Kristmas Wish Fulfilled for: celandineb
From: amand_r

Title: Old Habits Are the Sweetest
Characters/Pairings: Ron/Harry/Hermione
Rating: NC-17
Kinks/Themes Included: Unorthodox use of sweets, oral sex, rimming, double penetration, drunk!sex
Other Warnings/Content: None.  I sort of ignored the epilogue?
Word Count: 5120
Summary/Description: “Well,” Ron says, raising his glass of whiskey, “we're here now. So.” He clinks glasses with Hermione. “Here's to the third Tuesday of the month.”
Author's Notes: Thanks to my betas.





A friendship like love is warm,
A love like friendship is steady. (Thomas More, 'How Shall I Woo?')

Bounce, come on, bounce. (K7, 'Come Baby Come')



Harry is always the first to arrive. It's not that he's looking forward to it (though he is, he always does), but he lives down the street. The others have to disentangle from activities and Apparate.

And that's why he's always there at the Three Broomsticks, with three Quintin Blacks, three butterbeers, and a whole bag of pork cracklings.

Rosmerta is in high spirits, flitting from table to table with trays and bowls of stew. Harry waves her away with a shy smile, and she doesn't bother him. He's a regular now―no one cares about The Boy Who anymore, other than to buy him a pint or two (or a dozen) on Hogwarts Battle Day. In fact, just this morning Mrs. Wendrop had yelled at him over the state of his front garden. Even when he had passed her on the street on the way here, she'd merely scowled at him.

He doesn't drink any of the things in front of him. He's waiting.

Ron opens the door wide and steps into the room, slouching in his mac, shaking raindrops from his hair. He stands there a moment too long and the door hits him on the arse, sending him forward a few inches. He reaches out to catch his balance and almost succeeds in grabbing Rosmerta's ample chest for balance, but she pushes against him with a tray just in time. Ron gives her a sheepish look. One of these days it might work. Harry wonders what will happen when it does.

Harry raises two fingers, but that's rather stupid, as he's always at the same spot. This chair might as well have his arse marks on it. Ron slips out of his coat and falls into the other side of the booth. Harry slides a Quintin and a butterbeer to him, then sits back, because if Ron is here, Hermione can't be far behind. The day she is late for Tuesday night is the day that it might as well be over. In fact, Ron is early, too.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Ron says.

There, sorted.

They might have begun a conversation, How about those Chudley Cannons?, or Can you believe what they want for those new Nimbus 3000s?, but the door opens again, and Hermione streaks in, covered head to toe in a long cloak, which she whisks off immediately and dries with her wand. She tucks her wand behind her ear, something she must have learnt from Luna, and makes her way to the table, stopping to chat with one or two older folk whom she always seems to know, though how she does is anyone's guess.

When she finally settles into the booth with them, Harry slides the last of the unclaimed drinks to her and smiles when her fingers brush his hand.

You can wait a little longer, Potter.

“You wouldn't believe what George--” Ron stops when Hermione flicks his face. “Oh, right.” No work talk tonight. Never. Work talk is boring, and if he said something then Hermione would say something, and then Harry would have to say something, like, “The new Chocolate Frogs came in. Snape's on a card.”

“Well,” Ron says, raising his glass of whiskey, “we're here now. So.” He clinks glasses with Hermione. “Here's to the third Tuesday of the month.”

Harry doesn't feel the whiskey when it slides down his throat, but after the butterbeer chaser hits it, the coolness seems to leave behind a trail that illuminates the burn. Hermione sighs and sets her glass down with a little click. Ron shakes his head like a dog.

Madame Rosmerta stops by their table, bottle in her hand. “Keep them coming, then?”

They all hold up their glasses. “Please.”

***

“A whole store full of sweets, and you don't eat anything,” Ron mumbles around a mouthful of treacle fudge. Harry doesn't know how Ron eats it, because even after he modified Hagrid's recipe, barely anyone buys it. He only replenishes it every other week, and today it is especially dry and dense.

Harry peeks through three fingers at the wall of acid pops and other hard sweets (the lemon sherbets sell quite well), and shrugs. From his spot on the floor, the streetlights make a pattern on the ceiling. “Well, you know, busman's holiday.”

Ron has the grace not to make a bus joke.

