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Catch and Release	By : AndreaLorraine Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Lucius/Hermione Views: 19605 -:- 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
Author�s Note:�
Another plot bunny gone wild.�
This won�t be a long fic, though, and I am
working quite diligently on the other fics.� In related news, I started a livejournal for my fanfic so that
I can be more interactive with my readers.�
If you�re interested, it�s here: http://fbs_fic.livejournal.com/. �Hope you enjoy this little diverson!

A fish.

�� Of all
things, it had to be a fish.� Lucius Malfoy moaned and gasped
the stale air of Azkaban.� It suddenly
seemed miraculous when the alternative was suffocation.

�� When he had
recovered and his brain worked again, he struggled with his revelation.� He had finally become an animagus
� hooray � but the form he had taken was of absolutely no help.� He didn�t have legs or lungs or fucking�

�� He willed
himself to be calm.� Azkaban was
surrounded by water.� Fish belonged in
water.� If he could somehow get to that water�but no, he was so high
up that the impact could kill him.� He
knew the laws of physics as well as anyone else; there was a reason jumping off
bridges killed people.� Hitting water
from that height was no different than hitting concrete.

�� But he had
to get out of this place.� He knew that
this was the only way to do it.� He had
figured it out six months ago when his mind had strayed to Sirius Black.� Only one person had ever escaped from Azkaban
unassisted - the malignant Gryffindor himself.�
How had he done it?� How?� He had wracked his brain for a week.� In a moment of bored brilliance it came to
him.� Black had escaped in his animagus form.

�� After that,
the only problem had been that Lucius was not and
never had been an animagus.� But if Sirius Black could learn how to do it,
damn it, he could, too.� He�d always done
well in Transfiguration and might have pursued it more if it had not meant
spending excessive amounts of time with Minerva McGonagall.� The lack of wand was trifling.� Again, if Black could do it wandless, so could he.�
He was not going to be bested by that fool of a blood traitor.

�� Six months
of intensity had followed.� First he had
to teach himself how to do wandless magic.� It was not as difficult as he thought; all he
had to do was learn to focus the magic in his fingers � natural wands, really �
and press it outwards from there.�
Thankfully, the guards were oblivious to the fact that by the end of the
first month, he could and routinely did perform
levitation charms, summoning charms, and cleansing spells.� Thank the bleeding Lord, and he didn�t mean
the Dark Lord; the squalor of Azkaban was unbearable.� Sometimes it made him crazier than the
isolation, the cold, and the brain-numbing boredom combined.

�� As
victorious as that had felt, he knew those minor spells were nothing compared
to the magic necessary to transfigure oneself into an animal.� He didn�t know if there was a phrase to
speak, a gesture to perform�he was groping in the dark on this.� He thought intently on any animagi he had known, but the only ones he could recall
were Minerva McGonagall and Peter Pettigrew.�
McGonagall never spoke; the woman could transform into a cat in
mid-step, mid-sentence, at the drop of a hat.�
She made it look easy.� Pettigrew,
on the other hand, usually made an odd flourish with his wand before shrinking
into the rat he was.� Good riddance.� He had not been sad to find the rodent strangled
to death in his dungeons.� He doubted
there was anyone in the world that was upset about his passing.

�� He had
pressed his thoughts away from that night, the night Potter had escaped
him.� Oh, the Dark Lord had no boundaries
in his anger � and no boundaries to the dark punishments swirling in his brain.� He, Narcissa, and Draco had discovered that the hard way.� That was when he knew he made the wrong
choice.� Being a pureblood didn�t matter
when your pure blood was being spilled.� By
the end of the night, he had screamed, begged, groveled, pleaded, entreated, even cried for their lives.�
Not his, theirs � but in the end all three had been granted.� It would prove to be one of the last mistakes
Voldemort ever made.

�� Fighting
off those shadows, he had concentrated on transfiguration spells.� These were harder, much harder, but in six
more weeks he had managed to transfigure a stone into a flower.� That wasn�t good enough, though; he had to
transfigure something living.

�� An unlikely
test subject had come in the form of a spider in the corner of his cell.� Within another month that spider had been
transfigured into so many things that it probably suffered from an identity
crisis.� At any rate, it shrunk itself up
into a huddled bunch whenever he approached it now.

