Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Copacetic	By : alecto Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Lucius/Ginny Views: 8449 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I make no money off of Harry Potter

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
- 5
--

The third time they met, she had been shown—grudgingly—into his study by the ever-reticent house-elf.

“Where is Lucius?”

“The Master is busy at the moment. You will wait here. You will not touch anything.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes, and then berated herself for engaging on such a base level. The elf gave her a baleful glare and then disappeared.

It was eerie to be in his study by herself. It seemed to be a place in which she always needed supervision. Maybe because it was so inherently Lucius—very male, very pointed and angled, hard corners of wood and stone and glass. It was a man’s room, it was true, and somewhere inside of herself, the piece of femaleness that she had shoved down into her bottomless soul curled up in discomfort. Everything about the room assaulted her senses in a synaesthetic way—the smell of firewood and ashes hanging dusky and sweet in the quiet air, the overwhelming visual of the books all side by side in his bookcases, the feel of the worn leather under her palm, the glass panes of the windows under her palm, the desk surface under her palm.

Hurry up, Lucius, she thought. If there was one thing she truly despised, it was lateness. It was unlike him to be tardy for a meeting of theirs. Not that they had had a long time together, but even though he was odd and like to keep her guessing with his strange little power plays, she had never known him to be late. He was punctual and professional.

She was a bit unsettled by it.

She looked down at the desk surface. She was not prying, as there was nothing there to be worthy of looking at. Ginny had never really been one for prying. Living with so many brothers had taught her that if she had gone looking, if she had eavesdropped, she was going to see something or hear something that she didn’t want to experience. The amount of times she had walked in on her brothers shagging had scarred her from being nosy. But the desk was beautiful—rich and dark, the kind of desk she wished that she could afford. A writer needed a good, solid desk. Lucius wasn’t even a writer and he had the best one.

She sighed, ran her hands across the polished wood.

One of his desk drawers was ajar, which she found odd. Her automatic response—as a mother? as someone who cleaned up after others?—was to nudge it closed with her thigh, and as she did so, there was a sound of glass rolling around.

Glass?

Shite. She opened the drawer quickly to make sure that she had not broken anything. That was her worst nightmare—to defile Lucius Malfoy’s grand study desk.

Nothing was broken. In fact, the drawer held nothing but a glass vial with an orange liquid in it.

Ginny shut the drawer again, with a softer motion than before.

She had never been at the top of the class in potions, but Ginny had appreciated Snape in a way that none of her other classmates had. She had recognized in him a touch of the darkness that she, too, had possessed after the incident with the Chamber of Secrets. He had never been quite ashard on her as he had been on her fellow classmates. Maybe he recognized something kindred in her as well. Because of that, she had worked extra hard in his class, managing to boost herself to somewhere near the top half of the grading curve. Potions was not a subject that came naturally to her—she was far too impatient to wait for all of the subtle motions and nuances of the cauldron and the brewing process.

There was nothing in her mind regarding orange potions. Ginny made a mental note to look up the colour orange when she got home.

When Lucius finally entered the room, she was sitting on the sofa reading a book that she had taken clear off of his desk.

“I had my page marked in that,” he said, striding past her and taking the book from her in one swift motion.

“You were late,” she replied, not rising to his challenge but instead sitting back against the couch.

“Private Floo-call,” he said, his face slightly flushed.

“Floo sex?” She grinned at him, at the ridiculous nature of her question. He frowned.

“It’s none of your business,” he replied, voice clipped.

‘Floo sex,” she repeated, laughing, already drawing out her writing implements. She stopped, suddenly, mid-motion. He was putting the book back on his desk, meticulously searching out the page he had been on, sliding a bookmark in. When he looked up at her, he raised his eyebrows.

“What?”

“I just realised that I’ve laughed more around you in the past few weeks than I have around anybody else.”

“How sad for you,” he said, sitting down, opening one of his drawers and pulling out a ledger.

“I know,” she said, her voice soft. She watched as he marked something down and then put the book back in its respective place. He looked up again.

“Well?”

“Can we start now?” She gestured at him with her pen.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about your time at Hogwarts.”

Lucius surprised her by laughing, tilting his head back. “God, that was a long time ago.”

Ginny widened her eyes at him, tapped her pen against her teeth.

