Catch and Release #6
The stack of postcards in her drawer was becoming so large that she had to bring some of them home for fear of them taking over the desk. She shouldn’t keep them there, anyway. It was too risky.
Padma had noticed her collection and just smiled at her whenever she got a new one. She wasn’t sure what the Indian girl thought about them or who she thought they were from. Hermione doubted very much that Padma suspected the sender was Lucius Malfoy.
She sighed. Why did he keep sending them? Wasn’t it clear enough that she was finished with whatever strange game they had played? She had not responded to a single one, and yet they continued to arrive every few weeks like clockwork.
Most often they were blank. If he wrote on them, his comments were restricted to brief descriptions of what he had seen and done. Some of those things she envied and some she did not.
Today’s postcard finally deviated from that formula. It was from Thailand and it said:
Am I really that bad?
She placed it on the desk and her forehead followed, resting upon the colorful rectangle of paper. No, he was not that bad. He was not bad at all.
In all his time running loose in the world, he hadn’t done anything to harm anyone. She had seen a part of him that was vulnerable and unhappy and regretful. Paradoxically, freedom, not incarceration, was the thing that finally rehabilitated him. Freedom and exposure to the rest of the world, coupled with total exile from the familiar corner of his.
He was not a bad person, not anymore. She wasn’t afraid of him. She was afraid of how he made her feel.
In the week after their liaison in Amsterdam, her brain had been filled with cotton wool. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She couldn’t sleep. Every unstructured moment caused her mind to stray to the way he looked, the way he felt, and the way he made her feel.
He had made her feel powerful and weak at the same time - and she loved it. It was frightening. So, too, was the little ache she felt in her chest whenever her mind replayed his eyes flashing up to hers in the mirror, skittish, curious, and sad, or remembered the tone of his voice when he asked about his son and his grandchildren.
That day was her final straw. All along she had felt a grudging sort of affection for the man that exasperated her so; she just denied it. She denied her way right into his bed. What made it even harder was that she knew he hadn’t planned it. He had not summoned her there to seduce her. There wasn’t a single reason left to despise him.
And he kept sending postcards. That told her that their coupling wasn’t a fluke. She meant something to him. Hermione wasn’t sure what; he probably wasn’t sure, either. She sighed. She didn’t want to mean anything to a fugitive and certainly didn’t want him to mean anything to her - but denial only worked for so long.
Two nights later, she gave up and went to Thailand. She was too late; Lucius was nowhere to be found, and that made her feel shockingly bereft. Now she had no choice but to wait for the next postcard…if he bothered to send one.
It took three weeks, twenty-one long days in which she increasingly prayed that he had not given up on her. She was keenly aware of how life could emulate the thwarted romances in movies. If he gave up after so many rejections it would serve her right. She would never be able to find him again. Logically she knew that was a good thing, but it didn’t feel good to her heart.
But now, at last, the postcard had come. It was a grand struggle to wait until the workday was over and even more difficult to sit through dinner with Harry and Ginny. As soon as she escaped, she changed her clothes and left without any idea of what to expect once she got there.
She found the beach on the postcard easily - at least more easily than most. It was on a secluded corner of the island, one that would only be accessible to Muggles by boat or helicopter.
Once there, she stood and gaped. It was one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. The moon hung over the water and cast a soft light on the small shoreline. It was a semicircle of white sand, and in the middle there was the weather-beaten skeleton of a ship that had run aground long ago. It was surrounded by high cliff faces on all sides. Perfectly gorgeous…and perfectly isolated.
A splash drew her eyes to the water. In the daytime she knew it would be a brilliant blue but right now it looked black and mysterious.
“Lucius?” she said softly.
He had quite nearly given up on her. Sending the postcards was more a habit than anything else now. Though a part of him had known that she wouldn’t respond, another silly part of him foolishly hoped she would. He had not realized how strong that hope was until he felt it slowly being crushed.
He believed he had severed every feeling he had for her. What those feelings were, he wasn’t entirely sure, then or now. But he had blotted them out, pushed them into some little corner of his mind that locked away a lot of other memories he didn’t care to examine. Lucius was frequently amazed that the sting of being ignored by her stirred up more pain than recollections of being tortured.
