Continuing Tales

The Catfish

A Harry Potter Story
by Miss Dasti

Part 15 of 25

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When Hermione arrived back at her apartment she found it filled by the most horrible sound she'd ever heard. Oh god, is that Belgium? She followed the dog's cries back to the guest bedroom, where she walked in on a what might as well have been a murder scene.

Lucius was lying on the guest bed, leaning back against the headboard and staring empty-eyed at the opposite wall. Blood was everywhere: on the floor, furniture, even the ceiling, as if at some point he'd been thrashing around. Fergus had divested him of all clothes aside from his pants. Along his cheek, throat and down his left arm were wide pink stripes: evidence of deep, freshly healed wounds. Belgium was standing over him, alternating between pawing him, nosing his face, and throwing back her head and making a noise somewhere between a whine and a howl. Crookshanks sat in the chair under the window craning his neck to get a better look.

"Oh fuck!" Hermione hurried across the room but stopped short when Belgium snarled at her. The stood over Lucius, ruff up and ears back, every one of her white teeth bared. She growled and snapped at Hermione in a clear warning.

"Bel," Hermione said, shocked. She tried to take another step, reach out for her, but Belgium rushed to the edge of the bed and lunged. It was only because her wand still happened to be in her hand that Hermione was able to get off the Stunning Spell fast enough; the dog still careened into her full-force, knocking her to the ground, but the Stunner had got her before she could rip out Hermione's throat. Hermione pushed the big furry body off her and backed away, horrified.

She then remembered she was still masquerading as Narcissa, and Belgium was trained to detect concealing magic. When Hermione had walked into the room, all Belgium had seen was a potential threat. "I'm sorry, girl," Hermione whispered, stroking the long muzzle. "You didn't understand. It's okay." Still, it was probably best to keep her Stunned until the Polyjuice wore off…

Hermione went and stood over Lucius. The sight of him stalled her brain again. He hadn't reacted throughout that whole altercation; his eyes were still focused on something in the middle-distance she couldn't see.

"Mr. Malfoy!" She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. Nothing. She waved a hand in front of his face. He didn't react at first; after a few seconds' delay his eyes wandered and he looked at her, but she was almost certain he couldn't see her. "Mr. Malfoy! Lucius! Can you hear me?" No response; he went on staring. She recited the first handful of healing spells that came to mind. Nothing. Lucius remained unresponsive. "Oh my god, what did they do to you?"

She checked his pulse and found it racing a million miles an hour. She put a hand on his forehead; he was on fire but there wasn't a trace of sweat on him. "Shit." She paced back and forth in front of the bed, waving her hands around in a panic. By accident she managed to make it rain a little indoors, and that gave her a brainwave. He was hot. He needed to cool down.

She'd have to draw a bath. The elves would be so proud.

With a swish and a flick, Lucius rose several inches off the bed; steadying him with her hands, she pulled him into the bathroom and threw a spell at the tub. It immediately filled to the brim with cold water.

"You'll thank me later," she whispered. Then she dunked him completely under the surface.

He came up spluttering: a good sign. "Lucius?" She knelt beside the tub on the soaking floor and grabbed either side of his face to force him to look at her. His eyes had dilated so huge they appeared black; he stared at her uncomprehendingly. "Lucius, can you hear me?"

Slowly, he opened his mouth. "Narcissa?"

For a second Hermione couldn't figure out why he'd said it. Then she glanced at her reflection in the faucet and remembered. "No," she told him, "it's me. Hermione. I'm using the Polyjuice, remember?"

But he'd already looked away, down at himself in the tub of water tinged pink by blood. "Why do I have my pants on in the tub?"

"That's not important. Lucius, if you can hear me, if you understand me, you need to tell me what they did to you."

His eyes wandered, and his head rolled a little on his neck; Hermione thought of a child having fever dreams. "It's cold in here," he whispered. "I need to get out." He tried to push himself up.

And she pushed him right back down again. "Stay there, Lucius, you've got a temperature!" She conjured a glass of water and tried to tilt it down his throat. "Drink something—"

Suddenly he looked angry, and he slapped the glass out of her hand. "Fuck off, Narcissa." He turned away.