This is the first time they are meeting here, in the three years he’s owned the shop.  Usually, they end up at Hermione’s student housing flat, or Harry’s small house in Hogsmeade, or Ron’s office in the back of the store.  But Hermione’s got a flatmate this year, and the last time they’d gone to Ron’s, there had been a mishap with am enchanted bit of paper and Hermione had told them, in no uncertain words, never again.  

So that left Harry’s.  But after three bracing glasses of whiskey, and several butterbeers, suddenly the store had seemed like a  good idea.  Ron had said something about free samples,  and ‘getting his snack on’.  Hermione had just smiled and run ahead of them on the street, her hair flying from the sides of her hood as she skipped on the uneven road.  

They had only lit one candle, because the street has enough lanterns to see by, and then Ron had started to peel off his clothes, staggering through the store with one trouser leg off, drunkenly snatching at sweets in every flavour of childish nostalgia they could have ever imagined or remembered.  Hermione had disappeared into the back room, and Harry had resolved that if he heard anything fall over, then he’d get up and do something about it.  Right now, if he stares at things fleetingly, his head isn’t as spinny.

Ron swallows his mouthful and sits down next to Harry on the floor, leaning against the wooden counter.  “Well, I guess I’m not as excited about the stuff at the shop, either.”  He snorts.  “Once you’ve demonstrated Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder to the fifth group of third years in one day, it’s lost its sparkle.”

Harry had the grace not to make a joke.  That’s their coin tonight.  Because they’re too old to be in here, making fools of themselves, really, they should have left this stuff behind ages ago--the jokes, the sweets, the immaturity, the closeness they share even though they should have all three moved on like their classmates had done ten years ago.  

Instead, Ron leans against the counter and reaches out with one hand to casually unbutton Harry’s shirt, chatting idly.  “I think your fudge is off.”

Harry smiles with his eyes closed.  Ron’s hand sneaks into his shirt and under the vest, to the soft and tender parts of him, just before the crease of the arm, just under the clavicle, places that you save to caress for comfort, old and familar.  

“Hermione’s parents will clean your teeth,” he says into the dark, as if Ron has brought powder from work.  

There’s a snort.  “They used a drill, man.  ‘Mione gave me laughing gas.  Best.  Dental.  Appointment.  Ever.”

“Hey hey,” Hermione says, and Harry opened his eyes to see her coming from the backroom, almost starkers, her hair trailing over her shoulders. Her arms are full of Chocolate Frogs--the standard ones, the vampire ones, the special-edition Order of the Phoenix ones.  

Hermione stops in front of them and spreads her arms, letting all the sweets fall to the floor around them.  Harry shakes his head, and it’s hard not to stare at her breasts, since it’s a little chilly in the room, or her little knickers with the peekaboo lace (her Tuesday pants, she says, as everything else is reliably practical and plain, of course.  Harry has never told her that he wouldn’t mind any pants, even plain ones, because he’s a bloke, and he can still be a little selfish).   

“Oi, where were you hiding those?” Ron asks.  “I haven’t had one of these in...wow.”  He lowers the package into his lap and stares off into space.  “We have grown up, all right, haven’t we?”

Hermione undoes Harry’s flies and yanks the lots down to his knees, then puts one of her knees on the trousers in between his legs, effectively trapping him there.  The breeze is chilly and not unpleasant, and he can feel his cock hardening.  His hands reach out for her, but she sits back on her haunches, just out of reach.

Ron tosses his wrapper aside and the frog jumps up on the counter, but he ignores it, looking at the card.  “Armando Dippet, Former Headmaster of Hogwarts, c. 1940.  Unfortunate name, that is, Dippet.”

Harry is only listening with half an ear, because Hermione is weeding through the scattered Chocolate Frog packages, as if she has a special one in mind.  She can’t know that they are all the same, but her’s waving her wand, as if it is a divining rod.  

When she does seem to settle on one, Harry watches interestedly as she unwraps the frog, points the tip of her wand into the package and whispers something. Then she tosses her wand aside a little too haphazardly for Hermione-without-five-Quintins-and-two-butterbeers, mouths the opening of the wrapper and tips her head back.

