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Hermione Granger died on her birthday.
Antonin dispassionately noted this fact as he scanned the file he kept on her. 163cm, of undesirable, muddied lineage, though known to be breedable—which was no longer of any consequence—and in possession of a wand automatically classified as stolen.
Cause of death was left blank. Lucius Malfoy had claimed justifiable force had been required to subdue her, but Antonin could smell a cover up from a mile away. The man’s most exploitable weak point had always been his even weaker son.
Of course, the girl they called golden wasn’t really dead. Not in any of the ways that mattered to him, anyway. Lucius had never had the sense for iskra—loosely and inadequately translated as one’s inner spark—the way Antonin did. During his boyhood in Omsk they’d been taught how to find iskra by being stripped naked and left out in the snow. The wind plunged the temperature to glacial depths, and in such conditions one needed to look within and unearth one’s magic to find deliverance, or one froze to a silent, sleepy death. Simple as that. Locating one’s own spark was the first step; after that he learned how to sense the iskra in others.
She lay upon the dark marble slab, with the silver vein that ran through it like a lightning strike. If she’d had clothes, they were gone now, and only discordant undergarments remained, striking an odd note and tugged onto her in the sort of way that told him she had been redressed. Under the white cotton her skin was mottled blue and bore the ligature marks of incarcerous. Her nails were split, and her palms bloody—cruciatus left no mark, but its victims found ways to articulate their tales of pain. There was no breath to be found in her lungs, and no tongue left behind her teeth.
And yet her spark was burning as bright as a hand of glory, shrouded to all but him, who knew its secrets.
“
No other Death Eater possessed the proper respect for alchemical possibility. Antonin had only to look at her, to trace his wand along her rib cage in order to draw on her sulphur, vivid as fire and intangible as air. Her salt was there too, in the meat of her still tied to the earth, though her heart no longer thumped. For now.
Calcination had always been a gruelling, fastidious process, but he found he didn’t resent the heat of the purifying white fire quite as much when he could watch it kiss her skin. It was late into the first night of his labour by the time the flames had spent themselves and he could begin the dissolution of all that she had been before. He stirred her magic like a cauldron, his wand dancing above her body, allowing the mercy to rise out of her tender heart through her icy surface, a vaporous blossom that he banished, in favour of the ruthlessness she would learn to wield. It cost him more of his own magic than most would have been willing to pay; a wizard less committed to the worthy pursuit of transmutation might have abandoned the effort. But Antonin grasped what waited at the end.
It was time then—the vein that ran through the dark marble beneath her wasn’t truly silver. It was mercury, the final leg of the tria prima that would bind sulphur and salt, her iskra and her form, as one again. Fermented, distilled, and coagulated by the third day into an element more precious than gold.
Antonin was a wizard, yet few people appreciated he was also an artist. If they had witnessed the meticulous care with which he remade her, perhaps they would have paid him his due. Most of her vaunted colour had been sapped away by her not-quite-death, but her iskra made her blanched skin shine with inner moonlight, and it didn’t take much to coax her hacked off curls to flow forth and lie long over her neat little breasts. A touch of potion and a restrained glamour adorned her lips and her nipples and her cunt with the rosy flush a shallower wizard would expect to see, but he left all the scars that she’d so valiantly earned, especially a particular purple starburst on her sternum—oh, he remembered it well. How fiercely she fought, and now she lay on his slab, like a maiden asleep.
Before he’d arrived in England as an embittered youth, before he’d quietly learned the correlations and contradictions in how his blood was regarded by the cousin-fuckers, Antonin’s mother had bought him a new coat and taken him to the Bolshoi Ballet. That day he learned some people didn’t make magic with a wand, all they needed was a pair of special shoes and the mournful serenade of a single violin.
So when he bent to complete his spell, he recalled the prince performing grand jetés toward his Sleeping Beauty, spread out on a bed of moss and flowers.
Antonin’s moss was the silky stone aligned beneath her spine, and his flowers were the scent of sweet vitriol and yellow bismuth fumes, but it was as transcendent as the universal pattern. As above, so below. Her lips were cold when he sealed the enchantment. He could return her thoughts and her will and her fury, but she would never again know her own warmth. She would always seek what she lacked.
He knew well not to wait for breath; he anticipated instead the rattle—the gasp—and the iron grip that seized his black robes and held him in place. He knew he had succeeded when she surged up and claimed his lips. Through the kiss, she spoke with a mother tongue only they shared. It slid between his teeth, and she told him of her end, the coda of a too-short life.
She is halfway across the grounds before his hounds apprehend her. Summoned from smoke, their teeth sink in like knives and she is dragged back over branch and stone to where Adrian waits cloaked in all his deceptive beauty, sipping tea that steams in the cold air and drumming elegant fingers on the fluted stone column of a garden folly.
He binds her. Takes his time taking her apart.
“I will haunt you,” she vows after spitting blood upon his face.
Adrian laughs and out flickers his tongue to sample a drop of her. “Is that so?”
But her words are not for him, not really. She looks past the wand stretching out her agonising demise, long and thin. Just there, standing by the Rowan tree, she picks out a moon-pale mien and the yellow belly of a coward.
I won’t let them hurt you, Granger, he promised once. And now he stares unmoving, unseeing, unfeeling—but he will not meet her eye.
So she makes her own promise, right before the end, “You will never know peace in your wretched life.”
The grandness of the pas de deux faded away, and she tore herself back from him, lips parted in rude shock. Her heart could not race. Her chest could not heave. Antonin saw the oubliette of his private workspace and his own face through her revivified gaze. The alchemy that had restored and remade her was a delicate thing. The act of genesis was both science and instinct.