"Lucius!" She snapped her fingers in front of his nose, drawing his attention back to her. "Focus! I'm not Narcissa, I'm Hermione, and you need to tell me what's happening to you because I can't help you unless I know what's wrong!"

"What's wrong?" he repeated through gritted teeth. "What's wrong? What's wrong is that you fucked him, Narcissa. You fucked him. And not only did you fuck him, you ensured that I saw. You ensured that I saw you do it."

Hermione stared at him. "Lucius—"

"Life is a pit," he said quietly. He seemed to have forgotten that she was there. "You dare to trust, you give someone everything, everything… you give them everything, and they come into your home and they take until you are broken, and they try to kill everyone you love, or they fuck some random bastard in a bed you shared for years, or they abuse themselves to spite you, or they die, and leave you to brave the minefield alone."

Hermione didn't have any idea what he was talking about now. One thing was certain: he didn't have a clue where he was, or whom he was talking to.

"Mr. Malfoy," she said gently, placing a hand on his forearm. He glanced down at it, a line between his eyebrows; then up at her, his eyes dark and feral. "Do you remember what happened tonight?"

For a long time it seemed he wouldn't answer. "I remember," he said at last. "I remember Raleigh. He said something about Draco. He cut me. I remember letting him cut me…" His lip curled. "With a knife. A knife, of all things… what a fucking imbecile… he drew it over my face and arm. I let him. He did not faze me. He's like the Dark Lord, in a way… he reminds me of him a little, sometimes… it's best if you don't react. But one of the men—he came from behind. He had a canister of Doxie. I remember… He upended it over me." He sighed. "I don't remember after that."

Hermione let out a long breath. Doxie Dust. It must've gotten in the wounds. Lucius wasn't injured or brain damaged—he was high. They'd drugged him.

He closed his eyes and leaned back in the tub. "I suppose it's not so cold," he said quietly, before slipping under the surface with his lips parted. A few bubbles rose up, then the surface went still.

"Okay!" Hermione plunged her arms into the water up to her elbows and dragged him up again. "You've lost your bath privileges." He blinked slowly at her, mystified. From what Hermione understood about Doxie, the side effects (including death, for god's sake) tended to be the same for each user but the high was very different. She therefore had very little idea of what to expect from him. "Come on, let's get you dried off."

Lucius rose docilely enough from the tub and allowed Hermione to dry him. He didn't speak as she steered him back into the guest bedroom—but after taking one look at the mess, and feeling Lucius begin to collapse on her, she bypassed it and steered him across her flat into her own bedroom. It was only after she'd gotten him to lie down that he spoke again.

"Hermione."

"Yes?" she said distractedly, trying to think of what to do next. He didn't respond, so she shrugged it off. She needed to do some research on Doxie but she didn't want to leave him alone. There was one thing she did know, though: taken directly in the blood, Doxie was extraordinarily dangerous; the odds of an overdose increased dramatically. And she didn't know how much he'd actually gotten in him. Someone needed to watch him through the night. "Lucius, could you call an elf—?"

But he wasn't listening anymore. Something was happening to him: his eyes had slipped closed and his breathing had picked up, and he was writhing slowly in the bedclothes, curling into a fetal position, clenching his fists and flexing every muscle in his body. "Fucking hell," he whispered, "make it stop."

The look of agony on his face was so intense that Hermione didn't think; she crawled into bed beside him, curling up against his back and slinging her arms around him. She could feel his fluttering heartbeat this way, and every one of his labored breaths; after a long moment he relaxed, and she was hopeful that perhaps the worst had passed—but then he seized up again and gasped in pain, and her eyes filled with tears.

On it went, well into the night. He writhed and gasped through whatever it was the Doxie was making him feel, and Hermione held him through it; as the hours passed she found herself comforting him more, stroking his hair and murmuring in his ear. This, at first, did not help at all, but midway through the fifth hour of his bad trip he began to relax, leaning back into her, his reactions milder as each wave passed over him.

She wasn't sure if the drug was abating, or he was impacted by the fact that the Polyjuice had worn off and she was, once again, Hermione Granger. She didn't know what to think if it was the latter.

