Prisoners of Love - A Mystery - COMPLETE

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Updated 9-26-07


Thank you all for your reviews. Your insights and comments spur me on with my polishing and my next story. To answer a couple of questions:


AthenaMalfoy Baby naming will happen. It will be a few chapters on, though.


DeeDee Lucius apparates between the magic world and the Muggle world, so, no, no one can follow him. Lucius and Hermione are aware they need to be circumspect about their location. Remember Lucius told Hermione to quit her Ministry job. Rita announcing the marriage to the world isn't part of my story. The wedding announcement is up to Lucius and so is the Pureblood coterie's response to his marriage.


blue artemis You want to hit them both with a skillet? I rather think sometimes Hermione does want to hit LUCIUS over the head with a skillet.


Scary Bear Hair Do I think Hermione's parents will be nervous around Lucius? The answer will be a few chapters farther on.


dragon37 The house(s) of the villains? Answered many chapters farther on. No info on gender forthcoming. Sorry.

Some opinions are aired...
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Chapter Twenty-Three

Blame

Lucius came into the parlor later in the evening after their simple dinner and sat in one of the comfy chairs by the fire facing Hermione in her place in the other chair. Earlier he had asked at the dinner table what they were having for the second and third courses and been told there were no other courses for which she’d earned an earful of his opinions on how a proper dinner should be served, so their cozy evening wasn’t starting out so well. His ‘cocktail hour’ had been more successful because Hermione had been perusing the books Lucius had brought for her while he sat in quiet relaxation and sipped his drink.

Lucius imprudently fanned the flames of their degenerating evening when he announced that he could easily redesign her house interior to make it much bigger inside for the two of them. The exterior dimensions didn’t have to change and all she had to do was dismiss her housekeeper so the change wouldn’t be seen by a Muggle. He could bring in elves instead. Lucius was then promptly treated to an earful of her opinions on his crass insensitivity to Aggie’s need for employment and Hermione’s decided antipathy for the entire disruptive idea. Lucius was again told if he didn’t like her house, he could leave and return in time for the birth. With that idea shot down, Lucius sat hunched in his chair nursing a large after-dinner firewhiskey and a sense of ill usage.

Hermione sat reading as usual, but after she calmed down she began to see the funny side of their combative pas de deux and struggled not to laugh at her sulky wizard. Lucius never ceased his attempts to recreate or manipulate his environs to suit himself. This was actually better than a Sheridan play watching him come up with ideas for leavening his humble existence as her housemate. He just couldn’t seem to adapt to her simple, subsistence-level life, poor sod. She realized he had been just the same way in prison, always working on some way to better his grim reality.

She supposed she should view his constant attempts to overcome his particular adversity as a positive trait, but unfortunately what he was currently trying to overcome was her snug little home. Guinevere’s girdle, when was that man going to run down and just enjoy being with her? So far the only good thing about his passion for perfection was his undoubtedly sincere wish to keep her and their unborn baby safe – well, and his ardent attention to detail in bed.

She hoped that his sojourn in her home would help him relax more and learn to let life drift sometimes instead of always trying to direct the flow. The man was ferociously intelligent and rather self-absorbed and that could be a bad combination for her to deal with in their marriage. Or – maybe, not self-absorbed so much as unconsciously assuming his thoughts, desires, and ways were the correct ones and thus naturally more important and deserving more consideration than hers. That was why Hermione had to stay in her stronghold to deal with him.

She had the whip hand in her Muggle home and it gave her a position of strength to work from with a very complex, devious, fascinating, gorgeous, virile, sexy - oh Gods, she wanted to bite his ass again. Sweet Goddess, that kind of thinking wasn’t going to give her the whip hand in anything but a kinky afternoon with Lucius. She needed to redirect her buttocks-bound mind and had the perfect distraction. Her spirits picked up at the news she was about to hit him with.


“Lucius, we’re invited to my parents’ for dinner tomorrow.” She waited for the explosion.

