This story is also available in text-only format here, and in standard size print here.



Closer
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2014


Pairing: Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: NC17
Word Count: 2000
Summary: Sex in Azkaban is more a labour of love than a thrill, but today he needs to be closer than iron bars will allow.
More Fic: On AO3 or my fic site.
Feedback: Love the stuff. On AO3 or at deslea at deslea dot com.



A sound of frustration escapes Lucius' lips.

"It isn't enough," he growls, pressing into her as deeply as he can. Her thighs ache from bracing back, hard against the bars, and there are cold dents deep into her flesh. His cock is deep inside her but the rest of their bodies are miles apart.

There is honour among their kind, and Avery and Jugson are tactfully pretending to sleep. Macnair, though, is watching with a slow grin on his face, and she doesn't give a shit anymore. She can't allow sadness a foothold here, so she gives reign to slow anger. Fuck them. Fuck them all. She'll let them all see her do it before she'll let them keep her from her husband, the warden and the Ministry and the sainted fucking Order too. Let them try and keep them apart. Just let them fucking try.

She straightens, and it takes him out of her, but she leans back on the bars and lets him hold her. He draws long breaths, smelling her hair, his hands snaking out from between the bars to touch her breasts. Pushes down her neckline to do it, baring her a little. Just enough for him to cup and knead her. Bits of him touch bits of her between bars, odd places where limbs or soft flesh can push through. His knee beside hers. The swell of her bottom against his thigh. His cock pressed against her back, gentle pressure through rucked-up skirts. He bends his head and manages an awkward kiss of her shoulder; she presses it back for him, enough to press flesh where he can get to it, and he dips and sucks and nips at her.

It's a labour of love, this. Their climaxes are reached more through gritty determination than anything. She misses him, and she would rather have this than nothing, but the pleasure is streaked with grey.

The bars, she thinks. Those damned bars.

They are a concession to the Dark Lord, who wants his failed soldiers punished, but fit for further duty in the fullness of time. The general prison population roam free in the building, prone to unpredictable bouts of violence and discord. Lucius does not. It keeps him safe, but it also keeps them apart. The bars are an express order; the warden will not defy it, though he allows her access to the extent that his orders are silent.

She wears short, flowing skirts that can be lifted and spread. Off-the-shoulder blouses that give access to her breasts. Her whole wardrobe has been re-evaluated for its practicality to allow access and cover at once. They kiss awkwardly through bars, touch and bond, and then she turns and bends and he takes her, contact there purchased with distance everywhere else.

The frustration is something they both feel, but he has never complained before. He knows what this costs her. Before, during, and after.

"Turn around," he says. "I need you closer."

It's a trade-off, like all of it, but she does it. His cock is against her belly and her soft breasts push against his chest, but their hips are apart and there are precious inches between his breastbone and hers.

He pushes his face hard between the bars, stopped short at the cheekbones, and she cranes her neck to reach him. Her kisses are small but greedy, mouth open just enough to grab onto him without losing her place with him. The wild abandon of deep, open kisses is lost to them.

He makes that sound of frustration again, but this time there is a heart-rending note to it, and it wounds and worries her. It happens that way sometimes. There will be some little detail that he will grasp onto and be unable to shake, building into depression before her eyes. Today, it is closeness. Being able to kiss her and take her at the same time.

She grabs onto one of the bars. "Help me," she whispers. "Help me up."

He does, taking her weight on his thigh and bracing his foot on the bottom crossbar. They've gotten this far before.

"We've tried this, Narcissa," he says, but without a lot of conviction. She knows he wants to find a way. They both do.

"Then we'll try again," she says, pushing her legs through the bars. This is where they get stuck. She has to bend her thighs double to get close enough to take him, and that only leaves around his waist for her calves. That doesn't leave him enough room to get his arms through the bars and take her weight. He can get one arm around her back, stabilising her, but the other is too far away to help.

He can reach her now, but there's no way to move.

He tries and fails to touch her breast, and this seems to break him suddenly. He looks down between them, at her spread and twisted between bars like a bloody contortionist, and his eyes are suddenly wet.

"I shouldn't have done this to you," he says in a low voice of self-reproach. "I should have divorced you and set you free, not dragged you into hell with me."

She reaches out with her free hand and tugs his head against the bars. Presses her lips firmly against his. "Don't," she says. "That's the Dementors talking, not you."

"It's reality," he mutters.

"Reality is I'm here with you, and you can love me or you can leave me alone. The man I married might drag me into hell with him, but he would never leave me alone." She presses her thighs harder against the bars. Presses her legs tighter around his waist. "Now do it."

He hesitates, just for a second, but then he surrenders to it, lips closing greedily onto hers, his cock sheathing inside her to the hilt. It's an odd angle, but not a bad one, and she closes around him, tiny rotating movements that are all she can manage. He picks up the rhythm and grinds into her.





"God! Lucius," she gasps. She'd forgotten how good it was, to feel his cock and his heat and his mouth and to feel them all at once. Such a little thing, and now it's everything. For both of them.

