fic: When I Get That Feeling for purelush

Title: When I Get That Feeling
Recipient: purelush
Rating: NC-17
Pairing(s): Katie/Alicia
Summary: After a crippling injury at the Battle of Hogwarts, Katie is definitely lucky to have her good friend Alicia as one of her Healers.
Warnings: Erm, sex and a bit of swearing?
Word Count: 2657
Author's Notes: I tried to incorporate your idea of Katie getting a little help with a war injury, get together fic, Weasleys, and hopefully reasonably canon post-war, hopefully it all meshes alright! Thanks to my beta, Lauren.



“This is bullshit,” Katie swore, avoiding the eyes of the woman who stood beside her at the edge of the swimming pool, holding a flotation vest, which she was refusing to don.

“Swimming can help keep the muscles from atrophying, without having to bear any weight or strain,” Alicia insisted, unbuckling the straps of the preserver and offering it again, as though she were helping Katie on with her coat after a party. “Exercise is important, Katie,” she sighed. “If the Healers are able to re-grow the spinal column, and you haven’t at least been trying, this will all be so much worse.”

“And you really think that’s going to happen?”

“I do,” nodded Alicia. “You don’t hear the really great things they’re saying about you, you just heard the part where they told you that you wouldn’t be able to fly for a year or two.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the important part, isn’t it?” Katie retorted. It was hard to balance, for Alicia was both friend and one of the two Healers-in-training assigned to her care. Half of the time she was glad to have the familiar face; the other half she was embarrassed for Alicia to see her so weak and insolent. Holding back a quip about how she was curious to know how she was meant to swim when she couldn’t even feel her damned legs to kick them, Katie pushed her arms through the holes of the vest, tugging it into place before heaving herself forward with a splash. There was nothing to focus on in the hospital pool, no windows, no portraits, just blank walls, plenty of water, and instructions to keep trying to kick her legs. It was easy to cast her mind back two weeks, to feel bitter about falling from a hole gouged in the castle wall, onto the ground three stories below. There were people worse off than she was - Lavender Brown was shredded practically in half and paranoid that on the full moon she was going to go on a rampage to slaughter the entirety of St. Mungo’s, for example - but this was Katie’s second long-term stay in the hospital in as many years now, and somehow Harry had managed to kill You-Know-Who without needing any medical treatment at all. Put simply, she thought it was terribly unfair.

Even knowing what would happen to her though, Katie thought that she still would have gone to the Hog’s Head, through the tunnel and into battle, for she had blasted aside a Death Eater whose aim would have been better had she not, and Angelina would be getting laid low tomorrow afternoon instead of a Ministry commendation pin laid on her robes for her part in the Battle of Hogwarts. Your own legs for a friend’s life was a barter you could live with, even if it meant the end of your career as a third-string-yet-very-promising-Chaser for the Wasps. She just might have left sooner, say, before heading upstairs with Alicia and George and falling to a spinal injury and several other bones broken so badly they needed complete re-growing.

“Time’s up!” called Alicia half an hour later, and Katie used her arms to struggle her way back to a point where Alicia could help lift her out of the water. She could feel her face flushing, and she kept her eyes on anything but her friend’s, hoping that Alicia had seen worse things in her two years with the hospital than this.

~

“But there are twelve potions here,” protested Katie.

“Eleven,” Alicia insisted, pointing to one of the bottles on the tray she had just placed on Katie’s bedside table. “You counted that one twice.” Katie’s stare was deadpan at best, and Alicia continued before there was time for a response. “Just hold your nose, I’ll hand them to you one after the other, take them like shots, and pretend we’re just getting trashed at my flat.”

“Is that what all the Healers say? How romantic.”

It was Alicia’s turn for a wry grin, holding out the first dram and waggling it a little. For another moment Katie continued to sulk, but she accepted the bottle and said, “Move fast, save the best tasting one for last.” As soon as Alicia nodded, Katie began, trying not to taste or think about the potions. They were shots, they were getting drunk, and the last two times she had gotten drunk at Alicia’s there had been some small measure of resolution after an evening filled with strange sexual tension. It seemed less likely that they would make out after this, considering she was in hospital, incapable of feeling anything below her waist, and neither of them were actually inebriated, but the idea that they might made the series of potions easier to swallow, and the last of them actually tasted like it might pass for something served in a bar. “How long before this all is supposed to work?” she asked.