“And you ACCEPTED?” Lucius did not want to face the irate parents of the woman he’d dishonored with his denial of their marriage vows. He couldn’t see any way they would want to meet him except as a burnt offering on a funeral pyre. “Why on earth would you do that?” Several rather large sips of firewhiskey found their way down Lucius’ throat.

“Lucius, you have to face them sometime. They invited us and I accepted.”

Lucius glowered at his tiny personal plague, “Did they invite me for dinner or as dinner? They must hate me for leaving you, especially leaving you pregnant.”

“And would you still have left me if you had known I was carrying this baby?” Hermione’s chin came up in mute challenge.

Lucius looked away from her and stared at the light from the fire through the golden liquid of his drink, slowly swishing it and making the light scatter in the cheap juice glass from Hermione’s kitchen as he pondered his answer. He had hoped never to be asked that question. She deserved the truth, but he wasn’t certain what it was. “I’m…not entirely sure, tidbit. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have left you, not with a baby, my baby. But the best I can offer is I needed to be apart, to find the separate me again, if that makes any sense. I felt like I was ensorcelled by you. Do you remember when you said you felt like you wanted to crawl inside me and eat me up from the inside out?”

Hermione nodded and her chin came down again, “I could never forget that. It was extremely uncomfortable and frightening. But inevitable, inexorable, like a tidal wave sweeping over me. Yes, very scary, suddenly being…attached…to you, without being in the least in control. Did you feel like that, too?”

Lucius gazed at his wife, considering how he had felt. He knew positively he wouldn’t have proposed marriage if he hadn’t been feeling…attached…too. He had thought he knew exactly what he felt at the time. They were in prison together for years and could discover what they had in a safe environment away from his peers. But when first she had gone and then suddenly he had been released and he had to face his social set while feeling under her uncaring control, he had balked.

He had enough dirt to sweep under his figurative rug without adding a straying Muggleborn wife; the prospect of setting her cat among his pigeons (and in some cases his business colleagues were literally his pigeons) was more than he could face after a year of being dragged ignominiously through the lower magic courts and Magic Council, being incarcerated not once but twice for the same transgression, and then finding himself drowning in a tiny female witch’s enchantment where his normally dominant personality was painfully in thrall.

“If I had had more time with you in our cell, I think I could have coped with the drastic changes in our relationship,” and made you belong only to me and not those other men, his mind growled in silent anger, “but I couldn’t adjust to introducing you into my old life while my old life was so disruptive.”

He continued, “I felt disoriented fairly early on after you came into my cell, but I thought it was a fleeting reaction to sex deprivation and some…um,” he smiled apologetically, “some intimacy would solve my problem. By the time I asked to you marry me, it seemed the most reasonable solution in the world.” He stretched out his long legs and leaned more comfortably into his chair, “but when you were released, and I was left alone in the cell, I began to understand the strength of the bond and I’m sorry, but it was horrifying to me. I felt abandoned, hollow, my sovereignty suborned and it was as though I was having withdrawal symptoms - I was in agony. When you got me released, I wanted the link between us broken. I never wanted to have those miserable feelings again. I wanted my freedom back – at any cost.” Lucius sipped some more firewhiskey and stared morosely into the flames.

“And now? Why did you come back if you didn’t know about the baby?” Hermione had set aside her book and was listening with her heart pounding a tattoo in her throat for his answer.

He laughed mirthlessly, “I discovered that this…whatever it is…doesn’t just go away when I distance myself. I guess I should have figured that out in Azkaban but I was hoping it was the depressive warding of the prison affecting me. Do you understand how it feels to know you’re walking around with part of you missing? So I spent five months going from bad to worse, getting more and more restless, until finally I admitted defeat and came to see if there was any way to work out a compromise. I learned about the baby and here we are.”

“What kind of compromise, Lucius?” Hermione didn’t think any compromise was going to include concessions from Lucius and she was right.

