The Radiant

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Ginny started.

It was as if she was being pulled from a mire of a dream, waking up slowly but open-mouthed, like treacle and ice. She rubbed her hand across her eyes, blinking and struggling to take in the surroundings. It was a moonless night, so it was impossible to see anything in the bedroom. She strained, staring, but it was so dark that she felt enveloped.

Ginny cocked her ear and listening for Lucius’ breathing beside her, but she couldn’t—

“I’m here.” His voice was even but soft, and it sounded like he was situated farther away from her.

She pushed herself up into a sitting position, her nightshirt slipping off of her shoulders as she did so.

“What—” Ginny narrowed her eyes and looked in the direction of his voice. After a short moment, she managed to make out his figure, sitting at the end of the bed, leaning against one of the posts of the bed frame. He had his head bent slightly forward, and his hair was almost a curtain around his face, one leg straight out on the linens, the other bent, the foot planted near to his groin, one of his arms resting straight and rigid along the top of the bent knee.

That was all Ginny could see of him—not his facial expression, not any subtle body language. He was merely a silhouette, a darkened statue, lithe and sinuous even in the black. She watched him for a moment before his still-soft voice broke the silence.

“Will you tell me about him?”

She froze as she was pulling her nightshirt up around her shoulders, one hand clasped around the material. Instead of moving toward Lucius, Ginny let go of the flannel and used the soles of her feet to propel her body back, upsetting the bedclothes until her back was flush with the headboard, her legs bent out in front of her at awkward, lovely angles.

There was a substantial amount of space between them—the material across the bed was vast and dark and oceanic. Ginny stared at Lucius for a minute, noting that he had raised his head, his hair falling back down his neck. He was staring back at her, but his face was a void of black and shadow.

It was one of the most disconcerting things Ginny had seen.

He was expressionless because he had to be expressionless—the dark was rendering them faceless and smooth, like charred dolls, like masked performers. Ginny felt as though a sheet of black silk had been pulled over both of their heads. They were reduced to jointed shadows, moving languidly and yet cautiously at the separate ends of the bed.

“What do you want to know?” Her voice sounded just like that silk, scything across the thick dark. It had taken an almost dangerous edge, but was tempered with tiredness.

“Whatever you want to tell me.”

There was a pregnant, heavy silence between them. Ginny ran her hands up and down her thighs softly, feeling the downy hairs against her palms, watching Lucius as Lucius seemed to watch her.

Then she spoke.

“I never knew him as Voldemort. I only knew him as Tom. Just that one name—not Tom Riddle, not Lord, not Master—just Tom. One syllable, sweet and rolling and definitive, and we were on that first name basis. Friends. Pals. Friends, I suppose, even though it was that one-sided relationship that I never quite realised. But I was so young. I was only eleven, you know.” Ginny tilted her head back against the headboard and sighed softly. “I thought I had found a real friend. Some of the things I told him, in that diary—so personal. So personal.”

The mattress moved slightly as Lucius shifted, but Ginny could barely see the movement—both because of the darkness and because of the trance-like state she had entered into, reliving the memories.

“I was only eleven, but looking back now, Tom was like a lover. He was. He was like a lover.” She was sitting upright, her head tilted upwards, the nightgown forgotten and nearly falling off of her shoulders as she spoke. “Everyone speculated for so long about the Chamber of Secrets—about what had happened inside. If I was still—if I was still an innocent when I left. If Tom had raped me. Or—or rather, had sex with me—because at that point—it probably wouldn’t have been rape. I was so enamoured, even when being used.” Her head dropped down and the darkened curls fell in front of her face as a curtain. “But I didn’t mind it—I don’t think. As a child, I didn’t mind it. Being used. The attention made up for it because getting undivided attention at home was so hard—I sound so awful for saying this, but it was so, so hard. And it makes you think, as an adult, if you were so naïve as to think you were enjoying it—or if you truly liked the situation. It’s a hard call, really.” She looked up again. “And I changed, Lucius.”

“How so—”

“I don’t—I’m not sure. I guess have you to thank for that.”

He breathed in, sharply, and she was jolted back to full attention.

“Oh—no—I didn’t mean that in a snide way. Jesus, Lucius—can we light a candle or something? It’s so dark in here—Cupid and Psyche.”

“We’re not making love—not quite the situation Psyche was in.” His voice was even-keeled and still came from across the bed.

“True, I guess. I’m—I’m off-topic.”

“So the big, bad monster irreparably changed the direction of a mere child’s life?”

Ginny shook her head.

