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Catch and Release	By : AndreaLorraine Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Lucius/Hermione Views: 19606 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and his universe aren't mine and I'm not making any profit from the writing of this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
- 3
Author�s Note: Thanks for the great response to part 1.� I�m keeping these chapters a bit shorter than
those of my other fics so that I won�t end up turning
this into an epic.� I�ve got plenty of
those to work on!� Enjoy part 2.

Responses:

Michelle: Thanks!� I
love bad puns.

Daisymaeevans: Thank you, I�m glad
I managed to successfully pique your interest.

ChaosProphet: Yes, Lucius�s pride was dented a little but he�s certainly
figured out how to make do, hasn�t he?� I
haven�t yet decided if Hermione will find her animagus
form along the way, but it�s a possibility.

Sisterae: Yes, Lucius
definitely strikes me as the type who wouldn�t worry too hard about being
captured.� He just has to make sure he
doesn�t get too comfortable�thanks for reading!

Meankitty69: Great!� I
hope the rest lives up to the hype.

VoraciousReader:� No, Lucius�s form
hasn�t changed.� He�s still a fish.� What people are seeing and mistaking for a
merman is Lucius changing from fish to man while
still in the water.

Heidi191976: Thanks!

LaBibliographe: I won�t reveal Lucius�s �number�, hehe.� I will say that he was a p-i-m-p in his youth. *wink*� After he got married he was a good boy
and stayed faithful, mostly out of the desire to avoid scandal.� As for the tattoos, I will talk a little bit
more about them later, but I intended them to be reminiscent of the ones that
Mr. Oldman�s Sirius has in PoA,
though a bit more elaborate, hence the crop-circle designs.� Just a writer�s whimsy, I suppose�and the
thought that a tattooed Lucius would be different and
sexy.

Jesse:� Thanks, read
on!

Sky: Thanks, here�s some more to feed the reading beast.

Celesumi: I will admit I had a lot
of fun writing the first part.� I guess
it shows!� Thanks for reading and I hope
you continue to enjoy the story.

�

<>

They had alerted the authorities
and a team of thirty Aurors was sent to Hong Kong.�
Hermione thought the number both ludicrous and appalling.� Malfoy was a
fugitive, yes, but he had no wand, and in her opinion a force of thirty grossly
overestimated both his intelligence and his abilities.� Then again, she was somewhat jaded on the
matter and a small part of her knew the caution was warranted.�

She knew they wouldn�t find Malfoy, anyway; the picture was three days old.� He probably wasn�t stupid enough to linger,
especially not around magic folk or in a place where his looks were so
conspicuous.� If he was still there, the Aurors would be hard-pressed to search the Muggle city without performing magic.

The Chinese Ministry had been as
accommodating as it could be, but as Hermione suspected, Malfoy
was long gone.� The British Ministry had
launched smaller investigations to each of the places he�d been spotted and
found nothing.� There was no evidence of
magic or mayhem of any kind.� In the
absence of damnable behavior, they had nothing to give to the media and so all
remained quiet.� They believed it was
best not to spark panic.�

She and Padma
were both given awards for finding the first viable lead on Malfoy
since his escape twenty months earlier.�
They were also told to report any further sightings to the Aurors immediately.�
But, almost as if he knew he had made a mistake, Lucius
seemed to disappear altogether after his Asian tour.�

It frustrated Hermione to no end,
and long after the Aurors forgot about it, she
continued to monitor Muggle tabloids from around the
world in the hopes of encountering even one sensational story about merpeople.

There were easily a thousand
islands in the Pacific.� Some were small
spits of land, no better than atolls, and others reared fearsomely from the
water in volcanic peaks.� He ricocheted
between them with no real plan except to see as much as he could.

�� Some were
populated and many were not.� Sitting on
the desolate white beach of a truly deserted island was something else; his
mind exploded in the silence.� He thought
about solitude, isolation, and the paradox of an island.� Islands were cut off from everything.� They received only what the water and the
wind brought them.� This was enough to
enable some diversity of life, but in time the creatures would have to
interbreed, evolve, or die.

