raven_cromwell | Cross-Posted Fic Rec: "Minister's Wife" by Featherxquill (explicit; Rufus Scrimgeour/Rita Skeeter)

So I know some of y'all saw this already, though seeing it twice isn't a bad thing. :) Am going to be trying to do more content-focused cross-posting as more of my beloved Tumblr flist disperses to other platforms, so expect more repeats in future.

He’d just finished a conference with the Minister of Australia and was slipping back into the bedroom to shuck his robes of office when she pinned him to the wall and unfastened them just enough to slip her hand inside and wrap it around his cock. Then she was sliding, dropping to the floor, burrowing in amongst the heavy folds of fabric and taking him into her mouth, hot and tight and all the way down, and his voice gurgled in his throat as his hand fisted in her hair. She was voracious, insistent; filling the air with the sounds of suck and slap, and the blood was rushing away from his brain and filling his mind with fog. He was pulling her hair, tearing her away from him and letting her fill her lungs, then plunging back in and she looked wet, hungry, filthy, beautiful.

So all of

featherxquill's writing is profoundly gorgeous–I watched 5 seasons of what turned out to be a magnificent Brit police procedural solely on the fact I’d get to devour more of it. But her HP stuff carved out a place to permanently lodge right up there with classic lit, and I have such intense adoration for her Rufus and Amelia--I came of fandom age wanting to write Rufus and Amelia with the same skill she displayed and she’s still one of the highest bars for me on those two--it’s difficult to articulate properly. And of all her portraits of my two beloved Aurors, Minister's Wifelodges closest to my heart. Maybe because it was my first exposure to her writing, discovered in a desperate troll for Rufus fic, this minor-character hardass who screamed of my beloved Winston Churchill and who fandom largely seemed to view with something between indifference and disdain. Or maybe because: look y'all. I have feelings about Rita Skeeter and every last one of ‘em is down to Feather, and they started with this unholy gorgeous piece.

But honestly? I think it’s the juxtaposition of so many things I love. That atmosphere of the beginning of the war, when everyone knew it was grim but not how grim it’d get and the Ministry was girding for a battle that must’ve chilled their blood after the first go-round. The incisively sharp commentary on politics, and the way women’s ambition so often! gets caught in the cogs of it, sacrificed on the altar of men’s. But more than that, the way this piece says yeah, that’s often what happens and I’m gonna paint the reality, but I’m also going to consciously have two people strong enough to subvert it a little, with one of the best! origins for Rita’s book career in fandom. The way it’s as much a portrait of Rita, seen through Rufus’s eyes, as it is of Rufus himself. A Rita who has every one of her canon flaws, but is also deeper, richer, the architect of her own story. And it’s, too, a portrait of a marriage: the way two such sharp-edged people need to constantly work to fit their jagged edges together, but try anyway; the way their ambitions alternate, at once clashing and complimenting, and the depthless affection that ties it all together.

And the world-building, so much exquisite invention of what a transition in power looks like in the wizarding World. So many astounding dynamics that make up this vibrant culture; the ferocious competition between the wireless and the Prophet; the rock-solid friendship between Gawain Robards and Rufus, expressed more with gestures of affection than words, as you’d expect between two such veterans–Rufus would never admit the friendship is integral to his time as Minister, but its integralness shines through, nonetheless.

Rufus’s pov here is an unadulterated triumph, and I can’t imagine how many hours Feather reviewed HBP, turning the terse sentences of his dialogue into a pov that replicated it, and yet said so much through inference and the moments when he let his inner facades falter. It’s one of the three or four Rufus fics I’ve come across that feel entirely authentic in sentence construction and word choice to his canon portraiture and that also add about ten million layers.

And then of course, as I highlighted, there’s the smut. Sex that’s as revealing as any portion of dialogue, shameless and celebratory and, to crib some words from my chosen excerpt: filthy and beautiful.

So, go and treat yourself as Christmas fades slowly into boxing day; you won't regret spending the witching hour with Minister's Wife