The Alligator Pear

"The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star."

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste

Professor Sprout set it on the table with a thud. A foot and a half high, vaguely ovoid and covered with dark, scaly skin, it brought an ominous hush to the greenhouse.

"What hatches out of that?" asked Lavender with a revolted twist to her mouth.

The professor stroked its crown proudly.

"This is not an egg. It's an Alligator Pear. They're very unusual, which is why you're lucky to be seeing one as a surprise today. Has anyone seen one of these before?"

There was a condescending snort from the back of the class and the students turned to see Draco Malfoy leaning on a workbench.

"You've encountered one of these, have you?"

The glance he flashed at Crabbe suggested that he found the question insulting. "Well, yes."

"That's very interesting. The Alligator Pear is a threatened species, due to ... certain powers it is said to possess, and it has been a Class A Non-Tradeable Good since nineteen eighty-five. That means it is illegal to import it into Britain other than for strict research or educational purposes."

Malfoy gave her a considered look and crossed his arms.

"I'm very well travelled."

"Yes, very good Mr Malfoy." Professor Sprout gave the fruit an experimental prod near its base, and then another. "Does anybody else think they look familiar?"

Hermione looked up from her frantic searching of the index of her textbook and raised her hand immediately.

"It looks like an avocado. The Muggle fruit."

"That is exactly right. The Alligator Pear follows the pattern of many magical plants of the ancient world. Wizards - and in this case it was our Mayan cousins - tamed the wild species to make it easier to cultivate and consume. But the plant then became so tame that, with a little care, Muggles could farm it. And in time, a whole new species evolved, with no magical traits at all. The Muggles call it the avocado. It's much smaller than the Alligator Pear, but the main difference between them is ..." She stroked the side of her wand down the length of its scaly skin. "Yes, there we are! It's a bit weak - they never last too long after they've been plucked - but it's reviving a bit now. Watch carefully."

As she tapped slowly around the fruit's crown with a trowel, one slender tendril emerged from beside the dry brown nub where the stem had been, unfurling in a slow, jerky movement as the professor continued to stroke it. Blindly, the green stem swayed, and as it moved, the curled head of it unwound itself to reveal a furry pale brown bud, elongated, flat and tapering at one end. Motioning the students back, Professor Sprout touched the trowel's tip to the bud. Quick as a snake's strike, its pod split lengthwise, pulled back to reveal two rows of needle-sharp white teeth, and snapped across the middle of the trowel. Metal and wood showered onto the tabletop and the trowel was no more. With the same clumsy movements, the tendril pulled back into the body of the fruit and vanished.

"The Alligator Pear." Professor Sprout brushed the wood splinters from her apron. "A rare carnivorous plant, and one which you're not likely to see again in your lifetime. This one will be dead before morning."

"Professor?" Hermione raised her hand again, absent-mindedly, her attention so fierce upon her textbook it was doubtful whether she had watched the spectacle at all. "It says here that an illicit trade in the Alligator Pear continues, despite its protected status. But it doesn't say what it's used for."

"Oh, potions and whatnot." With practised dexterity, the professor whipped a length of sacking over the fruit and pulled it tight. "We don't use it here. Miss Bulstrode, Mr Longbottom, kindly help me put this away. It won't bite while it's constrained."

And for the rest of the lesson, Professor Sprout appeared not to hear any more of Hermione's questions.

*

"It's true then." The pinched face of Draco Malfoy watched her closely as he gripped the doorway and leaned back into the almost empty greenhouse. "The stories about the pear. It's an -"

"That sort of subject matter is hardly appropriate for my class." Professor Sprout snapped shut the cupboard under the rear workbench and vigorously straightened the Mandrake pots above it. "And besides, I have no idea what you're talking about."

*

"You have to remember it!" hissed a voice that could have been Ron's, or Dean's, or in his panic even Ginny's. "What does she say when she opens the door in the morning?"

Neville's extra Herbology classes were at 7.45 a.m., which was the worst time of day for his memory, apart, quite possibly, from 11 p.m. with the added stress of breaking curfew and attempted theft.