It was because he was faultless in this case. Those other things he had brought upon himself. This…he had only acted on instinct. He had done nothing to hurt her, nothing to spur her to reject him so coldly. Nothing except exist and bear the name he did.
He had not yet crossed over into resenting her, but he knew he was close. Every thought of her was now tinged with anger. For the most recent postcard, he had agonized for nearly an hour over what to write, if anything at all. He had cycled through a great many unkind comments, then through a bout of melancholy that made him want to spew all kinds of maudlin statements, and at last through a sort of bitterly curious resignation.
The plain and simple fact was that the world was a lonely place if you were traveling it alone. He had been doing just that for nearly three and a half years now. All he wanted was to have a home, a place that was his, and at least one person that cared about him to live in it. The continuing knowledge that he didn’t have any of those things was a type of penury that drained the soul.
Had he wanted, he could have settled down in some corner of the world with a Muggle woman, built a house or bought one, and started a life. He could have done that, but it would be a charade at best. It would only be a matter of time before he went mad from the lack of magical expression, or before he was found and dragged away. He couldn’t make himself someone else’s problem.
Hermione was no different. He knew he ought to get on with resenting her, let those feelings catalyze into whatever they were meant to be…but the moment he heard her voice, so timid yet so hopeful, his stomach dropped out. It felt like everything was squeezed out of his head, everything except the conflicting emotions of disbelief and sheer joy that she was there.
“I’m here,” he responded at last.
The earlier splash was clearly made by him. He was in the water. Slowly, she moved towards the line of the tide, marveling at how gently the water lapped at the shore. Hermione paused to remove her shoes and sighed at the feeling of the soft, cool sand between her toes.
“It’s warm,” he said. She could see him now, faintly, a blond-topped shape in the water. She was encouraged by the lack of anger in his voice. Hermione had half-expected a series of scathing insults to issue from him when they met again; Merlin knew she deserved them. If he felt that anger, he wasn’t showing it.
“I don’t doubt it,” she murmured, wondering where this encounter would go. She sat, letting her feet stray into the water. He wasn’t lying about the temperature.
“Come in.”
“No.”
He said nothing, resting in the shallows on his stomach a few feet away from her, chin propped thoughtfully on his hands. Hermione shook her head in amazement. She could see his piscine tail flicking lightly in the water.
“You really are a merman.”
“Not really.” The tail that so distracted her rose above the surface, giving her an iridescent flash of scales. “I’m a fish.”
“A fish,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“Then how?”
“I learned to control the transformation. I can stop it with only half of my body changed. All I need is the tail and the gills.” The aforementioned tail dipped back into the water. “The larger size is advantageous, as well. Less chance of being eaten in the open water.”
The danger inherent in swimming around the deep blue wonder of the ocean had never occurred to her. With some anxiety, she asked, “Have you almost been eaten?”
“Better than almost,” he chuckled. “I was eaten by a grouper. Unfortunately, he did not get to enjoy his meal for very long, since I transformed back.”
Hermione grimaced. That was a grisly end for the grouper, but there was nothing else Lucius could have done.
“It was around that time that I began working on moderating the transformation. Everyone thought I was a merman, anyway…”
She looked up at him. His eyes were so luminous in the moonlight. He did look like a merman - the kind in idealized stories. Real merpeople were not generally as easy on the eyes.
“I want to see,” she said softly. She had never before heard of anyone who could control their animagus transformation in such a way. Until now, she had believed it was all or nothing. However, Lucius was a very talented wizard, and one who had a great deal of time on his hands. Those two things usually resulted in something amazing, terrible, or both.
He tilted his head and gave her a penetrating look, but then beckoned with his hand. Hermione rolled up her pant legs and waded into the shallow water. Once she was close enough, Lucius closed his eyes; in mere seconds his body shrunk into the compact form of a fish.
Hermione stared in amazement. He was so small this way. She leaned forward and cupped her hands beneath the water so she could see him better. He circled lazily in the water above her hands, his long fins flowing gracefully.
