A/N I am so pleased that I haven't kept you guys waiting very long this time. Your responses were so kind, supportive and understanding. Thank you, everyone. Here's the Antonin content that you were all promised. I had a blast writing this one - hope you enjoy it!
Antonin noticed the difference in her at once. A surge of anticipation rushed through him but he tried not to let it show, just let his eyes drink her in.
To his great displeasure, on Granger's previous two visits to him she had arrived with a controlled and distant demeanour that she'd managed to maintain for the entirety of her time in his presence. He'd suspected that she'd been using some sort of mental discipline to rein in her emotions and he'd been hard-pressed not to let his annoyance at this new strategy show.
For as long as he could remember his anger had always burned white-hot, but a stern, disciplined childhood from his parents and a further education in cool Slytherin cunning had helped him control his fiery, retaliatory nature. Much of that had been laid to waste thanks to over a decade in Azkaban (what use did monsters have for self-discipline?) but this ongoing war with his zhar-ptitsa had forced him to utilise great control once more. So instead of trying to crack her out of her cool and indifferent mask by using provoking comments or pushing the limits of his physical touch, he'd forced himself to back off, to be similarly withdrawn. He'd had to clench his jaw so tightly to enforce his discipline that on both occasions it had ached for hours once she'd left. Patience, he'd told himself over and over. He had to believe that she wouldn't be able to keep up her control forever - a crack would show and he would be ready.
Yet judging by the emotion flashing from her eyes and radiating with every line of her body, he had been blessed with a chasm instead of the crack he'd been hoping for.
"This is an unexpected pleasure," he told her. His words had been meant in jest, to tease and rile her up, but they weren't exactly a lie either. It had only been a handful of days since her previous visit but Antonin did look forward to seeing her - and not just because it broke up the monotony of his life. He was so, so eager to touch her again after the previous disappointing visits. She would gasp for him tonight. He could tell. Fuck, he was going to make her moan if he could. He felt a surge of arousal in anticipation of what was to come, heat shooting straight to his cock. His desires weren't at all tempered by the anger he could see blazing in her gaze: fury he could work with (it was a hot and passionate emotion, afterall), it was indifference that had left him with nowhere to go.
He didn't know what he'd done to make her so angry with him. As he closed the gap between them, he took in her clenched fists, her tense shoulders and surly mouth, her quick breaths and, of course, that narrowed, hateful gaze. Interestingly, she didn't seem as flushed as normal nor was she eagerly removing her cloak. "What's brought you back here so soon?" he asked, not bothering to disguise the curiosity in his tone. Somehow, her mouth became even tighter and Antonin tried not to laugh. He'd missed his fiery and stubborn zhar-ptitsa. "Surely you don't need my touch already?" he questioned suavely and followed it up by delicately tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear, his fingers delivering a teasing whisper along her cheek and down her neck. His gaze had stayed locked on her face and he saw the slight widening of her eyes as his fingers came close, heard the smallest hitch in her breath in anticipation of the sweet sensation, witnessed the fluttering of her lashes when his skin met hers. "Or did you just miss me, milaya?" His voice was low, quiet, seductive but he finally got a proper reaction out of her, just like he'd been hoping for.
"Not a chance," she hissed, glaring at him once more as she pushed him back. She reached into the pocket of her cloak, pulled out a vial of potion and thrust it into his hands. "Nothing noteworthy has appeared in the news since I last saw you so you'll just have to make do with knowing that Slytherin lost to Gryffindor in the quidditch match today," she said, attempting a matter-of-fact tone as she removed her cloak and avoided his eye. "Now, let's get this over with." She put on a good show but Antonin could hear the strain in her voice, could see the rise and fall of her chest signifying her rapid, shallow breaths.
He arched an eyebrow at her but came no closer. "Are you not going to tell me what triggered the curse?"
Her eyes remained fixed on a point a couple of feet to his left. "It's none of your business," she said tightly, her lips barely moving. She crossed her arms over her chest and there came the previously absent flush. But he knew it wasn't caused by the heat from the curse this time. Something had clearly happened but she didn't want to tell him, which only intrigued him more. What could she possibly have done that would be embarrassing or humiliating for her to reveal to him and trigger a reaction to the curse? He'd never found out what had set her off last month on that memorable evening where he'd seen and touched her scar. Could it have been the same thing?
