A/N: Thank NaNoWriMo for faster updates! I'm way behind on word count, but writing much faster than usual anyway. Anyone else doing NaNo this year? If so, you can friend me over at and we can annoy each other! My author name is colbycheese.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Jacques Malfoi
"Porgy!" called Hermione as she reached the top of the stairs.
Porgy popped into sight.
"Yes, Miss Granger?" the elf asked politely.
"Where is Mr. Malfoy?"
"The master is indisposed, Miss Granger."
"Yes, I know that, Porgy. Where is he?"
"He is not to be disturbed."
"Porgy!"
"Porgy is following orders like a good house elf," said Porgy.
"But what about my orders?" asked Hermione.
"Porgy does not answer to Miss Granger," said the elf.
"But I'm the one who got you from the Ministry!"
"For Mr. Malfoy," said Porgy.
"Still, that has to count for something!"
Porgy stayed still, very much not revealing the whereabouts of Mr. Malfoy. Hermione groaned loudly.
"Fine! Fine, Porgy! I'll find him myself!"
"Wait!" was Porgy's reply, but Hermione was already halfway down the Grand Malfoy Hall – West Wing Edition.
"Lucius!" called Hermione, passing suits of armor and large, buttressed entrance-spines, flitting across fitted-wood stairs and faded, ornate rugs. Finally she pulled out her wand and yelled "Accio Malfoy!" to which there was a resounding bump against the third door on the right.
"Ah-hah!" she exclaimed. "I've found you!"
Throwing open the third door on the right, she was immediately blinded by the light of a hex and a voice proclaiming, "Stupefy!"
As she fell to the ground, she realized she really hadn't expected him to hex her.
-oOo—
Hermione's first realization of consciousness was that she was lying on the wood floor, and it was hard. Her second was that she no longer had her wand. She threw herself upright on her elbows and looked around frantically, some leftover residue of war panic rising to the surface within her, probably due to the combination of being wandless and being in Malfoy Manor.
Lucius was sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, leaning his elbow on some papers, and watching her with subtle, patient interest and perhaps some longsuffering.
"Do I look like a chair to you, Miss Granger?" he asked.
She blinked herself into full consciousness.
"No," she replied.
"Do I look, in any way, like an inanimate object?" he asked.
"No," she replied.
"Then whyever would you make the questionable decision to accio me like some kind of lost shoe as if that couldn't, in most cases, though fortunately not this one, cause extreme bodily harm, because I am, in fact, a person?" he asked, still deadly patient, though something was starting to show between the cracks, something hot like lava.
"Ahem," said Hermione. "Wow, so that worked?"
Lucius just narrowed his eyes at her.
"Yes, of course it did," she mumbled, remembering the thump against the third door to the right. "But you're fine, right?"
He didn't reply, and instead just continued sitting, one leg crossed with misleading calm over the other, and with narrowed eyes.
She sat up.
"Alright, fine, I won't accio you anymore. But I couldn't find you, and Porgy wasn't helping at all!"
"Porgy was following instructions. You weren't making the elf's life more difficult by trying to get him to disobey his master, were you?"
"You make it sound so bad," she said, frowning. "We needed you, and here you were locked away all day doing who knows what because you certainly weren't going to tell anyone what you were up to, were you? You were just going to let us wonder and have to deal with it, because that's what you do. You never tell anyone what's going on, because that's to your advantage and of course everything must be to your ultimate advantage, Lucius. That's all that matters."
She'd worked herself up into a fine spirit of agitation and pulled herself up off the floor with a brisk sigh. How many times would she become wholly sick of Lucius Malfoy and his machinations before this mess was through?
Lucius had remained quiet through her diatribe, and so when she looked over she found him with his chin in his palm and his face reflective. Maybe he wasn't even thinking about what she'd just said. Maybe he hadn't even listened.
"What happened today?" he asked.
"Two men were sent from the Ministry to check up on our work, but mostly because the vial of your blood was detected when I went through the gate," she said.
"Mn," he replied.
"One of the men actually told me about the Ministry's ward on the gate," she said.
"Oh, that is good news," he said.
"I suppose," she said.
He leaned back in his chair and smiled. "It's refreshing to work with someone who everyone inherently trusts."
She only scowled at him, as he was clearly using her trustworthiness to manipulate the world.
"I suppose that must be a first for you, mustn't it?" she said, sullenly.
"Depends," he said. "Voldemort and thus his side inherently trusted Bellatrix."
