The Radiant

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“My family is wondering.”

She had come to see him after work – still wearing her trousers and her blouse and vest. Ginny tended to dress in an extremely masculine manner at work, preferring to take attention away from her female assets and instead to her knowledge and her experience.

“Why are you dressed like a man?”

She had gone all out today, wearing a tie that she had looped into a Windsor knot, a proper waistcoat, a pair of long slacks. The only thing that she was wearing that was vaguely feminine was her pair of spike heels.

“This is how I dress for work, Lucius.” She looked at him, exasperated.

“You look like me.”

Ginny laughed then, uncoiling her hair from the tight bun at the back of her head, shuddering slightly as it fell around her shoulders and she ran her fingers through it, kneading out the kinks from the day.

“I do look like you. But I’ve always dressed like this.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, looking exhausted and utterly, delicately forlorn for a moment, sitting leaned forward with her forearms on her thighs, her legs open like a man’s, head tilted forward so her hair was obscuring her face. “They are really wondering. They are wondering and they think I am seeing someone new. And I am.” She looked up at him.

“So tell them.”

Lucius was on the window-seat again, a book open face-down beside him on the cushion. Ginny looked at him for a hard, gleaming moment.

“They will try to kill you. You know that, don’t you? They will try to murder you.”

Lucius tilted his head, reminding her of a bird again, and smiled small and subtly. “Ginevra, I’ve had experience with that.” She juddered, closing her eyes, reminded of the war and the tearing apart of the families, the loss. “I don’t mean to remind you, but I used to be a fighter back in the day.” Suddenly, as if reminded of his age, Lucius looked away from her, his face darkening with a cloud of a look, and he picked up the book again, wordlessly leafing through it.

He noticed her thighs first, solid and lithe, in front of him, directly in his line of vision. She laid her hands on his jawbone, roughly tilting his head back up to look at her.

“You must have been a Berserker, Lucius Malfoy.” He stared silently back at her. “You must have been glorious in mid-strike.” Her eyes softened for a moment as if she were recalling or imagining something. “That hair like a bloody halo – around your jaw line – arms out –” She smiled slightly, mentally regaining her hold. “Hm.” Ginny exhaled a soft sound and sat beside him. “How long have we been together now, Lucius?”

She felt him shift beside her.

“Three months?”

“Three months.” Ginny softly set her head down on his shoulder and felt as one of his hands came up to card through her hair.

“Are you happy?” His voice was a vibration against the side of her body.

Ginny turned her head and looked up at his face. “Yes. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes –”

“Why?”

Her voice had been low but he had heard it. Lucius shifted again and looked down his nose at her, jaw tightening for an instant. Ginny seemed to sense his discomfort and glanced up again, her eyes soft around the corners.

“I’m scared, Lucius.”

“Scared?” He subconsciously tightened his arm around her.

“I have to tell them, and it has to be face-to-face, and I’m legitimately scared that they will lose their tempers and do something awful. Something rash. Storm the Manor, maybe. Try to keep me away, physically restrain me from coming back. Keep me in their houses. Hurt you. Hurt me. And we’ve only been together for three months. I’m happy. You fit very well. You fit very, very well, and you make me happy, but I can’t do this – this confession to my entire family – if this relationship were to be nothing less than very serious.” She slid off the window-seat, coming to sit up on her knees in front of him. “Do you know what I mean?”

Lucius looked at her for a very long moment, his brow slightly creased and his eyes narrowed but not cold, not shrewd. In the beats of that time, Ginny felt her heart dance wildly and haphazardly. Had she offended him? Frightened him?

Finally, he spoke.

“Are you suggesting marriage?”

Ginny nearly fell forward.

“No.” She shook her head earnestly. “We’ve discussed this before. I don’t need the paper – the title – to make anything official. That’s another reason why my family will kill me – this living in sin business. Never mind that they think you are the devil himself.” She smiled crookedly. “I wasn’t hinting at that, Lucius.” She placed her hands on his knees, meeting his eyes earnestly. “I wasn’t. I know you don’t want to marry again and I would never put that pressure on you. If you say – if you just say – that you will stick with this, and that you won’t give up on anything – won’t let the stupid spats or the fights get in the way, won’t let me get too angry with you, won’t let yourself get too angry with me – if you just say that to me, I am fine with that. Really.” Ginny smiled.

“I say it, then.”

“Pardon?”