Artists put something of themselves in their creations, did they not? The sweat that had tracked down his brow as he’d cleansed her with fire, his own magic folded into hers as he’d agitated it with his wand—there was a choreography which connected them now. She would never again dance a solo. Beyond the stage he’d set, true death was the only thing awaiting her in the wings.
He had inherited too much of his father—who had possessed the breadth of a brick wall in all senses of the word—but when his куколка stared back she saw past impossibly broad shoulders, heavy brows, and a curse-broken nose. Her eyes absorbed the silk of his mother’s dark hair, and the talent for storytelling on his lips. She knew something was terribly wrong, and she searched for the answer as though those lips could tell her what it was.
Ever so slowly, like a python uncoiling, her hands found their way around his neck.
For a moment, he allowed her to rob him of his breath. He enjoyed the front row seat from which to view the display of her grief and her delicious rage. There was a heightened sense of consequence to it; Antonin was rarely in such proximity to passion of this magnitude and his mind did not need to wander far afield to imagine his body inside hers. He knew if he had been, as he watched a flint strike in her eyes, and her grip squeezed at his throat, he would have found a death then, though of a littler ilk than she sought.
She seemed to know it too. She tilted her head at a curious angle and the light guttered in her eyes, until it was all but dead—she tightened her grasp and used her nails to punish his presumption.
Although he was partial to the intimacy of their arrangement, he regretfully acknowledged the need for oxygen. Later, there would be time for such experiments. His fingers stroked along the wand lying on the stone at her side and a second, ghostly pair of hands emerged from its tip to aid him, pinning her hips back down on the slab, while he detached himself firmly from her grasp.
Her shoulders met the marble with an impact that would have knocked the breath from her lungs if she had any, and he held her there using base, brutish strength, delighted and proud of the fierceness and vehemence with which she struggled. He would keep the bruises.
“I will not tie you up, but you may not kill me,” he said.
“Dolohov,” she spat.
“We are beyond such formality. For you, I am Tosha.”
“Tosha.” She didn't mean to repeat it, but he liked the sound, and the affection inferred. Her voice had changed; it moved along a minor chord now, darker and more sombre. “What have you done to me?”
“I woke you—the beauty—from her sleep, to offer her a gift.”
“Harry. Where’s Harry?” An old name that no longer fit in her new timbre. Her voice cracked as she asked.
“Do not worry, they only caught you,
“Who?” she demanded to know.
“You already know, I think. A boy who deals in pain beyond his young years, a son too craven to stop him, and a father who tidied away the inconvenient consequences under one of his Aubusson rugs.”
“Not you?”
His palms eased their pressure where he’d held her to the stone and slipped down her arms, drawing her gently up and towards him, seated once more. “Not me.”
She arched along warm hands that drifted to her back and then her arse with a feline eagerness, leaning in as though she had no choice but to push for more. After several moments she tilted her chin and frowned in confusion, her eyes widening in surprise at her escalation even as she looked down at her lap to find her hips rocking lewdly, bringing her towards the unforgiving edge of the slab and nearer to him.
He allowed her to test her new needs, pressing close to his body, shifting, climbing, a guttural hum in her throat. There was little he wished to say to stay her, despite an urgent writhing that suggested she had no qualms about fucking him right through his trousers.
It was inevitable; she couldn’t help the burgeoning demands of her flesh. There was a price to the magic that had restored her and he’d had no choice but to carve away valuable facets to offer up as payment. At her core she was cold—he had sacrificed her warmth. At her centre an unstructured softness, unbalanced without the hard rigidity to answer. And deep inside her, a yawning emptiness, and the thirst to fill it.
She would always seek what she lacked.
After another minute he reluctantly detached himself from her. “You must save your strength.”
There was both petulance and an odd, entrancing power in her tone as she spoke. “I want my gift.” The whine was punctuated with insistent pawing at his belt. “I’m freezing.”
He laughed, and removed her hand from the sizable bulge it was zealously stroking, only swollen larger in the interest of appeasing her. “That is not your gift. You are starting to know the emptiness, you feel it now…”
It would grow, a by-product of the seventh step that had been her remaking. He might temporarily sate her, but until she was stretched and moulded by a different appetite it wouldn't satisfy for long.
“You wish me to fill you.”
The thunder which rumbled in the distance might as well have been her greedy growl of affirmation.
“True release will come only with retribution. To steal back what was taken from you will prepare your body for pleasures few have ever dared to know.”
There was fury inside her to match her desire, a hunger for revenge so ravenous she wanted to gorge herself until she choked. He could read it in her, on the curve of her lips, just as he knew that to explore those lips would peel back the layers of her mind even further to him.
Lightning flared suddenly through the high window—it lit her brow, her nose, her cheekbones in a brilliant white, and yet it paled in comparison to the iskra within her.
⚕
She could neither sleep, nor cry, but Antonin allowed her to wander. The Dark Lord had rewarded him with an ancestral estate in the Yorkshire Dales, ivy-wrapped and filled with heirlooms entrusted to an ancient line abruptly signed off with a bloody full stop. He had little cause to stray from his subterranean laboratory, but she returned to him wearing the master’s robe and a long string of pearls.
“You didn't lock the door,” she said, running a finger along the empty slab.
“Nor did I ward it,” he replied. “But you did not leave me.”
The rage in her eyes was eclipsed by the question she couldn’t yet ask him. The need her pride would not let her admit, even as it had begun to drive her insensible with want.
On the third midnight since he’d woken her, he peered through the eyes of a nosy portrait, and beheld her nude upon a chaise, with pearls twisted tight around her throat, a nacreous garotte that could not rob anything from her. He watched her decimate a century-old case of Sauternes she’d unearthed in the cellar, imbibing demi after demi of wine she couldn't taste. Afterwards she painted the lips of her cunt with sweet, stained fingers and fucked one of the bottles.