The blond sorceror was beginning to realize that conversations with his tidbit could be not only taxing but definitely dodgy. She didn’t want to hear he was feeling reeled in like a struggling fish. And it was not precisely because he was reluctant. He merely wanted the dominant position in their marriage and so far that wasn’t happening. She needed to learn her place as his wife. He would never allow her to have that crushing hold on him again. He would never hand her the hidden knowledge of his heartbreak over those younger men. He’d felt violated when she left, pulled apart and nearly mindless with grief, especially after reading those Daily Prophets which had so corroded and tainted his trust in her. Never again.

The turmoil of Lucius’ thoughts didn’t show on his face but a faint acidic streak colored his voice, “I’ll wait until the baby is close to being born if you need to stay here to feel comfortable, but when you near your time, all of us will move to my estate. In the meantime, I’m going to have Madam Malkin make you a new wardrobe because you will need to socialize with me at several functions that are coming up. If you are going to live with me you will of necessity need to be introduced to my friends and colleagues. We may as well start the rounds now. I don’t know how I’m going to explain a wife who is almost seven months pregnant, but I’ll manage somehow."

Hermione glared at her husband, “Where was it that you compromised? I’m afraid I missed that part. Was that the brief two months where I get to stay in my own home?” She went on the offensive, “And I’ll expect you to shoulder the entire blame for not presenting me as your wife before this. I won’t stand for any explanation where I ran away or refused to live with you. If I catch so much as a whiff of you passing off your misbehavior as my fault, I’m moving back here with my child and you can take the first-class tour of Tartarus with my good wishes. I hope we understand each other.”

“Now, now, tidbit, no need to get your serviceable cotton knickers in a twist. And by the way, Madam Malkin will need to fit you out in new lingerie also. I’m not having my wife strutting around in those spinster panties. I saw a few pairs of those disgusting white knickers when you changed drawers. That pink set you wore was acceptable, but you’ll need more.”

Lucius had already been planning to do just as Hermione had warned him against, so he was experiencing the ‘rock and hard place’ phenomenon, which completely deteriorated his mood. Lucius asked with a meek air that didn’t even come close to sincere, “I suppose a minor disagreement where we both wanted some separation wouldn’t serve for you?”

He tried to paint for his wife the likely outcome if he blamed himself, “If I am entirely to blame, what am I to say? I decided I didn’t want you, but discovered the baby so I had to accept you? That’s certainly what they will assume if I take the blame. And you’ll be reduced to the role of cast-off, unwanted wife even though I now acknowledge you as my spouse, because they would always think I had to take you in due to the baby.

“If, however,” he further laid out, “you didn’t want me, it will make the elite set wonder if you’re crazy -” he stopped Hermione’s scathing retort with an uplifted hand, “because as you yourself said, I’m a catch - and they will be more curious than dismissing of you. A Muggleborn, leaving a Malfoy. Quite a picnic they’ll have with that and at my expense, not yours.”

Lucius frowned to see that his word picture, designed to allow him to skate away from blame for his disappearing act, really would make him seem an abandoned husband. It would hold him up to some ridicule that a lowly Mudblood threw him over, only returning when she had to because of the pregnancy. But the disaster was his creation and he would have to weather some criticisms and jokes if he was adamant about having Hermione as his wife, and losing her again was not an option for his continued well-being. But he would control his desire to submerge himself in her.

Hermione didn’t like any of those scenarios – not at all. But she did see that if she made him blame himself, he could avow undying love for her from now until Merlin rose again and nobody would believe him. They’d all think Lucius merely wanted his child. Her shifty husband was right.

“You have made your point. We will have a minor disagreement, which caused me to live here. You will have been visiting me all along, trying to get me to return to Malfoy Manor with you.” At Lucius’ theatrical sigh she said, “Take it or leave it, Lucius. Your unflagging interest in me will ease my way into your clique as a woman who’s,” now she sighed, “merely seen as crazy not wanting to live in your lofty environs because we can’t get along. But that will seem normal, that a lowly Muggleborn would be nervous about associating with such crème de la crème.”