“What're you―” Ron stops when she lowers her head and envelops the head of Harry's cock with her mouth. He can feel her lips and the heat of her mouth, and then something, something like her tongue in the back there, and when she slides further down, takes more of him in, the underside of his cock is assaulted by a rhythmic pulse, too fast to be her tongue, to strong to be his pulse and then--

The legs of the Chocolate Frog beat against his cock in her mouth, something she's done to extend its movements, because after all, as Ron told him many many years ago, they only had one good jump in them.  Hermione hums around him, and the frog seems to know the tune as well, because it’s playing counterpoint, until the entire sensation around his cock is Bach.

Harry wonders why they’d not come to the store before.  They should be here every single time.

He hears the crinkle of another frog being unwrapped, and Ron lightheartedly reads, “Greta Catchlove:  1960 - present, author of Charm Your Own Cheese.”  

Harry wonders how Ron can just sit here and watch, but the he realises that he has his eyes closed and he can just open them to see, but when he does, a face is heading for his, and Ron’s mouth closes on his own, sweet with chocolate and harsh, because Ron kisses like he plays Quidditch--hesitant at first and then so irreverently confident that it’s almost more war than game.  When he pulls away his eyes are softer than they ever were on the game field.  

Harry grabs the back of Ron’s head, and thinks to grab Hermione’s hair, but that is a game-ender, he knows.  So he closes his eyes and thrusts up with his hips as Hermione works him.  The frog stops dancing, and when Ron bites his lower lip, Harry can feel something more liquid working with her tongue.  Her molars scrape at the sides of his cock.  

When he comes, she’s braced her hands on either side of his hips, holding him up off the ground while she milks every last drop from him, and when she pulls away, she wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, smearing it brown.  

Ron leans into Hermione, taking her mouth with his, tiny glimpses of their tongues flashing through the movement of their heads, and Harry wonders why they are here.  Why they aren’t locked in a cozy bedroom in front of a fire, thrusting into each other like love-stricken fools.  Instead they are here on the floor of his sweetshop, delivering oral sex with accoutrements.

And he’s too smart to say anything about it, because then they wouldn’t break the kiss and lower their heads in unison to his softening cock, still slick with melted chocolate.  

While they’re licking him clean, Hermione slaps the card from the package she’d used on Harry’s chest, and when he lifts it up, Albus Dumbledore winks at him.  

***

Ron is always the first to come. Hermione straddles him on the floor, working herself onto him, pressing her fingers into his nipples and pulling, then smoothing them and bending down to lick them into hardness. Behind her, Harry's face looms over her shoulder, eyes on Ron's when he reaches around to finger her clit.

Ron doesn't know when this started. This night, yeah, that's easy enough, but how long have they been having Tuesdays? Since the travels in the tent? Surely he remembers something pornographic about that year--they had all been eighteen and stressed and hormones had been running high.  

It was strange how being in the middle of sex could make someone think about all the opportunities for sex that they had missed in the past.  Because who wouldn’t want to be just, like, fucking, all the time?

Hermione leans down to kiss him, and Ron can feel Harry’s fingers at the base of his cock, right before he enters Hermione, and now there is only a small bit of her between them, the one who holds them together like she always has.  When Harry is seated in her finally, she rises off Ron and back into Harry, taking Ron's cock up and back with her.  Harry reaches from behind to palm her breasts, lifting them and running his thumbs over her nipples.  

Ron never knows what to do when he’s on the bottom like this, so he just waits.  He’s the one on the bottom, the plinth, as it were, and it’s his job to just hold everything steady.  Hermione begins to rock, sort of rub back and forth on the base of his cock, and he rolls his shoulders a bit to catch the rhythm of her, as if he’s hearing a tune that he hasn’t for a while, and it takes him a few seconds to remember the way it goes.  Harry goes with her, almost stuck to her back like a cloak of skin and white.  Hermione always closes her eyes for this, not because she doesn’t want to see them, but because sex is just one more thing for her to perfect, every performance better than the last;  she grinds in a little circle, stopping in mid-swing to tighten both cunt and ass so that they both suck in their breath, and there’s a little quirk to the edge of her mouth, because every success brings more than just physical pleasure.  