He did not stay for the finale she would not reach. He slipped back downstairs and set out the garb most suited to her objective on the slab. A muggle school uniform—not modified or bastardised—perfectly prim and proper. But modesty was in the eye of the beholder, and Lucius’ eye had always been drawn to white socks and straw boater hats, a covert fascination with muggle accoutrements which would have appalled his formidable Papa and which was not at all above board.
Atop the neat pile, he left her a note.
Now that you are awake, no gates, walls or spells can keep you from what you crave.
For years, Lucius has been unable to sleep. Only one potion can help, and after Severus’ untimely end, he turns to me to brew this favour. But he reports the latest batch is an aberration, sleep comes slowly, and he is suggestible rather than rigid. Worst of all vivid, violent dreams visit Lucius while he is still in his waking state…
⚕
Antonin was awake into the small hours in his laboratory, toiling away on one of his messier creations. Before chimeras could be born, they must first be made, and the making of them was bloody and strewn with entrails. He had rolled his sleeves up, too late to prevent the taint of viscera on cotton, and was puffing away on a smoke to ease the pervasive tension that had found its way into his shoulders.
She appeared like a haunting, silhouetted in the door by the rebounding light emitted from his wand as he worked. She was more covered in blood than he, although the school uniform she’d left the estate in remained neat and tidy. At her side was a cane that had not been in her possession before she’d returned, and she leaned on it now, hand heavy on its carved snakehead—not as crutch but as trophy.
She moved suddenly, and the strike of the cane on the rough stone floor synchronised with the beat of his heart. He raised his fingers to his lips and took one last drag from his cigarette. The taste on his tongue, and the bloodlusting dilation of her pupils made him feel sixteen years old, and immortal, all at once.
“Tosha,” she said, as if his name was a complete sentence.
He knew she would lunge before she did. He caught the downward strike of the cane in one hand before it could dash his brains out of his skull. With his wand he had her bound seconds later, with a whisper he had her docile, and he carefully removed the cane from her fist, tugging her skirt back into place.
It was already clear she had put in an outstanding performance, and he rewarded her with a kiss that would allow him to taste the memory of it, as delicate as sugar crystals on his tongue, and the magic as ephemeral as that of the dance of the sugar plum fairy.
Draco once told her Lucius is very proud of his bulbophyllum nocturnum, the only known orchid to flower after twilight.
She finds him in the conservatory, all prismatic glass and wrought iron flourishes. She is sure the air is thick with night-blooming scents, but all her senses are attuned to his vital signs. The focused breath rising and falling in his breast, the sporadic flick of argent strands over broad shoulders, and of course the reliable pulse to the left of his throat.
All the indications that Tosha suggested she look for are there. There are blue grey dreams in his eyes, and an empty vial next to his half-finished cognac.
She deems it safe, straightens her little hat on curls she has tamed into two plaits, tied with delicate yellow ribbons.
“Sir?” she ventures, softening the hell in her voice.
“Who goes there?” His hand seeks and finds the silver snakehead atop his ubiquitous cane.
“Granger, sir. Excuse me for interrupting, but it appears I’ve gotten myself lost.”
She steps out from behind the shelter of a restless flutterby bush, and twists her tartan skirt in her fingers in an appropriate pretence of innocence, the mincing steps of false naivety.
Lucius only questions the sudden manifestation of this figment of his imagination for a fraction of a second, though it was he who levitated her limp body and brought her to the slab.
“Miss Granger, you shouldn’t be in the teacher’s wing. This is highly improper.”
“I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—I’m late for world history and Herr Bastian wasn’t satisfied with my final composition.”
“I am not interested in your excuses. Come here.”
She steps forward until she arrives at the spot he is pointing at with a ringed finger, inappropriately close and exactly the right distance from which to look down his nose at her.
“Before you are dismissed, I will have to write you up for a multitude of uniform violations.”
She looks down at herself. “But I—”
“Hair in two braided sections rather than the regulation one, and adorned with non-uniform buttercup yellow.” He tugs on one of her plaits. “Nails not cut to the proper length. Under knee socks worn in place of over knee…” The cool tip of his cane grazes across her patella. “Shirt untucked.” He reaches around her waist and slips the tail of fabric back beneath the band of her skirt, dipping low enough to brush over her coccyx. A shock straightens her spine. Her shirt is hidden by the wool of her blazer, and she doesn’t know how he knew.
“And you are in direct violation of subsection XII which specifies underwear must provide full coverage, befitting a young lady duly preoccupied with her own modesty.”
From one moment to the next, she is shoved over a work bench and her skirt is bunched around her waist, revealing her lack of concern for any such virtue and her bare, clenching cunt. In Tosha’s neatly folded pile of clothes, he hadn’t merely left her inadequate knickers—he’d left her no knickers at all.
Lucius believes her to be a fabrication, the detritus of a dream, and imagines, as usual, himself at the centre. He is not entirely wrong, and she doesn’t mind a bit when he dispenses with foreplay.
She doesn’t feel much when he strikes the cane across her cheeks, but there is an echo in her sex, and she screams like he expects her to scream because she is so close to all she needs. He is hollow, and corrupt, but he is warm, and after two more cracks he presses his arousal against the place where welts should be.
“Lubrico.” He floods her, and she knows it is not for her benefit.
Two of his fingers dip and curl into her depths. If he notices her chill, he does not say. She pushes back onto his fingers, telling him she can and will take more with whines that are protest enough to satisfy him.