“Why do you want to know about that?”

“I cover all angles,” she said, gesturing at him with the pen. “And I want to know how much of a bully you were at age seventeen.”

“Hm.” He made the sound in the back of his throat, pausing a moment before speaking again. “It’s an awkward age span, Hogwarts,” he said, settling into the chair more comfortably. “Eleven to seventeen. I believe the Muggles begin their idea of adulthood when the youth enters the ‘teenaged’ years, yes?”

Ginny nodded, surprised that he was versed at allin anything Muggle.

“Eleven is too young to go away to school. It’s ridiculous. I was not ready for Draco to leave the household at that age—at all. Narcissa, on the other hand, was more than ready to foist him out the door onto others. He was a hellion at that age,” he said, laughing to himself.

“What? I thought it was Narcissa who wanted Draco to stay close to her. I thought that you wanted Durmstrang, which is considerably farther away.”

“Well, I did. I knew that either way, Draco was going to have to leave home at a tender age. Durmstrang would have been harder, I suppose, because of how far it was. But it was—”

“A Pureblood institution?” Ginny’s voice had a touch of snarl in it. Lucius turned bland eyes onto her, staring her down.

“I suppose. But it was also a safe house, Ginevra.”

“For Draco?” Ginny was somewhat surprised at that. “You realise that your son was the biggest bully in all of Hogwarts for at least five years of his years there.”

Lucius closed his eyes for a moment.

“That may have been,” he said, “but it wasn’t always easy for him. You yourself said that.” Here he looked at her. Ginny didn’t reply. “Did your husband ever tell you about the time he met up with my son in the girls’ bathroom at Hogwarts?”

Ginny’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“Nothing tawdry,” Lucius replied, rolling his eyes.

“What happened?” She didn’t like having the uneven footing in this conversation. Throughout their marriage, Harry had had his secrets. That was what happened when you married a troubled man—the kind of man that she had always been attracted to. Troubled men had their secrets, and she had never particularly prodded Harry for his—for she had had her own. Still, now, facing down Lucius, she wished that she had a little more information about the incident he was referring to.

His face tightened up.

Reliving the incident was not something that he liked to do. To be called to Hogwarts in the middle of the night, to see his son swaddled in gauze, the white all red despite the wounds having been knit together by Severus Snape’s thankfully fast counter-spell, seeing his son so drained of everything, so white, lying in that damn hospital bed because of Harry FuckingPotter—it had been one of the worst memories of his life.

“What?” Her voice was softer now, and as he looked at her, he noticed that she looked rather scared. “What did Harry do?”

“In sixth year, he came across my son, who was—who was cryingin the girls’ bathroom. I don’t know how they met up in there, but words were exchanged—I’m sure Draco was cruel as ever, so don’t try and defend Potter by using that excuse.” He had raised a palm to her. “But they started to duel, and Potter used a curse on Draco.” Ginny stared at him. “It was a curse that he had read in a book somewhere. He didn’t even know the curse when he used it. He ignorantlytook an unknown spell and used it on my son.” He took a breath. “Do you know how your brother’s ear was cut off?”

“Yes. That spell was nasty. We couldn’t re-attach—” She broke off. “What the fuckdoes that have to do with what you were just telling me?”

“You already know,” he tossed out to her, flicking his head slightly. “You’ve already made the connection in your mind.” She had turned pale. “Harry used that same curse on Draco, except it wasn’t a misfire, and it wasn’t just limited to his ear. My son—” his voice was low and full of anger “—has scars all across his body from your husband’s idiocy. And I wasn’t there to protect him. And I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“Christ,” she breathed. “Harry never told me that.”

“The whole bloody school hushed it up damn quick,” he snarled. “Potter got a reprimand. Draco got scarring across his chest so tight that it hurtshim on some days. It makes me sick. That would not have happened at Durmstrang.”

“You don’t know that,” she said.

“I do,” he snapped. “At least amongst his—his kind, he might have been more accepted. Draco was bullied more than you will ever know. He never talked about. He held it all inside. I’m amazed that he is a functional wizard in his day-to-day life, because the ways he could have been damaged—” Lucius broke off, inhaling. “Best not to think about that, I suppose.”