His hands work again, since he has noticed that they had been lying limply at his sides.  Sometimes humans have too many limbs to control, he decides, but he reaches down to finger Hermione’s clit, taking over where Harry had left off.  Harry bites one of Hermione’s earlobes, a gentle tug, and that must urge her on, like spurring a horse, because she whines and tosses her hair a little and bends over, moves from trot to canter, her shoulders hunching in a bit like a jockey crouching in the wind.  

Harry follows her down, but hands and arms prevent them from smashing into Ron completely.  Harry forehead is plastered with sweat, his scar bright red on his forehead, as if it is the kind of natural birthmark infants have, ones that you can see when they are crying.  Hermione’s brow is wrinkled in desperate concentration, and if he could see inside her head right now, he knows it would look like a textbook page that starts with orderly lines of text, devolving halfway down into black whorls of useless scribbling.  

He sniffs the air, wondering if he can smell the ink of her melting thoughts, but all he gets is a drop of sweat landing on his neck.    

Harry groans something and then he speeds up.  Hermione wrenches herself a little and then tightens her thighs, arms folded in on Ron’s chest, looking for the finishing line and waiting for a burst of speed.  Ron wonders when he had begun to think of this as a horse-racing metaphor, and then remembers that Arthur had taken him to the track a few weeks ago.  Hermione, were she smaller, should be one of those creatures, small and compact on the back of the animal, driving it with hands and feet and knees.  Everything in her fantastic head begs for mastery of the small thing, the small things that will conquer the bigger picture.  

It sneaks up on him this time, because he’s rolling around inside the sensation, uncharacteristically marrying it with romantic notions, and then he is coming, his legs lifting both his passengers from the floor with his thighs.  Hermione lets a big laugh burst out of her.  Harry holds Hermione’s hips in his hands and thrusts into her, taking Ron’s emptied cock with them on one last ride.

And when Hermione falls on top of him, and Harry presses his cheek to her shoulder, eyes on Ron’s, Ron can’t help but think that this time, they must have won something, if they hadn’t already, years ago, on a train.

***

Hermione is tracing something on Harry's back with a sugar quill. Harry can feel the press of it, much harder than an actual feather would be, but not the sharp pinch of the nib. He rests his head on his arms and wiggles just a little, so that she rides his arse like a cowgirl for a second. Perhaps a camel rider, swaying in the up-and-down lurch of unsteady gait.

She presses her thumb into the small of his back and the sensation shoots through his stomach and pins him to the floor. Her light humming is familiar and a little off-key, but it's hers. Every now and then he can pick up some mumbled words, and he wonders if she's actually writing words on him.

And if they'd be permanent.

”There's nothing...that can't be done,” comes with an embellishment on his left shoulder.  ”Nothing...sing that can't be sung.”  The quill stops and swirls over a shoulder blade and Harry shivers.  ”Nothing...you can learn how to play the game, it's easy...”

“Oi,” Ron says, and they both turn their heads ot look at him.  Ron leans against a stand of Wizarding funny books. “Listen to this: </em>Severus Snape, 1960-1998. Famous Potions Master and critical lynchpin in the defeat of Voldemort at the Battle of Hogwarts</em>.” He lowered the card. “Blimey, summarise much?”

“I don't think he had much input into the information they chose to put on his card, Ron,” Hermione chides, and Harry knows she is right, but he wouldn’t have put it that way, really.  In fact, he knows that all the card descriptions are now written by Hannah Abbot, as a freelance job on her summers off from teaching.  Not for the first time Harry wonders if she and Neville have hot passionate sex in the greenhouses on the grounds.  

“Still,” Ron says.  “You know, Ginny’s kid swears she got a You-Know-Who card once.”

Harry rolls his eyes.  “Ginny’s kid is five.”  As if that means anything.  “I think there was an agreement never to put him on a card, because they were afraid they’d be little Horcruxes or something.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Hermione says.  “Though I guess just seeing him moving on the card would be a bother to many people.”  She doesn’t say to us, though she means it.  “Besides, they have better people to put on those cards.”  Her quill stops on his chest and he hears the crunch of it as she bites off the tip.  “These just taste like sugar.”

Ron laughs.  “That’s the point.”

Hermione rolls off Harry and lies next to him, staring at the quill in her fingers.  “I dunno, I just thought there’s be something, special about them.”  