�� At the same
time, there was something wonderful about a creature only existing in one
place.� That was a triumph of diversity, that
even the most barren, secluded environment could produce a spectrum of unique
creatures.� He wondered how many
undiscovered beasts lurked in the forests, some no bigger than a quidditch pitch.

�� He had been
raised to believe in evolution, which was quite the irony.� If it had been taught to him correctly he
would have known that by limiting their reproductive options, the purebloods
were putting themselves in the same situation as the occupants of these fey
islets.� They had to interbreed, evolve,
or die.� Up until the end of the war, the
overwhelming choice had been to interbreed or die.

�� Lucius had flirted with both options and found them, in
hindsight, to be rather unappetizing.�
Blood purity was a concept, not a fact.�
If he was honest with himself, there had probably been some ancestor
along the way who either was not of the lineage they claimed to be or who
defied the rules and liaised with someone �lesser�.� He doubted there was a single real pureblood left in the world.� And if there was, so what?� It denoted no accomplishment, save that
generations� worth of xenophobia was firmly woven into one�s DNA.

�� Natural
selection had him up against the wall.�
He wasn�t fighting to pass on his legacy, for he�d already done
that.� However, there were other reasons
to evolve�and those were probably the better ones.

�� Damn it!�
Hermione exclaimed, stomping her foot.�
The pile of Muggle tabloids next to her desk
was quickly reaching epic proportions.�
�No merpeople.�
Malfoy is completely off the map.� He could be anywhere.�

�� Maybe he
figured out that he was being seen, or started using a Disillusionment spell,� Padma suggested.

�� If he did,
we have no hope of finding him.�

�� Padma frowned.� �It�s
not your job to find him, you know.�

�I know, but no one else seems too
keen to do it,� she retorted sourly.� She
was not happy that the Aurors had dropped the
case.� Granted, there were more important
things for them to deal with, but she loathed how little was being done to try
to recapture a dangerous fugitive.� It was
paltry in comparison to what they had done to try to find Sirius so many years
ago.� The discrepancy was ridiculous,
considering that Sirius was once thought to have held the same position as Lucius � the Dark Lord�s right hand man.

�There�s no way to track him.� They would just be spinning their wheels, as
the Muggles say.��
Padma twirled her quill and then set it
down.� �Let�s be honest.� Malfoy doesn�t have
a wand.� There hasn�t been a single
report of anyone being hurt or hexed or anything.� Maybe he�s just�seeing the world.�

�� Good for
him,� Hermione snapped.� �He still
belongs in prison.�

�� For the
first time in a long time, he traveled on land.�
It made him feel itchy.� Though he
was very often in wide open spaces, he felt the claustrophobia of being
land-locked.� He didn�t dawdle in Russia
as he had in many other places; he sped through as quickly as a wanderer
could.� It still took three weeks.

�� When he
finally made it to the Black Sea, he lingered
for a long time.� He circled the coasts,
tracing the periphery of Ukraine,
Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey,
Georgia, and Russia.� The world was so different in each place.

�� He chose Turkey.� He�d never been there but had always wanted
to go.� As soon as he set foot on land
just a few miles from Istanbul,
he was ambushed by something he hadn�t felt in a long time.� There was magic in the air.

�� It vibrated
and swirled all around him.� It made his
head hurt.� It was so strong that he
wondered if he had made the wrong choice�or if he had just become so used to
living away from magic that something normal was now overwhelming.

�� He couldn�t
make himself leave.� Something inside him
pulled and yearned for the world of magic.�
It had been so long since he used it for anything other than his
transformation.� He needed it.

�� It was
foolish and he knew it, but four days after he arrived, he walked into the
heart of Istanbul
as a wizard.� He used a glamour, of
course, and kept himself scarce and unmemorable.� Lucius bought a
paper and sat at a caf� like he had in Norway, watching, listening, feeling the teem of the magical world
around him.

�� The section
of the paper that was relegated to England was small and contained
only three stories.� Still, the knowledge
that Kingsley Shacklebolt was not seeking a fourth
term as Minister of Magic, the fact that the Chudley
Cannons had won a championship for the first time in 113 years, and the
promotion of Harry Potter to Head Auror made him feel
like he was connected, however briefly, to the world he�d left behind.