“Your little snatch is quite the temptation, but what is a maiden without her virtue?” He tsks. “Still, you must be taught.”
She knows what he intends before his belt clicks, before his thumb stretches her and warns her there is much much more to come. He is impatient, and unconcerned with her pleasure when he breaches the tight ring of muscle and seats himself in her arse with a greedy groan.
“Do you understand now, Granger?”
“Yes—yes, sir.” And she truly does. She is dead, in many ways, but this is life. She can feel everything again as he skewers her, and uses her. The rude shock of each of his thrusts branches through her insides and sends shockwaves across her clit. Warm. Whole.
“Please. I need—”
He stops suddenly, and manoeuvres his cane so the wood is between her teeth, like a horse’s bit. It is only fitting that he rides her then, stretching, burning, filling her—but all his concern always is for him and his, and he takes and takes.
“You will take all I have to give, and wear it to your next class. You will sit on that little wooden chair, and think of my cock in your tight little muggle arsehole.”
With the cane in her mouth she can only grind her teeth and moan. Her inner walls encourage his end, and she pulls in, and pulses around him. She needs to be filled.
With a gasp, rising to a shout, he lets go and all his arrogance, and his avarice is as hot as the cum that floods through her. Three seconds of pleasure is all he knows before assumptive dream becomes night terror.
She turns her head and smiles as her body turns the tables, and takes, drawing out his lifeforce through his presumptuous cock. Pale skin turns whiter than his most luminous orchid, before turning ashen. His eyes roll back, his cheeks hollow, and he desiccates as she watches with pleasure.
Tosha never told her what lay in her flesh. He didn’t need to. Somehow, she knew.
When she is sure Lucius Malfoy is finished in all senses of the word, she draws away, dripping, and carefully rearranges her skirt. He is not yet dead, but he is rooted to the spot like an elm tree. She tilts her head and plucks the cane from the bench. She could wait, it would only be moments, but she has brushed her fingers so close to the edge of a revelation while he was inside of her, that she wonders maybe if she might divine the answer should she break him open.
Two cracks of the cane split his skull, and a pretty little trowel digs a hole in his gut.
She leaves a single orchid on the ruin of his corpse.
Antonin knew she was special, but she had exceeded his every expectation. He kissed her again, not for gain, but because she was surpassingly beautiful.
“You are my greatest creation,” he whispered.
“I’m not yours.”
“No, you are correct. One cannot possess magic, and that, куколка, is what you are.”
“I could’ve left, but something called me back to you.” She did not understand what lay between them, but she would.
“
She looked uncertain, as if she didn’t know what she wanted from him.
“Only to cleanse you.” He summoned a warm, wet cloth to demonstrate his pure intentions and gently wiped a drop of blood from her cheekbone. “Then you must rest, if you are to go hunting again.”
⚕
Antonin returned from his standing monthly appointment with the metallurgist to find Hermione reclining against the pillows on the bed he'd claimed as his own through habit rather than sentiment. He paused in the doorway, considering the scene, and wondering why her presence on this indifferent piece of furniture inspired sudden feelings of attachment to it. She was conducting an experiment by smoking one of his cigarettes. When she noticed his regard, she raised a brow and stubbed out the glowing tip of the smoke on the skin over her hushed heart.
His nostrils flared with the scent of her pretty meat seared, but he still didn’t move, his gaze instead sliding to the death mask displayed on the pillow next to her. Not his, but he knew the filigree patterns, and the empty eyes as void of humanity as the man who owned it.
“‘Syoo-dah,’” he corrected her, nevertheless enchanted by this unexpected development—more proof, though he didn’t require it, that she would not stagnate, but could learn and evolve. “Not ‘suda’.”
He heeded her regardless, and allowed her to lever him to where she wanted him—surrounding her, his body a cage for a goddess guised as a
Her fingers threaded into his hair while he trailed the tip of his tongue along her purple scar. He licked her burn, and then licked her mouth, eager to savour the storytelling gift there he’d never meant to pass to her, repaid each time in memory.
Adrian has always been a selfish prick, grasping in more ways than one. The sort that pays for pleasure simply for the joy of shortchanging women with no recourse when he’s finished using them.
There was hardly a shred of surprise within her when she discovered Tosha’s latest note atop a pile of clothes, indicating the type of establishment that young Pucey may be found at most evenings after midnight. And even less surprise that the clothing Tosha had left her evoked the squib sex-workers she’s seen once or twice near the seedier wizard’s clubs on Knockturn, though few of the women forced to fall could afford costumery made from the supple, shiny scales of fledgling dragons. Hermione’s breasts spill over the top of a constricting scarlet dress so short it’s barely worthy of the moniker, and a garter belt holds up seamed stockings that provide her with nothing except another opportunity for her own objectification.
For his part Adrian wears black and a half-mask when he comes here—similar enough to the full-coverage symbol of death he dons when he does Voldemort’s bidding—to trade on his reputation and the fear such a thing inspires in those without power. It hides nothing. Not the cruel set of his mouth below the silver edge that cuts across his face, or crueler eyes, flat and black through the punched holes where they ought to be blue, the whites tinged pink already from years of dark magic. When she saunters up behind him where he sits in a low chair, nursing a firewhisky with a bored tilt to his shoulders, she can’t see the ruthlessness in his turned-away face though. Instead she drapes her arms over him, palm sliding slowly down his chest while she whispers low in his ear.
“You look like you’ve had a very trying day, baby. But you’ve come to the right place.”
Before he can turn around to look at her she slips the mask off of his face and onto her own. It is dark in this club, and warm in the sinister way, but Adrian is not Lucius with his suggestible dreams. He will not learn who she is until it is time.