Around the seventh hour she'd had enough. Dawn had long since broken and the Doxie still had its claws in him; he was weak in her arms, and it must've felt like he was on the brink of death.

"We've got to get you to St. Mungo's." She hadn't expected him to answer and had already begun to pull away when he responded.

"No." His voice was shattered. His eyes were shut, shadowed, his face glowing with sweat, but his mouth was set in the same stubborn line it reverted to whenever he intended to win an argument. The lacerations that Raleigh had left on him were nearly gone now, faded to the same shade of delicate pink as Narcissa's Polyjuice. He rolled onto his other side and Hermione found herself encased in his arms. His grip was very loose, weak, but she found herself unable to pull free.

"Lucius," she said breathily. He held on tighter. "I'm not—"

"I know you aren't Narcissa, Miss Granger," he growled. "I'm still high but I'm no longer that high. Anyway, I've come to see that I could never hold her like this again."

She really shouldn't have asked. It wasn't her place, especially considering he wasn't in his right mind. But true to form, Hermione simply couldn't stop herself. "What happened, Lucius?"

He answered immediately, almost as if he'd been expecting the question. "Narcissa asked for a separation after the War. I refused. I still loved her and I couldn't imagine letting her go—it was an idea I simply would not entertain. I thought she was just being stubborn to punish me for my failure to keep the family safe. We'd been together so long that I… anyway, she started to withdraw from me however she could: refusing to go out, to eat dinner in the same room, even to sleep in the same bed. She stopped having sex with me. I didn't care. I still refused a separation. Each time she tried to pull away, I held on tighter.

"So one day, I got an owl. Narcissa had been doing the rounds, visiting each estate to make sure all was as it should be; she claimed the house on the shore had been broken into and robbed. So I arrived at Shorecliff and walked in on my wife fucking someone else in the master bedroom." He paused. "She got her separation. And when she asked for a divorce a month later, she got that too, immediately. I might have been murderously angry… I might have hated her, perhaps even killed her and her lover right there… if I didn't know, in the pit of my soul, that I brought it upon myself. I didn't listen to her. I knew she felt trapped and I didn't care. I didn't want to believe she was no longer in love with me. So she was forced to convince me otherwise. She knew she was risking her life doing so… but she did it anyway. Because death would have been preferable to staying in a marriage with me."

Hermione lay there staring into his tense face: the slight grimace on his mouth, the furrow in his brow. She didn't know what to say. His candid analysis of what was undoubtedly one of the worst memories of his life, his willingness to accept responsibility for it, even despite the gross betrayal… it made her heart ache.

"I did the same to Draco," he went on. It seemed he couldn't stop; Hermione knew this was likely the first time he'd talked about this to anyone, and she doubted he would've been doing it if not for the drugs. Still, she leaned in to catch every crooning word. "I did not give him the support or comfort he needed after the War, quite the opposite actually, but I would not let him out of my sights regardless. I couldn't allow him to wander off and make matters worse, not after the disgrace of our defeat—my only thought was damage control, was keeping the family together. He must have felt very pressured, very alone… So he took up drugs, the most dangerous of drugs, because he knew it would result in a rift between us. Because life like this"—he spat the word, indicating himself, his own state of inebriation—"dying slowly under the influence… this is preferable to being around me."

"No." Hermione had heard enough. Lucius' eyes slitted open: the pupils were still round and huge, but his gaze was focused. "Lucius, you can't live in the past. What Narcissa and Draco did—they might've been pushed but they were wrong in their own ways. You can't hold yourself responsible for all of it. There were different things they could've done—the choices they made are not yours to own. You can't let yourself wallow in it. It's unhealthy."

He scoffed a little. "Some would say it was fair penance."

"Well some would also say being left-handed gives you cancer," Hermione sniffed. "You've done some—some distasteful things. But acknowledging that is half the battle. You've got to forgive yourself."

"Not everyone is worthy of forgiveness."

