Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Hungry Thirsty Crazy	By : AndreaLorraine Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Lucius/Hermione Views: 47434 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
- 5
Author�s Note: �Hi
all, thanks for the reviews and encouragement!�
A few responses, particularly to LaBibliographe:
no, my Lucius is never pure evil.� Pure evil is so boring!� Yes, he is married in this story (for now).� Hermione is not married to Ron, not even
engaged to him yet, but she is with him (for now).� As for the warnings, I usually go light on
them when I first begin a story because I�m not entirely sure where the muse
will take me.� I knew there would be
angst, the possibility of abusive behavior, and definite risqu� interaction.� Not entirely sure where the smut radar will
land, so the rating will be upped if necessary.�
Oh, and if you want to get a hint of how I write Lucius/Hermione
smut, you should read Chapter 7 of my other fic, Some
Blonde Fool.� I hope your heart can take
it!� Hehe.

A slight warning � this chapter is angsty
and contains underage non-con.� You can
thank the snowstorm for getting me out of class and enabling me to really work
on it.� Enjoy and please leave me some
feedback. ^_^

�

Another week passed and she heard
and saw nothing of him.� She was
beginning to tire of the bipolarity that he evoked in her without even being
present.� She was either
terrified and skittish, tense with the fear that he would suddenly
appear and derail her with his cruelty, or so angry that she wished he would
show his cowardly face so she could prove to him how unafraid she was.� Hermione
had never felt so schizophrenic in her life, and that was saying a lot.

At work Arthur had actually asked
her if things were all right with Ron.�

�You seem stressed, Hermione,� he
said.

Really,
what gave you that idea? she wanted to
scream.� But she�d settled for a polite
admission that she wasn�t sleeping well, and yes, she�d go see a doctor about
it.� But there was no doctor in the world
that could cure her of Lucius Malfoy.

She was determined not to be lulled
into a false sense of security by the days that marched by.� Was it possible that he�d only put the Vow in
place to keep her under control, and he wanted no further contact with
her?� Come to think of it, it was strange
that he hadn�t acted more quickly.� It
made her think that perhaps he didn�t care as much about his secrecy as he
might let on.� And perhaps the Vow was
more a formality than anything else.

But the man had, in his own twisted
way, come on to her.� Of course he was
just toying with her, trying to embarrass her, make her feel awful and unsafe
and guilty for actually liking his advances, and he had succeeded on all fronts.� He was a master of mind games.� That�s all his flirtation was � a mind game.

Yet the fact remained that he was
what he was: a gorgeous schemer.� A man powerfully in control of his charisma and his sexuality.� If and when those things were turned upon a
person, they crumbled.� Strangely,
though, she didn�t get the impression that he ran rampant.� He was
married and some emotion must exist there; she, like everyone else, had stolen
fervent glances at the Malfoys that strange day the
war had ended.� They were the only Slytherins there, aside from Slughorn,
and prior to that point had given the impression of being completely
untouchable � mannequins, almost.� But
there they stood, huddled together, shocked to the core in firm unity with the
rest of the battered crowd.� She had not
missed the way one hand had clutched his wife�s slender fingers and the other
his son�s tired shoulder.

The voice in her mind piped up and
reminded her that if his marriage meant so much, then why had he gone and put
his tongue in her ear?� It was possible
that he cared for his wife, but not in that way�

�Oh, Hermione, stop!� she
admonished herself out loud.� She had not just been hoping that Lucius wasn�t sexually attracted to his wife!� Narcissa Malfoy was beautiful, miles ahead of Hermione, even if she
did seem the type to be frigid�

There she was, setting women�s lib
back a hundred years by describing someone�s wife as frigid.� For all she knew the woman was a nymphomaniac
and Lucius had to beat her off with a stick six times
a day.� Maybe that was why he carried the cane�

A smile tweaked her lips.� And she would reflect a moment later that the
universe had a sadistic sense of timing, for that was when he walked into her
office � cane and all.