�� The last
two and a half months had been spent trying to figure out how the hell he was
supposed to apply those spells to himself.�
The problem was that he didn�t know what he was trying to transfigure
himself into; that was why becoming an animagus was
so difficult.� Your magic chose for
you.� You had no conscious control over
what form you took.� The best anyone
could do was try a directionless change over and over
and over again.� And one day, it might
work.

�� Today it
worked.� It had taken him by
surprise.� Suddenly his entire body
tingled and the breath was crushed out of him as everything rearranged.� The world was much bigger, he was much
smaller, and why�couldn�t�he�breathe�?� ��

�� Coming out
of it was easier than getting into it.�
So that was where he had found himself twenty minutes ago, shaking,
gasping for breath, touching his arms and legs like a madman to make sure they
were there.� That was not pleasant.

�� This was
clearly the universe�s idea of a joke.�
Either that, or karma was real and it was coming back to haunt him.� No one took the form of a fish, no one.� It was so impractical!� He supposed that was what he got for being a
water sign, though he was a Scorpio, not a Pisces.� At least a scorpion would have been useful,
since it would enable him to walk and sting people.� Fuck and double fuck.� All that work�

�� But still
he smiled as he leaned back on his cot.� It
had taken Sirius Black twelve years
to learn to transform wandless; he�d done it in half
a year.� If he could change himself into
an animal, no matter how stupid the animal, without a wand, there was a good
chance that he could do just about anything.�
That meant his odds were fairly high.

�� Lucius closed his eyes and dreamed of freedom � no matter
the form it took. �

�� Two weeks
later, Lucius Malfoy
flushed himself down the toilet in his cell.�
After a crazy, disgusting, hellish, and entirely disorienting trip
through about a million pipes, he was in the clear ocean water.

�� He swam for
all he was worth.� Somehow, he managed not
to be eaten by bird or sea creature and promptly beached himself.� It was a rocky shore, the wind cold, the rain
beating, and he was bloody naked because he hadn�t yet figured out how to keep
his clothes as part of the transfiguration, but he didn�t care.� He lay there like a dying siren, a pale blot
of white on the dark rocks.

�� When he
became so cold that he feared the loss of certain parts of his anatomy, he
bemoaned the fact that he hadn�t thought to teach himself a heating charm and
then struggled off the beach.� A few
minutes of thought provided him with an answer.�
All around him, there were currents of rainwater.� They were all rushing somewhere, be it a
stream, a river, a drain in a muggle town � all would
take him somewhere that was away from here.�
With a deep breath, he stepped into a swift, deep current and became a
fish once again.

�� He realized
fairly quickly that he had swum east rather than west.� The presence of fjords meant he was in Norway.� It was cold, but he didn�t feel too terrible
about it.� The natural beauty was calming
and the world was small enough that he could get back to England if he so desired.

�� The heating
charm had been learned out of necessity, as had a basic spell to start cooking
fires.� He�d transfigured clothing out of
other objects.� Fish were his most
frequent meal, though he was actually beginning to feel a bit of a pang each
time he caught and gutted one.

�� He didn�t
really know how many days had passed before he worked up the courage and energy
necessary to venture into a town.� Lucius observed first, noting the style of dress and the
social conventions so that he would not look entirely insane.� He was fortunate that he wouldn�t stand out
since he was blond-haired and blue-eyed.�
He didn�t have the benefit of a translation charm but he was certain
that someone would speak English.

�� He thought
about taking a job and earning some money, but that thought was quickly dashed
when he remembered who he was and that he could just steal whatever he needed.

�� Oddly, he
felt a pang when he did that, too.� The muggles, hapless as they were, were kind to him.� He reasoned that it was just that he was very
far outside his element.� Once he was
back in the wizarding world, he would revert to
himself.

�� He was
sitting in a caf� pondering what he could eat that wasn�t fish.� He settled for
a cup of coffee.� It was warm and strong
and he couldn�t quite reason out why it was so damn good.� He drank two more cups.

�� Then a
pretty waitress came to ask him what he wanted to eat.