She fretted, angry with him for subjecting her to the whole mess but wanting to get the unpleasant future settled as quietly as possible, “It chokes me to enter their world as a wide-eyed, awestruck parvenu, but that’s better for me than playing the role of spurned wife hanging onto your disinterested coattails.” She capped her ideas off with, “And you can begin by letting it slip that you’ve visited me many times and we’re expecting a child – and you’ve almost convinced me to move to Malfoy Manor.” Hermione sat back, not content with the patchwork story, but unable to see any alternative.

Lucius thought he might be able to work with that compromise and he wanted to stay married to his recalcitrant witch-wife, so he would live with the resultant uproar. He’d actually come out of his imbroglio better than he had foreseen, so his mood shifted upward with that one problem solved. Until Hermione started speaking again.

“So, let’s get back to our original discussion. Dinner with my parents. They know that you left me. The main things they’ll want to know are why you left and why you came back.” Hermione gazed quizzically at her wayward spouse waiting for any inspiration he wished to offer.

Lucius’ heart sank into his dragonhide boots. “Mea culpa all the way around. They’re going to hate me no matter what outlandish story I offer them.” He tossed the dregs of his firewhiskey down his throat and placed the glass on his little side table and ran his fingers through his hair distractedly. “So why not tell the truth?”

Hermione was stunned. “You want to tell them that you missed me so much in prison that when you got out you wanted to break the connection because you couldn’t stand being so dependent on me for your happiness - is that how you’d phrase it?”

Lucius squirmed in his chair, “I…um…essentially, uh, yes…I suppose. Maybe not happiness. Do we have to use that word? Maybe I could be averse to the idea of being in thrall to your magnetic sexual pull, and left you until I couldn’t stand it any more.”

“Oh, right. So you had to come running back in order to shag me again. These are my parents, Lucius. I’m not going to say that to them. You’ll have to do better. Really, Lucius,” Hermione admonished, “that story is disgusting.” Then she twinkled, “If partially true.”

Lucius took a bit of heart from her teasing glint, “Oh, all right, I’ll go with the happiness story, as long as you pave the way ahead of time and tell them before we arrive for dinner. Deal?”

“I suppose so. I’ll ring them tomorrow. The dinner is at eight tomorrow night. We can apparate outside their home. They get a little twitchy about me popping into their living room suddenly.” Hermione opened her new book again and her attention disappeared into a history of dark potions.

“I assume your minimal apparating edict does not include dinner with your parents,” Lucius murmured sardonically. Hermione was certainly bringing home to him his order of importance in her life. She would apparate to her parents’ for a dinner, but not to his estate to live.

Hermione looked up briefly from an account of a medieval potion slipped into a victim’s drink making them mute and eyed her argumentative spouse in thoughtful speculation. What a joy a silent Lucius would be to live with. Although she did love to hear him voicing his arousal in bed. Oh, well, the good with the whiny.

“You assume correctly. Do you want to know why?” she asked.

Lucius felt the ground under him get a little shaky. Really, she was becoming such a little martinet. He gazed at her with an assumption of boredom wholly faked to cover his unease, “I imagine the reason has something to do with them not abandoning you for the last five months.”

“Very good. I certainly hope this baby gets your intelligence, Lucius. Perhaps not your conscience, though.” She shook her head in mock sorrow, “that appears to be either wholly degenerated or it might have been missing at birth. I’m not sure which.”

Lucius frowned heavily at her nasty comment, “Does my penance ever come to an end or will I be up on this crucifix forever?”

“You see yourself as the injured party? Lucius, you are such a piece of work. You should bottle that boundless ability to dodge blame. You could sell it to errant husbands and wives everywhere and make even more Galleons to go with the millions you have.”

“I don’t see myself as the injured party, tidbit, I know I’m the nasty villain and need to have my comeuppance. I just would like to have it over with so I can have some peace in my life. It’s been a few months of abandonment and unhappiness for you, but it’s been years for me. I admit I’m the one responsible for your precarious situation, but at least let me explain the entirety of my side before I’m delivered to my judgment.” Lucius sat up in the comfy chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees in earnest entreaty.