�� He spoke to
no one, took no lovers, and did absolutely nothing except exist among the
bustling witches and wizards.� Seven days
later, the magic no longer made his head buzz.�
Quite suddenly, he didn�t need it anymore.

�� Lucius didn�t know what to make of it.� It seemed almost like he had somehow needed
to recharge a depleted part of himself.�
They didn�t do studies about magic deprivation; they were deemed
inhumane.� How interested scholars would be
in this.� He had attributed his
restlessness the last few weeks to the strain of being landlocked in Russia,
looking out the window and seeing only land instead of the security of
water.� Perhaps that was only half of
it.� The calendar told him that it had
been nearly two years since he�d escaped Azkaban.� That was a long time to go without any magic,
especially for a person who had always been brimming with it.

�� He knew he
couldn�t stay.� This was the world that
wanted to imprison him and he wasn�t perfect.�
There was always the chance that he could be caught.� Incarceration had driven him mad before and
now he knew it would destroy him.

He left Istanbul
for the Mediterranean, and was careful to
limit himself to surfacing only at night.

Padma was
staring at her office mate.� Hermione
hadn�t given up on her Muggle tabloids.� She still flipped through about five of them
every day at her lunch break.� She was
bound and determined to find Lucius Malfoy and it was getting on Padma�s
nerves.� The search wasn�t very fruitful;
there hadn�t been a single sighting since Hong Kong.

�Look, Hermione, the earth is
seventy percent water!� she finally exploded, crossing the office to forcefully
close the flimsy magazine Hermione was paging through.� �There�s no way you�ll be able to find him
with those odds.� Just let it go!�

�Seventy-one percent, according to
some,� Hermione fairly moaned.

�Whatever,� Padma
replied, rolling her eyes at her partner�s perfectionism.� �The point is, you may as well throw a dart
at the map and go there, and you�ll have as much chance of finding him as you
would anywhere else.�� She picked up a
pushpin and transfigured it into a dart.�
�You need a vacation anyhow, so try to aim for somewhere good.�

Hermione looked at her
partner.� �Padma��

�Seriously.� Wherever the dart lands, you�re going.� You spend way too much time in this office.�

She sighed.� Padma was
right.� Her life was dreadfully mundane
and it was partially her own doing.� But
just partially�

�All right,� she relented, reaching
out for the dart.� �But what if it lands
somewhere I don�t want to go?�

�Then I�ll give you a do-over.�

�Okay.�

Padma
stepped out of the way and Hermione raised her arm.

�Close your eyes,� Padma ordered.

�Are you sure that�s wise?�

�You�re facing the right direction
for the map, so unless you�re really uncoordinated, it should be fine.�

�All right.� Here goes.��
Hermione closed her eyes, drew her arm back, and threw.� She heard the thwack of the dart hitting the
cork board and no clatter followed; it had stuck.

�Not bad,� Padma
said.� �You hit the Nile
delta.� So I guess you have a choice
between Cairo or Alexandria.�

�Alexandria!� she nearly shouted.

Padma
winced.� �Of course.� The Library�s there.�� She shook her head.� �Well, you have a week.� If you�re not back after that, I�m coming to
drag you out of the stacks.� Don�t forget
to eat.�

The Library at Alexandria, thought by the muggles to have burnt to ash centuries before along with
all its contents, was well hidden even by magical standards.� It was designed that way so that only the
most worthy could enter it.� Hermione was
very clever, but after thirty-six hours she still hadn�t been able to find a
viable entrance.

She sat on a ridge overlooking the
small island she knew the building was on.�
She had narrowed it down from dozens of similar spits of land, carved by
the silted delta.� Now she only need to
know how to be able to see it, gain access to the wards, and find out how to
get in.

She ate a small packed meal of
hummus, pita, and olives and washed it down with cool, sugary hibiscus
tea.� The food energized her and the
wheels in her head began to turn again, contemplating how the keeper of an
ancient library, once the world�s greatest, would choose to hide it.

In time, she walked down to the
water to wash the salty residue from her hands.�
It was a thin excuse to immerse her arms in one of the most legendary
rivers in the world.� Hermione watched as
the Nile�s essence flowed over her hands.� She fought the urge to strip and jump into
the cool water.� This wasn�t the Ganges
and she had no idea how swift the current was; she had no desire to end up in
the Mediterranean.