�� Do you
have anything that isn�t fish?�

�� She
smiled.� She had a dimple.� �If you don�t like fish, you are in the wrong
country.�

�� He smiled
back, knowing she spoke the truth.� He
suspected that these people practically slept with herring under their pillows.� In the end, she brought him a stack of
biscotti and that was his dinner.� And
surprisingly, coffee-soaked biscotti suited him just fine.

�� Three days
later, he slept with the waitress with a dimple.� She was pretty in a way he couldn�t
explain.� Perhaps he would have been like
a moth to the flame with any woman as Azkaban was a lonely place, but something
about her drew him.

�� He lay
dazed afterwards, curled against her warm body on a soft bed that smelled like
some kind of faint, flowery soap.� She
stroked his hair a few times; it was longer than hers.� He felt her fingers tracing the tattoos of
Azkaban, the odd, crop-circle-like designs that were scattered over his torso
and of course the faded brand on his arm.

�� He had just
committed adultery.� That is, if Narcissa had not divorced him while he rotted in
prison.� He wouldn�t put it past
her.� Even if she hadn�t, he had a hard
time caring.� He�d had his share of
interesting and incredible sex and couldn�t have guessed that a simple
Norwegian waitress would rank in the top five.�
Narcissa had never even broken the top twenty.

�� He had not
only committed adultery, but done it with a muggle.� It was the first time he�d slept with someone
so inferior.� But for an inferior woman,
she sure knew what to do to him.� Like
now�she had become bored with his tattoos and wrapped her slender hand around
his cock.� His satisfied body was slow to
wake again, especially since so little time had passed since their completion,
but she was patient.

�� Wordless and patient.�
She didn�t talk much.� He quickly
discovered that there were far better things she could do with her mouth.� She was unhurried and attentive,
stoking nerves he didn�t even know he had.�
When she rose his cock was thick and engorged against his belly.� She climbed astride him and he didn�t protest
even though he had never liked woman on top.

�� Being
inside her was like the coffee � hot, sweet, and inordinately good for reasons
he couldn�t comprehend.� He didn�t know
why he should care for the pleasure of someone so far beneath him, but he
lifted up to take her nipple between his lips anyhow.� He liked the feel of the soft flesh, the
peaked bud against his tongue, and the sounds it drew out of her.� And when the time was right, he pressed his
thumb against the swollen little button of her clit and stroked.� She shivered and moaned and clenched like any
other woman would, be she muggle or witch.

�� Not
surprisingly, he also came like any other man, and his ears rang.

�� He didn�t
stay, in no small part because he was quite tired of
eating rolls and biscotti.� The thought
of fish or any seafood turned his stomach now.�
That was quickly making his stay in Norway a bit difficult.

�� Something
else was getting to him, too.� He felt a
perverse yearning for the water.� Land
felt restrictive.� He didn�t know what
was happening to him.

�� Two days
later he bought a ticket for a ferry to Denmark. �In the dark of night, when the ship was quiet,
he jumped over the side.

�� What have
you got?� Padma Patil asked
in a bored voice.

�� Looks
like�a mermaid sighting,� Hermione Granger replied around a bite of her apple,
flipping through the brief report.� �Rather,
a merman.� Muggles
on a fishing boat north of the Cape
Verde Islands
saw him surface.� They thought he was a
person and tried to throw a flotation device to him, but it spooked him and he
went under and disappeared.�

�� The Cape Verde
Islands?� Padma asked thoughtfully.�
�Are there merpeople there?�

�� I didn�t
think there were.� Too
far south.�� Many didn�t realize
it, but merpeople were primarily cold-water dwellers.� The waters near the Cape Verde Islands
were much too warm for their comfort.

�� Are there
any pictures?�

�� One,�
Hermione nodded.� �It�s terrible
quality.� Probably from
a mobile phone.�� She held it out
to her partner.� Padma
frowned; it was no more than a pale blur.

�� I don�t
think that�s a merman,� she said.� �I
think it�s a bunch of superstitious fisherman.�

�� I
agree.� If there are any other reports,
we�ll investigate it.�

�� Lucius swam on, through cold waters, warm waters, waters
murky and clear, through coral reefs, volcanic vents, and boundless
trenches.� There was an entire world
beneath the water and sometimes he couldn�t help but think that it was more
beautiful than the one above.� But he
couldn�t live without that world above; the need to see and interact with
people drew him from the waves every time.