“I say it. That I won’t give up on it.” Lucius was bent over, one hand loosely around her neck, his forehead close to hers. “That I won’t let you break any of my antiques in your terrible anger. That I won’t let myself lose my temper with you too often. That I won’t let those inane arguments get in the way.” Ginny closed her eyes but continued to smile as his thumb traced up and down the tendons of her neck. “That I will find you attractive. That I will continue to take pleasure in your body – with your body – for as long as I can” He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth.

When she arched up into him, Lucius slid off the seat and pushed her back to the floor, sinking his weight on top of her pliant body. Ginny reacted immediately, widening her legs and allowing the sharp arc of his pelvis to settle in between her thighs. Her hands came down and she pulled up her skirt. Lucius couldn’t even bring himself to fully remove his trousers – instead, he unbuttoned the placard and slid inside of her, moving slowly.

She was so wet – as though she were constantly in a state of readiness for him.

“It’s you.” Her voice was low in his ear and his hips moved involuntarily.

“What?”

“I’m always like this. Wet. No underpants. Because of you – it’s being around you that does it to me.”

Lucius wondered, for a moment, if she were capable of reading his mind, but when she closed her eyes and nuzzled against his neck, moving her hips up into his, he responded in kind, following the earliest biological pace without even realizing it, starting a slow and meaningful rhythm. He could hear the slide of their bodies, of him disappearing into her, the aural evidence of her arousal making him harder, harder –

Ginny moaned and drew his head down to hers, sucking his bottom lip into her mouth and tracing her tongue along the edge where lip met skin. She kept her eyes open as she kissed him and Lucius stared back at her, aroused by her brazenness and the fact that she was watching so intently.

“Yes – please – please –” She reached to the back of his head, her hands feathering across his occipital skull, and when she found the ribbon holding his hair back, she tore it out, flinging it behind her. His hair hung down around their faces and she tugged sharply on it, along with his thrusts. “Please, Lucius – please –”

He reached down and roughly adjusted her legs, drawing them up and around his waist. He had wanted to bend her double, drape her legs over his shoulders and screw her into the carpet, but, looking down at her, gazing back at him and begging him like that, he had abruptly changed his mind. For some reason, Lucius needed to feel the grind of her skin against his – wanted the intimate weight of full body on body.

Her thighs locked around his waist and she crossed her heels at his back.

“Yes. Yes.”

He was still mute but she was whispering her encouragements into his ear, alternately speaking and then biting along his lobe, tracing the pathways with the tip of her tongue, making her way down his neck. When she reached his lips she stopped, remaining just a breath away, and instead looked back up at him.

He couldn’t look away – damn her. Damn her. He had to look at her – for some reason, she was impossible to look away from. His hips sped up and Ginny looped her arms around his neck, anchoring herself.

“I want to feel you come inside me.” Her words were murmured against his lips but when she said them he gasped onto her, jaggedly thrusting a few more times and then falling completely onto her waiting body as he came, the thick fluid hot and willing. Lucius’ head was buried into the carpet beside her face, his mouth at the crook of her neck, and Ginny still had her arms around him, her hands tracing lines up and down his back. “So good.” The words made him shift once more, feeling the last twinges of arousal leave his body. “Thank you.”

Lucius pushed up off of her, brushing her lips with his. “You didn’t come. I apologize.”

Ginny laughed, then, pushing his hair back from his face and kissing him again. Lucius pulled out of her and she sat up, sitting beside him with their backs against the bed.

“It feels good, you know.”

“What does?” He sounded suspicious.

“You – coming inside of me.” Ginny ran her hand up and down his thigh. “It feels like you’re marking me as yours. When it drips out of me throughout the day. When I smell like you – that scent. I like it – being marked as yours.”

“You’re so deviant.” He spoke his words into her hair. “When will you tell them?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“Ginevra – thank you.” Lucius was looking at her intently, and Ginny kissed him on the shoulder. “I realize the sacrifice you’re making. The Malfoy families were never as expansive or as close knit as the Weasley families. I realize how frightening this must be.”

Ginny sighed.

“I’m very scared. I’m very scared, Lucius. But I’ve always been a bit of the dark horse. I don’t know how they will react, considering you were the one who slipped me the diary. There is still so much that you and I need to broach, you know. To talk about. There is so much that we haven’t hashed out. We need to make a sort of peace. But the first step in that process is being honest. Draco knows, and I think it might only be a matter of time before the secret is out. They have to hear it from me before they hear it from anyone else.” She stood, brushing off her skirt. “I think I’ll go now.”