Hermione winced slightly at the woman's name, who would be forever associated with horrible memories. She turned away to take in the room, which was a large, well-furnished sitting room including his desk, and on the far wall, an arch led to another room in which sat a bed and other bedroom-type furnitures. So this was probably his "quarters". There was a lot of black, and silver, and some green and a little blue, and a few splashes of red. Whatever. She hated it, right then.
"Please return my wand," she said, instinctively looking for and locating the door which led out with her eyes.
There was the scuffing of a chair against the floor as Lucius stood up, and as he approached she decided she would deign regard his visage.
With a slow exhale, she turned to look at him, and he was holding out her wand for her, handle extended. Accepting it, the whole process felt too easy.
"If you would like to fight, we certainly can," he then said. "But you did say you would prefer not to."
"To fight," she said right away.
"Yes, that's what I was saying."
"No, but you can't just leave the sentence like that with a 'to' on the end, it's just dangling there, you have to finish it-"
"No I do not have to finish it."
"At least put something at the end!"
"It is acceptable either way!"
"Acceptable to whom?"
"Normal people!"
"Are you implying that I am not normal, Lucius?" she inquired, resisting the urge to accept that she was suddenly full of rage. "Are you implying that you are?"
"Miss Granger-"
"Oh, for crying out loud, Lucius," she groaned. "Call me Hermione."
"I have," he said, suddenly vaguely defensive.
"Once or twice, and entirely by accident," she said. "That doesn't count."
"What does it matter?" he said, irritated and moving away to return to his desk, as if he had decided that this conversation no longer pleased him and he'd rather be doing something else.
"It matters because as long as you continue to call me 'Miss Granger', I will continue to feel as if you are condescending and treating me like a seventeen year old child at Hogwarts, instead of like a fully capable and possibly extremely brilliant adult who is assisting you and your house with your many, many continual Malfoyesqueian issues."
"Malfoyesqueian?" he asked, somewhere between confused and delighted by the invention.
"Don't change the subject!" she spat.
"Hermione," he suddenly stated from his chair at the desk, his voice and his face reflecting both acquiescence and a darkened challenge. His tone and his compliance took her by surprise, and she fell into silence a second longer than she would have preferred before replying.
"There, that wasn't so hard," she said, casting her eyes aside to lock on the way out. She kind of needed to get out right then, very badly, and she wasn't really sure why, but there was a creeping claustrophobia that was pulling at her and nagging at her to get out of there and go find Luna and do it immediately and-
"Wait," he said, knowing her mind somehow.
"Come find me in the dining room," she said, hastily making for the hall.
"No, wait," he insisted.
He was up and after her faster than she'd ever seen him move, though she didn't actually see him, she mostly heard him and then braced with anticipation for what must suddenly be contact, and that contact was him grasping her arm and the centrifugal force of being turned to face him, and how did her back come to be against the doorframe and why exactly was any of this happening?
"I expected visitors from the Ministry today," he said, explaining to her, his captive audience, "and I knew everything would go more smoothly if it came across as if I didn't exist. Despite my blood, it did come across that way, and now the Ministry suspects less than it did last night, or one can hope. I even dressed you for the occasion, so as to elicit respect and attractiveness, both equally disarming for men and intimidating for women, depending upon who the Ministry sent, but I expected men. I was correct on all counts, and thus you should probably proceed to compliment my foresight."
"At this time, I would prefer not to compliment your foresight, Mr. Malfoy," she said to him, testing the give in his grasp, but finding very little.
"Surely a reasonable woman such as yourself should recognize and voice the value of such foresight in a case such as this, Miss Granger," he replied, unrelenting.
"Perhaps reasonably, I should," she rejoined, "but I would rather not."
"Might I inquire as to your motivation?"
"Spite."
His hand tightened on her arm, like the testing, anticipatory grasp one makes on a broadsword just before one charges into battle.
"Cut your hair," she blurted out suddenly, stopping him in his tracks.
"What?" he asked, wholly expressing that word to its fullest extent.
"What if you were to cut your hair?" she asked.
"What are you talking about?" he asked.
"Your hair," she said.
"Why are we talking about my hair?"
"Because," she said, "it's your most distinguishing feature."
He gave her a sideways look.
"And if you're going to pass as a distant Malfoy inheritance cousin from France, you'll need to appear at least somewhat unlike yourself," she said.
"Oh, dear Merlin, what on earth are you going on about now?"
She casually leaned her head back against the doorframe and merely said, "Think about it."
It was, in fact, a compliment to Lucius that she thought enough of his intellect and powers of reason that she trusted he was capable of fully working out what she was "going on about" on his own. Whether he would realize it was a compliment or not was his problem.