At first she could only stare at
him, not entirely sure that he was really there.� Her mind had been throwing some fantastic
variations at her at night; what she�d said to Arthur about trouble sleeping
was not entirely inaccurate.� In the most
recent dream he�d reverted to Hades.� He
sat on an ebony throne, and she was at his side, his queen � Persephone.� Orpheus came before them, begged for his
wife, Eurydice, played his lyre with heartwrenching tenderness to beseech the Lord of the Underworld.� And in the real story, Hades had been
merciful and allowed Orpheus to remove his wife on the condition that he did
not look at her until they had left the underworld.� Orpheus had failed and Hades� mercy was
wasted.� But this Hades had no mercy to give
in the first place.

Orpheus�s song had made her cry in
the dream.� Lucius
was unreadable, immutable, betraying nothing.�
When the poor man was finished, Lucius pulled
out his wand.� It looked like the Dark
Lord�s wand, a thing she had never wanted to see up close.� And with a lazy flick of his wrist, the
apollonian Lord of the Underworld and Lord of her Nightmares murdered
Orpheus.� She woke with tears and green
light in her eyes.

�Ah, I have just missed a joke, I
see,� he said, a false note of lamentation in his voice.� �Though it is clearly all your own.�

She wanted to shout at him, to ask
if he was capable of making idle conversation without insulting someone, but
all that came out was,

�What are you doing here?�

�I should think that is rather
obvious.�

�Only to you, Malfoy,
but I�d hazard a guess that trapping me into an Unbreakable Vow simply wasn�t
enough, so you just had to come down here to abrade me with your
presence.�� THERE, it had at last come
out right!� She was regaining some of her
sense around him, although that small whisper in the back of her mind said that
maybe it was only because they were in the Ministry, and he couldn�t possibly
do anything indecent to her in a place that was crawling with Aurors and lawmakers.

One of his pale eyebrows rose
slightly.� �And she returns to
life.�� He took two steps forward and
then arranged himself in the lone chair she had to accommodate guests.� She didn�t receive many; in fact this was
only its fourth use.� He made the
battered, spindly thing with a cracked vinyl seat look like a throne.

She reverted to staring, flummoxed
by his reaction.� He couldn�t be
provoked!� This was not the same man she
remembered, however briefly; in the past, any slight from her lips would have
sent him into pertinacious monologue on why he was better than her and what he
would do if she opened her mouth again.�
He seemed to have gotten that reflex under control.

Hermione sat down behind her desk,
resigned.� He was being pleasant
enough.� She may as well just deal with
him.� The quicker, the better�

�What do you want, then?�

�What, no small talk about the
weather?� he asked in mock-disappointment.

�You have five minutes, Malfoy, before I call the Auror
Department and tell them that you�re harassing me.�

�Try it, Miss Granger, and I will
do more than harass you.�� His voice
struck like a sniper�s bullet.�

She met his eyes, gauging how
serious he was.� Changed or not, he was
mercurial and she was convinced the entirety of his soul resided in his little
finger.� She was not sure where his
meager conscience might exist; maybe it was there, in the nebulous circle of
his pupils.

Black
and white were not black and white and nobody could
see it but him.

His words sprang unbidden into her
mind.� They were a warning, a reminder
that nothing that came out of his mouth was one hundred percent accurate.� But still, if the promise of harassment was
even fifty percent true, she wanted none of it.�
Swallowing, Hermione folded her hands and tried to look like she wasn�t
intimidated.

She kept her voice level.� �I am sure, Mr. Malfoy, that the weather has
nothing to do with your visit.�

�That is where you are wrong,� he
responded.� �I find the weather here
quite dreary and obstructive to my progress.�

She was about to ask what he was
referring to and then remembered the second novel.� Soif.� A small kernel of
relaxation bloomed in her stomach.� He
was only here to tell her he was going elsewhere to finish his writing.� He just wanted to reiterate how cleverly he�d
penned her in and ensure that things would stay quiet in his absence.

But that was not what came out a
minute later when he opened his assassin�s mouth.

