Cunnilingus Totalus

Afterword

I will only make this request of 1 in 100 fics: if you love it, please share it, recommend it, and speak about it. I've never wanted to get a fic right as much as I've wanted to get this one right. And I want it to bring healing and beauty where it is needed most.

Some personal sharing: The last time I (a cis, queer, single, South Asian woman) had sex was before Donald Trump was elected in the United States in 2016. Since then, and with the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the rise of right-wing forces in our country, I just haven't felt like it. Although I've been lucky to always have safe experiences in bed, my ability to access the safety and trust needed to enjoy sex seems to have vanished — or frozen.

I wrote this piece — initially just a goof on Petrificus Totalus — to imagine the kind of sex I wish I could be having, and to prompt others to imagine the sex they wish they were having.

In my own case, it has worked. Not all sex has to be cozy or loving — and I haven't yet had it again — but ever since I imagined the bed Draco created, I've personally slept better, and I've fantasized better. The magical bed and their mutual nap represent the loving preparation, the dedication to safety and comfort, that make it possible to find total release. Likewise, their conversation after the nap represents the intimacy that unlocks us — that surfaces every fear and shame about our bodies, our selves, our worth, our validity, that holds us back.

It is only after all this safety is established that we can fully, totally release ourselves into the kind of sex described in this story.

At first, Draco and Hermione don't know that this kind of sex exists. They are young, they are (in this story) Western, and like people all around the world, they have been taught to approach sex with the utmost dysfunction. Whether shamed by religion, deprived of information by our schools or families, pressured to enter and sustain false relationships to fulfill a hetero fairytale, bombarded with messages about sex as competition and conquest, or even being taught that sex is something *everyone wants* (not true for those who are asexual), we have collectively fucked up our approach to one of the most valuable human experiences many of us can ever have.

If you read or write fanfiction, you're probably already aware that sex can be better than we've imagined it. I have absorbed destructive messages about sex from my Indian upbringing, my American upbringing in an all-white town (where it felt especially impossible to feel part of a community of bodies), from straight people, from queer people, from white people, from people of color, and from every generation of people (I am 39). No one culture or group is exempt from fucking this up. We are all responsible.

An act that can open the imagination, expand the spirit and heal the body — an experience in totalus — is reduced to belt notches and babymaking and drinking stories and compulsion. In the bed that Draco creates out of unconscious devotion and love, he and Hermione lie down to heal their issues with sex and life — their disappointment, their anger, their hunger, their competitive streaks, their zeal to excel in ONE thing (oral sex), their entrapment in their own heads, and their traumas. It is where they come to be reborn.

They arrive ready to conquer each other, but sex itself conquers them — then opens, and unites, and transforms them.

How it unfolds. First he forgets himself (and his memo) in the joy of pleasuring her, then they each forget themselves in the joy of pleasuring each other. Their prophetic dreams (the hair on her head, the hair on his body, the blanket under their bodies, the image of water in a palm) prepare them for an encounter more fulfilling and enrapturing than their conscious little bookworm minds could have ever imagined. It locates their sexual encounter somewhere beyond their bodies — in the larger movement and ripple and eddy of the cosmos (sorry).