Ginny was quiet, watching him. She had never before seen Lucius Malfoy in such a human light. She had never before realised the depth of his love for his son.

He was uncomfortable under her gaze, and so he spoke again.

“Maybe your family doesn’t understand,” he stated cruelly. “Having so many children and all—if one went missing, they might be unnoticed.”

Ginny blinked, and then tilted her head to one side. “It’s like my mum used to say when we would ask her which child she loved the best. If you have ten fingers, and you cut two of them off, each wound is going to hurt equally.”

Lucius was the one to blink.

“I suppose so,” he said, immediately ashamed of his vitriolic outburst. She had responded with such coolness, such maturity, and it had made him feel inane. “I apologise,” he murmured, flicking at his fingernails.

“That’s fine,” she said, her head still tilted.

He frowned. He didn’t like that she was so even-handed sometimes, because it made him feel like the naughty child, gave her the edge over him.

She had stopped staring at him and was writing again.

He hefted a sigh.

“What?” She spoke without lifting her head.

“What what?”

“I’m a mother, Lucius. I can tell when someone is in a snit without even looking,” she replied, and still her head was down.

“I’m not in a snit,” he retorted.

She looked up at him.

He frowned. There was something so placid about her face, and it made him feel even more ungainly and out of line than he had felt before.

“You’re not as feisty as you once were,” he murmured.

Those words didhave an affect on her, he noticed. Her shoulders twitched in a way that told him that she had consciously made sure they didn’t hunch up around her neck—a universal item of body language that conveyed discomfort. A cringe.

“I suppose,” she answered, her voice deceptively light.

“Why?”

He had asked the question very earnestly. There had actually been no spite in his mouth when he had said it to her. He very much wanted to know what was going on in her life—maybe somewhat self-servingly, but still honestly.

She frowned.

“I haven’t noticed.”

“Yes, you have,” he answered.

“I am older, you know. I’m not the young woman I was,” she started.

Lucius scoffed. “That’s an excuse.”

She was staring at him. It was clear that she was not going to speak. She looked extremely taken aback. Perhaps she had not been expecting him to delve into her personal life.

But she had been wrong. He made it a goal to knowevery person that was near him. He had done it in his youth, and he did it now. Granted, he had not had many people nearhim since he had retired to the Manor. Visitors were scarce. Nobody particularly wanted to associate with the snaky, fallen former right-hand man. And so she—she—coming into his life like this—well, he had asked for her, after all. He had chosen her because she had seemed so snappy, so crude in her younger days. He had wanted some entertainment.

And she still had a whisper of that in her—the way she had shoved past him on the first day, the way she rarely let him get away with being cruel and rude, but she seemed tired.

She was opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish.

He raised his eyebrows at her. Never had he seen Ginevra Weasley struck so silent.

She shut her mouth, and inhaled, and then finally spoke.

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

He blinked. He had not really expected her to acquiesce.

---

A few weeks later, Ginny was surprised to find herself thinking about him on a normal week-night—not one of the days they had met on. A day where she had not seen him at all.

That was disquieting. She was both repulsed by herself and—at the same time—interested in why her mind had strayed to him. It had been about a month since they started meeting. Once a week, he was an important fixture in her life. Perhaps not important, but at least an indomitable one.

It was funny. Their meetings were not incredibly long—an hour or so, a few hours at most—but they were very draining. She wasn’t sure if it was because she constantly and consciously suppressed her younger self around him—that eleven year old who had been scared by the Lucius Malfoy of the past—or because he was merely such a huge personality. The things he said

The last time they had met, she had been caught staring at him.

It was odd. She never felt shame when she was caught looking at him. This time had been no different. He had been sitting, talking to her, and she had slowly forgotten about her notes, and had instead just stared at him.

He had finally noticed, and had frowned very slightly, had asked her can I help you?and had maybe expected her to blush, to be embarrassed. No, she had not. Ginny had only slowly tilted her head from side to side, and then had smiled, had answered no.

She had been looking at his features. So like his son, and yet different. The Malfoys were so visually similar that it was very disquieting to see them side-by-side—and when Narcissa had been thrown into the mix, it was almost blinding. Ginny wanted Draco to come visit just so she could see the two Malfoy men next to each other. From what she remembered, Draco was probably as tall as his father now, but there was a broadness to Lucius that she did not remember in Draco’s body. Draco was nervous and mouthy and quick, his muscles lithe, his limbs always in motion. Lucius was weighty and meaningful, moved with languid intent, a subdued grace that she could tell was imbued right into the marrow of him.