He permits the theft, the transmutation of his poor disguise into her much better one, and she understands, in the way she simply seems to know things now, that it is because he’s just decided to punish her for the audacity.
There is nothing Adrian loves more than an excuse.
“You’re new. You must be, or you would know who I am and how little tolerance I have for squib sluts who give me cheek.”
The room he drags her to with a brutish pinching grip, fingers burrowed into the soft part of her arm, is even more dim than the one they’ve just left, although she has little time to absorb its details before she’s cast roughly at the floor.
“Get on your knees, whore.”
She wants to, and so she does. Adrian is petty and mean, and this will be petty and mean too, but he has something she seeks.
He digs merciless fingernails into the meat of her cheeks, squeezing viciously. He can’t know that she barely feels it, but she will hit his marks and perform the choreography as he expects. “Stick out your tongue.”
It isn’t as though she really has a choice, with the way his fingers have tightened, but she obeys regardless. He takes his time, the muscle and bone of his jaw working, shifting, rolling saliva within, before he bares his teeth and then spits directly on the flat pink, into her mouth.
“Swallow that,” is all the warning he gives her before his cock, drawn nimbly from his trousers, is shoved to the back of her throat.
There is nothing nimble about the way he fucks her face. It is domineering and uncompromising and purely for his own self-gratification, although she enjoys the simplicity of merely existing as a hole for a moment, drawing closer in her pursuit.
Adrian likes sharp things. Pitiless words and the press of the floor into her knees. The edges of blades and those of denial—dangling a necessity and snatching it away. He’s a sadist, and a cliché.
His crude, choking thrusts do not seem to be having the desired effect on her however, so he pulls her hair savagely enough to make her eyes water.
Screams and tears make him hard, and she ought to know—she gave him enough of both on the night he killed her. She begrudges him every one she handed over there in that folly under the moon, but tonight these tears ultimately serve her ends, not his.
Moans, though—moans he is less enamored of, and when he senses the resonant hum of one around his cock, grown too thrilled within her ribcage to bury anymore, he pulls her off of him and slaps her across the face.
“This isn’t for you,” he berates her.
She smiles though—if he only knew. He sees her lips curve but doesn’t understand, and takes it as a challenge, pushing her backwards. Her elbows hit the floor behind her, sprawled, as he brings himself down to her level and perfunctorily pushes up her skirt. Once again, Tosha left her no undergarments.
He glances down at the mess slicking her thighs. “You actually like this? This gets you off?”
She says nothing, the answer is self-evident.
“Fine—show me what a depraved little slut you are, then.”
She opens her legs wider and uses her fingers to spread her labia for him; he can see exactly how poorly he’s managed to terrorise her. She’s dripping.
The slap he imprinted on her face is nothing compared to the one he delivers her cunt.
There must be enough of a shriek in the strangled noise it drags from her chest—false agony and true delight—that he is satisfied. It is a new onslaught after that; he begins the same thrusts as before, but more deeply inside her, a new hole to conquer. If he notices her abiding cold, he does not say, though perhaps he is accustomed to not receiving a warm welcome when he stages an invasion.
As he presses inside her body his voice is low in her ear. “You’ll take it because you have to, you don’t have a choice.” He says it as though it is a comfort to himself, as he stuffs her over and over and attempts to split her open. He cannot see her as anything other than a woman made desperate by circumstance, someone who fate has frowned on and who consequently is forced to submit herself to the abuse of strangers.
She decides the time has arrived to show him how badly his mistake will cost him.
Her magic is altered now—different means for different ends. The words and wrist movements that might have silenced him or bound him with black rope fled her lips and fingertips when he thieved what didn’t belong to him and took her life.
The iskra though…
He may be nearly done, but she is not even close.
The shadowed phantom of hands that Tosha once used to pin her to the slab have become hers to control, his strength borrowed to shove Adrian off of her, dragged to his feet and back toward the pole at the centre of the room. He’s fixed to it while dumb confusion still decorates his face, although she relishes the way it melts in alarm as she slips the mask up onto her head.
He stands there, rigid steel at his back, while she winds her way to him and then sinks down to her knees once more, and he stiffens in fear, unable to move.
She tilts her face up towards him. “You were right Adrian, that wasn’t for me before,” she coos. “But this is.”
She sinks her teeth into his femoral artery, and spits the blood back at him, before tracing his cock with her tongue and then enveloping it with her mouth.
He is still hard and he hates it and fears it—her teeth are much, much too close. She appreciates the idea, but she has something more permanent in mind for him. She’d rather sever him from his life, a true succubus.
“You’ll take it because you have to, you have no choice,” she repeats back to him around a full mouth, and it is more than he can take. He comes, and she swallows down his semen, just as he made her swallow down his saliva, and swallow down her own death.
Just as she will swallow down his.
For someone fond of delivering pain, Adrian proves rather intolerant to experiencing it for himself. She doesn’t cease in sucking, and milking him for all of his unworth, and she almost laughs when the phrase ‘rub him out’ and all its possible meanings surfaces in her mind.
He watches, in disbelief, and afterwards she plucks his eyes, and cuts out his tongue—all for being a sadistic slut who dared to give her cheek.
She carefully arranges eyeballs and tongue at his feet like an offering, but she takes the mask as a gift for Tosha.
⚕
It was not for Antonin to decide the pace of lex talionis, and her presence as a houseguest was certainly gratifying as she quietly watched him work, read books in the library, and persisted in her attempts to fuck herself, both with and without the assistance of various pureblood heirlooms. The results always seemed to dissatisfy her though, and he had begun to suspect she knew she had an audience, and was optimistically endeavouring to tempt him out from behind the wall.