�Here�s the conundrum, Miss
Granger.�� He paused, looked over his
shoulder, and waved his wand at the door.�
It creaked slowly shut.� As the
door latched, that small kernel of hope in her gut promptly shriveled up and
died.� �You are the only one who knows of
the book or that I write at all.�

That surprised her.� �Not your wife?� Dra--� she started
to say the name, but thought better of it, �your son?�

He shook his head.

�Why?�� It was stupid to ask and he would probably
scoff at her without offering any kind of answer.� Slytherins were
notoriously good at answering questions with scathing rebukes.� She frowned, firing off another query before
she gave him a chance to reply to the first.�
�If they read the book, don�t they know it�s you?�

Lucius
actually laughed.� Tilted his head back
and laughed.� It made her feel like she
was watching a particularly demented circus.�
Not the act itself, or the sound of his laughter � that was curiously
normal and maybe even pleasant � but this was a man who didn�t laugh.� Evil laughter didn�t count.

�You are funny, Miss Granger.� I am truly dejected that I missed your joke
earlier.�� The smile faded from his
face.� �You assume that my wife and son
read.�

It boggled her mind.� How could anyone not read?

�I doubt my wife has read anything
but her gossip papers and torrid bodice-rippers in the last ten years.� Draco sees no point
in reading if he doesn�t have to, which is probably why you consistently beat
him in school.� I have heard that you
cannot be torn from your books for anything short of natural disaster.�

�Judging by your colorful
vocabulary, you�ve been reading your wife�s bodice-rippers, too,� she retorted,
not knowing where the comeback came from but appreciating it nonetheless.

He shocked her again by smirking
and stating, �Only in the loo when there is
absolutely nothing else.�

Hermione shuddered, physically
shaking in her chair.� That was a thought
that she didn�t need.� She was perfectly
content to see him one-dimensionally.�
She was fine with him being a walking robot that had absolutely no
bodily processes that required a loo or reading
material for a sustained visit.� God, if
he saw the pile in her bathroom�

�I return to my original question,�
she said.� �What do you want?�

�As you are the only person who
knows of my endeavors,� he replied, all business in spite of the previous
whimsy, �you are the only person I can talk to about them.� And I confess, Miss Granger, I have a
problem.�

Hermione swallowed.� Any problem of Lucius
Malfoy�s was a problem that she preferred to avoid
like the plague.� She waited, not wanting
to look interested because she wasn�t.� She just wanted him to go away.

�Since our initial encounter I have
only been able to write one paragraph.�

�One?� she squeaked.� �But it�s been nearly eight weeks!�

�Yes, my calendar informed me of
that quite sufficiently, thank you,� he snapped, sullen.

She had no idea what to say.� Lucius was rapidly
turning every expectation she�d held on its head.� He was looking at her expectantly, a hint of
a natural pout on his lips.

�You � you have writer�s block,�
she stammered at last.

�Writer�s block?� he asked, leaning
forward intently.� �What exactly is
that?� And can it be cured?�� He was so serious that she had to struggle
not to laugh.� He had obviously never
heard the phrase before.� To the
uninitiated, she supposed it might sound like some sort of medical condition.

�It means that something is preventing
you from writing.� I�ve never experienced
it, but others have told me that no matter how much you want to write, and how
many ideas are in your head, it refuses to happen when you sit down with the
quill in hand.�

�Accurate.�� He frowned, his lower lip going between his
teeth in a subconscious gesture.� �I know
what I have to write, what I want to write, but it will not come out.�

�Well, what did you do when you
were writing the last book and you got stuck?�

He sat back and shook his
head.� �I didn�t get stuck.�

�At all?�

He shook his head again.� �I�� he paused, reconsidering whatever he was
about to say and deciding to say it anyway, �I wrote it in six days.�

Hermione could have fallen out of
her chair.� Six days?� Twenty-three years in six days! �Faim was pure genius,
and full of strong emotion, besides; it would have taken her the better part of
her life to craft something like that.