�Are you trying to find the
library?� a voice asked from behind her.�
A man, his speech crisp yet inviting.�
She froze.� For all she knew, this
could be part of the test.

�I am,� she replied carefully,
withdrawing her hands and drying them on the back of her shorts.� �Do you have any insight for me?�

�It might help to think of the
gods.�

�The gods?� she asked,
straightening up.

�Yes, the Egyptian ones.�� There was a chuckle in his voice, and something
that was distantly familiar.� Pondering
that, Hermione considered her options.�
He didn�t seem to be a gatekeeper.�
His clue was vague but not obscure.�
He was probably just a regular person who had already found the library
and didn�t mind offering a hint to another scholarly adventurer.

Hermione dared to turn, wanting to
engage him further to find out what he knew.�
At first she was looking at a solidly formed chest.� Upon adjusting her glance upwards, shock nearly
knocked her off her feet.� There, on the
bank beside her, was the man she had been trying to track for eight
months.� He was watching her with
calculating eyes, seeming to enjoy her astonishment.�

Not for the first time, she
wondered if Padma Patil had
a touch of the Inner Eye.� Similarly, she
wondered if fate liked to laugh at her.�
This was no chuckle.� This was a
full-on belly laugh that destiny was having at her expense.

What were the odds?� Her mouth worked and her breath hitched in
and out.� He simply stared at her.� When she found her sense and her voice, she
reached into her pocket for her wand.

�Lucius Malfoy, I hereby place you under arrest in accordance with
the laws set forth by the Ministry of Magic, London, England--�

He rolled his pale eyes, and with a
flick of his wrist, her wand was wrenched out of her hand.� He didn�t take it; rather, he let it drop
about fifteen feet away from her.

�Hey!� she cried indignantly,
stunned at both his cheek and his effortless use of wandless
magic.� Well, she could do that,
too!� �Accio
wand!�� The wooden stick rose and began
to drift towards her and she turned to grab it.

�Well, you�re no fun at all,� he
groused.

When she whipped around, ready to
try to arrest him a second time, he was gone.

She sat there and fumed for nearly
an hour.� If only she had moved more
quickly, thrown a hex, anything!� What
was Malfoy thinking, anyway?� It was clear from the way he approached that
he knew who she was.� It was an awfully
risky move just to toy with someone.

Hermione sighed and tried to let
the anger go.� She was on vacation, damn
it!� She was going to figure out how to
get into that library if it killed her.

Think
of the gods.

Was it possible that he�d actually
given her sound advice?� There was no
reason for it; he�d be more likely to mislead her for his own sick
amusement.� However, it occurred to her
that his question about the library meant that he knew about the library and had purposely sought it, same as
her.� Grudgingly, she had to admit that
he had good taste in structuring his world tour itinerary.

It wouldn�t hurt to give his clue
some thought.� It wasn�t as if she was
any closer to an answer with her own methods.�
She had nothing to lose but more time.�
Sighing, Hermione thought about ancient Egyptian mythology, listing gods
and goddesses in her mind and piecing together myths as best as she could
remember.

There were so many to think
about.� Ra, Anubis,
Isis, Osiris, Set, Nepthys, Horus, Geb, Nut, Bast, Hathor, Ma�at, and�

Thoth!� She nearly slapped herself in the
forehead.� Of all the gods to be
associated with a library, he was the one!�
The Egyptians had believed that he was the true author of all things,
human or divine.� His power had rivaled
that of Ra.� If she was going to choose a
god to protect a great library, Thoth would be her
selection.

No sooner had she realized it than
she saw a great monument rising from the earth.�
It was a tremendous statue of the ibis-headed god.� It looked out upon the desert to the west and
the muggle city to the east.

A smile curled her lips.� A seeker of the library�s knowledge couldn�t
see the statue until they knew to look for it.�
She was willing to bet that only those with pure, honest, and scholarly
intentions would be able to see it, as well; ancient wards frequently worked
that way.� It was rather ingenious � a
scheme worthy of Thoth himself.�

The only thing that irked her was
that Lucius Malfoy had
figured it out before she did.� That
meant that his intentions were pure, honest, and scholarly, at least as far as
the library�s contents went.� Those weren�t
adjectives she usually applied to anyone
bearing the Malfoy name.� It certainly required a slight adjustment of
her opinion of the man and that did nothing to soothe the sting of his escape.