For her last unsettled score, he would provide no wardrobe, nor would he nudge her to recall the profundity and cowardice with which she’d been betrayed. At a certain point, one must choose to hear the music within for themselves and simply dance. For over a week, she did not act, and for just a moment, he wondered if there was enough left of her mercy that she was harbouring second thoughts.
And then, one night, she was gone with the howling wind.
He waited for her to return, the hours passing slowly on the horologium in his laboratory.
When he finally sensed her arrival, and realised she did not intend to seek him out, he followed the soft strains of her inner composition to an upstairs balcony. Against the mottled wounds of sunrise, she would appear to be just a girl. Whatever had occurred overnight, it did not show on her skin.
There was momentary quiet, though of course she knew he was there. He was certain she could feel him just as surely as his magic reached out for her, near or far. Early birdsong filled the space until she spoke again.
“Draco Malfoy is dead,” she announced, with her back still turned.
“And you rue his end?”
She shook her head. “Only that it isn’t enough.”
She took another look at the sky and turned, just a warm-hearted girl who was neither, until she became hands around his neck. Whatever differential of size and strength they possessed meant nothing when his shoulders crashed into the French doors he’d walked through, delicate panes of glass rattling, wood groaning as she pressed in.
“Not enough,” she repeated, turning her face up to him. She had learned quickly, and he rewarded her by bending his neck and consuming the inches that did not belong between them.
This time she has chosen her armour. The brushed cornflower cotton she’d frequently worn to bed, short shorts, and long sleeves, because she’d often experienced the cold in uneven patterns before she felt it always. She lights a candle, parts four-poster hangings and slips beneath the covers. There she finds the new young master of the manor warm—oh, so warm. He wears old terrors and new grief on his sharp features, and she sees he is lingering in the inbetween. Half-awake, half-asleep. He opens his heavy eyes and takes in her face and splits again, half-afraid, half-soothed to see her.
“Granger—Hermione. You’re alive.” He reaches for her, reverence overcoming any reluctance. “How in the fuck are you alive?”
“I don’t know. It was dark, and all I knew was a kind of…spark.” That spark, and the man who forged it, consume most of her waking thoughts these days, and many of the slumberous ones as well. “All I knew was that I had to get back to you.”
He should question everything about her presence, and her skin that feels like ice, but she can see he is preoccupied by lifting the weight of her death off his shoulders. Draco cannot stand his own guilt, but has never learned that guilt is best avoided by living a life that does not give birth to it.
His hands are gentle, and he is slowly accepting she is real. And she is real. But she is not the girl who he left to die. Not the same. Not his Granger.
Theirs was a ballet that lasted years, the steps complex and adjacent, but rarely intersecting.
She kisses him, first, softly, so softly, and he makes a sound like she is already delivering the pain she has in store for him.
Before the inevitable comes to pass, she has questions.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“He said he wouldn’t kill you. I couldn’t blow my cover, not after all this time. If I had I might have been killed instead.”
“How could you believe he would keep his word?”
“The Dark Lord—he wanted you alive. Adrian knew that.”
“It was my birthday.”
“I know.” His voice was verging on petulant.
“Why didn’t you help?”
“I swear, I didn’t know he would take it that far.”
“You’ve seen how he plays with his food, and you let him string me up and cut out my tongue when he got sick of my screams.”
He flinches, though it is she who remembers that pain.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me, Granger. I’m done. I don’t care any more, we’ll go wherever you want us to go. Fuck the Order. Fuck England. Now that I have you back, nothing else matters.”
She allows him to apologise with little kisses all over her face.
“You're cold,” he breathes.
She shows him fake relief, a shade of real pain, and categorically genuine desire. “It’s okay, you can keep me warm.”
“No really, you’re freezing. Have you been outside?”
She distracts him again with an unapologetic kiss that takes them further than they’d ever dared. The girl who held back, who wasn’t sure, she’s dead—the creature she has become lulls him into believing in miracles and forgiveness that he has not earned.
He touches her in all the ways she used to crave, and she arches until her breasts fill his hands and her pyjamas grind along his cock. It’s almost what she needs.
“You’re here,” he looks up at her, amazed.
“Fuck me,” she says. “I know how much you want to. You’ve wanted it for years.”
“Yeah,” he admits to it, after all this time.
“Tell me why.”
She watches his throat bob as he swallows, thinking about how she used to love witnessing and cataloguing his details, and now all she can wonder is what it might sound like if she crushed his Adam’s apple in her fingers.
“Because I love you,” he says.
Once, she imagined this was an answer that would bring order to all her chaos, and she completes the picture when she guides him inside where she is so empty. For a minute she is just a misguided girl and this is enough, he never watched as she bled to death over hours.
He doesn't love her and he never did.
That doesn’t stop her though, from slipping her shorts down, or his. From sinking down on his cock while he gasps.
It doesn’t stop her from leaning down to whisper in his ear while she tilts her hips and spurs him on. “I was the one who killed Adrian.”
His eyes go wide and she pins his arms above his head, riding him even faster, a wild instinct flogging her on.
“You—oh Gods.”
“And you know what else?”
“Tell me.”
She reserves her confession for the precipice, when he is already toppling and there is nothing she can say or do to stop his descent.
“I let your father sodomise me,” she whispers in his ear. “And then I ripped his guts out.”
It is too late to stop it. He cannot hide his horror, and neither can he halt the orgasm that overtakes him.
As the wave of his climax recedes, it is swiftly overtaken by unfathomable pain that she was once forced to fathom. He withers and rots before her gaze.
“The sad part is, I thought I loved you too.”
“Granger, please,” he rasps.
