HP fic: Camping [Bill/Charlie, adult]
Title: Camping Author: celandineb Fandom: HP Pairing: Bill/Charlie Rating: adult Warnings: see pairing Summary: They've gone camping every summer since they were very small. Note: Teenyfic (389 words) written for mariamme, at the request of emiime, who suggested Bill/Charlie, prompt "camping."
The first time they went camping, it was at the far end of the overgrown part of the garden. Bill was six and Charlie was four, and they ate the squashy sandwiches that their mum had made for them after the biscuits had all been devoured (because, as Bill explained to Charlie, if something happened it would be a shame not to have eaten the nicest things). Bill told Charlie ghost stories, and Charlie's eyes grew rounder and rounder, but he didn't cry. They were both scared enough by the stories that they finally went to sleep back to back to make sure that nothing could creep up on them.
By the time that Bill was eleven and Charlie was nine, they had persuaded their parents to let them camp in the wood that lay between the Burrow and Ottery St. Catchpole. Not really very far away, but enough that there would be no question of having Percy – who was only five – with them. Bill still told ghost stories; Charlie made up stories of adventures with dragons and sphinxes and chimaeras. They still combined their bedrolls, neither of them quite willing to admit that the stories made him nervous.
Bill was fifteen and Charlie was thirteen the summer that the stories changed from being scary to being something else altogether. Bill had heard most of them from his mates at Hogwarts, and Charlie teased him to retell them in the sticky-hot darkness. So Bill whispered about pricks and cunts and all sorts of things that he didn't really know the truth of, any more than he had known the truth of the ghost tales, and heard Charlie's breathing quicken as his own did, the air in their tiny tent becoming somehow thicker, enfolding them both in a warm embrace; Bill surrendered to it, and Charlie came with him.
They never discussed it, knowing instinctively that any open acknowledgment would upset the delicate balance between reality and fantasy, and they continued to argue and roughhouse and carry on as any two brothers would. But at least a couple of times every summer afterward, one of them would suggest going camping, evading all attempts by their younger brothers to be included. They still ate their biscuits first, but now it was because there was something sweeter to anticipate, after their sandwiches.