However, all her irritation vanished
when she approached the majestic statue.�
Upon touching it, she was transferred into the library of her
dreams.� All else was forgotten.

The Muggleborn
witch had become quite attractive.� It
was a strange thing to realize, especially since it seemed like he had left his
libido somewhere in the vicinity of Indonesia.� He hadn�t thought about sex in almost two
months.� Now that he was thinking about
how he hadn�t been thinking about it, the urge returned.

Two nights later, the woman in his
bed had such tiny, kinked little corkscrew curls upon her head that she made
Hermione Granger look perfectly coiffed.

�� It was a
struggle to leave.� Hermione could have
stayed in that library for months.� The
sheer volume of priceless texts was staggering.�
She would probably be returning for her next vacation.

�� She did a
lot of thinking among the stacks, mainly about her chance meeting with Malfoy.� It had been
foolish of him to come here, as it was a magical site and there was no way to
know if someone would recognize him or not.�
Evidently no one had.� Save her,
of course, and he had handled that easily, hadn�t he?

�� Perturbed,
she asked one of the librarians whether they tracked who came and went.� He was positively ancient; the wizard looked
as brittle as some of the pages of the oldest books.� However, his eyes shone with an intelligence
that was both awe-inspiring and a little frightening.� It was that look that people sometimes had when
they were so smart that the line between intellect and madness was ambiguously
blurred.

�� It is not
the identity of the seeker that is important.�
It is the information that he seeks.�

�� Sensing
that that was a no, she tried to reframe her question so that she could get
something out of the situation.� Fate had
not thrown her this opportunity for nothing.�
She described Lucius to the librarian and
asked what he had researched and read while at the library.

�� Reluctantly,
the librarian led her to a far-off section.

�� You will
find your answers here,� he said.� He
adjusted his robe around his thin frame.�
�But keep in mind, young lady, that with answers you often discover more
questions.�

�� She stared
after him as he shuffled off.� He
reminded her a bit of Dumbledore, just a tad grumpier.� Shaking off the odd feeling of transparency
that had frequently gone along with her former Headmaster, Hermione inspected
the section she was in.

�� All the
books were on magical theory.� They
weren�t focused on particular disciplines, such as Potions or
Transfiguration.� Rather, they considered
what magic was, where it came from, how it worked within a person, and why
different people excelled at different areas of magic.� There were also many books on the semantics
of acceptable versus dark magic, wandless magic, and
sex magic.� The smallest section,
relegated to a small shelf near the floor, was on the topic of magical
suppression.

�� She picked
up one of the books on magical suppression.�
She had read about all the other topics already, but this was one she�d
never heard of.� At first she thought it
would be about squibs and why their magic wasn�t expressed.� That wasn�t the case.

�� Hermione
frowned as she skimmed.� It was about
magical people who, either purposely or due to forces outside their own
control, did not use magic.� It
considered the impact of magical deprivation on wizards and witches in a series
of case studies and drew conclusions based on those.

�� There
weren�t many books on the subject.� That
didn�t surprise her.� She, like countless
other magical people, didn�t understand why anyone would choose to suppress
their natural magical abilities.� Having
it done by force was a different story.�
That occurred so rarely, though, that such cases were only footnotes in
the pages of magical theory books like those on the wall behind her.

�� She put the
book back and sighed.� Why would Malfoy have been browsing magical theory books?� Perhaps he was looking to improve his wandless magic.� Yes,
that had to be it.

�� Hermione
wandered back out to the main atrium.�
All told, her investigation into Lucius�s
reading selections had been rather anticlimactic.� It was surprising, though.� She hadn�t expected him to be quite
so�intellectual.

�� An
intellectual fugitive � that was just her luck.�
She smiled to herself.� Her
accidental meeting with him had once again sparked her desire to put him back
where he belonged.� Now she knew that he
would offer her a real challenge along the way.
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