"What are you talking about? Of course everyone—"

"What about the Dark Lord? Or Raleigh, for that matter? Or Bellatrix, or Grayback—"

"You don't seriously put yourself on the same level—"

"I am on the same level, Miss Granger." His burning eyes ratcheted onto hers. "What do you believe the term Death Eater means? I have done things you could not even stomach to hear about. I have stood by and watched things you cannot begin to imagine. I am on the same level—in some ways, I am worse."

"No, you're not," Hermione snapped. "None of those other people cared that what they did was wrong. You do."

"I cannot describe to you how little that matters."

"It does, Lucius!" She could feel her frustration mounting exponentially. It would've been very satisfying to shake him just then. "Going on suffering forever is no help to anyone. It's not going to fix your relationship with Draco, it's not going to solve the issue of Raleigh, and it's not any help to me, either."

"You?" He cast his gaze over her face. "Why you? What am I to you?"

"You're…" She paused, and he looked at her skeptically. "I don't… I don't really know. But it doesn't help me."

He sighed heavily and started to turn away from her; his arms slipped off her and she felt a sudden chill. "Lucius…"

"What?" He didn't snap at her; he sounded drained, defeated.

Did she dare? She let her eyes rove over the aquiline profile, the smooth skin, flushed as if with fever. Her heart ached again. Oh, what the hell. "I do care about you."

Languidly, he turned back to face her, looking into her eyes with an unreadable expression in his own. She remembered him in the smoking room as she left, staring at her as if she were the last good thing he would ever see. Had he been thinking about Narcissa, she wondered? Or had he looked past her disguise and seen her?

"Why?" he asked quietly.

She wasn't sure how to answer. He was so very broken. His life was a complete mess, the exact opposite of hers. He was dangerous, a proven liar and manipulator. He'd driven his own family away and had a long history of cruelty and malice. He was complicated and emotionally damaged. He was many years older than her. He couldn't change. He was, for all intents and purposes, completely unlovable.

But then she thought of Belgium, and Fergus, and Francis and Harriot, and the way he'd carried her down the cliff to watch the drakes in flight, the solarium full of flowers, the grooming session in the bathtub—the way he'd kissed her. The sound of his voice when he was happy, or thoughtful. The softness that sometimes entered his eyes, the warmth he'd let slip when he was feeling safe. He was mesmerizing—poignant and intense and, in his own way, beautiful.

He was human. Unfixable, tenacious, volatile, brilliant, remorseful, vicious and sweet. He might have been unlovable… but that didn't mean he couldn't be loved.

Rather than answering, Hermione leaned in and pressed her lips against his. He moved into her slowly, kissing her in the same sure, methodical way he'd first kissed the false Narcissa back in Shorecliff. He hadn't known who he was kissing then. He'd been playing a game, toying with a stranger for his own amusement. Was he doing the same thing here? She thought about the last few days, the chilliness of his demeanor. He was drugged now. He couldn't technically give consent, she couldn't say for sure if he actually wanted this or if he was just dying for some kind of contact. His lips were rough against hers and it wasn't long before he was pulling her closer, deeper, extending the kiss until they were completely wrapped around each other, all hands and lips and legs and teeth.

It took next to no effort to remove her dress. The garment was loose on her anyway, and even drugged, Lucius had no problems with the bindings. The rest of her clothes followed, and now all that separated them were Lucius' pants. Hermione swore skin-on-skin contact had never felt so delectably, deliciously good; she wanted to rub every inch of herself all over him. He was hot, still on fire from the Doxie, and just as firm and velvety smooth as she remembered; he really did have beautiful skin. Every contour of her body fit so insanely well into his that she didn't know if she could ever really let go of him—he felt so, so good. Though his touches were a little weaker than they had been in the past, there still wasn't anything tender about the way he clasped her to him; his fingers dug into her, just skirting the edge of painful, and he ground the sharp lines of his pelvis against her hips hard enough to make her gasp a little at the friction. He began to writhe and she wondered if he was battling another wave of Doxie, but no, he was just sliding out of his boxers; in moments they were both exposed, and he was pressing hard into her lower back with his hand, forcing her against him, and thrusting up against her, his cock hard and heavy between them.