"Of course it's my business," he scoffed. "The whole reason I'm here is to research the spell and its side-effects. This is the second time in barely a month that the symptoms have deviated from their ordinary pattern. If you want me to break you from this curse then I need to know what's setting it off."
It was her turn to scoff this time but there was significantly more venom in her expression as she finally turned her gaze to him. "Don't pretend like you actually care about helping me," she snapped. "You only care about yourself! You haven't made a single spark of progress since you started your research." She threw a scathing, hateful look at the table, where some of his books lay jumbled untidily. She made another derisive noise. "I doubt you've even been trying - after all, the longer I'm dependent on you, the longer you get this cell." She'd advanced on him, closing the small gap between them, and Antonin had to resist the urge to take a step backward in the face of her wild emotion. "You're a selfish, heartless monster and I hate you!" She was breathing heavily as she waited for him to respond, her chest heaving but expression defiant. This aggressive and hostile behaviour was so unlike Granger that Antonin was determined to get to the bottom of it.
Instead of meeting her with fire of his own, he adopted a typical sneer and disdainful tone. "Stop behaving like a spoiled child and tell me - " He caught her wrist just before she could land the outraged hit to his face and she let out a whimper at the contact. Her expression showed the battle between her anger and the pleasure he gave her. Granger's attempt to hit him with her other hand was much weaker but he restrained her all the same, the increased contact making her shudder and bite her lip. "... what happened." She tried to glare at him but he shifted his hold so that he could stroke his fingers along what small parts of her skin he could reach, and her eyes fluttered shut.
"Have you lost your words?" he asked her after a few seconds. He'd been enjoying watching her revel in his touch, confirming the power he had over her, but he wanted answers more. Disorientating her with his hands and his provocative words might just make her frustratedly blurt out what she wanted to keep from him. As expected, her eyes shot open with a glare and she struggled in his grasp. "It's not usually an issue for you."
"I hate you," she repeated vehemently and Antonin just managed to avoid a kick aimed at his shin. He used her imbalance to force her backwards until she was flush with the wall. "Hate you, hate you, hate you!" she yelled.
Antonin forced her arms above her head and was able to hold her wrists in place with just one hand. She squirmed and tried to kick him again. Simultaneously, he slowly ran his free hand down her throat and wedged one of his legs between her own to keep her still. Judging by the gasp he felt in her throat and her blissful expression, she didn't realise just how intimately they were pressed against each other. Antonin tried to ignore how close her hip was to his cock. If he just lowered himself a little… but no, he had to stay focused.
Delicately, he cupped her throat. "Because I tried to kill you?" he whispered, responding to her hate-filled words. "You still hate me because of that?"
Granger let out a sound that seemed to be a mixture of a laugh, cry and a scream. Despite the attention of his hands, she momentarily looked at him with frank disbelief before her face became angry once more. "Of course I still hate you for that! It's not exactly something I can just get over - particularly when you've shown no remorse for what you did."
Antonin teasingly traced his fingers up her neck and along her jaw. "Just seems like an extreme reaction after all this time," he replied, briefly pressing his thumb into some of the tension he found in her jaw muscles and she let out a puff of air in response before jerking her face away.
"Because it never ends," she retorted angrily. "Your curse just takes and takes from me. Even when I think there's nothing else it can do, it finds another way to infect my life and take even more until I'm not -" She sucked in a breath but Antonin's hands had barely moved so he knew that her reaction wasn't of his doing. He waited to see if she would continue her tirade and hopefully reveal all to him. "…until I'm not even sure that I'm still me… because I would never…" She almost seemed to have forgotten that Antonin was there. Her eyes were fixed on his work table, on the books that lay upon it. "I would never do something like that to anyone."
She was scared, he realised. Not of him. She hadn't been scared of him for a long time. No, she was scared of herself, of something she'd done. His spellbooks were still occupying her gaze.
It suddenly clicked.
His mouth ran dry and another surge of desire ran through him, forcing him to hold in a groan. "You cursed someone?" he asked hoarsely. She shuddered and closed her eyes, letting out a whimper that was more despairing than pleasurable. "With one of my spells?" Lust had suffused his voice and he knew that he was panting almost as much as she was. His whole body thrummed with arousal and his cock strained to receive some friction from her, but however torturously close she was he managed to keep his lower body still.
