Just Another Step Down the Abyss
Title: Just Another Step Down the Abyss
Author/Artist: stonegrad
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Lucius/Draco
Summary: Some things have to be seen to make them real – to be appreciated, or reviled.
Warnings: Exhibitionism, very dark.
Prompt: An evening with Fudge…
Notes: Mmmmhmmm… Lucius is just so… -g- Beta’d by a friend of mine in the real world, who probably wishes I’d just leave her alone.



Just Another Step Down the Abyss
(Lucius/Draco)

Because we reap what we have sown,
And are as we were bred;

-- Mates by Ada Cambridge

The sound of brandy hitting the bottom of a glass seems painfully loud in the tense silence.

"I will admit, Cornelius - you had your uses," Lucius says softly, and his footsteps are muffled by the rug as he moves away from the table; the firelight throws shadows across his face, and Fudge is shivering, shivering and the chains are clanging against each other as he tries to sink into the wall…

There is a wing-backed chair near the hearth, old, carved – and Fudge is thinking ‘his father used to sit there’ as Lucius settles into it, and Lucius is thinking the same thing, too, except his memories are edged with blood and steel (‘Will you scream for me, Lucius? I want you to scream for me’ – the sheets were wet and his body was burning, burning away to nothing… ashes, ashes); the curl of his lips is sharp as a razor.

“Greedy for power, so impressionable,” Lucius muses, and brings the glass up to his lips, but does not drink. “Weak,” he adds, and shrugs elegantly, eyes narrowing. “And blind.”

Fudge swallows convulsively, throat dark from the rope fitting snugly against it; there is thoughtless panic in his eyes.

Lucius smiles, and replaces the glass on the side table with a dull clink, leaning forwards; the heavy velvet rustles like dry snakeskin as he moves, the light tangling in his hair, pulled back and tied with a black ribbon.

“We had an… interesting relationship, wouldn’t you say?” and here he pauses, almost as if he expects an answer, though the first spell he cast cut through Fudge’s vocal cords, severing them completely with only the briefest flash of pain – Lucius can still remember the way his face contorted when he tried to scream.

“A working relationship, even… though I suppose you wish we hadn’t, now?” He quirks an eyebrow, and leans back in his seat again, tapping the gloved fingers of his right hand against the arm of the chair in thought. “You are wondering, of course, about why I have you chained to the wall of my study – entertaining thoughts of a quick and painless end, are we, Cornelius?”

He laughs lightly, brushing the thought away with a wave of his hand.

“Oh, never fear, you’ll have no such thing; I have been planning this night for quite a while, and it will be very special indeed.” Lucius rises gracefully, walking slowly towards Fudge, sprawled as he is across the wall in another hideous set of robes – they will have to go.

Fudge flinches as a finger traces down his bloodstained cheek, the chains around his limbs rattling; and the leather of Lucius’ gloves is colder than it has any right to be, chill and smooth - he closes his eyes.

“I must confess, however, that this is not all for you,” Lucius concedes in a tone that sounds truly apologetic, running his thumb down to idly stroke along the rope digging into the flesh of Fudge’s neck.

“No,” he murmurs, and pulls away; footsteps clatter in the hallway, and the door opens slowly – Fudge’s gaze snaps too it, but the person stepping through barely glances at him as he turns; there is the dull click of a lock sliding into place, and Lucius smiles.

“The problem, Cornelius, is that you are ignorant; you know nothing about the so called ‘Dark magic’ you protest so vehemently against -” he pauses, and looks over his shoulder as Draco removes his hood, settling easily into Lucius’ vacated chair with a wry expression “- just like the rest of this country.”

Draco smiles, and leans back, the fingers of his right hand ghosting over the arm of the chair as he reaches for his father’s abandoned glass; Lucius looks back at Fudge, and there is an amused glint to his silver eyes.

“But that is not what this is about. You see, Cornelius, I find I am quite the exhibitionist at heart…” he trails off, the corner of his mouth lifting into a smirk as he turns away; a clatter of glass on wood, and Draco rises to meet him.

Fudge can’t close his eyes.