Then, as if he was no longer comfortable with the discrepancy in their size or in the small enclosure of her hands, he slipped quickly between her fingers. A few moments later he broke the surface in his merman form.
Hermione retreated to the shore. Once again, she was dazed at the level of trust he displayed. She could have plucked him out of the water, taken him between her hands and crushed him…and while he could have defended himself by simply transforming back, her gut told her that it was a risk he wouldn’t have taken at another time in his life.
He swam forward. When the water receded, he pulled himself gracefully up to her with his arms, the thick tail trailing behind. Her eyes traveled from his face to his strong shoulders to the line of his spine, protected by bone and pleasingly curved sinew. That was where his resemblance to a man ended.
The scales began at his sacrum. At first glance they were black; at second, they bore a blue-green luster. The contrast with his pale hair, still long in spite of the trim she’d provided, was beautiful.
As if he sensed her inspection was complete, he finished the rest of his change. The scales and short, translucent fins leached away, fading into tanned skin. All skin - he wasn’t wearing clothes. She didn’t look away.
Once he had his legs back, he rose up on his hands and knees and covered the rest of the small distance between them. A low throb began inside her. He moved with such sensuality…such intent.
He paused just in front of her with his hands resting on either side of her hips. Lucius was in her space and it was plain in his gaze that he wanted to kiss her. He was only waiting for her consent.
Hermione swallowed. She wanted to apologize for never responding, for pretending that she didn’t want to see him again. She knew he was hurt by it. The fact that he waited instead of just doing as he pleased told her that; he wasn’t entirely sure that his advances were welcome.
Right now words seemed frivolous and unnecessary. Every cell in her body yearned to touch him. There was no denying their chemistry, strange as it was.
Impulsively, Hermione leaned forward to place her lips against his. He kissed her like the last five months of her ignoring him had never happened. It felt like it was only a day later, mere hours after their first encounter in Amsterdam. Only, his skin was still slick from the warm Ionian Sea and his lips tasted like salt…
He moved forward, pressing her down onto the sand, and she let him.
What she had feared the most was true. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. With every coupling, the wall around her heart crumbled a little more. It didn’t help that he was a very passionate lover, forceful yet considerate, and that he never once left after they made love. He would stay curled beside her until she had to leave…until the real world beckoned her back.
For his part, Lucius grappled with the same thing. Initially he thought he was just satisfying his need to do magic in the only way he could. That was a bald-faced lie. If he could have had any witch, any witch at all, he still would have chosen her.
Quickly he realized that he didn’t care if they made love or not - but they always did. Always.
She bought a boat. No one quite understood, since she had never before shown any interest in nautical pursuits. Hermione wasn’t bothered by their puzzlement. She had a lot of money saved up, not to mention a lot of vacation days, and with Rose away at school there was no reason not to use them.
She was living some kind of dream with him, a not-quite-reality. She knew it, yet it was hard to care. Long ago she had lost her fear of the power of his presence in her life. Now she felt like a fraction of herself without him. That was just that.
She wouldn’t label it, but in her gut she knew that a certain four-letter word had grown between them.
It went on like that for a long time. Hermione would work during the week and retreat to the boat on the weekends, spending long Saturdays and Sundays languishing with him in the middle of the ocean. He would mind the boat during the week, living on it, going wherever he pleased and making sure they had enough supplies. On Friday afternoons he would send her exact coordinates for where he was and she could just Apparate directly to the boat.
In time, she began to spend Fridays with him, too. The Ministry didn’t mind if she only worked four days a week as long as she could get all her work done in those four days. It was barely a question.
Padma asked her if she had met someone. Hermione didn’t bother to lie. Padma was too perceptive to be duped. The other witch accepted her evasiveness as to his identity and wished her well. Hermione suspected she was just glad that her office mate was no longer mooning over her ex.
Existing with Lucius, Hermione wondered why she ever had.