�How is that even possible?�� She didn�t mean to ask it out loud, but her
mouth had other ideas.

�I am not entirely sure, myself.�

Azkaban
made a cut and that was what bled out of me.

She heard his voice, clear as day,
but he hadn�t spoken.� Her eyes widened.

�Are you a Legilimens?�

His wintry eyes snapped to
attention.� �I fail to see how that
relates to our present conversation.�

��Azkaban made a cut and that was
what bled out of me,�� she recited.

To his credit, he managed to rein
in the majority of his shock.� It was
reduced to a polite cough and a few rapid blinks.� Then he went very still.� Realization permeated his handsome face.

�Oh, bugger,� he said slowly.� �It must be a side effect of the magic I used
to create the Vow.�

More
trouble than it is worth!� His voice
sounded in her head again.

�You�ve got that right!� she nearly
shouted.� Alarm flared in her entire
body.� �Oh Merlin, can you hear what I�m
thinking?!�

�No,� he replied.� Then his eyes narrowed.� �Not yet.�

�Explain,�
was all she could coherently emit.

Lucius
took a deep breath and crossed one leg over the other.� �The best I can do is speculate.� It took powerful magic to create the Vow over
such a distance and without your physical presence to seal it.� So now that you and I are in close proximity,
the magic must be amplified.� It must be
connecting us in a stronger way.�

�Then if we�re apart the effect
would fade?�

�I don�t know.� I would hope so.�

A frustrated ire rampaged through
her like a match dropped on a trail of gasoline.� What had he been thinking, tinkering with
magic that even he didn�t fully understand?�
It was bad enough to be tethered to him by the Vow, but now this?� Having him in her head would drive her
insane.

�I assure you, the feeling is
mutual,� he snarled.

Hermione blanched.� Already he had figured out how to attune to
her.

�And for your information, Miss
Granger,� he went on, incensed, �I was thinking that I had a lot to lose if you
ran your pretty mouth.�

She stood up, her palms slapping
the desk as she leaned forward.� �You
still have a lot to lose, and you will when I figure out how to go digging
inside your brain, Mr. Malfoy.�

It was his turn to blanch, though he
did it with more grace and subtlety than she did.� She had read him right once more; his veiled
expression said that he�d rather die than give her free range of his mind.� Truthfully, she felt the same.

�Remove the Vow,� Hermione said.

�No.�

�I won�t tell anyone, I promise.�

�Forgive me if I place less faith
in promises than I do in compulsion,� he sneered.

�Do it or I will find out exactly
which parts of that book are true, Malfoy.�� She hurled a thought at him, sure that he
would intercept it � a line of his book that had haunted her.� The
taste of dirty skin and dirty deeds lingered, sickening him with its refusal to
die�

He stood up too fast,
galvanized.� His cane clattered to the
floor.� Low, girl, very low.

She held his vicious glance,
knowing by his reaction that it haunted him, too.� But she couldn�t feel any sympathy, not now,
not when she was so close to escaping this hellish situation.� I can�t
help it if I have to sink down to your level.

He crouched to retrieve his cane
and straightened up to his full height, his chin tilting up.� It�s so
noble of you to engage me in familiar territory.

I
learn by example.

�We can do this all day,� he said
out loud.� �And frankly, I am done here.�� He pivoted crisply and walked out the
door.� But she could hear his turbulent
thoughts as he made his escape:

That
bitch�that cruel, black-hearted bitch�

Then his presence faded, and
Hermione was alone.

She was magnetically drawn to his
book that night, pulled by some incomprehensible force to her gap-toothed
bookshelf.� She still wasn�t sure what
had happened that afternoon.� He was
right, though.� She had been an awful
bitch.� He had not threatened her,
insulted her, nothing; it had bordered on civil conversation for a few minutes
there.� And then�

The red typeface on the cover
seemed remarkably menacing now.� Its
starkness was a violent statement, an aggressive minimalism.� It hurt, just like what she was about to do.