Hermione had been seeing him as the carefree multimillionaire whooping it up at galas and living the high life while she sat in her small cottage in a quiet, routine existence, making sure everything she did helped her baby grow strong and healthy. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was anything else major to understand, but his gaunt appearance was a visual mark that his recent past, at least, hadn’t been all that wonderful. “I’m willing to listen, Lucius.” She put her book down and settled in under her quilt, waiting patiently for him to explain himself.

Lucius didn’t know if he would come out ahead or not in trying to smooth over all the messes created by his defection. He just wanted the uneasy results to go away so he could settle down with his wife and new child into some sort of normalcy. Even excluding the legal wringers and Azkaban, the last several months alone had been nothing but increasing misery capped by Snape’s horrific remedy for his illegal drug use and he was only now hoping to finally get out of the depressive miasma he’d devised for himself.

Lucius took a fortifying breath and began, “For the past several years, I’ve been doing a balancing act between Voldemort – which mess I freely admit I got myself into – and protecting Draco from falling into the vortex I was embroiled in. Voldemort was getting crazier and crazier, fixating on your friend Harry Potter finally to the exclusion of most of the original agenda of our association. I wanted the magical community to be Pureblood because it seemed as though the Muggle world was encroaching into ours, crossing lines even at the top in the Ministry where the Muggle Prime Minister was affecting our world more and more. Fudge was such a spineless coward, currying favor with whomever had the deepest pockets, although that usually worked out well for me, as you know,” Lucius smiled grimly. “He usually had his nose so far up my ass he could smell the garlic on my breath after lunch at La Cucina.”

Hermione frowned a little at Lucius’ vulgarity, but otherwise remained silent, listening.

“Scrimgeour was a whole other problem. He was much harder to control. Impossible in fact.” Lucius got up to pour himself another dollop of firewhiskey from the small table at the back of the room, then sat down again and got more comfortable as he continued unfolding his tale.

“As I said, I was walking a tightrope between the new Minister, Scrimgeour, and the increasingly mad Voldemort. I did what Voldemort told me to do and only modified his commands if I could do so when my Death Eater colleagues weren’t looking and if it was safe to do so. I had not only myself to protect, but Draco and Narcissa, who were essentially pawns for my good behavior. You might remember in the Department of Mysteries, I didn’t harm Potter as I asked him to give me the prophecy. I could have hexed him easily but I didn’t.”

Another quick sip of firewhiskey spurred Lucius’ recollections. “I was sent to Azkaban for that fiasco and Voldemort got to Draco. I think he knew Dumbledore and Potter as a team would be exceptionally dangerous to his plans. And he was right. I was immobilized and couldn’t save Draco – thank the Gods Snape stepped in. After the Dark Lord died and the war ended, I served part of my sentence and then I was set free from prison - again. I’m thinking of suggesting they install a revolving door for me.”

“Yes, how did you manage to do that?” Hermione had wondered that many times.

“It was a deal between me and Scrimgeour. I was to provide a combination of judicious bribes to fatten the coffers of the Ministry departments and give inside information on Voldemort’s leftover moles in the Ministry.” Lucius shook his head, sending his hair tumbling over his shoulders, “But I was a fool. I thought it would be safer for me if the moles were all rooted out, but once Scrimgeour had that information and was satisfied that he had found everyone, he turned on me, and recharged me with the Department of Mysteries transgression saying I hadn’t been tried correctly. Back I went to Azkaban and there you found me.”

He took a deep breath, “In the intervening months before I was thrown in Azkaban again, I was harried legally with changes of venue and timing for various appearances before the Magic Council, numerous disruptions of my business dealings which took me tremendous effort to clear up, mostly for innocent backers so I could keep my financial reputation, and a slurry of whispered innuendoes started at Scrimgeour’s knee I’m sure, trying to blacken my name with lies, some vulgar and some financial, in my social set. By the time I lost my last appeal, I was almost happy to go back to Azkaban just to escape the persecution. The harassment had been never-ending and I was worn down, mentally and physically when they came for me, putting me in prison again for the same offense I’d been cleared on before. Scrimgeour’s word was worthless.”