"I don't know! She normally says "Oh blast! I've forgotten that dratted -"

The greenhouse door swung open.

It was quick work for Neville to lead them to the cupboard where the pear had been stowed and, after some delay while Ron and Harry argued about whether those teeth might bite through hessian, Ginny rolled it out to discover that it was quite indisputably dead.

"This had better be good for something," Dean grumbled as they closed the door carefully behind them. "Or Hermione can put it back herself."

"She knows what she's talking about." Ron clapped him on the back, then grew furtive. "You won't tell her I said that, will you?"

With its back against the enormous oak that shadowed the far end of the greenhouse, a small figure cursed and stamped its feet silently into the grass.

*

The portrait hole swung back to reveal Malfoy leaning on the doorframe like an overacting film noir lead.

"I'm sorry," Neville chirped at his housemates, releasing the door handle abruptly.

In the unnatural silence, Malfoy surveyed the room at leisure, his gaze fixing everywhere but on the low table bearing the stolen Alligator Pear, Hermione (who had rested a plate of its violated slices on her textbook and was poking them curiously with her wand) and the handful of Gryffindors who gathered around it with an assortment of spoons and penknives and green-coated fingers.

When his vision alighted, as if shocked, on the fruit, he tutted in disappointment and stepped into the room.

"You'll be expelled for this." He could have been addressing any of them but it was Harry at whom he directed his venom. "Stealing school property, and illegal property too. I'll insist on expulsion for the ringleaders and a year's detention for everyone who ... oh hell and buggery, you've eaten it."

Hermione drew herself up and laid her textbook on the table.

"The Alligator Pear is considered a delicacy, as you're well aware. And as for reporting us, we've done no harm since it was dead when we ... um, got it, and besides -"

"We'll say you were in on the plan." Neville sprang forward and clutched at Malfoy's collar to smear a large slice of green flesh into its weave.

Ron and Dean looked at him incredulously.

"Well, he did seem very interested in the lesson. Don't you think that was ..."

Neville had got very good at knowing when his cause was lost. The signs were all there: he had stopped speaking and everyone was gaping at him as if struggling to formulate a reply less insulting than "Bollocks". Malfoy, plucking a chunk of green pulp from his robes, was the least lost for words.

"Bollocks," he snapped. "Nobody would believe that I conspired with Gryffindors, and certainly not with filthy -"

He trailed off and looked in puzzlement at his fingers, which had been slowly mashing the fragment of Alligator Pear into oily smoothness. He separated his fingers and watched the pulp part with them, turned them over, smoothed a dollop of it into his palm. He ran them under his nostrils and then very close to his lips.

"What's he -" Lavender began, peering out from where she had half-concealed herself in the curtains, before Ginny kicked her.

Nothing, it appeared, could distract Malfoy from the rapt contemplation of his hand and the fascinating substance which lay upon it. He frowned at it suspiciously, and when his finger first approached his mouth it halted there, calculating, and left a tiny green splodge on the very edge of his lip. The tip of his tongue touched it tentatively once; his gaze lowered in consideration; and then with one quick swipe of tongue, his lips were clean. He shot a defiant look at his audience, as if to say "They're doing this on all the catwalks in Milan - when will you people catch on?" and then he set to work licking his fingers clean.

The room was in complete silence as he wiped his fingers on his handkerchief.

"So are you going to rat on us?" Hermione asked evenly. "Or would you like to stay and share?"

Malfoy and Ron gave identical snorts of disgust. Ron glared at Malfoy. Malfoy watched the pear with his mouth very slightly open.

"Well?"

"You don't seem to realise what trouble you're in, Granger," Malfoy said quietly, sauntering behind her to approach the place where the fruit lay. "I am confiscating this stolen school property. You should all be disciplined - and if it were up to me, you'd all have detention for a month. However ... if you disappear without another word, I might generously forget to mention this incident."

Four wands were drawn before he could lay a hand on it. His stomach shrank. He knew this scene. It was the one that happened each year on the Hogwarts Express: too many attackers, too little time, and then hours of wishing for more pain to distract from the humiliation or vice versa. He turned his sneer up a notch and shivered.

