fantastic beasts & where to fondle them

“Oh!” she cried, pulling the maple seeds she’d gathered earlier from her pocket.  “Em, you haven’t a stove or other heat here, yeah?”

His face fell.  “Oh, no - are you cold?  I’m so sorry, I completely forgot, it’s just I -”

She shook her head vehemently.  “Don’t! I’m just glad I can contribute something to all this.  Give me a moment.”

Lining up the maple seeds, she thought about some of the practice she’d been putting into Transfiguration recently.  McGonagall said that alliteration and sympathy both helped with Transfiguration spells - and that while the best results typically came from tried and true combinations, the hallmark of an emerging understanding of the field was being able to spot those and create new transformations on the fly.  She hoped, since the winged seeds themselves were sort of containers…

“Ah!  It works!”  With a wave of her wand, she’d turned the five maple seeds into mason jars.  She laughed giddily and Barnaby, through his shivering, gaped between her and them.

“Did I miss that, in Transfiguration?” he asked.

“Oh, no no no!” she replied, hastily casting bluebell flames into each jar and distributing them around the circumference of the essentially round room.  “No, I’ve been doing extra study. Can’t miss any edge I can get, hunting the vaults and all.”

He nodded, crossing his arms over his chest and chafing at his biceps, the bulges of which jumped under his moving hands.  “Right. Well, gosh, that’s just brilliant. Thank you! I should have thought, I’m just so stu -”

She growled, surprising even herself a bit as she cut him off.  “Never,” she rumbled, “ever let me hear you call yourself that again - or anyone else, for that matter.”  She finally disengaged the brooch and threw the cloak around him, too, huddling close to him to share her own warmth.  “Especially not yourself.”

He looked down at her in confusion, his cheeks coloring slightly

She shook her head, still peeved as she glared defiantly back up.  “Look at this brilliant place you brought me to. That you found. That you built , in your fourth year, before even taking your OWLs.  To facilitate an unprecedented breakthrough in Magizoology, while still a student yourself, to observe… to observe…”  She trailed off, looking a little lost as she lifted her hands under the cloak to chafe at his forearms to help warm him.  “Em, what exactly are the unicorns going to do, again, Barnaby?”

Barnaby was still a moment, but then seemed to shake off a spell.  “Mating. The unicorns mate in the brightest safe moonlight close to the vernal equinox.  Druids think it’s something to do with Ostara. Has to be someplace of great natural beauty with fine weather and, preferably, flowers.  Em. And this is the night there wasn’t a portent of rain, so…” He shrugged, moving currents of heat between their bodies under the massive cloak.  

She shifted her weight from knee to knee as she processed this - the ceiling wasn’t high enough for standing, but it was comfortable on the soft carpet, and she… she was beginning to understand a bit of how Rowan felt when that one Ravenclaw fellow said brilliant things in class.  

But also…

“Em, so, mating ,” she said, only squeaking a little over the last word.  “Em.” Her eyes flicked up to his then down. “What do the accounts that do exist say?

Between warmth and being on comfortable conversational territory, Barnaby’s shoulders relaxed, dropping a couple inches after he rolled them back and forward to unknot.  “Well, the stallions are meant to have rather impressive mating displays. Sometimes there are fights - they can get quite gorey, I fear - over unmated mares, but, well, unicorns mate for life, and are long-lived and seldom conceive, so that’s rare.  Some think they come to the mating grounds already fairly sure who they’d like to pair off with, and since foals seldom come, that it’s sort of a social formality, really, for most of them - like going to a da…”  

Barnaby’s eyes flew wide and his hand slapped over his mouth, cutting himself off mid-word.  

She blinked up at him, suddenly less diffident herself to see him going bright red.  “Like... going to a dance?”

A few weeks prior, they’d attended the Celestial Ball together.  She’d helped him magically preserve his “buccaneer” - a rose boutineer - as a souvenir, touched by his sincere admission that he’d really like a keepsake.

The slow dances had been sweaty-palmed awkwardness, full of eye contact and eyes darting away, full of charged brushes against the mysterious body of the other - in short, both tantalizing and excruciating, leaving both lead-tongued and simultaneously yearning to be closer and to run away.  In fact, he’d walked her back to the door to her common room - and in the moment she looked down to gather her nerve to look up, unsure if he might want a goodnight hug - or even a kiss - he’d spun on his heel and sped away, posture as small as she’d ever seen him contort it to be.  

There was a long pause as, she suspected, they both turned similar memories over in their minds and were reminded that, once again, they were in physical proximity to one another, each brushing against the fathomless but so-close body of the other.

She was scandalized a moment by her own errant thought: Damn, I shouldn’t have made those bluebell flames!

Shaking herself a bit (and trying to ignore the collision of her soft hip with his muscular thigh), she cleared her throat.  “Em, I … I suppose that makes sense. Is … em, is there anything else I should look out for?”

Barnaby blinked down at her.  “Well… there is a courtship ritual.  Em. Every year, the stallions work to impress the mares before their physical interaction begins.  It’s meant to be quite spectacular - there’s light involved, but no one’s ever seen more than motion and a soft glow in the distance.  That’s really what I’m the most curious about, to be honest. There’s no other mention anywhere of unicorns seeming to do magic, rather than just being magic, if that makes sense.”

She looked up at him.  It made sense. And his eyes were such an unbelievably vivid green - like the anemone leaves below, like the flood of color back into the world in springtime.  Realizing she’d been quiet just long enough to touch on the awkward, she cleared her throat, nodding. “Yes, yes, that does make sense. Now I’m curious, too.” She hemmed a minute before asking, “Em, and after that, anything… unusual?”

His color rose a little again.  “As I understand it, unicorns… draw things out a bit by comparison to other equines, even, say, Abraxans, who coordinate everything in mid-air, so… well, that hasn’t been specified much but I hope I can record some of what happens, I guess, for others.”

“For posterity,” she murmured, looking up at him.

“Em, yeah,” he murmured even more quietly, gazing down at her.

Infinitesimally, they turned toward each other.  Leaned toward each other. Static drew the fronts of their robes together, and there, on their knees, his head stooped not to scrape the ceiling, they forgot to feel awkward about falling, just a little, into each other’s eyes - lost only in the wonder of intimacy without any real self-consciousness - or consciousness of the other, really - to incite embarrassment.