She opened the book and
scanned.� She had read it twice already, this part, and both times her mind had recognized
the awfulness of it and the razor-sharp narrative.� The first time she hadn�t known who the
author was; the events made her woozy and cathartic but that was it, because
things were never as bad when you couldn�t assign a face to them.� The second time she had known it was him, but
an odd desire for self-preservation made her skim over it quickly, pretending
like it was not there.� Since discovering
it was his book, she hadn�t thought about the implications of these pages.� She had never felt it with him.� Even
knowing that he had written it and
that it might be an exceedingly painful droplet of truth, she hadn�t been
courageous enough to feel it.

She was going to feel it now.� She found the page, close to the beginning.

The
night was warm and heavy but he was too young to recognize the air of
potential.� He was also too young to
understand that low, moonless nights like this one overflowed with a darkness
that had nothing to do with the rotation of the earth.

The
path was dewy and his shoes would be soaked.�
If he could get a house elf to do a drying spell it would save him a
lecture.� He was distracted at the
thought and didn�t notice the shadow.�
There had never before been a shadow.

The
man smelled like tobacco; that scent he knew from his father�s occasional
cigar.� There were other smells, too, things
he would later come to know as the stink of an unclean body and worse, cheap
spirits.� A fifteen-stone vessel of vice,
this man was, this drunk muggle�

But
for a drunk the man was fast.� And for a
child, he was necessarily slow, not recognizing the danger until it was too
late.� He had always been taught that muggles couldn�t do anything to wizards.� Muggles were weak,
useless, powerless�

But
this muggle, this vagrant, was so strong, and he was too
young to have a wand.� He had never been
shown how to protect himself without magic, again because magic was the only
thing that could hurt him.

Wrong.� It was all lies.� He wanted to scream as the man wrestled him
down.� And he did; the reek of his attacker
filled his nose and mouth as he cried out.�
He screamed but knew the sad futility of the road he was on.� It was a country lane, traveled by less than
a dozen people in a day.� This far along,
at this time of night�no one would hear.

He
fought.� The man was bigger than him but
he might be able to struggle away. �He
almost succeeded, driven by the knowledge that he was in terrible danger if he
did not get away, if not quite understanding what that danger was.� He would come to know soon enough.

The
stone came down on the side of his head and jarred his brain, scattering his
thoughts and stilling his limbs.� He was
a rag doll.� He wanted to move, to resume
his fight, but his arms and legs would not obey.� Pain saturated his consciousness, filling it
up and overflowing, an excruciating throb of failure.� He thought he knew what pain was, then.

He
saw his hands, blood so dark in the night that it seemed like dirty oil.� His hair was being pulled, twisted, and it
renewed the waves of sharp suffering.�
What was wrong with him?� Why
couldn�t he move?� He�d hit his head
before, every child had, but never had it incapacitated him like this.� Never had he felt a prisoner in his own body.

Fear
flooded in, replacing the pain with its queasy adrenaline.� This man was going to hurt him.� He already had.� What if he could never make his mind work
again?� What if he was forever paralyzed?� What if his brain was so grievously injured
that these were his last moments, these harrowing, guilt-ridden, helpless
moments?

The
man pulled him roughly about.� If these
were his last moments, why couldn�t he just die?� Why couldn�t he just die, slip away, fade
into nothing as the vagrant�s hazily understood actions played out?� But he had no such luck.� None�

He
choked a moment later, invaded by a foul taste, something he knew he ought not have his mouth on.�
A hot shame cascaded in him; this man, this base, powerless man, had put
that in his mouth, that unmentionable
part, it was in his throat, gagging him, cutting off his breath, and he wanted
to scream and vomit and cry and die all at the same time.

A
shred of sense returned to him and he knew he should bite.� But he was terrified of what the man would do
to him if he did.� Was there something
worse than he was already doing?� Death, maybe.� He
could move his hands at last, though they felt heavy and tingled and like one
great glove.� Still, they worked, and he
dug his nails into the man�s thighs, drawing blood.