"If you'd rather explain this to Sprout or Filch, then please, go ahead and provoke me."

"No way, Malfoy." That was Harry, moving to the front of the group and finally succeeding to his natural role of wrecker of Malfoy's best laid plans. "You're not confiscating anything."

"We can keep you here til morning and eat the evidence," Neville piped up from where he still stood by the door.

Neville had got very good at knowing when his cause was lost. The signs were all there: he had stopped speaking and everyone was gazing at him as if ... well, that was unexpected. Comprehension was dawning on several faces and Ron was even nodding:

"Yeah, we can. Good one, Neville."

Harry bent over the Alligator Pear. Actually, they had only sampled a tiny bit of it, slicing the top off it like an egg to reveal the stone inside which emerged from the green flesh, dark brown and bald and shiny. He scraped a chunk of fruit onto the tip of his wand.

"Close the door, Neville. And take his wand away."

With a low growl, Malfoy stepped forward. Hermione's wand was at his temple before his foot hit the floor. Jerking his head away from its painful point, he thought of the countless times he had insulted or injured its owner; pictured as many as he could remember in glorious detail. But he raised his left arm to allow Neville to reach into his pocket and, after three unproductive tugs, remove his wand.

"Now, Malfoy," Harry went on. "We're going to have a feast now. You can sit in that chair in the corner and watch, since you obviously wouldn't want to be part of this appalling behaviour. Would you?"

"What's your choice?" Hermione asked, close to his ear. "Are you with us or against us?"

Harry extended his arm then, with his wand in his hand and the thin crescent of pear flesh balanced on it. The morsel stopped a few inches from Malfoy's nose. He eyed the wand coolly for a moment. Then he took his hand from his pocket.

"Uh-uh."

Hand and wand halted. Malfoy looked at Harry, whose eyes glinted darkly. Looked at the wand wavering dangerously close to his face. Looked at the pale green sliver at its tip. Moistened his lips.

"Say it, Malfoy. Swear you'll keep this secret."

Uselessly, Malfoy made a quick snap at the sliver, but Harry moved quicker and the piece of fruit teetered, almost fell. Something very like sweat was forming along his hairline. He curled his lip into its most offensive sneer.

"Fine. I swear it. Are you happy? Now let me have that."

Harry's face was hard.

"Open your mouth."

It was insolent the way he said it, deliberately provocative. Malfoy's stomach knotted right up into his chest and the tendons in his wrist tensed, craving the wand he couldn't reach. He put his hand back in his pocket where it could clench invisibly. And he opened his mouth, opened wide.

For sheer screaming frustration, those seconds of waiting were right up there with the hours of writhing helplessly on a luggage rack on the Hogwarts Express. His mouth watered. The first prickling of sweat had spread to the palms of his hands and the skin around his collar. He moved his tongue carefully over his teeth, searching for any last remnant of the nutty flavour that had seduced him. Nothing. All that was left was a bitter aftertaste. With all the willpower he had, he kept his gaze focused on the black length of Harry's wand and away from the triumph in his eyes.

Then finally the wand was in his mouth. It brushed his lower lip and pressed his jaw down unkindly. His lips tingled with the knowledge that it was there, inside him. With a quick thrust of tongue, he swept the delicious flesh from it and bit, leaving vicious toothmarks in the holly wood.

If Harry cursed, he didn't hear it, for the Alligator Pear melting on his tongue reduced him to a creature of two senses - taste and touch - as he crushed it against the roof of his mouth and rolled his tongue around in the pulp. Slippery and silky, the feel of it was pure sensation. And the taste ... the taste ... first the oiliness of it, buttery thick and smooth, then a more bitter, grassy flavour cutting through it and spreading up along his tongue, shooting sparks of intense sharpness all across the back of his mouth and then fading, fading slowly until the comforting feel of the nutty oil was all that was left. There was sweetness hidden in it, too, a rich, young sweetness that bled out of the flesh when it was broken, a slender thread that lost itself among the stronger flavours and could only be tasted when you closed your eyes and searched for it. His eyelids fluttered and closed. He searched for it until here was nothing left to be found.