The brandy on Draco’s lips makes them shimmer, mesmerizing, as he steps forwards over the plush carpet, firelight glinting off the steel bands on his boots – he never so much as looks away from his father as he drops to his knees, one hand gripping Lucius’ hips as he leans forwards.

Dismay rises like bile in Fudge’s stomach; terror, aversion – such a wealth of disbelief that, in his shock, he finds it impossible to look away as gloved fingers fist themselves in that pale blond hair, tipping the younger man’s head back.

“And some things, you just can’t share with the living,” Lucius breathes, and there’s something so beautiful in the way he closes his eyes, the way Draco’s fingers slide across the buckle of his belt before he undoes it – and they are blurred by the firelight and by the pain that brings tears to Fudge’s eyes, his throat bloating around the rope that is slowly cutting off his breathing, the chains on his wrists clanging as he jerks in sudden, brutal revelation.

Draco smiles, as if feeling the horror reverberate through the air between them, tangible enough to touch - his eyes are heavy, gaze locked on Lucius’ face as he parts the fabric of his trousers, rubbing his cheek affectionately against his father’s inner thigh like an overgrown cat.

There is light tangling in his hair, flashing through the bright silver of his eyes as he leans forwards just that tiny bit more, and Fudge has a second to witness the terrifying proof that Lucius is hard from this, before Draco parts his lips and slides all the way down.

For one insane moment, Fudge manages to convince himself that he is simply dreaming – but then Lucius opens his eyes, and smiles that small, triumphant smile, looking away from Draco to throw an amused look at his captive; and he is a man of silk and steel, cheekbones graced with the faintest trace of a blush as he lets his head fall back, a strand of hair escaping from the black ribbon holding it back to lie against his pale skin, blond on white.

Firelight flickers, and the air is far too hot to breathe as Draco’s head moves slowly, his hands dropping from Lucius’ hips in the direction of his own cock, the bulge of it visible through his trousers, before he seems to think better of it and splays his fingers across the back of his father’s thighs instead; Lucius’ fingers tighten in his hair, and he arches forwards, biting his lower lip in way that seems so carelessly wanton that, were Fudge not appalled by the very idea of it, would doubtless cause the ex-Minister of Magic to become hard himself.

When Lucius opens his mouth, Fudge expects another snappy line – a comment on the way the rope is digging into his throat, or the way the pain has made him drenched in sweat, makes him shake like a leaf in the breeze; but the man only moans, wetly, slowly, and closes his eyes again.

Fudge thinks that might be even worse.

Draco still hasn’t looked away, hasn’t closed his eyes as he pulls back the entire way, running his tongue up Lucius’ cock and swirling it over the tip, before he takes it down his throat again; his head moves in an easy rise and fall, and Lucius’ gloves are painfully dark, tangled as they are within his light blond hair – the rope around Fudge’s neck constricts; his vision goes dark for a second, before it sparks back in with startling clarity.

Lucius bites his lip again, and Draco tugs him forwards in one brutal moment, throat working; the blush deepens, and Fudge closes his eyes as another breathy moan forces its way out of the older man’s mouth, hitching up at the end into a kind of throaty growl – then dwindling away into nothing but slightly laboured breathing and a slick, wet sound that Fudge does not want to think about.

“Do you see now, Cornelius?” Lucius asks, in a tone that belongs to polite dinner conversations, and certainly not to this. “Do you understand it yet?”

Despite himself, Fudge opens his eyes at the question, feeling sweat drip down his back, the muscles of his shoulders taunt with strain – Draco is sitting on the carpet at Lucius’ feet, forehead resting against his father’s thigh; his pale face is flushed and, Fudge realizes with a thrill of nausea, his pants are undone, his straining cock gleaming wetly – there is something dark wrapped around the base.

His eyes jerk upwards to Lucius just as the man unknots the ribbon holding back his hair, dropping it to the carpet; his boots are already off, tossed carelessly away – oh, yes, Fudge knows where it’s going.

Lucius smiles thinly, and looks at his son, reaching down to run a thumb over Draco’s cheekbone; the younger man moans, and finally closes his eyes, fingers working to take off his boots – he throws them aside, and then begins on his shirt.

