp warmth. Heard Rita’s breath hitch in her throat.
But Minerva couldn’t do it. She knew the portraits on the walls were just pretending to be asleep, and she’d never been an exhibitionist.
“I think we should go somewhere else.”
Rita cocked her head to one side, and smirked. “Those snores are slightly too enthusiastic, aren’t they? Where will we go?”
Minerva paused for a moment, then murmured. “Ginger newts.”
A panel of the bookcase slid open and admitted access the bedchamber that had belonged to Albus only days ago.
She knew she would have to move in eventually, but up until that moment she hadn’t even had the courage to step inside. Right then, though, with Rita’s fingers curling around her own in a way she would never have thought possible even an hour ago, it felt like just the right time.
Inside the room, a purple robe lay on the floor, untouched by house elves, as if they too had been afraid to enter.
Rita let out a breath. “No personal touches in here yet, either.” None of the acidity of before, only a quiet sort of awe. A heavy presence hung in the air.
“No,” Minerva replied, turning to face the other woman, feeling her fingers laced tightly in a fierce grip. “I think this will be the first.”
The room didn’t need any tartan wall hangings to belong to Minerva that afternoon. The scratching post was Minerva’s back, scored with ragged red lines from inch-long nails. There was a different kind of fire in Minerva’s veins, this time, the kind that began with a firm, full body pressing her down against the sheets, claiming her roughly with a kiss, then showing just how well she understood, just how much she knew.
She was certain no other Hogwarts Headmistress had ever claimed the bedchamber in quite the same way.
Many times, she’d thought herself a tired old woman, one who knew the world too well. Two wars and countless students made you think that of yourself – that you could see things coming before they did, that you were world-weary and wise. But perhaps she realised some of her own faults, that afternoon, in realising how much she could learn from a woman like Rita Skeeter, how much she could be taught.
A stockinged foot teased against her leg, and scarlet lips left outlines of kisses on her breasts.
All in all, she thought, Albus Dumbledore would have wholeheartedly approved.
A/N: I don't think I've ever wibbled this much about a fic in my LIFE. Compliments and Criticisms are appreciated in equal amounts.
Rating: R
Warnings: HBP Spoilers
Pairing: Rita Skeeter/Minerva McGonagall
Summary: Following the funeral, Minerva agrees to allow Rita to interview her. The result is something neither woman would have expected.
A/N: For the Rita Skeeter Fuh-Q-Fest at
ritaskeeter_. Dedicated to ledivinemarquis because she wins at internets, and life, and saucy ideas, and a great many other things ;).An acid green quill snapped in her thin fingers. Grief made her ruthless and desperate.
“It’s been years since I’ve been in here.” It was not reverence in Rita Skeeter’s voice but excitement, as her eyes fixed on Albus’ sleeping portrait and she surged forward to get a better look, lifted her fingers as if to caress canvas.
Minerva’s voice was a whip crack. “Don’t touch it.”
A head of blonde curls twisted and the smile died on the woman’s lips at the sight of her shredded feather in cat’s claws. Minerva let it fall to the floor.
“If you want to do this, you’re going to have to do it my way.”
A pencilled eyebrow arched in challenge, and she half turned, folding her arms and peering over one shoulder at Minerva.
“Really. And what are your terms?”
“I want you to stand at the desk and face the wall. You’re not to look at me.”
Rita scoffed as though to protest, but Minerva cut her off.
“Do you want this interview or not?”
Rita said nothing. She didn’t need to. A feverish desire was etched in every line of her face, every angle of her body, as though it had set her very skin afire.
“So I thought. The desk, then.” And Minerva leaned back against the window frame; curling hands around protruding wood and letting her fingernails dig into it.
For a moment Rita’s eyes flashed daggers as deadly as the poisonous words that so often dripped from her quill, but a moment later she had stepped up to Albus’ desk like a schoolgirl waiting for an absent Headmaster. She spread taloned fingers and laid her hands palms down on the desk, leaned forward a little and shifted in her black ensemble, forcing the fabric to mould against the lines of her body, and Minerva’s eyes to travel over her back and down over hip and the swell of buttocks to the seamed stockings that traced her legs in perfectly parallel lines.
It was obscene. Obscene that black mourning wear should cling to the form so. Obscene that her nails were a violent shade of purple, and that she was draping herself over the Headmaster’s desk before the stones of his tomb were cold.
“I see you’ve not added any personal touches to the place yet. No tartan wall hangings. No scratching post.”
“You shut your mouth.”
“I thought you were going to give me an interview if I stood at the desk like a good little girl.”
“Not if you disrespect Albus Dumbeldore, I won’t.”
“Fond of him, were you?” She let her head fall back against her shoulders, staring up at the ceiling. Lacquered curls bobbed and twisted. Minerva ignored the question and it’s slithering undertone.
“I’m moving my collection of taxidermed beetles in tomorrow.”
Instantly Rita’s head snapped around, that lithe body went tight. Voice like a whip. “Did Granger tell you that?”
“No.” Minerva pushed herself off the windowsill and strode over to Rita, reached up and gripped the back of the woman’s head in one hand, then gave it a violent twist back to face the wall.