When he looked again, everyone was staring at him except Harry, who was rubbing at the end of his wand.

"Well." Malfoy smiled, but tersely. "In for a Sickle, in for a Galleon."

Snatching a pen-knife from Dean's startled fingers, he knelt by the plundered Alligator Pear and began to cut it into neat slices. With his right hand, he steadied the fruit, and he would never lay a hand on any human with such tenderness.

*

Each of them made love to the Alligator Pear in their own individual way.

Hermione, for instance, approached it first with her eyes and then with her fingers, turning the slices over on her plate to feel its oily surface until the scent of it cleaved to her skin and she found herself insisting that the test of taste was the only scientific approach. For Harry, it was about the novelty; he tried it in small bites and in gulps, crushing it until it dissolved in his saliva, smoothing it over teeth and gums, tracing the cool trail of its chunks as they slid down his throat.

Lavender cut it into neat little squares, while Parvati liked to have the smoothness of it slither over lips and tongue before she could bear to bite.

To Ginny, it tasted best off Dean's penknife, pliant fruit slipping off the cold point of blade. Somehow, the squashiest pieces ended up in Neville's hands, which he was constantly sucking clean such that his memory of the fruit would always be tainted with salty skin and the residue of ink stains.

Ron's first slice lay untouched on a teaspoon dangling from his hand. On his face was the same disbelieving expression he had worn throughout the mad adulation of Gilderoy Lockhart.

"What's up with you lot? Ginny, Mum had to threaten you with Unforgivables to make you eat your vegetables. And you, Dean. You're a chicken and chips man. This is bullshit. Yeah sure, it's stolen. So what? That doesn't make it taste better."

Ginny and Dean devoured in silence. It was Malfoy who stood up.

"I don't believe you people." He gave each of them their own individual glare. "Even for Muggle-lovers you're ignorant. You haven't got the slightest idea what a privilege this is, have you?"

"Malfoy," Ron said, reclining on the lounge and evidently glad to be back on familiar territory. "Maybe you know something, maybe you don't, but you're impressing no-one with that green stuff all over your face."

There were one or two feminine giggles. Malfoy wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.

"Do you know, Weasel King, why the Alligator Pear has been protected for fifteen years? What about you, Mudblood? Why was it culled to the point of extinction?"

Hermione dropped her eyes and coloured.

"The commonly known fact which none of you appear to have heard is ... " A wicked light came into Malfoy's eyes. "Actually, no. Let me demonstrate."

The deferential space which had opened around the fruit allowed him to bend easily and scoop out a fingerful of the most buttery flesh just inside the skin.

"The Alligator Pear ..." On his right was Hermione; when he found that his laden finger was pointed at her, he shuddered and tried his left. Neville. He shared a humourless laugh with himself. "The unique property of the Alligator Pear is this."

Neville watched in wide-eyed horror as Malfoy reached for him. Before he could lean away, Malfoy's hand had caught the side of his face and captured him with fingers gripping fiercely behind his ear and a thumb beneath his jaw. Tiny muscles tensed all over his scalp and made the hair at the back of his neck stiffen; the whole prospect of being touched made him silly with panic. Touch was a sensation limited to Trevor - wet-skinned, slow-moving, unresponsive Trevor - and the occasional functional contact with Madam Pomfrey. Unsolicited touch was dizzying. How was he supposed to know what to do with it? Perhaps it would be clumsy to pull away. Perhaps he should stand still and pretend it didn't bother him. His heart galloped in fear and his feet refuse to move.

Malfoy moved first. His thumb pressed Neville's jaw to open. With his free hand, he took his finger full of fruit pulp and slid it deep into Neville's mouth, past his lips, past where his teeth met, past where any decent finger ought to penetrate. Neville tasted the sweat on Malfoy's skin long before he noticed the fruit. He moved his tongue dazedly and swallowed.