And now she was thinking of him.

“Hm.” She grunted out loud to her empty bedroom, and saved that fact away.

---

The next time they met, Ginny was earlier than she had expected to be.

Lucius had stopped giving her Portkeys, and now let her Apparate directly into the front hall. She was surprised that he had allowed that.

His taciturn house-elf appeared.

“Er—hello,” she offered.

No such luck.

“Master is finishing up his daily swim. You are early.” The elf’s voice dropped vindictively.

“Well, better early than late,” Ginny said briskly, refusing to engage in an argument with a Malfoy house elf. “Take me to the swimming pool.”

“What if Master does not want to see you?”

“We have a pre-arranged meeting, obviously,” Ginny said, her voice becoming firmer. “Take me to Lucius. Now.”

She never thought she would have seen the day where she was arguing with an elf. Hermione would have smacked her upside the head and handed her a S.P.E.W. button. Ginny sighed to herself. She would have to try and be more polite with his house elves. Her mum had always taught her that it was possible to get more flies with honey than vinegar.

The elf frowned at her but reluctantly took her pant-leg and Apparated them to the indoor swimming pool.

“Jesus,” Ginny breathed, as the elf left. Indoor. She hadn’t been expecting that. It was a whole specific realm of wealth that merited an indoor pool. Although she had grown beyond being effortlessly impressed by the Malfoy fortune, there were moments—such as this one—where she felt small and pale and eleven years old again.

The muted sound of a hand whisking through water brought Ginny back to awareness. Looking at the pool, she realised that Lucius was swimming. She had known that all along—the elf had told her—but she hadn’t been visually aware.

He was underwater. She smiled a little at the sight of it, because he looked as mermen were supposed to look, idealized—beautiful and streamlined and completely fluid, his long white hair caught behind him, moving subtly with the movements of the water as he sliced his way from the far end of the pool to the near end. He seemed to be going for as long as he could underneath he water, trying to hold his breath for as long as possible.

Her eyes travelled the length of his body—white flesh to white flesh. No interruptions.

No interruptions.

He was naked.

The thought registered in her brain, and she kept herself from gaping at the idea of it. She was in a room—willingly—with a naked and wet Lucius Malfoy. Ginny willed herself to look away from the water, and instead stared up at the stained glass windows.

Were those the stations of the cross—

He broke the water. She heard it, and her eyes were drawn back down to the water without her even meaning to.

He was naked and he was breaching the surface of the water at the end of pool closest to her, streaming lines down his face and his creamy sheet of white hair, his mouth open but his eyes closed as he emerged.

Then he opened his eyes and while he did not jump at the sight of her, he seemed taken aback that she was standing there, looking down at him.

“You’re early.”

“You’re naked.”

Oh. She hadn’t meant to say that.

Ginny resisted the urge to bite her lip.

He was surprised to see her there, and yet also—a small print of him thrilled at the idea of standing just a few feet away from her, naked as the day he was born. His nudity did not make him feel uncomfortable. If anything, it made him feel more powerful. She was obviously taken aback by his state of undress. He wondered if something about his masculinity made herfeel uncomfortable—Potter had been a sorry excuse for a man, anyhow.

“Yes, well—considering it’s my private indoor pool, I do tend to swim naked.” He was leaning slightly against the tiled edge of the pool, pressing his body against the underwater wall. “And considering I’m about to get out and get my towel, you have a choice. You can avert your eyes or you can watch.” With that, he pushed up on the edge of the wall with strong forearms, and Ginny turned her head quickly away in order to avoid getting an eyeful. All she saw was the beginning of pale flesh.

She stared at the wall as she heard him walk over to one of chairs, heard the soft sound of fabric, and she assumed that he had at least grabbed a towel.

Ginny had always been an impatient type. Sometimes it worked for her, and other times it did not. Turning so quickly meant that she could urge Lucius to get dressed faster and perhaps bump up the time of their meeting, but it also meant that she saw Lucius Malfoy in only a white towel.

Oh.