In case you were wondering, the locale where Lucius and Hermione meet again is here:
It's Shipwreck Beach on the island of Zakynthos in Greece. Incidentally, my grandfather was from Zakynthos. :)
Padma had noticed her collection and just smiled at her whenever she got a new one. She wasn’t sure what the Indian girl thought about them or who she thought they were from. Hermione doubted very much that Padma suspected the sender was Lucius Malfoy.
She sighed. Why did he keep sending them? Wasn’t it clear enough that she was finished with whatever strange game they had played? She had not responded to a single one, and yet they continued to arrive every few weeks like clockwork.
Most often they were blank. If he wrote on them, his comments were restricted to brief descriptions of what he had seen and done. Some of those things she envied and some she did not.
Today’s postcard finally deviated from that formula. It was from Thailand and it said:
Am I really that bad?
She placed it on the desk and her forehead followed, resting upon the colorful rectangle of paper. No, he was not that bad. He was not bad at all.
In all his time running loose in the world, he hadn’t done anything to harm anyone. She had seen a part of him that was vulnerable and unhappy and regretful. Paradoxically, freedom, not incarceration, was the thing that finally rehabilitated him. Freedom and exposure to the rest of the world, coupled with total exile from the familiar corner of his.
He was not a bad person, not anymore. She wasn’t afraid of him. She was afraid of how he made her feel.
In the week after their liaison in Amsterdam, her brain had been filled with cotton wool. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She couldn’t sleep. Every unstructured moment caused her mind to stray to the way he looked, the way he felt, and the way he made her feel.
He had made her feel powerful and weak at the same time - and she loved it. It was frightening. So, too, was the little ache she felt in her chest whenever her mind replayed his eyes flashing up to hers in the mirror, skittish, curious, and sad, or remembered the tone of his voice when he asked about his son and his grandchildren.
That day was her final straw. All along she had felt a grudging sort of affection for the man that exasperated her so; she just denied it. She denied her way right into his bed. What made it even harder was that she knew he hadn’t planned it. He had not summoned her there to seduce her. There wasn’t a single reason left to despise him.
And he kept sending postcards. That told her that their coupling wasn’t a fluke. She meant something to him. Hermione wasn’t sure what; he probably wasn’t sure, either. She sighed. She didn’t want to mean anything to a fugitive and certainly didn’t want him to mean anything to her - but denial only worked for so long.
Two nights later, she gave up and went to Thailand. She was too late; Lucius was nowhere to be found, and that made her feel shockingly bereft. Now she had no choice but to wait for the next postcard…if he bothered to send one.
It took three weeks, twenty-one long days in which she increasingly prayed that he had not given up on her. She was keenly aware of how life could emulate the thwarted romances in movies. If he gave up after so many rejections it would serve her right. She would never be able to find him again. Logically she knew that was a good thing, but it didn’t feel good to her heart.
But now, at last, the postcard had come. It was a grand struggle to wait until the workday was over and even more difficult to sit through dinner with Harry and Ginny. As soon as she escaped, she changed her clothes and left without any idea of what to expect once she got there.
She found the beach on the postcard easily - at least more easily than most. It was on a secluded corner of the island, one that would only be accessible to Muggles by boat or helicopter.
Once there, she stood and gaped. It was one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. The moon hung over the water and cast a soft light on the small shoreline. It was a semicircle of white sand, and in the middle there was the weather-beaten skeleton of a ship that had run aground long ago. It was surrounded by high cliff faces on all sides. Perfectly gorgeous…and perfectly isolated.
A splash drew her eyes to the water. In the daytime she knew it would be a brilliant blue but right now it looked black and mysterious.
“Lucius?” she said softly.
He had quite nearly given up on her. Sending the postcards was more a habit than anything else now. Though a part of him had known that she wouldn’t respond, another silly part of him foolishly hoped she would. He had not realized how strong that hope was until he felt it slowly being crushed.
He believed he had severed every feeling he had for her. What those feelings were, he wasn’t entirely sure, then or now. But he had blotted them out, pushed them into some little corner of his mind that locked away a lot of other memories he didn’t care to examine. Lucius was frequently amazed that the sting of being ignored by her stirred up more pain than recollections of being tortured.