He imagined that Malfoy blinked twice, very quickly, at the movement of tongue. Then Malfoy parted his lips and kissed him - though his mind blanked with disbelief, there was no other word for it. Malfoy kissed him: seized him by the shoulder and pressed their mouths together, pressed all the harder when he found that Neville was tense and unbendable in every muscle of his body. A startled gurgling sound came out of Neville's throat and his left foot jerked pointlessly.

Malfoy put a tiny space between their lips, so narrow that Neville could still feel the moisture on his breath gathering on his skin. And he turned his head deliberately so that the sharp tip of his nose brushed against Neville's cheekbone.

And then it kicked in. It was a warmth rising from very deep in Neville's gut, spreading up along his spine and downward as well, squeezing lightly on each muscle until the hardness left it. It fizzed and sputtered, this feeling. It made him want to run or dance or fling himself wildly about the room.

As Ron muttered threateningly in the far distance, Malfoy ran his fingers down the front of Neville's shirt to his navel and back up, and again - slower, with its fingers spreading out. Neville murmured because everywhere those fingers touched, they were drawing up the warmth and the jittery feeling from inside him and brining it to the surface of his skin, making it tingle with sensation. And Malfoy's tongue was just flicking against the place where his lips met, and his body - his whole body - curved into Malfoy's and he wanted to bend and mould himself wherever that touch wanted him to go. He opened his mouth and wound his arms around Malfoy's shoulders.

When he opened his eyes again, he was bent so far back that, past a curtain of white hair, he could see the ceiling. With a darted look of triumph at his audience, Malfoy straightened suddenly and Neville only just stopped himself falling.

"The Alligator Pear," Malfoy concluded with a quiet flourish. "Is one of the most potent aphrodisiacs known to the wizarding world."

And he smiled, and his smile, for all its thin-lipped meanness, was wanton with the slick of oil smeared over his lips like a clumsy clown mouth. Lavender stifled her little gasp and turned her face into the curtains, imagining she was the only one possessed of a sudden urge to trace a finger over those glistening lips.

With a thick squelching sound, Malfoy scooped up a greedy handful of the fruit - leaving a precise indentation of his knuckles in what remained - and went to sit on the stairs where he could suck the food from his fingers free from the wet-mouthed gaping which seemed to be the standard Gryffindor expression tonight. Neville plonked himself down on the lounge next to Ron and pulled his robes tightly around himself.

*

The vicious stamen of the Alligator Pear gave way before Ginny's determined fingers until, with a tug, she pulled it free. A quick spell had it clean. She wound it once around her neck and let the bud hang like a pendant at her throat, its mouth drooping open and all those long teeth on display. Dean ran his fingers over it.

Ron, wedged in the corner of the lounge with his long legs curled up to his chest, watched them sullenly.

"You're taking this too far. It's just a fruit."

"No it isn't." Without looking back at him, Ginny cut herself a long slice of flesh. "You saw what it did."

"Yeah, but that's only Neville."

"You're not immune to it, Weasel King," came Malfoy's disembodied voice from the stairwell. "Or were you hoping for another demonstration?"

"You wish, Malfoy," Ron called. But he didn't press his point.

"You know he's bullshitting." Ron rejoined later. "The thing with Neville doesn't prove anything. I mean, Nev's not exactly the best person in the world at knowing when to say no. Are you mate?"

He punched Neville on the shoulder and Neville stood up vacantly and walked away.

"Ron Weasley!" Hermione looked up from her book to frown at him. "I can't stand listening to you condemning something you've never even bothered to try. Either stop moaning about it or taste it."

"There's no point." Ron's back hunched on the lounge. "It won't work on us. I mean, you know. We are Gryffindors and all, and we're pretty solid in a fight or a Quidditch match, but we're not exactly adventurous when it comes to ... you know."

"Aren't we now?" Hermione asked coolly with an odd spark in her eye. "Parvati, come here a moment."

Parvati left her close discussion with Harry and Dean to saunter over and slide onto the arm of Hermione's chair. Her hair was loose and black and tiny glints ran along the length of it where it fell over her shoulders. Hermione licked the last of the fruit from her fingertips. Her book tumbled. Precisely four seconds later, Ron's jaw hit the floor.