“A month or two, maybe,” Alicia said, and Katie groaned. “The good news is that you get to go home tomorrow and I’ll be coming by with more potions and exams every few days.”

“Brilliant,” Katie retorted drily, though getting out of the hospital was more than a relief than she was willing to let on.

~

“George I don’t think that this is quite what Alicia meant,” Katie insisted.

“I’ll thank you to remember that I am in charge here,” George said, giving his wand a wiggle so that Katie jostled slightly in midair, prompting a squeal. “Alicia said you were meant to exercise your legs without putting too much weight or strain on them. Come on, give us another try,” he implored.

With a sigh, Katie closed her eyes, trying to focus on whatever pathway there ought to be from her brain to her feet. She knew how to move them, she’d spent nearly two decades walking on them, this was something she could make herself do. “Okay,” she said, and George responded in kind before throwing a quaffle to where he had levitated her above a heaping pile of the largest, squishiest cushions she’d ever encountered, on the very unlucky off chance that Katie would kick the quaffle directly back and hit George in the head.

At the thwack! of the ball making contact, Katie opened her eyes, looking hopefully to George below. “I thought I might have seen a twitch before it hit?” he offered, and had she been supporting any of her own weight, Katie would have slumped in frustration.

“This is absolutely useless.”

“It’s really not,” said George, lowering her slowly down to the cushions where she managed to find one to prop herself upon with her arms. “Alicia and I had a serious conversation - I know,” he said at Katie’s abrupt raising of her eyebrows, “it’s uncommon, but I’ve been doing serious a little more lately as you know, and you’re worth a little solemnity.”

“Thank you.” In truth, Katie was just as worried for George as he must be for her. For all that he was putting on a good show of things, she felt certain that there must be an immeasurable mountain of hurt and sadness that he wasn’t showing to any of them.

“You’re welcome. She says that the odds on this are really good, you know. She says in her exams last week you could feel her touching your right hip, and that you’re not relegated to diapers, which is a real shame because the wealth of jokes with that...”

“George, no,” pleaded Katie, halting him before he could delve into all that was diaper-related humor. “I get that those are good things, I do, it’s just that I want more than that. I want to be able to at least fly on a broomstick, if I can’t have my career back. I want to be able to walk with a cane if I have to, but not be stuck in a wheelchair. I’d love to have sex, even if I can’t have children -”

“You can do that,” interjected George. “Alicia said so.”

“She said I could have children?”

“She said you could have sex, if you wanted to. I didn’t ask about children,” he clarified.

Katie paused in thought. She hadn’t given the matter any serious consideration in the last six weeks; in part because the idea of walking again had consumed most of her imagination, in part because there wasn’t anything sexy about incomplete spinal cord injuries or the care that came with them. “But you asked if I could have sex,” she noted finally, and George grinned, with the sort of wink that had more often been given by Fred in the past.

“Let’s just say I’ll not be turning you down if you show up in my bed late one night,” said George, prompting a laugh now seldom heard from Katie’s lips. “Nor would Alicia.”

With a smack on the shoulder that put a quick end to wherever George was going to try and steer the conversation next, Katie shook her head. “Let’s keep going,” she insisted. “Hoist me back up.”

~

“Did you tell George we could have sex?” Katie asked, pulling the blindfold up away from her eyes enough to look at Alicia.

It was another examination day, a blind sensation test to see if any other areas had regained feeling, and Alicia laughed, looking up from where she had been working her fingertips up Alicia’s right calf, inch by inch. “I didn’t say that he could have sex with you,” she said, “I said that you’ll be able to have sex, which is true, you’ll just have to be more careful at first until you figure things out.”

“Careful how?” Katie asked. “I tried getting off, the night after he told me that.” It wasn’t something she would have admitted so freely with the other Healers at St. Mungo’s, but Alicia was friend and Healer both, and whatever else had been going on between them months ago too.

Alicia didn’t quite meet her eyes, though, and went back to her gradual progress up the leg. “Put your blindfold back on,” she instructed, and Katie let it cover her eyes again with a sigh, leaning back against the stack of pillows propping her up on her bed. She was meant to let Alicia know if she thought she could feel the pressure of her fingers at any point, which had now suddenly become embarrassing after the confession of her own self-examination. “I meant careful as in you can’t have sex in your locker room shower, or anywhere your weight can’t be fully supported, or anything that requires a lot of prolonged movement of your hips. How did it go?” Alicia asked, and Katie thought she could sense a strange tension in her voice.