He drags out his free arm from between the bars and thrusts it out above the crossbar, plunging his hand into her hair. Now she's braced against him all over the place, by his thigh and his hands on her back and in her hair, and by her own legs suspending her around his waist. There's something all-consuming about it, the different lines of tension in her body, the way his face is pressed hard to hers, blocking out everything else. She can't imagine tensioning herself like this at home, but here and now it's somehow exactly what she needs.

Lucius grinds harder, rhythm fast and erratic. "Fuck, Narcissa. Fuck them all. Fuck them for doing this to us."

Including the Dark Lord, she thinks, but does not say. There will be a time to make him choose, but not today. Today, his anger is enough to keep him sane.

"Forget them," she says. "Fuck me. Love me."

"You know I do," he growls, deep and primal, and that trips a switch inside her, awakens all sorts of places inside her that their movements couldn't have woken alone. She chokes out his name as shudders ripple through her, and he kisses her, hard and greedy as she takes him with her.

They stare at each other for long, long moments when they're done. Drawing trembling little puffs of breath.

She says at last, "How the fuck am I going to get down?"

He bursts out laughing. "Crazy woman," he says, and kisses her.

As he helps her down, she thinks it's the first time they've really laughed together in years.






When she arrives in the warden's office to take the Floo back, he corners her, as he always corners her. His breath is stale on her cheek and his fingers are blunt, feeling up beneath her skirt, tracing over her naked flesh.

"Did he fuck you hard? Did he make you come?" he taunts slyly, tracing over her clit. He thinks he's humiliating her, and she's thankful for that. If he didn't get off on the humiliation, he'd get off by fucking her, and she doesn't think she could take that. She is at the outer limits of what her mind can reconcile already.

She is not humiliated. She is a married woman, giving and taking what is rightfully hers by every custom and law going back ten thousand years. He cannot shame her.

"I ought to make you save some for me one day," he whispers into her cheek, scratching her with stubble.

She says coolly, "You ought to remember that the day you take something of my husband's is the day I wage war on you. You know I can do it."

He slides a finger between her folds, and holds it up, then sucks on it deliberately. "You aristocrats and your fucking rules. Only your husband can have your cunt, but playing with your pussy is a-okay. Drinking from you is totally fine as well." It's more Lucius on his lips than her, but she knows better than to say so.

He's right, she supposes, but she has to keep something. She has to.

"As long as I get to see my husband whenever I want, you can play. Cross the line and I'll destroy you."

He smirks then. "Have it your way. It's all bullshit anyway. I know what you are. A filthy slut, no better than any other." He lets go of her skirt and smooths it down. "Think on that at your pretentious fucking parties. You can wear all the pretty clothes you like, but underneath, you're just a whore who fucks through bars in front of a dozen men, and lets a stranger rub it all over her clit when she's done."

She lets him carry on his invective. It is the last part of the ritual of humiliation, and the one she minds the least. She knows what she is, and it has nothing to do with better or worse, or highborn or low. It is surviving and thriving in a world that wants to see them crawl.

"I know what I am, warden," she says as she steps into the Floo. "I'm a Malfoy."

Let them try and take that.






She hoards it, the part of him she's managed to take with her, like a thief with his treasure.

She slips into bed unwashed, and finds it between her folds, and strokes. Just strokes. Sometimes she takes her pleasure, sometimes not - it depends on the warden and how much of a mental toll he has taken - but that isn't why she does it.

She does it because here in the dark, comforting warmth of his seed inside her, she can almost believe that he's here. That the silence is one of companionship. That she could reach out with her hand and touch, without iron bars between.

She doesn't reach out - the illusion is fragile - but she traces out her foot, straying it into his space. Feels the gentle heat of his spellwork. Every time he went out to fight, he would leave his place in the bed charmed to keep her warm for him while he was gone, and she'd thought it a sweet gesture. Just that. Never dreaming that one day it would be all she would have of him.

He knew. She knows that now.

She needs his warmth more than the illusion, and she crawls over to his space. Curls up there, eyes closed. Feels his warmth around her and his warmth inside her, and bittersweet tears seep out from beneath her eyelids. Grief for something half-lost. Gratitude for what she has managed to claw back.

When the tears have been and gone, she feels some measure of peace.

Slowly, quietly, she takes her pleasure after all, and falls asleep with his name on her lips.

END




Author's Notes

The artwork accompanying this story was made before the story, and the story was inspired by the process of making it. Although the image only shows them from the waist up, I posed the models from head to toe in the 3D modelling software. I did turn off the "limits" that mimic the range of natural movements and allowed limbs to rotate a fraction further, but I didn't change the width between prison bars, shorten or lengthen limbs, or anything like that. So the position is possible, although quite difficult.

The thing is, in the course of experimenting and trying to find a way that they could do this, I actually started to tap into the utter frustration and heartbreak of it. It was something that really stayed with me. The story was the result.