“I figured it out myself, though it doesn’t surprise me that she’s cleverer than you.”
“Little bitch blackmailed me for a year.”
Minerva was suddenly aware that she had not moved away, that she had withdrawn her hand but not lowered it, but anger flared then, made irrational by everything else writhing inside her, and in an instant her fingers were back in Rita’s hair again, twisting violently, and she’d stepped forward and pressed her body against Rita’s back to give herself better leverage to pull.
“Don’t insult my students.” Her voice a deadly hiss.
There had been a moment of shock visible on the profile of Rita's face, but she overcame that quickly, and then she was pressing herself back against Minerva and chuckling.
"Were you this rough with Albus?"
It was bait, and Minerva knew it, but she bit anyway. “You need to learn some respect.”
Respect for the dead, for wounds unhealed, for the lengths to which a person could be pushed before they snapped.
Grief made her ruthless and desperate.
“Are you going to teach me some, Minerva?”
“Don’t presume to call me by my Christian name. And yes.” Her hand came down hard on Rita's backside.
Rita gave a gratifying little squeak of surprise, and a pleasure shot through Minerva that was both hot and dangerous. It was like her blood had finally turned to acid, like the tears that still remained unshed had turned her veins poison, and here was a way to rid herself of it. Like a tiny bit of grief tingled out through her fingers with Rita’s cry, and left her. Gone.
A moment later, tight black skirt was being rucked up over hips. She wore black lace panties that only half covered ass and screamed I want to be fucked, and Minerva thought whore, and her hand laid another stinging slap that left a red blemish on creamy skin.
Rita’s fingers arched and scratched at the desk, and Minerva hit her again. And again. One hand fisted in the fabric of her top, pulling against her and holding her up, and the other thrashed her bared ass with merciless abandon.
She could hear Rita’s moans as if from far away, see the wetness dampening her panties, but it wasn’t about that. It was about the fire in her fingers, the red welts rising on pale skin, the release of this demon in her blood. The way her hand tingled and her mind swam and the beast inside her formed of grief broke lose and roared fury. There were hot tears on her cheeks that she’d not cried before, but she hardly felt them through the fire in her blood.
“Oh Merlin.” It was Rita, and it was a voice hoarse with desire, but full of something else less defined. “He’s watching.”
And Minerva’s head twisted, and he was. When their eyes met, there was something in them that held a glimmer of the power he’d had in life – a weight in that gaze that asked her whether she knew what she was doing, or what she was turning herself into by doing it, and then Albus Dumbledore melted from his portrait like a disappearing ghost.
The world came crashing back, then. Minerva released a gasping Rita to fall upon the desk, and she moved aside to grip it with one hand herself. Breath rushed in and out of her in hot, quick bursts. Blood still raced through her like something potent and unstable, but the adrenalin was gone. Gone out of her into the redness of Rita’s cheeks, gone into her breathless gasps as she collapsed onto the desk, holding herself up with elbows.
Minerva hated herself. Hated the loss of control, hated the way her hands were shaking. She lifted the one that gripped the desk, and found she was steady enough on her feet, but then her hands shook more, and she covered her face with them. Took a deep, steadying breath that hardly steadied her at all.
When she unlaced her fingers, Rita had turned her face up and was looking at her with an expression Minerva had never thought to see on her face. Interest. Concern. Surprise. Not the fake or predatory kind, but something else.
“That wasn’t about desire, was it?” The voice she spoke in didn’t belong to the sharp-witted journalist, but some other person with rounder edges that Minerva didn’t know Rita had within her.
“No. I don’t suppose it was.”
“It wasn’t about sex.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t even about power, was it? Not really.”
It took Minerva a moment. “No.”
Minerva had always been the kind of woman who judged quickly. When she’d first seen Rita Skeeter, with her manicure and her crocodile skin bag and her venomous quill, she’d seen someone who understood little and cared less. Someone only interested in her own desires, and not caring who she destroyed to fulfil them.
She seemed to see Rita through a different pair of eyes in that moment. Here was a woman who had an extraordinary understanding of people, who knew how to get inside their heads or under their skin, who knew what they wanted and how to give it to them. Who knew what they had to offer and how to take it from them.
A woman who was pushing herself up, then, and turning, sliding against the desk to sit with a slight flinch. Pushing herself along so she was level with Minerva, whose eyes had not left her. She reached out with two long fingernailed hands, and they turned Minerva’s face toward her even as a stockinged leg curled about the Headmistress and pulled her close.
Then Rita’s lips were against Minerva’s and Minerva suddenly knew that a woman like Rita, capable of such a ruthless determination, was also capable of a fierce, possessive passion. It was a dominating kiss, and Rita’s hands were hot against Minerva’s cheeks. When it broke apart, Rita did not let go.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been so honest with me before.” It was a breath with weight, rather than a voice.
“I didn’t say anything epic.”
“It wasn’t what you said.”
Breasts pressed hard together, a lean body against a full one.
Minerva didn’t know why it was important, then, when they were both so breathless with what had passed between them, but it was. “We were never lovers, he and I.”