"Hermione! Put that back on! Everyone can see your - Oh, bloody hell, Parvati. Why wouldn't you do that behind the Three Broomsticks?"

He glanced at the Alligator Pear. He glanced back at the two most fanciable girls in sixth year. He cleaned the teaspoon in one hungry gulp. Shuffling crab-like so as not to miss a moment of the spectacle, he reached the fruit and, with an unspoken prayer, plunged his face into its shell to fill his mouth with flesh.

*

He was still there, now with his legs stretched across a step and his back up against the wall, white hair, white collar and his face collecting what little light there was while the rest of him remained a dark smudge. More than just pointy, his features looked jagged lit like that, alien and hard. Neville took a deep breath and tightened his grip on the jar as he descended.

Malfoy gave a short laugh when he looked up and saw it.

"Is that the bit they trimmed off your brain, Longbottom? Lovely."

Neville had a furious discussion with his legs, which begged permission to turn and run.

"No," he said, and cringed the way he'd validated the question by answering it. He pressed on, his voice quickening. "It's a berry from my Mimbulus mimbletonia. From last summer. It's perfectly preserved. You could eat it now except Mimbulus is poisonous."

The sneer had almost claimed Malfoy's mouth when realisation kicked in.

"Oh."

This time when he examined the jar, it was with a calculating regard.

"I could show you how to do it."

Malfoy stood slowly, evening up their height.

"Tell me."

Neville had to look back at the jar, which reflected eerie globs of the thin light onto his hand.

"Oh no. It's quite difficult, and the pear is so much bigger. I expect I'd have to do it for you." There was a sudden yelp downstairs and he had to put his hand on Malfoy's forearm to get his attention back. "I could keep it here and take care of it, make sure the, er, mugwort gets changed often enough. You could tell me when you ... You know. When you want it."

Malfoy leaned on the wall and watched him noncommittally and, because he knew he had nothing else to offer, Neville held out the triangle of fruit he had sawn off with the sharp end of his quill.

There was a spark in Malfoy's eyes that he wasn't quick enough to hide.

Neville knew what to do when Malfoy reached out for the fruit.

"Uh-uh," he breathed.

Though Malfoy glared black murder at him, he swallowed loudly and evidently found that the lure of the pear outweighed what pride he had left to lose. He put his hand under Neville's hand to steady it, turned his face into Neville's palm and took languid mouthfuls of fruit.

When the flesh was all gone, Malfoy continued to work the fruit under his mouth to scrape the last bitter shreds from the inside of its skin. Through the thin, knobbly skin, Neville could feel the movements of his tongue, warm and strong, making deliberate strokes from one end of the wedge to the other. All Neville could see was the edge of Malfoy's cheekbone and a thatch of white hair that was now anything but slick, his own thumb protruding from the side of Malfoy's face. His heartrate leaped as Malfoy pressed his palm harder towards his mouth. And when Malfoy's lip slipped past the edge of the pear skin and made sudden, wet contact with his hand, Neville almost dropped the jar.

Then Malfoy tipped Neville's hand to make the stripped wedge of skin fall to the floor and licked a slow stroke from his wrist, along his heart line to the tip of his index finger. Neville shuddered. Malfoy released him. Like a sad, lost kite, Neville's hand waved directionless in the air.

"I can ... I can preserve as much of it as you want." His heart was rattling around in his chest and he suspected that his lips were trembling, just as his grandmother always said they did when he was being reprimanded. "You can ..."

Neville blushed in the half light. How did people make it clear that they wanted to be kissed?

There wasn't a speck of pear fruit on the top of Draco Malfoy's mouth, just to the right of his cupid's bow. But, Neville thought with sudden recklessness, he didn't know that. With all the usual voices screaming words of doom inside his head, he leaned down - only very slightly; he wasn't tall himself - and licked at Malfoy's top lip. A puppyish lick, he realised in horror, not as suave as he had pictured it. It made Malfoy's breath stall, though. And an ugly imitation of a smile unfurled on his face.