Granger's eyes were still closed but she was grimacing. She shook her head slightly. "I missed."
That was incidental to Antonin. The fact remained that she'd successfully performed the spell with the intention to harm - his spell. He had never imagined Granger casting one of his curses before because, well, his mind had never considered something so wholly unbelievable. But picturing it now, it was without doubt one of the most arousing fantasies he'd ever had - yet it wasn't a fantasy. It had actually happened. His pretty little pure and self-righteous zhar-ptitsa had performed dark magic. Fuck, if that wasn't the sexiest, most titillating vision. His body urged him to act on his raging desires - to take her here and fully claim her as his own - but he couldn't. He knew he would lose everything that he had worked so hard for. Instead, he would have to store this all up in his memory to work on his release when she was no longer here. He only wished he knew what spell she'd used to paint the scene more accurately in his fantasies.
His spare hand had been shakily tracing up and down her throat for the last few seconds without him really thinking about it. He risked releasing her wrists and then used his touch as effectively as he knew how. He'd been with her enough times now to know what she liked from the few areas of her body that were available to him. When he'd noticed her more locked-down demeanour a few weeks ago, he'd very briefly tried to break her open with his touch. But as soon as he'd seen it wasn't having enough of the effect he'd wanted, he had backed off and kept his touch simple and substandard in the hopes that she'd crave the true relief he could give her. Now he had the chance he'd been waiting for. His hands moved to the back of her neck and the small amount of skin at her shoulders that he could touch. Carefully, he applied just the right amount of pressure to the tension he found there. She made a high keening sound and her head turned from side-to-side, her arms dragging slowly and heavily down the wall. One of her hands slid into his hair, the other wrapped around his wrist, trying to keep him close.
"Which spell was it?" he asked her huskily. "Which one did you use?" Her grip reflexively tightened in his hair at the question but it was hardly an unpleasant sensation, and he pressed his fingers a little harder into her muscles. "Tell me."
Her eyes snapped open and they locked gazes. "Goret'vechno."
Antonin's hands stilled at once, his breath caught in his throat. He hadn't expected her to say the actual incantation. Burn forever. Hearing her perfectly pronounce the words he'd crafted from his native tongue was nothing short of beautiful. Fucking beautiful. His thumb was suddenly hovering over her slightly parted lips, so close he could feel her breath moistening his skin. With just the pad, he quickly but delicately traced over the blush-pink lips that had uttered those beautiful words. She whimpered, her hot core moving restlessly against his thigh, and then there was a trace of wetness on his thumb that could only have come from her tongue.
Granger abruptly forced him away from her with a despairing cry, nearly ripping out a handful of his hair in the process. The suddenness of her actions caused him to stumble backwards but he quickly regained his composure.
"No!" she yelled, once more looking furious. "This is all your fault. All of it."
"I didn't make you say the curse, milaya," he pointed out smoothly, nonchalantly crossing his arms over his chest as he leant against the armchair even though his body was still afire with lust.
"But your books -"
"I didn't make you read them," he countered. "That was all you and nobody else. You were quite insistent as I recall. Knowledge can be powerful, dangerous. You've brought this on yourself."
Her eyes widened and she pointed a finger at him. "Don't you dare," she hissed.
He shrugged, not the least intimidated or sorry. She needed to be honest with herself if she was going to move on from this. He wouldn't tolerate having her constantly moping around during whatever their future together entailed. "Hard to accept the truth sometimes, isn't it?"
After seeing her eyes widen, he had then expected her to scowl or sneer - not burst out laughing. She held a hand to her chest as she laughed but there was a coldness in her expression in contrast to her apparent mirth, and it all grated on him excessively. Before he could even think about asking what she found quite so amusing, she said, "That's rich coming from you." He glared at her but now refused to give her the satisfaction of requesting that she explain herself. "It's all been worth it for you, has it? You'd have happily continued if you'd known that this was what you'd receive?" Her tone was a strange mixture of scornful and pitying, and there was a maddening air of self-righteousness around her as she looked down her nose at him. He just bit his tongue and maintained his icy glare. "Seriously - I want to know," she continued antagonistically in the face of his silence. He still didn't have a fucking clue what she was on about but he knew that whatever was behind all this was going to make him angry. "You've spent nearly half your existence - almost your entire adulthood, what should be the best years of your life - in this hellhole," she stated frankly, but Antonin's heart was hammering in his chest. "Do you lie to yourself that it's all been worth it?"