“I never really thought you were.”
Rita’s lips quirked just slightly into a smile. And it seemed she knew, that she had read all Minerva didn’t know how to say in the flickers in her eyes.
Knew it wasn’t that Minerva didn’t love Albus Dumbledore, just that she’d never been attracted to men. Knew that she hated the insinuations not because she found the idea repugnant, but simply because it wasn’t true. Rumours like that made the beautiful friendship she’d had with him into something else – they suggested that such a powerful alliance could only be forged through romantic ties, and ignored the fact that they’d been powerful, intelligent individuals that worked well together and respected each other – like minds, not romantic attachment.
Never mind that he’d also been one of the few people who did not judge her in some way for her sexual preference.
Rita seemed to understand all that, as her eyes twinkled and she scraped fingernails lightly over Minerva’s cheek.
Minerva’s hand fell against Rita’s knee, and she trailed fingers over silk stockings warmed by the skin beneath. Traced little circles on the inside of a knee, slid up under skirt to the point where stockings ended and skin began, felt lace under her fingers, and damp warmth. Heard Rita’s breath hitch in her throat.
But Minerva couldn’t do it. She knew the portraits on the walls were just pretending to be asleep, and she’d never been an exhibitionist.
“I think we should go somewhere else.”
Rita cocked her head to one side, and smirked. “Those snores are slightly too enthusiastic, aren’t they? Where will we go?”
Minerva paused for a moment, then murmured. “Ginger newts.”
A panel of the bookcase slid open and admitted access the bedchamber that had belonged to Albus only days ago.
She knew she would have to move in eventually, but up until that moment she hadn’t even had the courage to step inside. Right then, though, with Rita’s fingers curling around her own in a way she would never have thought possible even an hour ago, it felt like just the right time.
Inside the room, a purple robe lay on the floor, untouched by house elves, as if they too had been afraid to enter.
Rita let out a breath. “No personal touches in here yet, either.” None of the acidity of before, only a quiet sort of awe. A heavy presence hung in the air.
“No,” Minerva replied, turning to face the other woman, feeling her fingers laced tightly in a fierce grip. “I think this will be the first.”
The room didn’t need any tartan wall hangings to belong to Minerva that afternoon. The scratching post was Minerva’s back, scored with ragged red lines from inch-long nails. There was a different kind of fire in Minerva’s veins, this time, the kind that began with a firm, full body pressing her down against the sheets, claiming her roughly with a kiss, then showing just how well she understood, just how much she knew.
She was certain no other Hogwarts Headmistress had ever claimed the bedchamber in quite the same way.
Many times, she’d thought herself a tired old woman, one who knew the world too well. Two wars and countless students made you think that of yourself – that you could see things coming before they did, that you were world-weary and wise. But perhaps she realised some of her own faults, that afternoon, in realising how much she could learn from a woman like Rita Skeeter, how much she could be taught.
A stockinged foot teased against her leg, and scarlet lips left outlines of kisses on her breasts.
All in all, she thought, Albus Dumbledore would have wholeheartedly approved.
A/N: I don't think I've ever wibbled this much about a fic in my LIFE. Compliments and Criticisms are appreciated in equal amounts.
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"Here was a woman who had an extraordinary understanding of people, who knew how to get inside their heads or under their skin, who knew what they wanted and how to give it to them. Who knew what they had to offer and how to take it from them."
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What can I say about the fic? Wonderful. It so moving and yet so erotic. Without explicit sex you made it more sensual more mysterious... wanting to know what did happen between them and making us imagine that part and, they are so in character that make them get into your heart. I have to say it again. Wonderful! :D
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Though, I think my next story will be a bit more explicit ;)
(*uses a Sybill icon for no apparent reason*)
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Thanks! I'm glad it worked for you. Glad to see you here, by the way :)
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I was looking for Rita fics, but it's an equal show between two strong females with brilliant characterisation. You manage to make them match canon perfectly and yet bring out something original and something orginal from both of them. I wasn't too keen on Minerva's use of 'fuck' and 'whore', but then it was inside her head, so it didn't really bother me.
This is a wonderful look at grief, anger and respect (and the pervy Headmasters, including Albus, made me grin) and I love the style as well.
She was certain no other Hogwarts Headmistress had ever claimed the bedchamber in quite the same way. and the last line are both made of win. Just wow :o)
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Thank you so much for this! I'm glad you like the fic, and it makes me full of squee to get reviews on things I wrote some time ago.
With regards to Minerva's use of curses, I agree in a way. I would never expect to hear her swear. I think I might have used them to show just how angry she was, how much control she'd lost, and because, well, Rita tends to inspire that sort of reaction in people :P.
Btw, if you want more Rita fic and haven't seen it yet, there is a masterlist (http://www.livejournal.com/users/featherxquill/69323.html) that I compiled some time ago and keep as up-to-date as possible (some of the links don't work, but that's mostly to the art, and I've kept them there so that I might one day chase down the artists and see if I can find them again).
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Ooo, I'll definitely check out the masterlist! Thank you for the links :o)