“It’s a quill,”  Ron replies slowly as if speaking to a child, “but it’s made of sugar.”

There’s a clatter as she tosses the quill at him, and Harry nudges over when Ron falls on her, half-covering them both with the length of his body.  

“Are you taking the piss?” Hermione says with a loud squeak at the end, because Ron is biting one of her breasts.

“Yes,” Ron mumbles.  One of his hands is reaching down between her legs.  “You have no sense of childish self-neglect.”

Harry thinks to ask where Ron’s learnt all the big words, and then he remembers that Ron has the correspondence degree, not Harry, making him the second-best-educated of the three of them.  

Or he could have been watching the Muggle talk shows on the telly again.

“I have plenty of self-neglect,” Hermione bites back, grabbing a handful of Ron’s hair and yanking it like a dog shaking a newspaper. “I still look fondly on all the times we broke the rules at school.”

Harry tries to remember a single conversation they have had tonight that hasn’t revolved around the past, and fails.  In the corner of his eye, the window to the street has frosted over in the chill, and he cannot see anything.  They could be suspended in a snow globe arrested in 1999 and never know.  There is some small comfort in that.  

“Like the time we stole all those things from Snape’s supply closet in second year?” Harry says, raising up on his arms and feeling his skin stretch and itch a little, as the sugar Hermione has painted on him with the quill and his sweat had dried out and cracks with his new movements.  

“I was thinking of how we used to sneak down into the kitchens in Hogwarts,” Hermione murmurs, arching her back so that Ron can lick his way down her belly. His head disappears in between her legs. “Tickle the pear.”  Ron does something to her, because her breath hitches and she smiles and closes her eyes.  “The pear.”

Harry watches the play on her face, because he has not been able to the previous two times in the night, only Ron’s over her shoulder, red and worried and happy and frightened and lost in something that had made him look older.   But now, face hidden by Hermione's hips and legs, Harry can lean down and lave one nipple whilst still watching her eyelids flutter, her lips trying to form words that Ron seems to be pulling through the core of her.  Harry knows that she likes it when he bites her clit, her lips, all the small bits of her that are hot-wired to overcome her massive brain.

He likes when they slips fingers into her, already loose and wet with the night’s activities.  She loves when they twirl her pubic hair on one finger right above the middle of the cleft, pulling it tight.  Hermione turns her face to the side and takes Harry’s loose hand and sucks in a finger, then two, and three, jamming them in and out of her mouth until he catches on, and then he pushes them in and out, deeper, feeling the soft bumpiness of her tongue, the little tickle of the uvula when he pushes in, fucking her mouth.  

Ron pulls away long enough to bunch his coat under Hermione, the flannel lining on the outside, though the slicker neoprene might have been more practical.  Harry bites down on a nipple and feels the lift of Hermione’s lower half, up in the air, as if Ron were preparing to change her tyres.  He kneels again, and this time his arse is in the air, the top of his head bobbing as he does something to Hermione that makes a few slick noises below and a great number of high-pitched ones from her head.  

Over her body Harry can see a small pile of sugar quills, and reaching over her, he grabs a new one, pulling away from her breast to slip it into his mouth.  It is sugar, plain, though he must have flavoured ones around here, right?  No matter, when he draws it out, slick with spit, he runs it along her stomach dipping into her navel and twisting it by the stem.  Hermione giggles and clamps her thighs about Ron’s head for a few seconds.

“No tickling,” Ron mutters, face hidden from view.  “She’s like a nutcracker down here.”

Harry rises from his knees, and, reflecting that he is not so very drunk anymore with a sense of fleeting disappointment, he scuttles down to position himself right behind Ron’s arse, sticking in the air and swaying with his movements.  

He wets the quill again and traces the rim of Ron’s arse, watching the shine of moisture paint Ron’s hole.  He presses the tip of the quill into Ron, and there’s a little crack when the quill splits off and he is left with most of the stem in his hand.  Ron’s arse tightens, and the quill trembles as if it will fall out.  

Harry leans forward and takes it in his mouth.  It tastes of sweetness, only sweetness, dissolving on his tongue, and with every second of sucking brings him closer to Ron’s arse until he is tonguing it, working at the muscle.  He swallows the quill down and works the tip of his tongue deeper, cleaning out all the barbs and the thicker rachis of it until all he is left with is Ron, purely.  