Lucius had one towel around his waist, and was using another to dry off his hair, wringing the long tips of excess moisture.

“So impatient,” he reiterated, but the words lacked his usual malice. He had no intention of frightening her off, not now. There was something odd about the way that the two of them were standing near each other, one dressed and one nearly naked. It took away façades.

And so to avoid looking at his curious, unreadable grey eyes, she instead examined his body.

His chest was broad and lightly-haired, the definition of muscle there underneath the pale of his skin, and she was grudgingly impressed with the state of his body, even in his sixties. He moved with a leonine grace—more leonine than serpentine, which also surprised her. His body language was subtle and yet so present, so powerful. Even the slight shift of his shoulders, as he stood under her view, conveyed physicality and force. There was a language to those shoulders, to that ribcage, and Ginny wished, irrationally, that she could include a picture of him at the present moment in the article—how his body would express the things she could not.

What startled her most, however, was how chewed-up he was—Ginny was amazed at the sheer amount of scar tissue that he had across the front of his body. There, above the right nipple—a vicious looking half-moon scar. There, circling around the left hip—a jagged mouth of a mark, silvery and tight. Across his stomach—lines that could have been caused by anything sharp and delicate. Around the tattoo on his left arm—that tattoo that she had seen so often that she was not scared of it anymore, simply could not be—there looked to be knife scars, pink and raised, and she wondered if they had been self-inflicted and if they were newer than the faded ones. And lapping over his shoulders, curling towards her—the worst of it, thin slices that could have only been caused by a bullwhip.

He was looking at her with an unknowable look on his face—she did not feel like there was anything sexual in his gaze, but that he was watching her watching him, wondering what her reaction would be. If she had been a more observant person, someone better at reading other people, she might have been able to tell that he was mildly distressed by her appraisal, that he was having a moment of slight insecurity, but as it was she did not feel that,

She met his eyes boldly, and there was a moment of awkwardness where Ginny wondered what she should feel—would he be offended if she showed pity in her eyes, or would he be receptive?

Her thoughts were interrupted because he turned away from her, in the process of pulling the towel tighter around his body, and his back was exposed to her.

If the front had been bad, the back was so, so much worse. The criss-cross of ancient unhealed welts and silvered scar tissue was breathtaking, and Ginny felt her stomach drop down into the soles of her feet. His back was a latticework of old torture and layers of memories of pain and punishment.

There was simply no skin visible beneath the scarring.

That was why, she thought, he hadn’t wanted her to touch his back.

And the language of his body in that moment was almost heartbreaking to her. She never would have thought that Lucius Malfoy could portray insecurity, but his shoulders did an odd bunching motion, and she noticed how tightly his fingers were gripping his towel at his hips, fingertips turned white, and nearly shaking.

She was galvanized.

Ginny reacted as a woman—as her mother? as amother?—might have. She reacted as a flesh and blood human might have. She reacted as only she could in a situation as disquieting and silent as that. She stepped forward into his personal space and placed a full, hot palm in the centre of his broad back.

Lucius stopped moving immediately, still in place, his hands still holding the towel around his waist. Ginny could feel the muscles under the welted skin of his back tighten, and his body reacted accordingly, the shoulders moving just so incrementally, the buttocks and thighs stiffening so subtly. It looked as though he was awaiting a judgment.

She did not speak. She moved her hand curiously across his skin, feeling it ripple under her fingers, and she thought about the years of suffering that had caused what she was touching. She was so close to him that she knew that he could feel her breath across his shoulder blades, but her intrigue was drawing her so near, so near that she could see the puckered, silvered edges of each specific whip mark. How they must have bled—Ginny wondered if they had been all at once, and suddenly she got an image of Lucius, his hands bound behind him, naked and prostrate on a cold stone floor, his mouth open and screaming but hoarsely silent, some blood-coated whip flung midair—

She realised that his body had relaxed again, and when she looked up, shaken from her thoughts, she saw that he had turned his head so that his face was in perfect side profile to her, and his eyes were trained on her from across his shoulder.