“No. I didn’t say that. You are putting words in my mouth. Yes—you probably did change my life, put me in another direction, altered my personality. But was it for the worse?”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. I became harder—more glittering, more brittle—after that jag in the Chamber. I became darker, more knowledgeable. People were scared of me for a while, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t like that. I liked it. I liked it when people moved away from me in the hallways when I walked. Do you know how exquisite that looked? Waves of students, parting for me, like Moses and the sea—me, with the bright hair, walking right through the empty path down the middle. It was fantastic. I guess, in a way, I can understand—” Her attention stopped wandering and she became focused again— “I guess I can understand, partially, why you got mixed up with him. Tom had a way of making a person powerful, you see. Even if it was just for a moment—even if it was just for a day—it was still so damn intoxicating.” Ginny shook her head suddenly. “Fuck me. I’ve said a little too much in that regard. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. There is no way in hell I would want the Muggleborns eradicated. I want to vomit when I think of the Final Battle. But I understand that one part of it—it all—the power.”

Lucius was silent across the bed.

“I don’t know. Maybe my change was inexorable. Maybe, one way or another, I would have become this person—this person with that subtle, knife-like edge, that sweet hint of darkness. The funny thing is—the funny thing is I got so many more dates after that. Tom made me the forbidden fruit—I was untouchable. I was a god.”

He was still silent, and Ginny suddenly had the urge to taste him, to at least feel the hot press of his body against hers because she now felt small and tired and cold. She sat up onto her knees and moved a foot closer to him, pushing off from the headboard.

“Say something, please.” She heard him move slightly. “Say something to me.”

He shifted again and she could hear the soft sound of his tongue un-clicking from the roof of his mouth.

She sat back on her heels and laughed weakly.

“Oh—” she exhaled softly. “Did I render you speechless? I didn’t think that that whole thing with Tom—that it was so—bad—but maybe it made me sound—”

Suddenly he moved from across the bed, barely even a darkened blur, and Ginny couldn’t see all of the action but she felt as his body settled on top of her, pressing her down to the mattress, two solid thighs settling between her own.

“I was so quiet,” he said, “because I was so struck by our similarities. I understood, just then, why we—why we work. I wasn’t horrified, or frightened, or turned off of you by what you said.” Lucius shifted his hips and she realised—“In fact, the opposite happened.” Then he bent to kiss her, hard.

Ginny brought her legs up close to his skin on either side of his hips as his hands traveled, unseen, from her waist up to briefly cup her breasts and then tangle in her hair, pulling her head back. His face was right above hers, and she could feel his erection hot against her lower abdomen, but she couldn’t even see his eyes in the dark, his mouth, the lines of his expressions. She wouldn’t be able to see where his hands would travel next.

There was a movement above and then his mouth was on hers again, and Ginny moaned into him and wound her arms around his neck. Lucius released her hair and then his mouth moved to her jaw, to the curve of her ear, licking down her neck. There was something unrestrained about him—he was furious and wonderful, totally uninhibited by his admissions and her admissions and then the cloak of the dark.

“I—can’t—” Lucius’ voice was laden with need above her, and as the heat of his hardness brushed against her thigh, Ginny realised that he needed to be inside of her.

“Yes,” she said, and kissed him. As he thrust inside of her, she opened his mouth with her own, sliding her tongue between his lips and crying out into his body.

Lucius dug his forearms under her body, curling his hands up so that they grabbed onto her shoulders from underneath, rendering Ginny helpless and stationary for his sharp, hard thrusts. There was no relenting in the rhythm of Lucius’ hips—he was raw and he was real, and he was fucking her through the bed, snarling incoherent words into her ear and neck and hair as Ginny exclaimed below him. His chest was pressed to hers, and the sweat was pooling between them, making a slick and sucking sound as they moved. He was biting at her shoulders, he was biting at her neck, and when she wrapped her legs around his waist he could only manage a grunt in response. Ginny, for her part, didn’t speak but merely dug her nails into his back, letting him ride out his frustration and his exhaustion and his insecurity. Breaking down in front of her had probably been bad enough, but having to hear about the man who had turned his life upside down for years had put him over the edge. Lucius was fucking her and trying to lose himself.

He shifted his angle, loosening one of her legs and draping it over a shoulder, and Ginny shrieked, her hands scrabbling at the bedspread as she pushed her torso upright. He moved along with her, never stopping the tattoo of his thrusts, keeping up with her movements, keeping her impaled on him.

She was chanting his name into his ear, and he spoke his first discernible words.

“Say it. Keep saying it.”