It crossed her mind that she ought to stop him. There was something morally wrong about this—there always was, perpetually. But she'd kissed him for a reason, and despite it all, she wanted this. She dug her fingers into his shoulders and pulled down, dragging the tips hard down his back. He hummed and arched up into her, his hips flexing again, his cock scoring a hot, damp line up her stomach. She thought about it inside her. How it would feel. He was broader than any man she'd seen; she thought about how he would tear her apart, given his way. Her sex ached and fluttered helplessly; she felt her hips arc up, trying to position him, trying to make it happen.

Mind over bodyBut there was no reason why she shouldn't, other than the fact that he was high off his ass and probably felt as if someone had run him under a steamroller. He was getting impatient; their kiss was getting brutal, his fingers winding knots in her hair, the press of his lips giving way to teeth and tongue. He nipped her particularly hard on her lower lip and she gasped and looked at him. He was smiling a dark, indolent smile, tonguing a pointed canine as he did when he was particularly turned on, sliding closer, pushing, trying to force her onto her back.

She made a snap decision before her spine hit the mattress; she pushed back, and in a moment she was on him, straddling his abdomen, her sex hovering an inch above his navel. He looked surprised, and then he scoffed and grabbed her hips, trying to propel her down onto him. She shoved his hands away.

"Stop."

He blinked his drug-dilated eyes at her. "Excuse me?"

"Stop," she insisted. "Let me do this." She placed a hand on his chest, fingers splayed over his jumping heart. "Please."

He almost-but-not-quite rolled his eyes, but nevertheless leaned back in the pillows and dropped his hands docilely to his sides, palms up. For the first time, Hermione noticed the scar on the pale expanse of his inner arm, no longer black as it was during the War. She reached out inquisitively and ran her fingers over the pink ridges, the serpentine pattern; he flinched, and when she glanced back at him she was met with a convoluted expression: guarded and tired and, beneath it all, so very sad.

Are you going to leave now, too? she could practically hear him ask. What will you do, to get away from me?

Her heart broke a little for him. With her fingers still on the Mark, she leaned down and pressed a kiss to the hollow of his throat, then lower, down on his sternum. Slowly, she drew her fingers up his arm, soft enough to tickle (and she did notice him wriggling just a little), over the tense ball of his shoulder and down, down to the jut of his hip. She heard him sigh as she descended—whether in satisfaction or resignation, she couldn't tell.

He was so hard when she finally wrapped her fingers around him she could hardly lift his cock away from his abdomen. She felt his hands still in her hair, applying just the barest of pressure on the back of her skull, coaxing her down. She ran his cock through the tight ring of her fingers, pulling the flesh taut over the core, and then, with a glance up into his eyes, she slid the large dark head of him into her mouth, and sucked.

Whatever impatience he might've felt before was obviously dispelled now. His head lolled, his lips parted, his hands fisted in the sheets and his eyes rolled back in his head, just as hazy as they had been last night when she'd found him. He let out an audible breath and leaned back, thrusting shallowly into her mouth as she began to draw him deeper inside. Hermione had very little practice with this, but she reasoned that, if men liked tightness and friction (and she'd read in a magazine somewhere that they did), well, she'd keep it as tight and fast as she could—it had worked before, why not now? It also helped somewhat that she was actually relishing the act. Before in her life, it had been something of a chore; now every cell in her was alight and feeding off whatever reaction she could draw from him.

She liked the taste of him, fresh and salty—the feel of him, thick and straining—but most of all she liked watching him unravel under her ministrations. She fluttered her tongue over the vee of his cock and he shuddered; she dipped into the slit at the top and he gasped, bucking up into her. She spent quite a bit of time just torturously playing with him: he'd done it to her, it was about time he got a taste of his own medicine. He realized what she was doing soon enough, and no doubt in an attempt to spite her, he pressed his lips together and tried to muffle his sounds. Still, as she progressed to swallowing him as deep as she could and dragging him back up through the firm ring of her lips, he couldn't contain himself entirely. Every so often, when she'd pull him just right, he'd moan, low in his throat and thick with pleasure; it sounded almost like humming, and Hermione couldn't believe how hot she was getting from it. Each one sent a wave of fire down her back, through her belly and directly to her neglected sex. Not for the first time since boarding this crazy train with him she wished to god she wasn't so damn ethical: he was so thick and so hard it made her sob a little inside to know she wouldn't be enjoying him in quite the way she wanted. Not just yet, anyway.