Something inside of her told her to savour this moment, that another moment of insecurity and closeness as this one would not happen with him any time soon. So she moved her hand across his back again, watching in fascination as goosebumps involuntarily raised on his pale, pale skin—in between the furrows of the scar tissue—in the wake of her own warm flesh touching him. He was so broad. She felt as though she could trace her hand forever and still not reach the end of his muscle and flesh. She had not realised how big he actually was. Somehow the well-made shirts and trousers disguised it.

Her head dropped closer to his skin, as though she were in a sort of trance, and she had the odd urge to drag the tender skin of her lips across the Braille of his back. There was something about the wet warmth of the room, the smell of the water, that was lulling her into thinking this was a good idea, this closeness, this almost tenderness. She noticed that his body had relaxed completely, the muscles under her hand softened. She could smell the salt of his skin, and so leaned forward and brushed her lips across it, feeling the roughness of old scars underneath.

Lucius’ spine locked and straightened and Ginny realised, immediately, what she had done. Instead of being embarrassed, which she refused to feel, she felt stubborn. Even as she girded herself to be berated, she noticed a light pink flush across his back.

Ginny did not drop her hand right away. She dug her fingertips into his skin slightly, watching as the muscles moved under her palm, and then she slowly disengaged herself from him, taking two steps back.

Lucius did not turn around to talk to her. Instead, he briskly finished drying off and pulled on a robe that she had not seen hanging off of the backs of one of the pool chairs. He did all of this while facing away from her.

Ginny contemplated her actions. She knew that on a level she was supposed to be revolted by the fact that she had just willingly touched Lucius Malfoy, but a warmer piece inside of her was accepting that same fact. It was human touch. It was humanto want to comfort someone. After all of those years, Ginny had relinquished her hatred of Lucius. It had been too tiring to spend her time being angry.

He had turned to face her.

Ginny snapped back to attention, her hands in her trouser pockets, her hips slung at an insouciant angle. She met his eyes evenly.

He seemed thoughtful. Then Lucius gave a great exhale, and shook his head slightly, and his hand rose up as if he were contemplating touching her. She did not move. His hand dropped back down to his side, and he finally spoke.

“If you want to move to the first library, I will meet you in there in a few minutes.”

She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but that hadn’t been it. So Ginny smiled crookedly and nodded.

When he came into the library ten minutes later, his hair was still damp, tied back from his face. He was wearing dark slacks and a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up to his elbows. She could see his Dark Mark quite prominently, but for some reason was not bothered. She knew that he did nothing without thinking, first, and therefore thought that he must have displayed the tattoo on purpose, to try and regain some sort of control over their situation.

She was leaning against his desk, her finger holding her place in one of his books.

Lucius walked over to her, standing closer to her than she had anticipated, and pushed the book up in order to read the cover.

“Slavic Sex Magick?”

“Yes,” she replied calmly, refusing to feel embarrassed. He shrugged and turned from her, and she wondered if it was to conceal a smile.

Lucius settled into the divan, and Ginny realised that was getting ready to speak, and so she put the book down on his desk and picked up her writing implements, sitting down on the sofa opposite him.

They sat for a moment and watched each other. Neither spoke.

Finally, Ginny opened her mouth.

“I’m sorry if I invaded your personal space.” She did not need to specify what she was talking about. They could both recall the feel of her hot breath on the water-cooled skin of his leathered back.

He regarded her for a moment, and then sighed, his body losing its rigid, frosty stance and becoming more human.

“That’s fine. I was more surprised at you.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t sure why you would willingly touch me.” His statement had him looking away from her, his jaw tight, and Ginny wondered if she was seeing another inner slice of Lucius Malfoy—that perhaps he considered himself a bit of a physical monster.

He didn’t want to appear as he did in front of her. The mess across his body—his back, specifically—was something that he tried as hard as he could to disguise. Women had been taken in the dark, their wrists pinned to the pillows by his large hands. He did not dress in front of people. Narcissa had known, and he had let her kneel on the bed behind his seated figure and rub dittany across his back. She would always tie her hair back to prevent it from sticking to his skin. She would hum to herself as she spread her palms across him, and it was those times that he felt closest to her. Now, he did not want to appear fraught or weak in front of the female Weasley, but something in him was welling outwards towards her, words coming out of his mouth.

“Rubbish,” Ginny said scornfully. “Call it a bit of the Molly in me.”

He smiled at that, despite himself. “Molly. The only woman I’ve ever been truly scared of.”