"As much as I want," he murmured. "Whenever I want. Is that a binding promise, Longbottom?"

When Malfoy's breath - Malfoy's real, human, smelling-of-Alligator-Pear breath - was on his cheek, how could he refuse? He nodded numbly and leaned in.

Oh, he liked the way Draco Malfoy kissed. He liked it more than anything he could remember. He kissed like he was kissing a mirror, as though Neville wasn't there at all. He didn't make pointed sighs or gasps that sometimes were requests in a code Neville couldn't decipher, and othertimes were no more than sighs and gasps. He didn't bring his lips to a sudden halt as if to say: "Your turn now. Go on, impress me." No, it was all wonderfully simple. When he wanted to kiss, he kissed. When he wanted to stop, he stopped. When he wanted access to the deeper parts of Neville's mouth, he tilted his face more and wrapped a hand around the back of Neville's neck and pushed his way in.

And for once, the fact that Neville didn't know where to put his hands, or how to make his breathing sound quiet, or when was the right time to use his tongue, it didn't matter at all. Malfoy was tasting Neville's mouth all to a rhythm entirely of his own, a rhythm of small bites and sudden, intrusive swipes which took no account whatever of Neville's responses.

Malfoy seemed so caught up in appreciating his own talent that he thought he could get away with it, taking the hand that gripped the edge of Malfoy's robes and sliding it around to the small of his back so he could, very very gradually, press their bodies together, chests and stomachs and hips. Malfoy didn't gasp, didn't change his pattern, only started to sway his hips to the same beat as his tongue. Gravity was too strong for Neville's knees then. The weight of the jar was tipping him downstairs and he followed it with a distraught moan. Malfoy steadied him with an impatient arm around his waist.

When their mouths drew apart, making a tiny wet smack, the sudden cold hurt Neville's lips. It was funny, Malfoy didn't look like Malfoy at all, the way his lips were swollen and red with short, sudden breaths catching on them and his face looking flushed even in the twilight.

"Very good, Longbottom," he said stiffly and leaned in to whisper moist breath against Neville's ear. "Fetch me some more of that fruit."

*

The common room looked like a war zone.

Ron lay stretched along the back of the lounge with his hand reaching down. A foot in a black buckle shoe protruded above the lounge, stocking pooled around the ankle below a stretch of naked calf. Ron pulled the leg towards him and ran his tongue along the shinbone. Two notes of feminine laughter mingled below him.

Seamus had finally been woken from sleep and come down to eat smeared fruit off Lavender's stomach. She squirmed and moaned.

Harry was on his knees, shirtless with his head thrown back and eyes closed tight as Dean fed him slivers of fruit on the end of a wand.

"Open for me, Harry."

A bead of sweat ran down Harry's neck, over his breastbone, and Neville heard his shuddering breath from the stairs.

Neville looked at the pear, poor wreck that it was, sitting fatly in the epicentre of the carnage. Its scent still pervaded the room, inching its way into Neville's nostrils.

With a fierce tug in his groin, he remembered the throbbing pulse he had felt in Malfoy's stomach when their bodies pressed together, and wondered just how that tender skin and that heartbeat would feel under his mouth. He tucked the savaged stub of the Alligator Pear under his arm and took the stairs two at a time.

*

On the table: two half-empty cups of tea, two untouched cupcakes, and a plate smudged with green pulp.

Under the table: Professor Sprout with a wicked man between her thighs.

"You monster!" she gasped as the dark head emerged from her skirts and fastened itself to her lips once more. "You beast! Oh my! You have a tongue like Devil's Snare!"

"This is ..." he panted into her unclad bosom. "Exhilarating. It is everything I expected, and so much ... yes, like that ... so much more. You ... The pear ... Oh, ecstasy! ... I never imagined such total release from inhibition. Extraordinary."

As he gripped the cotton of his underpants in lean hands and tore them from his hips, she shook away the guilty knowledge that, above her head, the traces of green fruit would soon be morphing back into apple as the hasty spell faded.

"Yes, Severus," she whispered. "Extraordinary."

*

end