It was because he was faultless in this case. Those other things he had brought upon himself. This…he had only acted on instinct. He had done nothing to hurt her, nothing to spur her to reject him so coldly. Nothing except exist and bear the name he did.
He had not yet crossed over into resenting her, but he knew he was close. Every thought of her was now tinged with anger. For the most recent postcard, he had agonized for nearly an hour over what to write, if anything at all. He had cycled through a great many unkind comments, then through a bout of melancholy that made him want to spew all kinds of maudlin statements, and at last through a sort of bitterly curious resignation.
The plain and simple fact was that the world was a lonely place if you were traveling it alone. He had been doing just that for nearly three and a half years now. All he wanted was to have a home, a place that was his, and at least one person that cared about him to live in it. The continuing knowledge that he didn’t have any of those things was a type of penury that drained the soul.
Had he wanted, he could have settled down in some corner of the world with a Muggle woman, built a house or bought one, and started a life. He could have done that, but it would be a charade at best. It would only be a matter of time before he went mad from the lack of magical expression, or before he was found and dragged away. He couldn’t make himself someone else’s problem.
Hermione was no different. He knew he ought to get on with resenting her, let those feelings catalyze into whatever they were meant to be…but the moment he heard her voice, so timid yet so hopeful, his stomach dropped out. It felt like everything was squeezed out of his head, everything except the conflicting emotions of disbelief and sheer joy that she was there.
“I’m here,” he responded at last.
The earlier splash was clearly made by him. He was in the water. Slowly, she moved towards the line of the tide, marveling at how gently the water lapped at the shore. Hermione paused to remove her shoes and sighed at the feeling of the soft, cool sand between her toes.
“It’s warm,” he said. She could see him now, faintly, a blond-topped shape in the water. She was encouraged by the lack of anger in his voice. Hermione had half-expected a series of scathing insults to issue from him when they met again; Merlin knew she deserved them. If he felt that anger, he wasn’t showing it.
“I don’t doubt it,” she murmured, wondering where this encounter would go. She sat, letting her feet stray into the water. He wasn’t lying about the temperature.
“Come in.”
“No.”
He said nothing, resting in the shallows on his stomach a few feet away from her, chin propped thoughtfully on his hands. Hermione shook her head in amazement. She could see his piscine tail flicking lightly in the water.
“You really are a merman.”
“Not really.” The tail that so distracted her rose above the surface, giving her an iridescent flash of scales. “I’m a fish.”
“A fish,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“Then how?”
“I learned to control the transformation. I can stop it with only half of my body changed. All I need is the tail and the gills.” The aforementioned tail dipped back into the water. “The larger size is advantageous, as well. Less chance of being eaten in the open water.”
The danger inherent in swimming around the deep blue wonder of the ocean had never occurred to her. With some anxiety, she asked, “Have you almost been eaten?”
“Better than almost,” he chuckled. “I was eaten by a grouper. Unfortunately, he did not get to enjoy his meal for very long, since I transformed back.”
Hermione grimaced. That was a grisly end for the grouper, but there was nothing else Lucius could have done.
“It was around that time that I began working on moderating the transformation. Everyone thought I was a merman, anyway…”
She looked up at him. His eyes were so luminous in the moonlight. He did look like a merman - the kind in idealized stories. Real merpeople were not generally as easy on the eyes.
“I want to see,” she said softly. She had never before heard of anyone who could control their animagus transformation in such a way. Until now, she had believed it was all or nothing. However, Lucius was a very talented wizard, and one who had a great deal of time on his hands. Those two things usually resulted in something amazing, terrible, or both.
He tilted his head and gave her a penetrating look, but then beckoned with his hand. Hermione rolled up her pant legs and waded into the shallow water. Once she was close enough, Lucius closed his eyes; in mere seconds his body shrunk into the compact form of a fish.
Hermione stared in amazement. He was so small this way. She leaned forward and cupped her hands beneath the water so she could see him better. He circled lazily in the water above her hands, his long fins flowing gracefully.