Ron groans and pushes backwards, widening his arse, and Hermione waves her hands, trying, Harry is sure, not to grab Ron’s head.  Harry smiles into the light dusting of hair, reaches up with one hand and caresses Ron’s balls, rolling them in his fingers.  Ron’s back stiffens, and he tries to accommodate them both by bowing his spine to reach Hermione’s cunt and allow Harry full access.  Harry reaches around past the balls to Ron’s cock, working it with one hand, bracing himself on the floor with the other, licking around and into Ron’s arse intermittently.  

Hermione braces her feet flat on the floor, lifts her whole lower half from the ground, and mumbles and screeches at the same time, such a strange noise that Harry wonders if he might not have invented a new verb for it.  Ron keeps at her, holding her aloft with one palm, digging into her with his other fingers, probably pressing a thumb into her arse too, if her noises are anything to go by.  Harry pumps Ron’s cock and shifts his weight so that he can reach his own.  

It’s a challenge to see if they can all come at the same time, and they still don’t manage to do it--Hermione comes first, almost causing them to topple when she lifts one foot off the ground and curls her leg about Ron's shoulder.  Harry can see her purple nail varnish from here.  The sight of her toes flexing on and off point is the last step and he comes, dripping onto the floor.  Ron takes a little longer this time, but when he does, it is with such a noise of satisfaction that it is worth the wait.  

Well, Harry thinks as he falls to the floor at Hermione’s feet, barely noticing that their one candle has gone out, they can always try again next month.        

Ron lies next to Hermione, panting, not even bothering to wipe his mouth.  Harry loves him for it.  

“Well,” Hermione murmurs, sleepy and sighing, “Sweet shop success, then.”

Harry thinks that they should scramble back home, but they’d have to dress, and he can’t feel his legs.  

Ron rolls one shoulder and reaches behind him, pulling something from under his back.  It is a Chocolate Frog card.  “Bertie Bott, Inventor, 1935 - present,” he reads in the dim light from the streetlamp.  “Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans were created quite by mistake. His original purpose was to create tasty candies from food. He accidentally included a pair of dirty socks in his experiment!”  

Harry wonders what they could do with Every Flavour Beans, but his cock tells him that it needs a lie-in.

“When do we get Chocolate Frog Cards?” Ron muttered, flinging the card over the counter.  Hermione’s reply is a gentle snore.  

Harry doesn't tell him that he has a whole case of Dumbledore’s Army pre-ordered. They'll make nice Christmas gifts.

***

Hermione is always the first to leave. She has papers and a hot shower and strong coffee waiting for her. Ron and Harry are draped over each other in front of the counter, their clothing padding the carpet so that it is a little more comfortable to sleep on than the bare floor. Hermione is sure that she has a few splinters in her knees, possibly carpet burns, but it’s too soon to tell.  

She’s made sure to find all of her clothes, because leaving behind knickers in a sweetshop wouldn’t be wise.  She’d gathered both Ron’s and Harry’s too, but stopped short of folding them as they’d never notice and she’s in a hurry to get out.  There’s something sticky on her breasts that begs to be washed off with a spray of hot water.      

Harry lies with Ron’s mac over him, flannel side down, and Ron is asleep on her cloak, so she takes Harry’s coat.  It smells like Brut and chocolate.

For a second she debates leaving behind a few galleons for all the sweets they...appropriated from Harry’s stock, but that smells of something dirty, and that’s not what they’re about, so she just snatches up a few of the quills and tucks them into her bag for experimentation.  There were lots of things one could do with a sweetened feather.

One last glance about the place (she tucks an amused Dumbledore card into her pocket), and she’s ready to go.  She silences the door bells with her wand and casts one last glance back at them before stepping outside.  Harry rolls over and buries his face into the crook of Ron’s shoulder.  Ron shifts until he can turn a little into Harry’s embrace, probably more for warmth than anything else, and then he lets out a slurpy drooling noise.  

Boys.

She almost doesn't draw the curtains on her way out. Almost.

***

Everything you've ever said is brilliant,
Anything you want to do is fine with me. (Too Much Joy, 'Crush Story')

END