"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about," he snarled, fury flaring up white-hot.
"If you'd known that serving him would lead to a lifetime of imprisonment with ceaseless nightmares and mental torture, would you have still let him brand you?" Her voice was almost cruel in its coldness, her words slicing into his brain. "You've never questioned? Never doubted? Never wished your life had been different?"
"Hold your damn tongue!" he hissed, struggling to rein in his temper.
She shrugged, completely at ease. "Don't you like what I have to say? Are you scared of admitting the truth to yourself? It's hard to accept sometimes, isn't it?" She looked entirely too smug with herself for repeating his earlier words back to him.
"Self-righteous, ignorant mudblood," he spat. He longed to throw something, but that would prove that her words were getting to him and he wouldn't let her win.
She smiled. She actually fucking smiled. "Ah, yes. I wondered when you'd resort to using that slur - most bigoted pureblood's go-to insult when they encounter a muggleborn who doesn't kowtow to them, someone that scares them."
"Oh, dream on, zhar-ptitsa," he chuckled menacingly and then stalked towards her until there was barely an inch between them. "You don't scare me." She didn't back away or even flinch.
"Of course I do," she insisted, nose in the air. "Because I'm proof that you've been lied to from the moment you were born - that your whole life has been a lie. Because pureblood supremacy is a fallacy and you know it. Because I'm a smarter and more capable magic-user than every witch or wizard in my year and many years before me, even though I have no noble magical ancestral blood flowing through my veins, even though my parents are muggles. I scare you because if his cause is built on a lie, if you admit the truth to yourself, then what have all your years of sacrifice been for?"
Her words thundered in his head, rocking his very core, but he refused to give them credence. He blocked out any internal qualms and focused on the puffed up harpy in front of him. She needed putting in her place but he didn't know how to do so without crossing a line. "The Dark Lord will reward me handsomely for my loyalty."
"If you ever get out," she scoffed.
"Oh, I'll get out," he assured her with a confidence he hoped was warranted, and her smugness dimmed a little. "Whatever pretty delusions you've convinced yourself of in your head about the magical world, whatever news you've failed to tell me, I know that he gains in strength. That it's only a matter of time before he returns for his most favoured followers." He chuckled, and the sanctimonious, lecturing wave she'd been riding for the last few minutes calmed even further. He slid his hands along her cheeks so that he was cupping her face. She tried not to react to his touch but he felt her shiver and saw the struggle in her gaze. "And then what'll happen to you, milaya? That is the scary question, no?"
She glared at him, or at least tried to because he moved his hands to the tension that he could reach in her shoulders. "I hate you," she hissed.
"Believe me, I'm not particularly fond of you either," he replied silkily. "But for now, we need each other - so fucking deal with it while I give you what you want."
"I don't wan-"
He silenced her with a finger over her lips. "Yes, you do. Don't lie to me or to yourself, zhar-ptitsa."
She jerked her head so that his finger was off her lips, her eyes glinting with her familiar fire. "You want it too," she retorted, the slight raising of her chin daring him to deny it.
Antonin knew that she was aware of his attraction to her - how could she not be? He'd controlled it, denied himself from properly acting on it and concealed more of his baser desires from her, but she wasn't a complete idiot. However, this would be a first confirmation of what had been left unsaid between them - that he enjoyed touching her. If he wanted to be able to do more than that one day then this was a logical admission for paving the way to something more. But in light of who they both were, of her earlier antagonistic words (that he refused to think about), admitting out loud that he liked touching a mudblood was not something he was wholly comfortable with. Not that he would let her see that. "Yeah," he said shortly, meeting her scrutinising gaze with a cool, raised eyebrow. "I do. Nice to be on the same fucking page at last."
A/N It was so much fun to write angry Hermione after all this time. Interesting things were said here that are certainly going to get each of them thinking. This might be one of my favourite chapters.
I really hope you liked the update - let me know! Fingers crossed you'll hear from me relatively soon again.
Love,
Red
PS For those wanting to see my other stuff on AO3, just search this username or lildropofmagic. Hopefully I'll post this story on there one day, but I would want to read through and check each chapter first before doing so and that's not something I want to do right now.