It
paid off.� He didn�t have to bite.� He could breathe a moment later, collapse to
the ground and breathe and cough and feel his stomach threatening to
spill.� He wanted it to; he wanted to
tear off his own skin and turn it inside out and beat this man�s dirt out of it
like the house elves beat dust out of the carpets.

His
return to comprehension was short-lived.�
The man hit him again, almost in the same spot, and it hurt so badly
that he knew he was crying.� It was the
kind of pain that would make a grown man cry, so as a nine-year-old he didn�t
stand a chance.

And
it became worse.� It became much worse as
his face was pressed into the weeping grass and something was inside him.� Oh, God, what was that?� How did it hurt so much?� The man was cutting him in half.� It stung, it stung and bit and tore and
opened him further than he could open.�
He closed his fists around the grass, dug his fingers into the wet soil,
tried to pretend that it was dew on his face, not tears of hate and helpless
stigma.� He tried to merge right into the
dirt because that was what he felt like.

He
heard the man tell him that he was pretty, that he was good and wonderful and
perfect.� He despised the words, felt
them brand into his skin.� This is what
pretty, good, wonderful, and perfect got him.�
With the man�s weight on top of him, his body doing this monstrous thing
� a thing he didn�t have a word for, not yet � he resolved that he would never
be pretty, good, wonderful, or perfect again.

He
thought that it was quick but he couldn�t be sure.� Every moment felt like eternity in hell.� But finally the muggle
made a loathsome sound and loosened his grip.�
His insides stung like salt grated into a wound and he bit his lips to
choke down a scream.� He lay like that
for a long time, still and frozen.� The
man patted his hair, reaffixed his clothing with rough hands, and left.

He
wasn�t sure he could move.� His entire
body pulsed with pain, a low, dull constant, and movement might make it
worse.� At last the thought of his mother
or father coming to look for him and finding him like this propelled him to try
to get up.� They would not feel
sympathy.� They would blame him for
sneaking out, for going to the village to play with the muggle
children.� They would tell him it was his
own fault and instinctively he knew those words would kill him.� Because it wasn�t � was it?

His
arms shook as he pushed to his knees.� He
was wet and bloody and sticky.� His skin
crawled.� An irrational fit hit him, in
which he shook and screamed and wished that he could flay himself.� And his mouth, oh God, to cut out his tongue
would be a sweet relief.� The taste of
dirty skin and dirty deeds lingered, sickening him with its refusal to die�

Later
he would not know how he did it, walking the rest of the way home like a
shell-shocked refugee.� Limping was more
like it.� Mercifully his parents were
asleep or wrapped up in their own business.�
His entrance went unnoticed and in the safe haven of his bedroom he
could finally put order to his thoughts.

He
could not face them looking like this.�
He was bruised, grimy, smelling of grass and cigarettes, his hair
stained with clotted blood.� And he was
bleeding there, it hurt terribly to
sit down, to move at all.� He couldn�t do
anything about it himself.� He knew no
useful magic, couldn�t heal, nothing.�
The only option was one of his parents � or the house elves.

He
called a house elf.� It cried as it
helped him, fussing until the sounds of its pity drilled a hole in his
composure and he told it to shut up.�
Still its huge eyes watered and it dared to ask him if it should
retrieve his parents.� He said no and
swore it to secrecy.� This was something
no one could know and he was sure the elf�s fanatical loyalty would keep it in
line. ��

The
elf healed him, made it like it had never happened.� He gave it the torn and bloody clothing,
instructing it to burn them beyond recognition.�
And lastly, he asked for a cup of strong mint tea.� When it got there, steaming, volcanic, he did
not wait for it to cool, but much to the creature�s horror, gulped it down,
tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes as it burned.� But it was the only way�the only way to
banish the taste of him from his mouth.�
The mint and the fire did it.� He
could not taste anything for a week.