�� He took to
the muggle world with an ease that scared him.� He made friends and took lovers, spoke of
poetry, politics, and anything else that interested him, and soon became a
sponge for languages.� In the amount of
time it had taken him to teach himself to become an animagus,
he had gotten most of the romance languages down.� They were all very similar.� He did sometimes mix up his vocabulary or
conjugate a verb wrong but nobody seemed to care.

�� Muggles didn�t care.�
They didn�t care if he made mistakes, if he made a fool of himself, if
he was a little unkempt, or what family he came from.� All that mattered was that he was good
company.

�� They had to
be good company to him.� He had been in
some kind of denial in Norway.� He knew now that he could never go back to
the world of witches and wizards; his only hope for freedom lay in avoiding it.� Knowing what he could not have might have
made him hate what he could, but he wasn�t that self-destructive.

�� The
merman,� Padma said, placing a picture on Hermione
desk, �again.�

�� Where?� the curly-haired woman sighed.

�� Brasil.�

�� Where was
he last month?�

�� Newfoundland.�

�� And the month before?�

�� Bermuda.�

�� She rubbed
her temples.� �He�s taking the bloody
world tour.�

�� So it
seems.� I hate to say it, Hermione, but
Riverton wants us to find him and warn him away from muggles.� If he doesn�t cooperate, they�re issuing a
warrant.�

�� A warrant for an albino merman!� That�s a new one.� How would the aurors
catch him, with fishing nets and harpoons?�

�� Padma laughed.� �Whatever
he is, he�s in danger of breaching the Statute of Secrecy and revealing the
magical world.� It is our job to prevent that,� she reminded her partner, quirking a
finely shaped brow.�

�� Well,
we�re always praying for a change from the usual Loch Ness monster sightings and
accidental magic.� I guess we�ve got it.�

�� Penguins.

�� Lucius smiled.� He
had never seen them in anything other than a zoo.� Now, at the southernmost tip of South America, he had seen them in the wild.� He thought they looked happier, but he
couldn�t be sure, because he didn�t understand birds.

�� They had
nicknamed him.� Now, the roving merman
was known to Hermione and Padma as Merlin the Merman.

�� Galapagos Islands,� Padma said,
sticking a pushpin into the map.� They
were tracking him, attempting to find some pattern and therefore a way to
predict where his next destination would be.

�� If you
were Merlin, where would you go next?�

�� The Indian
woman surveyed the map.� �I always wanted
to go to Aruba,� she remarked.� �Where would you go?�

�� Hermione
thought and thought hard.� �Not Aruba.� He�d have
to cross the Panama Canal.� He could get caught in the locks.� He won�t risk it.�

�� Padma nodded.�
�You�re right.� Are we really
trying to predict where he�ll go?�

�� Let�s make
a bet for now.� I say�Acapulco, Mexico.�

�� What are
we betting?�

�� Whoever
loses treats the other to happy hour.�

�� Done,� Padma said.� �San Francisco.�

�� He stymied
them both.� Merlin didn�t make another
appearance for nearly three months, and when he did, it was nowhere near either
of their predicted places.� It was near
the border between Thailand
and Malaysia
and it was the clearest picture they had gotten of him so far.

�� Now they
could see that he did resemble a human.�
He had blond hair, very long and pale, and beautiful enough that if seen
from the back, he might be mistaken for a female.� He was very clearly not female from the
front.� The picture was still too inexact
to make out a face.

�� Hong Kong was his undoing.� The cameras there were super modern,
exceeding 8 megapixels in resolution, and just before
the new year Padma and
Hermione found themselves staring at an entirely improbable thing.

�� Merlin the
Merman was submerged from the waist down, leaning against a rock and wringing
water out of his hair.� Though his face
was partially in profile, it was impossible to mistake who he was.

�� Oh my
God,� Padma said.�
�Is that who I think it is?�

�� Yes,�
Hermione replied, equally stunned.�
�That�s Lucius Malfoy.�
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