As she spoke her challenge to him to think, his eyes had immediately shifted to instant mistrust, subtle of course, because this was Lucius, but she knew that look already, and she watched as it blossomed into interest and curiosity, and then faded, glazing into the shuttered machinations of his milling mind. The light of realization beat against the backs of clouded thought, shining through only momentarily once, then twice, before he had it in full blazing sun with clear eyes and all the color of his face; he'd worked it all out, and she hadn't had to explain a thing. She let out a slow, slightly unsteady breath.
"That's insane," he said to her, though without full conviction. "You're insane." He said that with slightly more conviction.
She couldn't help but smile at him, because, good grief, it had been such a pleasure to watch him think.
"You do speak French, don't you?" she asked.
"Je suis ennuyé par votre demande," he replied.
"I'll take that as a 'yes'," she said.
"No, no," he said, pulling her in a little with his hand, which was still 'round her arm, "Listen. It's too risky. They've just discovered my blood at the gates, who's to say they won't have a similar charm at the ball, immediately rooting me out? It's impossible, I say."
"Simple. They're mistaken. That blood isn't Lucius Malfoy's at all. It's just strikingly similar, since it belongs to his second cousin, Jacques Malfoi. Of France, naturally," she said.
"Jacques," he replied, totally blandly.
She gave him a lopsided smile.
"How very creative,-," he began, and he stopped, and she knew he was stuck just before saying her name, and somehow he couldn't say it. He released her arm and disengaged, averting his attention and then clearing his throat.
"Who could possibly think it is you?" she asked. "You've not aged a day in twenty years, and everyone believes you're dead. Nothing like this has ever happened before, Lucius. It wouldn't take much to suspend everyone's disbelief, especially if you were, I don't know, nice."
He glanced sharply at her.
She spread her hands apologetically and said, "Just think of it as another method to get what you want."
He groaned and turned away, moving to the desk, where he could reside with his safety nest of papers, but she wasn't going to let him.
"Lucius-," she began, but he spoke.
"One could suspect you are trying to reform me," he said.
"How could one manage such a thing?" she choked.
"One could suspect manipulation," he said, picking up a stack of parchment.
"Yes, one certainly could, couldn't one!" she said. "One could suspect manipulation pretty much all the time. Every day, all of the day."
She hoped it was super-duper crystal clear she was talking about him doing the manipulating, not her. Because she didn't manipulate! She just … did things. Or, at least, she didn't think she did the manipulating. Maybe she did and she didn't know it. Now this was getting complicated.
"Look," she said, "I'm not manipulating you, at least not to reform you, at least not consciously. I'm finding solutions to your problems. I think. Is that enough?"
"I wonder if…," he began, holding the stack of papers, yet ignoring them in his deep thought, "Do you think that if I manage to go back to my own time, that this timeline will reset?"
"Oh," she said, considering the implications of such a thing.
"Do you think that none of this will have happened and it will be erased from existence?" he asked, looking at her.
"Wow," she said, both finding the idea alarming and intriguing and alarming and back to intriguing in some kind of oscillating brain seizure. "I don't know," she finally said.
"It makes sense, doesn't it? Because how could any of this happen again, if I go back and right what went wrong before it can go wrong?" he asked.
"It… wouldn't," she said.
"But I would imagine I would retain my memories of it happening, wouldn't I?" he considered. "I would have to."
"To retain them," she quietly corrected, completing his sentence, because she just had to. Rather, it was a thing of which she had to do.
He very nearly rolled his eyes at her, but he didn't, to his credit.
"Well," she said, clearing her throat, "In my time at Hogwarts using a time turner that is how it worked. There can only be one true timeline. At least, one timeline in which you and your specific, singular consciousness exist. And if in that timeline, you were to go back in time and stop the process occurring which sent you here, then, for example, the Hermione Granger from that 1998 would never experience incessant wrangling with Lucius Malfoy and his mysterious house in 2015."
"Well then, isn't that good news for you?" he said, wryly.
She began to reply but was stopped by a surge of unfamiliar internal panic over the idea of losing everything she'd learned and experienced over the past few weeks, and perhaps even it was accentuated by the idea of losing her familiarity with Lucius, because, yes, he was interesting.
"I … suppose," she said, casting her eyes aside to avoid contact with his.
There was a weighted moment.
"Of course it is," she said, "I mean it isn't, because I don't like the idea of losing memories, not at all, especially when the memories and experiences have been very… um… well, illuminating. Possibly slightly life-changing."
She didn't care to look to see what the expression on his face might be.