Then, as if he was no longer comfortable with the discrepancy in their size or in the small enclosure of her hands, he slipped quickly between her fingers. A few moments later he broke the surface in his merman form.
Hermione retreated to the shore. Once again, she was dazed at the level of trust he displayed. She could have plucked him out of the water, taken him between her hands and crushed him…and while he could have defended himself by simply transforming back, her gut told her that it was a risk he wouldn’t have taken at another time in his life.
He swam forward. When the water receded, he pulled himself gracefully up to her with his arms, the thick tail trailing behind. Her eyes traveled from his face to his strong shoulders to the line of his spine, protected by bone and pleasingly curved sinew. That was where his resemblance to a man ended.
The scales began at his sacrum. At first glance they were black; at second, they bore a blue-green luster. The contrast with his pale hair, still long in spite of the trim she’d provided, was beautiful.
As if he sensed her inspection was complete, he finished the rest of his change. The scales and short, translucent fins leached away, fading into tanned skin. All skin - he wasn’t wearing clothes. She didn’t look away.
Once he had his legs back, he rose up on his hands and knees and covered the rest of the small distance between them. A low throb began inside her. He moved with such sensuality…such intent.
He paused just in front of her with his hands resting on either side of her hips. Lucius was in her space and it was plain in his gaze that he wanted to kiss her. He was only waiting for her consent.
Hermione swallowed. She wanted to apologize for never responding, for pretending that she didn’t want to see him again. She knew he was hurt by it. The fact that he waited instead of just doing as he pleased told her that; he wasn’t entirely sure that his advances were welcome.
Right now words seemed frivolous and unnecessary. Every cell in her body yearned to touch him. There was no denying their chemistry, strange as it was.
Impulsively, Hermione leaned forward to place her lips against his. He kissed her like the last five months of her ignoring him had never happened. It felt like it was only a day later, mere hours after their first encounter in Amsterdam. Only, his skin was still slick from the warm Ionian Sea and his lips tasted like salt…
He moved forward, pressing her down onto the sand, and she let him.
What she had feared the most was true. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. With every coupling, the wall around her heart crumbled a little more. It didn’t help that he was a very passionate lover, forceful yet considerate, and that he never once left after they made love. He would stay curled beside her until she had to leave…until the real world beckoned her back.
For his part, Lucius grappled with the same thing. Initially he thought he was just satisfying his need to do magic in the only way he could. That was a bald-faced lie. If he could have had any witch, any witch at all, he still would have chosen her.
Quickly he realized that he didn’t care if they made love or not - but they always did. Always.
She bought a boat. No one quite understood, since she had never before shown any interest in nautical pursuits. Hermione wasn’t bothered by their puzzlement. She had a lot of money saved up, not to mention a lot of vacation days, and with Rose away at school there was no reason not to use them.
She was living some kind of dream with him, a not-quite-reality. She knew it, yet it was hard to care. Long ago she had lost her fear of the power of his presence in her life. Now she felt like a fraction of herself without him. That was just that.
She wouldn’t label it, but in her gut she knew that a certain four-letter word had grown between them.
It went on like that for a long time. Hermione would work during the week and retreat to the boat on the weekends, spending long Saturdays and Sundays languishing with him in the middle of the ocean. He would mind the boat during the week, living on it, going wherever he pleased and making sure they had enough supplies. On Friday afternoons he would send her exact coordinates for where he was and she could just Apparate directly to the boat.
In time, she began to spend Fridays with him, too. The Ministry didn’t mind if she only worked four days a week as long as she could get all her work done in those four days. It was barely a question.
Padma asked her if she had met someone. Hermione didn’t bother to lie. Padma was too perceptive to be duped. The other witch accepted her evasiveness as to his identity and wished her well. Hermione suspected she was just glad that her office mate was no longer mooning over her ex.
Existing with Lucius, Hermione wondered why she ever had.
In case you were wondering, the locale where Lucius and Hermione meet again is here:
It's Shipwreck Beach on the island of Zakynthos in Greece. Incidentally, my grandfather was from Zakynthos. :)