Lucius stood up beside her, placing a hand on either side of her face and kissing her. “When will you be back?”

Ginny gave a small smile.

“Tomorrow night, maybe. I’ll be going to see them during the day. Please keep the Floo open.”

Lucius nodded.


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The sound of crying woke him up.

Lucius had been asleep in the master bedroom when a sort of soft sob – a gasp of a thing – had roused him from his fitful slumber. At first he had been confused – still being drawn out of the treacle grasps of sleep, still cotton-headed, but his instincts kicked in and he was upright and holding his wand in a few quick seconds. Still naked from bed, he eschewed clothes but instead followed the sound to where the cracks of light were coming from around his bathroom door.

“Ginevra?”

She was standing at the sink, wearing her slip, her clothes balled on the floor by her feet. He couldn’t see her face in the mirror because her hair was hanging down, but he could see the delicate and shattered movements of her bird-like shoulder blades, the way her skin was patched with red and white, her fingers curled on the counter top.

“Did you just get in now?” He almost cringed at the sound of his voice – a sort of breathy mix of horror and softness.

“Yes.” Her voice was flat and clogged, as if she had been crying –

And he noticed the drops on the counter – drops that, at first glance, could have been mistaken for water, flung from wrung out hands reaching for a towel – but at second glance were unmistakably tears, salted, hot, shed in desperation. He wanted to step towards her but was so horribly uncertain – uncertain if she could still want his touch after what she had obviously just been through with her family, uncertain if the disapproval of her blood ties could sever their own tie.

“And?” His word was actually whispered.

Ginny turned, then, and shook her hair back from her face, and Lucius started. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot – she had been crying, those had been tears – and she had a red handprint stark across her right cheek, the deep colour in sharp contrast with the waxy white of the rest of her face. It must have been a woman’s handprint – maybe her mother, maybe one of her sisters-in-law. Lucius met her eyes then, and saw that her day must have been awful, awful, awful.

“It went badly.” She whispered too, her words breaking on the floor between them. “It went badly. As bad as I thought –”

He moved rapidly, gathering her into his arms as she began to cry again, and he felt the wet of her tears against his chest, the salt tracing down his skin. Ginny let herself crumple against him, and Lucius hefted her into his arms, carrying her to the bed and sitting them down, perching her on his lap as he rocked her slightly, crooning into her ear.

“I’m sorry, my sweet heart. The sins of my past have come back to haunt you, the innocent. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The only one who should be responsible for that is me.”

Ginny had her arms around his waist, her face against the skin of his neck, and he could feel the tender meat of her body, the sharp delicacy of her bones as she sobbed and sobbed, the action making her body wrack.

Lucius held her for a long while, his large hands spanning her back, sliding under the straps of her slip and pressing to her feverish skin. He kept his head over her shoulder, his eyes closed, and continued to rock her slightly back and forth, pulling her into him. She began to quiet after many minutes had passed. Eventually, she became silent, and he unhooked his chin from the tendons of her neck, looking down at her.

He didn’t say anything.

“My mum hit me.” Her words were hoarse and garbled. “She was the one who slapped me. And the rest of them –” she swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand – “Ron broke things. He broke lots of things. And Dad just sat there, silent. He was so silent. And then there was Harry – Harry shook me until I was sure that his fingerprints were on my skin. And my mum hit me. She called me a Death Eater whore and slapped me so hard that I had to hold onto the table to keep upright. And I didn’t cry in front of them. Did you know that? I didn’t cry once. But I came here and I saw you asleep and I started to cry.”

Lucius felt as though his throat were swollen, his heart swollen, his lungs hurting. He kissed the top of her head and marveled at how tiny she seemed in the basket of his arms. Ginny was so sinewy, so strong, but at the moment she was fragile and broken.

“You can cry. That’s fine, sweet.” Lucius shifted back on the bed, lying down and pulling her back with him, and Ginny curled into his side, winding her arms around him again. She sighed and Lucius watched as her eyes closed.

“She hit me. They might hate me now, Lucius. Maybe not Bill. Maybe not George. I don’t know. I don’t know. I can only give it time now.” Her voice trailed off into a whisper and Lucius rubbed her back in long strokes as she drifted off into sleep.

He lay awake for a long while, staring at the ceiling, and he couldn’t figure why his eyes were full and smarting.

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