“More than Bellatrix?”

“More than Bellatrix,” he affirmed.

“Good for mum,” Ginny murmured, twiddling her pen in her fingers. She changed the topic easily, smoothly, directing it away from the dangerous ground it had just been on. “What of Bellatrix, anyway?”

Lucius cocked his head at her. “How do you mean?”

“What was your relationship like with her?”

There was a slow moment when Ginny observed him understanding the question, and then a deep bit of a smirk appeared on his lips.

Ginny blinked. “You didn’t.”

“Why not?” His voice was low and laughing.

“Before or after you married Narcissa?”

“Before,” he said. “Naturally. I was considering marrying Bellatrix for a while, anyway. I needed to test the goods.”

Ginny looked at him, disbelieving.

He continued. “Good thing I did. She was simply too insane to hold up the Malfoy name. So I changed my wedding contract to accommodate Narcissa. Andromeda, of course, was already taken by that time.”

“She was older than Narcissa?”

“Narcissa was the youngest. Bellatrix was the eldest.”

“Did you fuck Andromeda?” Ginny’s voice was disbelieving.

“Andromeda was the first of the three that I fucked,” Lucius replied, mimicking her voice by raising his own voice on the expletive. He chuckled at her face. “We were the same age, Ginevra. And we travelled in the same social circles. It happened when we were sixteen. We were both in the same house, after all.” Ginny was writing, thinking. “I took Andromedafrom behind in the boy’s dormitories in the Slytherin dungeons.” His voice dropped to an odd pitch, and Ginny found herself picturing his conquests. “NarcissaI deflowered on our wedding night, and she bled so much that the wedding sheets were nearly all red, which the rest of our families loved when she hung them the next morning. And Bella—Bella I fucked in the arse when we were seventeen, in my parent’s bathtub over the winter holidays.”

Ginny blinked at him.

“Bellatrix was the best because she was so feral. But she was frightening and untamable. I could have never married a woman like that. Andromeda was the most submissive, which I had not expected. And Narcissa—she was the bossiest. I liked that,” he said, laughing. “They were great beauties, the women of the house of Black,” and his voice turned introspective.

“So you werea bit of a libertine,” Ginny said, her voice a bit more snippy than she had intended.

“More than a bit,” he supplied.

“How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

If anyone had told her, years ago, that she would one day have been asking this question of Lucius Malfoy, Ginny would have laughed at them.

“Fourteen,” he answered calmly. Lucius was watching her evenly. “To my cousin.”

“Cousin?”

“Second cousin.”

She couldn’t help it. She dropped her face into the palms of her hands. When she looked up, he was observing her. “You are vile.”

“She was seventeen. And very helpful.”

“Stop! I don’t want to hear anymore about incest.”

“It’s a common thing in the Pureblood families, especially the older ones.”

“It’s not in mine!”

“I forgot that you were Pureblood,” Lucius mentioned casually, and Ginny scowled at him. Funny that she should have never cared about her blood status until he began making disparaging comments about it.

“Charming” she snarled.

“Incest was always common. It’s like the Muggle royalty. Everyone wants to save the blood status, so they have to marry within the families. I’m surprised there aren’t more visible birth defects—of course, every one of the ancient Pureblood families has some son or daughter that they keep locked away, so who can be sure?”

“Good grief.”

“People go to interesting lengths to keep blood pure.” He was steepling his fingers under his chin. His hair had nearly dried and it had taken on a staticky quality, fanning out around his head like a corona.

“What about men?”

“What about men?”

“Men loving men, I mean.”

“Homosexuality?” Lucius leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

“Being gay,” Ginny repeated. “Is that allowed in Pureblood society?”

“Somewhat,” Lucius began. He looked intent, and Ginny realised that she liked him like this, when he was intenton discussion and not belittling. “Every Pureblood male has to marry and procreate. It’s not an option. Continuing the bloodline is a given. I’m not sure of the logistics, really. A few of my cousins enjoyed the company of men far more than women, but they married and had children nonetheless—perhaps they never even consummated their marriages and other methods were taken.” He looked thoughtful. “But men can have male ‘mistresses’, for lack of a better term. It is not a homophobic society. My society simply places more value on children than sexual happiness.” There was a touch of bitterness in his voice.