“Fine,” was all she said, in case Alicia was only making small talk now to keep the rest of the exam from descending into miserable silence, which was what followed for what felt like nearly a minute.

“Did you come?” Alicia asked, just as Katie said “There,” having felt something near her upper thigh. “What?” they both asked, and Katie moved to pull off her blindfold, Alicia’s hand stopping hers before she managed it.

“Leave it on.”

Katie swallowed, and with a nod, let her hand fall back at her side. Yes, she could definitely feel Alicia’s fingers, pressing across every centimeter of skin. “I can feel all of that,” she said, rather than answer what she thought she might have heard her friend ask.

“That’s good,” said Alicia’s voice, and the hands continued moving higher before shifting Katie’s legs further apart. She was wearing knickers and a t-shirt along with her hospital issue blindfold, but even without the aid of her vision, Katie could tell that Alicia’s attention was becoming localized in an area yet unstudied by the parade of medical professionals that had been administering such tests over the last two months. She felt a hand lay gently over the cotton of the knickers, covering her and making Katie more keenly aware of the warmth beneath it. Her mouth slackened, but she didn’t say anything else, lest this be some embarrassing fantasy in her mind, and not what was really happening to her body. “Do you feel that?”

“I think so,” Katie said, and the hand started to explore again, even though it didn’t continue on to other areas. She could definitely feel the bed shift, and sense that Alicia was laying beside her now rather than standing above. “Are you... “

Alicia’s hand returned, on her hips this time, and she asked, “Is this something you want to do? I can stop if you want.”

“I... no, it’s good,” Katie whispered, feeling a little breathless. She didn’t feel confident that she knew how to do this, she hadn’t ever even kissed another girl besides Alicia, but there had been too much fantasizing about this sort of scenario to turn it down just because she wasn’t sure how things would go forward when she wasn’t imagining the whole thing.

“If you can’t feel something, if it’s not doing anything for you, just say so, yeah?”

Katie nodded, and the hand on her hip slid underneath the elastic waist, sliding down to the soft curls of hair Katie hadn’t paid any mind to since the accident, fingers threading lightly through them and down below. She couldn’t help but make a little noise as Alicia’s fingers found the center of her nerves, pressing lightly in slow circles. Lips began to kiss her neck, and Katie turned as best she could, wrapping her arm around Alicia, her hand finding her way up to the soft curve of her neck. A few minutes ticked by, with Katie’s breath growing a little less even, and Alicia’s hand spreading slickness in ways that made Katie think she could even feel the air on skin she had thought might not feel anything at all anymore.

The kissing stopped, and the bed shifted again as Alicia moved Katie’s hips to take the underwear completely off. Yes, she could feel the cooler air, but Katie gasped in surprise when it was replaced with something warmer and wetter than Alicia’s hand had been. “Holy sh-shit,” she stammered, reaching down and confirming her suspicions with the silky feel of Alicia’s hair beneath her fingertips. Alicia was licking every place her fingers had touched, pressing her fingers instead to Katie’s entrance, sliding them inside and curling them forward in a way that made Katie’s head fall back, eyes tightly closed beneath her blindfold and her hand pushing up underneath her shirt to find a nipple.

In the quiet of her bedroom, the littlest noises sounded delightfully obscene to Katie. Her own breath, the creaks of the bed and the occasional moan from Alicia pushed Katie even closer to delirium. She could feel all of it, the fingers pumping steadily against her g-spot, the heat and pressure of Alicia’s mouth sucking her swollen clit, the softness of Alicia’s hair tangled between her fingers and brushing over her thigh. With a quiet cry, Katie’s breath hitched in her throat and her orgasm washed over her, muscles releasing and blood rushing in her ears as her heart pounded.

As her breathing began to slow, the blindfold was pulled away to reveal Alicia’s face near her own, eyes wide in what looked like delighted surprise. “You moved your legs,” she said, and Katie strained to focus.

“I what?”

“When you came, your legs tensed, all the way down to your feet.”

Katie laughed, overfull with happiness only fractionally to do with her calf muscles. “It’s all thanks to my very, very, very dedicated Healer,” she said, wrapping her arms snugly around Alicia, who laughed in return. “Now I’ll have to think of something to do to repay her...”