She watches him die, quid pro quo, but she does him the courtesy of looking him in the eye. Such lovely silvery eyes, filled with bitter remorse and tears he’ll never shed.
“It’s too late,
Day had broken across the Dales, and the skylarks were singing as a soft orange sun began to spill over the horizon line.
Antonin still stood where she had shoved him but there was no aggression left in their stance. He cupped her face and ran hands down her back, his fingers soothing her turmoil and whispering that they might ease an ache.
“The young Malfoy does not have to be the last.” He presented the suggestion to her like an offering. “The world is filled with evil men.”
He left her to rest, and to feel the hollow sun upon her face. He knew what choice she would make, because three insignificant deaths could not balance her golden scales.
After breakfast—dark tea, kasha, and a cigarette—he made his way to the lab and found her already in situ, seated on the slab with her lovely legs idly swinging. He was not surprised. Everything had happened along the predetermined path of steps, the dance written long before.
“Are you an evil man, Tosha?” she asked.
He’d long since stopped asking himself this question and others like it. He had no interest in subjecting the elegant complexity of the world to oversimplification. But he liked considering himself through her eyes, and he was approaching a conclusion.
“Maybe you are evil. Maybe that’s why I want you so badly.”
“If you want to make this simple, I will agree. But you know this thing that draws you to me is more.” He dragged her hand over his chest, to trace down his sternum, her touch like cool water at his heart.
When she spread her fingers on his skin and pressed her palm down, he knew it as an acknowledgement of the truth. He kissed her then, a hand threaded through her curls and the other at her shoulder, and bent her back over the slab, where it had all begun.
He wanted her in her rawest form, and he was surprised by his own instinct to rush—to surrender to a savagery he had long since mastered. How fascinating she was to catalyse her own side effects. All he knew was the need to put his mouth on her, but with a deep breath of anjelica and re’em blood scenting the air, he found his centre, he found measure. The fastidious walk of his fingers unpeeled all her meaningless outer layers, her clothes discarded at their feet on the stone floor.
He placed his palm in a mirror of where she touched him, below her breasts, on the bottom-most flare of her ribcage.
Her lips parted with the shock of the same thing that answered instantly, buzzing through his veins.
“It feels—it feels like I’m a wand. Like when you touch me I could—” She cut herself off, and hauled him down to her. All her strength and her violence was concentrated into a tongue lashing, and a kiss so scorching he lost himself, for just one moment, and groaned.
“I know you’re holding back,” she whispered, sinking punishing teeth into his lips.
“You are correct. But no more.” He kissed down her jaw, and bit her back, the marks of incisors pressed hard into her neck.
She cried out. “Oh Tosha, that hurts, oh—it hurts—” Pain and pleasure coalesced into a shattering realisation, and he soothed all her jagged edges, licking over her jaw and back into the invigorating cold of her mouth.
Their contact told stories.
She is no more than nine, running away from a pack of girls who are howling for a teacher’s justice. In truth, she is running from what she’s done; the writhing, slimy worms she conjured, infesting the pink paperback in her cruel classmate’s hands. She didn’t mean it—she’d simply grown sick of the nickname she could not shed. Bookworm.
She doesn’t look back, but she does look down in confusion when her running feet start to sink into powdery snow and the colourful school corridors bleed into snow-laden pines.
In the middle of a frozen river ahead, she spots a boy, crowned with dark hair and wearing clothes barely fit for a mild spring day. His breath mists thick and white and his whole body is quaking with intolerable cold. Somehow, he doesn’t notice her approach. His singular focus is directed towards his own cupped hands.
Gingerly, she steps onto the ice. When she is sure it will hold her, she tiptoes—en pointe—towards him.
“Hello.”
The boy doesn’t look up. His lower lip is trembling, but she knows the true danger comes when the shivering stops.
She doesn’t understand the words, but she understands what he needs. Without touching him, she holds her hands over his. Between the hemispheres created by their palms, a little light flares. Its diminutive size is deceptive—the moment it appears colour floods through his cheeks and he finally raises his eyes and sees.
“What was that?” she asked breathlessly.
“I think you know.” The memory of her vendettas were not the only thing that might be shared with a kiss, and they had hardly begun to scratch the surface of what lay between them.
Antonin was a talented alchemist—there were those who might have thought his fixations were madness, but he understood the secrets where the natural and unnatural intersected. There was magic in metal and magnetism, in the traces of iron in the marble slab that called to her ferrous, sluggish blood, in the mercury that whispered to her spark. He pulled on it, and in turn it pulled on her, spreading and rearranging her limbs outward in a captivating splay. His wand summoned a flask of exstimulo to his waiting hand, and although most would have thought merely to drink it, he understood the potion held other properties.
He initiated a slow drip and drizzle that would strengthen and fan the flame of iskra, warming her from the inside out. A gentle pink bloomed where beads of light blue fell, and to chase after them with his tongue would only fortify his own spark as well.
He traced the tip of his wand in pursuit of droplets as they wobbled and rolled along the dips and curves of her, priming nerve endings and following an exacting path.
The wand grazed lightly through her slit, just enough to cant her hips, before it fled upwards and circled each nipple. She flexed her fingers and toes, circulation and perception escalating.
Over the course of his capricious life, Antonin had flirted and fucked with tobacco, vodka, and all manner of ill-advised potions. Tongue traced scar and bone, navel to mons, until he opened her wide, dipped in deep, and encountered a substance more addictive than any he'd ever imbibed.
“So wet for me.” He used his thumbs to spread her for his penetrating study, and found that the magic his wand had tracked here, and the traces of exstimulo it had carried with it, had made her swollen—was still engorging her further under his watchful eye. She was dark pink and so needy, and he bent his head diligently to aid the cause.