He
didn�t see that house elf for a long time afterwards.� Perhaps it was afraid of him, or afraid that
it might be tempted to tell his parents if it saw him.� But in its absence his gratitude
metamorphosed into something else � hate.�
Hate because it knew, it knew how weak he was, how stupid, how filthy�and
it would always look at him with that unwavering pity, pity he didn�t want.

He
wanted no one�s pity, but the knowledge of what had happened � what had been
done to him, to him, a wizard, by a
lowly muggle � built up in his mind, day after day,
torturing him.� He was better than
that.� He was.� He should never have been so weak.

And
the crowning glory of that torture was that they didn�t even notice.� He knew he looked sick, felt sick, barely
ate, and some days couldn�t even think about smiling.� But his parents, in their pristine world,
caught none of it.� On his tenth birthday
they held a small, sedate party for him and it was a grand struggle not to
break down, not to take the knife that had been charmed to cut the cake and
plunge it into his own atrophied heart.

So
if he could pinpoint where it all began, where he had gone wrong as a human
being, it was there.� It was walking that
country lane alone at night, too na�ve to understand that the world was full of
predators. �It was not telling them right
away, not letting them see him � because even his imperial sire and dam would
have been moved by a boy beaten and sullied and bleeding down the back of his
thighs.� Blame would have been better
than secrecy.� Shame would have been
better than rage.� And perhaps a little
recognition would have kept him from resorting to violence, from smiling and
laughing as faceless drunks and highwaymen died beneath his fingers.�

Never
that one, though.� He never found that
man again.� He searched as he grew older,
prowled with an insane need to choke the life out of him, but in the end
someone else beat him to it.� The muggle newspaper reported that he had been found dead, his
head cracked open on cobblestone, and his only solace was that perhaps another
victim had done it.� Because he couldn�t
bear to think that he had been the only one�

Hermione shut the book and mopped
at her tears.� She couldn�t read any
more.� She knew what came next.� He had tried to tell his mother, thinking she
was the better candidate, but she had responded with denial and cruelty.� Told him he shouldn�t make up lies, that he
better not ever say anything to his father if he knew what was good for
him.� Merlin, she wanted to kill the
woman.� She would have self-destructed
long before Lucius did, plunging himself headlong
into the whim of his depthless rage�

She understood now.� She understood why he hated muggles, why he treated his house elves so badly,
just�why.� That didn�t excuse it and
didn�t change any of the things he had done, but it enabled her to feel a deep
and painful sympathy.� Not pity, because
he�d probably kill her if he saw that in her eyes.� She took that lesson from his anonymous
disclosure.

Azkaban
made a cut and that was what bled out of me.� Oh, Merlin.�
That was what he had seen, felt, experienced, every moment in Azkaban. �She was amazed he hadn�t taken his own
life.� Then again, she didn�t know if he
had ever tried.� He might have.� There were many things she didn�t know.

She did know that she had to
apologize.� It had truly been a low blow
to taunt him with his own tragedy.� It
took a lot of courage to put it down on paper, even decades later.� The fact that no one knew whose tragedy it
was didn�t matter.� Writing it down made
it real, acknowledged it, confessed to its power�

Why had he published it?� Why?�
Well, with no one knowing it was him, it was a way to exorcise the
demon; he had not told anyone before, but now he�d told the entire world
without having to bear witness to its reaction.�
It had to be therapeutic in some odd way.� And maybe�maybe he had at last come to peace
with it.� Maybe it was written in the
third person because he was not that
person anymore.

She could sit there all night and
analyze him, but the reality was that she knew nothing other than what he�d
chosen to reveal.� While it was more than
he might have admitted if he had known anyone would ever discover his identity,
it was probably still just the tip of the iceberg.� And Lucius Malfoy was one hell of an iceberg.

Yes, he stretched widely across her
path, and though she had not yet run aground on him, she had cracked his
foundation and she was in danger of being drowned by the resulting tsunami.� She was still tied to him, still vulnerable
to his manipulation, and now she had actually given him reason to exploit
it.� Hermione could only hope that she would
find a way to navigate around him�
- 3
- 4
- 5
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Hungry Thirsty Crazy