"But it doesn't matter, it doesn't change our goal at all, of course," she said. "What is important is restoring your family and setting right that which went wrong. Someone is responsible for the general destruction of the Malfoy name – besides your own evildoing, of course, which didn't help, but we can discuss that later, stop looking at me like that – regardless, someone has destroyed your family and we are going to find out who or what it was, and then we're going to politely ask your house to send you back to fix it, and whatever memories or experiences I lose are worth it to repair it. As long as you don't meddle with my life in the past, everything should be quite similar to how it ended up. Just promise not to have me murdered to stop me from becoming the grammar-mad abomination I am now. I kind of like who I am, and no, everything isn't perfect, but when is everything ever perfect?"
"Everything is never perfect," he replied, "And I promise not to have you murdered. How could I extinguish something so unique and irreplaceable?"
There was something resembling fondness toward her on his face and it made her decidedly uncomfortable.
"So," she said, forging on, "you know what that means, right?"
"What does it mean?"
"It means that whatever you do here, if we are successful in sending you back, will only have consequences in your own memories. All that matters is that we succeed."
"You're right," he said.
"And so what does it matter if you impersonate a pleasant, non-evil –stop looking at me like that—Malfoi in order to get the result you require, which is Draco out of St. Mungo's and here where Luna can remove the strange ward on his body and restore his memories, thus giving you the answers to who or what killed Narcissa and be given your house's permission to go back in time and stop it from happening in the first place?" she asked.
"I suppose in the end it will be only I who is aware of my abject shame over behaving like an imbecile," he replied.
"Oh, please," she laughed. "Shame? Really? You do, after all have to pass as a Malfoy relative, so I'm certain you can behave almost just like yourself. If you believe that to be imbecilic, then just remember it's you that said it, not I. No, I think you just have to do something unexpected."
"Like what?" he asked, letting her snide slide.
She thought for a moment.
"Oh!" she said. "I know! You can take a muggleborn to the Ministry's Spring Ball. That's something Lucius Malfoy would never do. Never, ever. He would simply die first, before being sullied with such incendious filth."
She really played that up, but hey, she was kinda bitter.
"Or, more reasonably, he never would because he is already married to a pureblooded witch," was his reply. "And he tends not to go in for overt affairs. Too many loose ends and possibilities for blackmail and/or extortions."
"Don't even begin to pretend that my reasons and your reasons aren't both true," she said, ready to, who knows, maybe punch him in the nose if he pretended he hadn't always been the world's second-biggest bigot (after Voldemort, naturally).
He didn't admit it, because perhaps he preferred to keep his silence on the matter, but he didn't deny it, and a raised eyebrow showed he'd let it pass. Whatever, moving on.
"And, though I'm very sorry to bring this up, I really am," she said, secretly congratulating herself on showing at least some empathy, "but Lucius Malfoy is a widower, and has been for a very long time."
He took that in momentarily, and a certain sorrow passed through his features, sinking in and imprinting itself on his bones. Maybe this was the first time he'd allowed himself to realize what he was, and he clearly didn't like it. It seemed to her that Lucius Malfoy didn't at all like the thought of not being married, despite whether or not that marriage was "good" or "terrible" or "middling" or whatever descriptive terms people might use to describe marriages. She didn't know, obviously.
"Yes, well," he said after a moment, his words heavy. "That is all relative to one's perception of time."
A fine point. He could still be not-a-widower, depending upon what Time decided to do with him.
But he would be married in a terrible marriage.
Yet… he seemed to strongly prefer that terrible marriage to not-marriage.
There was so much to figure out about this man.
Why would he want to be in a terrible marriage with someone? What is the motivation? Political? Social? Political-social? Did he love Narcissa but she didn't love him? Did she love him and he didn't love her? Did they both equally dislike each other? Narcissa was dead, why was she thinking about her as if she were still alive? What was this flowing time stream doing to her mind?
Was it a marriage of convenience? If so, why did he care so much?
Lucius bland look in her direction made her realize she was doing too much inner-monologuing.
"So," she said, knowing she couldn't ask him any of those questions, as they were far, far too personal. The problem was, those questions were screaming from every corner of her mind, disallowing her from coming up with anything useful to say. She took so long to think that he cordially came in to fill up the spaces.
"Voulez-vous aller au bal de printemps avec Jacques Malfoi?" he asked.
Well, then, she supposed that took care of that debate.
-oOo-
A/N: If you can't read a word of French, here are translations:
"Je suis ennuyé par votre demande," he replied. = "I am bored by your questions," he replied.
"Voulez-vous aller au bal de printemps avec Jacques Malfoi?" he asked. = "Would you like to go to the Spring Ball with Jacques Malfoi?" he asked.
There will be more French at the Ball. Also, my French is middling, so if you are French and my grammar is lousy, please correct me! I love learning about language!