Soon enough the moans stopped, too, and he quieted, sitting up now, his hands winding tighter in her hair. He was trying to pull her off, tugging at her, but she ignored him; she kept on working her mouth over his shaft, faster now, and he eventually gave up trying and sank back into the pillows, sighing that enigmatic sigh.

She thought perhaps his trying to pull her off was a sign that he was about to come, and he hadn't wanted to come in her mouth. After a few minutes, however, she wondered if it hadn't been him wanting to fuck her before he got too close. Either way, he was being distressingly quiet now—not a dull quiet, no, it was intense and focused, like he was trying to solve some complex equation in his head.

Perhaps it was time to change things up.

She'd been working his lower shaft with one hand; now she brought the other up to hold the heavy sac at the base of his cock, applying as much pressure as she dared. That reignited his interest. The hard thighs on either side of her stiffened, and he hummed again, appreciatively. His thrusts began to feel a little less shallow. She recalled a bit of male anatomy she'd once looked over in a medical textbook, and purely out of academic curiosity, she reached a finger behind his balls and pressed against the stretch of skin between them and his anus; sure enough, she felt the telling stiffness of his inner-member, and immediately his cock twitched on her tongue and the grip in her hair grew painful.

"Oh." She could've laughed at how much of a statement it was. He was so matter-of-fact about it, like she'd told him he'd written the wrong date on a letter. He began to writhe, much as he had done the night prior, though she didn't think he wanted the prompting sensations to stop this time around. Then—"Oh, yes," as if to mimic her words when their positions had been reversed, his voice reduced to a low, breathy moan.

"Oh. Yes. Oh, fuck… fuck—" He spat the last word, nearly angrily, and Hermione felt his cock jerk, and she knew he was coming. The thought made her moan, which in turn made him buck, and then he gasped, "Hermione," as if in warning just a millisecond before he spilled everything into her mouth in several long, burning pulses that had them both moaning and moving in clumsy unison. She wasn't prepared for the amount of come he pumped into her; long after she expected it he was still coming, and she tried to draw back but his hands were both in her hair, keeping her down. His seed escaped the corners of her mouth and rolled down the length of him in pearly ropes; the sight of it made her sex spasm and her hips curve down towards him—all futile. She'd made her decision.

When at last his shuddering gasps died away, she was able to draw back a little, far enough to lock eyes with him. He had an expression on his face someplace between awe and curiosity; she knew what he was wondering. With her lips still enclosed around his cock, she swallowed—he could feel it. Another shudder when through him and he leaned back—only to glance down again in surprise as she ran her tongue over his slackening cock, gathering up the semen that had escaped her. This she swallowed, too, her eyes never leaving his. She saw his brows dip, and he looked at her like he'd never seen anything quite like her.

She hadn't known why she'd done it. She'd never done anything like it before.

"God," he whispered. Strong hands enclosed her upper arms, dragging her up his body; he kissed her throat, tried to roll on her, force a hand towards the sopping mess between her legs—but she slid away from him, off the bed.

"I've got to fix the guestroom," she told him. He stared at her, his pupils huge, though from the drugs or the orgasm she couldn't say anymore. She leaned in and smoothed a hand through his silky hair, pressing the other to his shoulder, pushing him down onto the mattress. "You seem stable now. Sleep—sleep the rest of the Doxie off and come out when you're feeling better. I'll be just down the hall."

He was looking at her so incredulously, she might as well have begun babbling nonsense at him. Then his eyes narrowed, and he drew away, curling onto his other side, towards the wall. She stood there watching him a moment—that feeling, was it regret? But she supposed the decision was made now, and really, the man didn't have room to complain; she'd put his needs above hers, hadn't she?

Now that she thought about it, she wasn't sure.

Without a backwards glance she walked out the door and shut it behind her.

The Catfish

A Harry Potter Story
by Miss Dasti

Part 15 of 25

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