“Tosha—I can feel your tongue on my clit.” She drew in a sharp breath at either the sensation or the realisation. “I can feel everything.”
“
Hard suction on her nub earned him a scream, and he smiled to hear it, his lips curving against her cunt as he swept and swirled and laved, hauling her right to the edge of a steep drop.
He pulled away suddenly, dashing the back of his wrist across his mouth just as she was about to topple, and she raised her voice again, this time in frustration. “More,” she demanded, her hands tugging at clothing he was only too willing to shed for her.
He climbed up her body and her eyes roved over the ink that his shirt had shielded from her gaze, the dark mark nearly lost amongst stars, sigils, and strzyga. He allowed her to look her fill, and stroke her fingers through the hair on his chest, down to where it grew thick over the defined muscles of his abdomen.
Preempting the question he knew she wanted to ask, he kissed her.
She sits next to him in a tiny cell. He’s young and pretty, and so fucking hungry.
“
Outside the bars, fiendfyre vaults and pirouettes ever closer, alongside a symphony of screams. She takes his hand and laces their fingers, and they will face the hordes together.
She faced him now, eye to eye and lips to lips, and the spark that spoke between them murmured that it was time. He stared rapt at her, so beautiful as he pressed inside her and felt her flesh give way. An experimental thrust, and then another, and she warmed inside with each one while he kissed her neck and then licked inside her mouth once more.
A labyrinth is formed by rows and rows of dusty spheres, and she is being hunted down by monsters. And yet she is not a teenage girl afraid to admit she doesn’t know-it-all, she is herself, a woman of twenty-five.
She glances backwards over her shoulder and sees him there, walking at a leisurely pace, even as her legs cramp with the effort of fleeing him. He is not masked as he once was. His dark eyes weigh variables, and he awaits her interpretation.
He is no one’s puppet, she knows that now. He is Tosha and she does not fear him. She stops. She pivots. And she races towards the refuge of his arms. Together, they crash into a wall of prophecy and hundreds of futures sigh and whisper of maybe and perchance.
Every stroke inside her was stoking the spark into a blaze—when he plunged so deeply that he bottomed out it became an inferno. The urgency of her moans, the heat he could feel everywhere, the electric knowledge inside his own body, all of it told him she felt everything, all of it. They climbed toward a finale, arrived at the coda of a grand pas de deux, and he knew it was more than she’d ever felt in her life, even the one which had come before.
They were so intertwined, the iskra in each of them touching at last, that the contact of lips was no longer necessary. They kissed with the whole of their bodies instead.
The vision they fall into is not a memory this time, but one of those maybes—the hazy grey of a possibility. And yet as he watches their divided ambitions synthesise into vivid colour he knows they will make it so.
Over time she will abandon attempts to quantify good or evil in people or situations, but she will never lose sight of balance. Voldemort remains a problem she wishes to solve, and she will, of course—the beginning of the end will come the moment she agrees to work with Tosha.
Voldemort will never trust anyone, but in desperation, with all his horcruxes turned to dust, he will take note of whispers of Dolohov’s doll—the golden girl, who wears the veil like a cloak and whose cunt promises absolution.
A plan will form at pace, built back and forth across the slab, and murmured from his pillow to hers, later.
She will fuck the dark lord, with the soft magic she carries within—not light, nor dark—she will turn back the clock. Astride his hips, with Tosha behind a wall, looking on, the hourglass will turn and Voldemort will die so Tom Riddle can live—terribly beautiful, a whole new threat with raven wing curls, and curving pink lips. He will enjoy only moments of ascendancy, where he sees himself reflected in her eyes and vows to cherish and defile her while driving up and up.
He will come, and he will die. Like the rest. And Hermione will return to Tosha, with one last dirge upon her lips.
Her body wrenched around Antonin’s in the throes of a violent climax as she witnessed the inevitability of her ultimate triumph.
The clench of her cunt was as utopian as promised, but what tore his own orgasm from him was the emergent stutter of her heart, as powerful as the bolt of lightning which forked around them as it settled into a steady beat.
As her moans dwindled into luxuriant hums, he became slowly aware that she was watching his face, as captivated by him as he had been by her. Her expression was equal parts expectant and bereft, and he was heartened at the confirmation that, although she had not lost her newly acquired viciousness, she didn’t truly desire his death.
He caught one miraculous tear on his finger and raised it up to sample her salt.
By the time his cock slipped, and all that beautiful mess trickled and dripped, she simply looked confused. Somewhat smug, he sent her a lazy grin, and gathered up creamy spend to massage it over still-sensitive skin. She jerked until she howled, yet still she would not stop staring.
He laughed and licked his fingers. “You look like you are waiting for something.”
“You’re alive.” She sat up on her elbows, and then reached for his face. “How are you alive?”
Antonin had always understood magic as an exchange. The price for his lovely little doll—his Hermione, was no less than a part of himself. She walked and fucked and killed, because from the moment dear doomed Lucius had dumped her on this very slab, Antonin knew her iskra’s glow like it was his own. It was not destiny, but alchemical affinity made unbreakable by sulphur, salt, and a skerrick of his own spark, given away for good.
“You live because I live. You feel because I feel. I will never die by your hand, or your body. I lied to you, before; you are magic, yes, but there is no doubt that you are mine, just as I am yours.”
Her hand found his throat at the same time as her lips brushed over his cheek. She slowly closed the vise, and he allowed the crushing pressure to build until she was the one gasping for breath when he gripped his revived cock and stuffed himself inside of her again.
“
“
All the while, outside a tempest had swallowed the hopeful sun. Lightning seemed to fork and spread outwards from the slab, and thunder boomed across the Dales.