“Have you ever been with a man?” She asked the question to goad, as queerness was simply not often talked about in Wizarding society. She wanted to see if she could raise his shackles, as a seeming straight man.

“Yes,” he said, his voice placid, and he leaned back onto the divan.

She hadn’t expected him to be so straightforward.

“Really?” She breathed out the question before she could stop herself.

“No, I just said that to get your knickers in a knot.”

“Don’t talk about my knickers,” she said firmly.

“My younger days—it was the seventies. It was a different time.” He was not apologetic or awkward about it. Rather, he seemed happily reminiscent. “And the revels were hedonistic. They always have been. Men are better than women at some things, after all.”

Ginny was struck, suddenly, which the breadth of his carnal knowledge. This was a man with so many years of partnering under his belt. She put her pen down and looked at him.

He looked back, his eyebrows raised.

“It’s an interesting world, Ginevra. But it has changed from how it used to be.” He looked almost melancholy for a moment. “You should come to one of the society events.” He nodded at her. “If you really want to know the world I grew up in.”

There was silence as she gawked at him. Then—

“Would I be your plus-one?”

“Yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of sending you into that scrum alone. You’d either faint or—” He contemplated her for a moment. “—throw a punch.”

“I don’t want to be your date.”

“There are other things I’d rather do than show up to a society gala with a blood traitor on my arm.”

“You are such a shit,” Ginny said, her voice thick and strong.

“Language.”

He wanted to get a rise out of her. There was a party coming up at the Parkinson house in about three weeks time, and he had asked her to be his guest partly as a joke. Lucius still received all of the invitations to the pureblood soirees, even though he had not gone to one in years. The last time he had gone had been when Draco had cajoled him into it, and so he had trailed along with both his son and his daughter-in-law, Asteria, and had felt like a bloody stupid third wheel and had left early. He smirked, internally, thinking of what the woman in front of him would respond.

“Fine.”

“What?”

“Fine,” she said, meeting his eyes.

Lucius resisted the urge to break out in raucous laughter. He had not really anticipated that she might have said yes. He had expected a little spitting match, for her to toss her hair and snarl at him, not for her to acquiesce. Now he was going to have to follow through.

Damn.

“Do you have a dress?”

“No,” Ginny said, almost defensively. Lucius wondered if he had struck a nerve, and then remembered all of the taunting he had done throughout her youth in terms of the Weasley poverty. He shifted in his seat, refusing to feel bad.

“Well, buy one.”

“Can you give me a little more information than that?” She suddenly looked slightly panicked and he was amused.

“This is a dinner party. Do you know what fork to use in what instance?” He took a little pleasure in seeing her face twist.

“Not really.”

“You’re lucky you’re a pureblood, despite being a blood traitor.” Ginny opened her mouth as though to protest, but he made a quick hand motion and she shut it again with a click. “Wear something full-length. A ball-gown, Ginevra. I don’t care what colour it is. I’m not going to be matching you so I don’t care. I don’t care who designs it—wizard, Muggle, porcupine, no matter. Just make it nice. Think of the kind of dress that you could wear with evening gloves. Full opulence. No expense spared.” He had gotten a sort of introspective look in his eyes, remembering the old days of the old balls.

She was staring at him with an undeterminable look on her face. He snapped back to attention.

“Can you handle that?”

If she noticed the amount of vitriol in his voice, she chose not to comment on it.

“I can handle that.” Her voice was just as vitriolic. “I’m not slow.”

“Ha,” he barked out, and she very nearly bared her teeth at him.

They became quiet, and Lucius watched her.

“Why did you touch me?”

He hadn’t expected to ask the question, and was rather taken aback that he had. He had been thinking it in his mind, over and over again, nearly screaming it at her across the tunnels of his brain, but he had refused to ask it of her. He didn’t want to appear needy or too invested in their relationship, but his mouth has misbehaved, had spoken out of turn, and so now he was bound to what he had just said.

She looked at him.

“At your pool?”

“Yes.”

“Because you needed to be touched,” she said, and folded her writing pad into her satchel.

He sat and watched as she gathered her belongings and left. Apparently it was as simple as that—that she had sensed that he had needed to be touched. There was nothing more that she had said.

---
- 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

Copacetic