“Lucius.” Ginny snarled his name into his ear, moaned it across the bright plateau of his hair, murmured it into his neck, garbled it against his mouth, panted it and breathed it out into the dark bedroom air—air that smelt of heat and sex and musk. Ginny threw her head back and cried out in sharp angles and slick sounds as she came—first, roughly and jerkily, thrashing below his body as much as he would let her—and then again and again and again in rolling, fluttering, warm roils. He was unending, and she was still coming, her body a tuning fork, a cymbal, a bowl filled. Lucius was still growling, claiming that intense ownership over her, but as her orgasms kept coming and coming, he began to thrust more and more spasmodically, hitting so deep inside her that she cried out, her eyes smarting, and then as he came thickly she continued to ride out her continuous linking of orgasms, her legs squeezing erratically around his waist and hips, her voice an almost-whimper in his ear. Her voice was a rasp from shouting up into the darkness, and his thighs were still twitching, unbidden, against her. Ginny breathed heavily, feeling her breasts push against his chest in a rhythm.

“Sweet god, you are so good,” she breathed into his ear, turning her head to kiss at his arms caged around her. Lucius responded by turning his own head and kissing her slowly, using the leverage of his own head to press hers head down into the bedding. His tongue lazily swept along her lips, tangling with her own tongue, and she tasted him, hard and masculine, as he kept her pinned to the bed by the way of his mouth. As he broke away from her lips he breathed deeply and trailed his tongue down her neck, keeping his head on the bed beside hers, his large body spread out over hers. Lucius’ hands moved across the bedding from where they had been planted for leverage and slid out to where her fingers were tangled haphazardly in the bed sheets. He covered her hands with his, laying still and solid on top of her, all at once proclaiming ownership and a deep affection.

Lucius breathed evenly and deeply and Ginny realised that he had slipped into a sleep, still inside of her, and so she moved him onto his side carefully, pulling him out of her with her hand, him still hard and she still sensitive, her fingers wet with their combined release. She brought her fingers to her face and held them under her nose, relishing the strong scent. It was an animalistic gesture, and it made her feel primal—made her want to mark her man and herself, to show the world that they were bonded in every way.

Lucius murmured something in his sleep, and shifted closer to her, even in sleep his arms reaching out to her, and Ginny took said arms and looped them around her waist, turning to face him and tucking her face into his chest, feeling as his hands unknowingly tightened their grip on her, spreading his fingers wide and layering across her skin.


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“Good morning.” He was propped up on his elbow, on his side, leaning over her, one long-fingered hand pushing her hair back from her forehead.

Ginny was on her stomach, her face pillowed on her arms, turned towards him.

“Good morning, Lucius,” she murmured, and closed her eyes as he rubbed at her scalp. He leaned over to kiss her just below the ear. “How do you feel this morning?”

“How do you feel this morning?” When she looked muzzily up at him, he was smiling slightly, the corners of his eyes crinkled and warm.

“That’s a good look for you.”

“What is?”

“Nudity and a genuine smile,” she half-murmured into her forearms, sighing as he continued to massage her head.

“Why, thank you.” He bent to kiss her temple again. “Actually—all joking aside—I do feel better. Thank you for prodding me into speaking—speaking about all that.” He had stopped smiling but his eyes were still soft at the edges, and Ginny sat up, the bed sheet falling down to her waist, as she moved and wrapped her arms around him.

“You’re welcome. I don’t judge. You didn’t judge either.”

“No—how can I judge?”

Ginny shrugged. “I don’t know. But you didn’t—you listened properly and then you—we—” She turned slightly pink and rubbed the back of a hand over her mouth.

“And then I pinned you to the bed, and then we fucked—and then you had multiple orgasms, I believe.” He smirked at her and she laughed, swatting at him and still blushing.

“I’ve never had that before. It was amazing. Must have been the unloading of all that emotional baggage.”

Lucius laughed, continuing. “Perhaps. It could also be that—I think it was because I realised, at that moment, how much I lo—”

He stopped, and Ginny felt her breath catch hard and hot in her throat, because she wasn’t sure what he was about to say—could have been anything, could have been any word—but he looked skittish suddenly, and then furrowed his brow, and Ginny pretended not to notice his distress, instead leaning forward and kissing his tense mouth.

“Yes, we are a little more similar than we had first realised, aren’t we?”

Lucius nodded, seeming relieved, and she leaned back. His eyes were tracking from her mouth to her breasts, and Ginny laughed, pulling the sheet back up over herself, shaking her head.

“I’m sore from last night. You were—it was deep—rough.” She looked away, smiling. His hand closed over her ankle and she tried to pull it away jokingly. “It doesn’t look like morning, though,” she said suddenly, craning her neck to see where the light was coming in from under the curtains, a darker purple dusky light.

“Well—it’s not.”

“What?”

Lucius smiled small again. “It’s actually early evening—we slept the whole day. I suppose it was because of the emotional stress of the night before. So, in my opinion,” he continued, pulling the sheet down to her waist, “we can just stay in bed. Have dinner in bed. Not get out of bed for the whole rest of the day, and then just fall asleep after we’re—done.”

“Can you do what you did last night, please?”


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