Lucius ran his fingers through his hair again, scraping it back behind his shoulders, “I know my part in the Dark Lord’s ambitions doesn’t make me a saint and you of all people should probably want me behind bars, but by the time I met you in that cell, I was functioning on a low level, living day to day, not particularly caring about anything except surviving my five years and saving my financial empire. I wasn’t even sure if Scrimgeour had plans to have me die in prison and I watched through my orbs to try to keep myself safe. It was one reason I was suspicious of you.

“I don’t like to be beholden to anyone else. I want the power in my hands and it was the last straw, when I found out that although you’d gotten me released, now I somehow still felt bound to you. I had been increasingly miserable in prison after you left and I was through being anyone’s flunky. I guess at that point I snapped. I wanted my total freedom at any cost and you paid the price.” And I paid the price even more painfully wondering which young wizard you would choose over me. Lucius yawned behind his hand. “Are you ready for bed? Suddenly I’m exhausted.”

Hermione had been listening to her husband’s history as a Death Eater and target for Scrimgeour and she wasn’t completely sympathetic, but neither was she quite so angry at him for his abandonment any more. For a man who had been brought up to great wealth and been a dominant power in his own world all his life (and she could draw that parallel from Draco), being ruthlessly subjugated first by Voldemort and then by Scrimgeour must have been devastating. That he’d brought most of it on himself hadn’t mitigated the effect the discordant pressures had wrought on him. She supposed him discovering that yet another person now had him in thrall, and that one a Muggleborn, would have been intolerable to the haughty sorceror.

Hermione felt a tiny bit better about his reasons for leaving her, seeing that it hadn’t necessarily been she personally who had been rejected but rather one more perceived loss of power, which to him had been the final unbearable straw. Added to his haggard, emaciated looks, Hermione saw that his self-esteem had crumbled, probably into one of those firewhiskey decanters that stood on her side table. He certainly drank enough of the stuff.

She never even thought about her brief, four-day stint as Glamour Girl, those photographs showing her out nightclubbing with young male wizards in the Daily Prophet - the experience had been negligible to her and she had been concentrating on Lucius’ appeal, never dreaming anyone besides Snape would give her husband any Daily Prophets.

What happened now? She still had issues with her husband – she could feel them gnawing at her ego at odd moments when she looked at him; she simultaneously wanted to kiss every inch of him and send a crucio his way. That wasn’t a very healthy relationship. Their marriage was damaged, but neither one of them wanted it to end. So maybe she could start there. They had a baby to consider and that little life was more important to Hermione than any revenge scenario for imagined or real slights. She really thought Lucius was sincere about his love for his baby, too.

Hermione still had to contend with her husband’s delusions that he was master and prevailing ruler in their marriage. She began to smile. His reign was about to come to a sticky end. Lucius helped her up from her easy chair and she preceded him from the parlor only to hear a glass shatter. She turned around and re-entered the firelit room to see Lucius standing, looking down at the broken glass on the hearth.

Lucius looked up at his wife and for an instant, a terrible rage was visible on his face, then it winked out and was replaced by a slightly sheepish expression, “I dropped the glass. I’ll clean it up.” He waved his wand over the mess and it disappeared.

Hermione walked out of the parlor again and into their bedroom assessing in her own mind the erratic anger he was transmitting and just what she had seen. That glass hadn’t been dropped – it had shattered from the hard force of being thrown.


tbc...


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Well, a lot of backstory and some insight into our characters' views of their situation. I hope this answers some of the questions brewing in the fertile minds of you readers. Is anyone more sympathetic to Lucius yet? Yes? No? I'm almost afraid of the reviews for this chapter. (Slides all skillets out of sight.) Okay, I'm ready...

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