“You put me away in Azkaban, Cornelius, for over year,” he supplies, and Draco smiles as he lowers himself onto the carpet, lying supine in the firelight as Lucius’ hand moves upwards work at his own collar; gloved fingers pluck at silver buttons, and the fabric slides from his shoulders, fluttering down to the floor.

The light does strange things to him; deepens the hollow of his throat, fades the Dark Mark on his forearm, turns his pale skin a dusty gold and his hair a darker cream where it falls down his back and over his shoulders – makes him seem a surreal figure, cut from marble, cold, beautiful, flawless; as if from some alternate universe where, of course, there is nothing wrong with the picture at all.

But this isn’t some alternate universe, and there is something very, very wrong - though Fudge is the only one who cares.

They seem to ignore him now, as if Lucius’ last words are the end of it; as if a single sentence has somehow locked them away in some private place – but Fudge is painfully aware of how the white silk looks against Draco’s sweat-beaded skin, the arch of his hips and the slow revealing of his legs as he slides out of his trousers; his cock, flushed, glistening – and his lips, too, parted softly as they are around another breathy moan.

He knows he’s meant to see all this, and he cannot look away, though he watches with the cold burn of terror in his chest – the pain of his limbs is all that keeps him from being overwhelmed by shock; it helps him to deny.

Lucius’ belt hits the carpet, and the fabric of his trousers slides down over his hips – Fudge has never been as terrified as he is now, witnessing the slow reveal of muscled thighs, the impossible length of those cream-white legs; his gaze skitters down to the calves, and there it stays, cloudy and dark-edged as he feels the edges of his shackles slide through the thick flesh of his wrists – he jerks roughly against the wall to escape the sensation.

Draco throws his head back, the line of his neck standing taunt in the firelight as he licks his lips. "I want you to get inside my skin with me," he breathes, and smiles as his father’s eyes darken – when Lucius laughs, it is the most real sound Fudge has ever heard from him.

He doesn’t know how he manages to become even more afraid – he just does.

“Please,” Draco moans as the laughter fades away – and Fudge looks up, knowing that everything, everything is totally lost; he’s never going to see the halls of Ministry again, never going home to his wife. No one hears a Malfoy plead, and lives to talk about it.

When Lucius moves, the light catches across the side and shoulder that had been dwelling in shadow – the skin is crosshatched with scars, and Fudge’s eyes follow one on it’s winding path across what little he can see of that lower back, a jagged line that moves over one hip and ends barely a centimetre away from the first smatterings of perfectly pale hair.

He wonders where it came from, but doesn’t dare to ask.

The terror in his heart is chilled; fear writhes around in his stomach until he feels physically ill, and only the rope burning his throat stops the rise of bile – yet still, there is a large portion of him that is terribly envious of the uncanny grace in Lucius’ movements, the bright wash of hair that hangs down around his face as he kneels between his son’s leg; the slender fingers that curl about Draco’s hips.

His voice - his damned voice! – as he says a charm and Draco moans again, feet planted on the carpet; Fudge closes his eyes to the collision of their bodies, but he can see it in his mind nonetheless. It is as if his vision is contracting, blurring out all else in the room – he cannot help but look again.

Lucius’ head is tipped back once more, hair spilling down across the half-lit scars on his back, teeth a startling white against a lower lip made red with the pressure; he smiles, and rocks back onto his heels before slowly sliding forwards once more.

Draco groans, straining against him in a futile attempt to speed up the process, his supple body twisting like a snake – Fudge has never seen anything so utterly depraved as the sight of the young man’s hips rising and falling, the curve of his lips, the skittish struggle of his fingers as they strive to wind into the carpet; when he tries to speak, it comes out as little more than a desperate mewl.

Blood slides down the rope, and nearly numb fingers curl into fists, Fudge’s vision wavering, his breath wheezing between his lips – his vision is totally dark but for the pair of them; the steady, easy, shameless way they move together.

They’re not real. They can’t be real.

This isn’t happening.

“Oh god!” Draco chokes out, and what faint shreds of denial Fudge has managed to conjure are whisked away by the blatant desire in the sound – shredded by the way Lucius presses his lips to his son’s throat, fingers sliding down to flick against the dark ring at the base of Draco’s cock; it opens instantly.

Fudge can’t decide which is worse – the half-strangled scream of release it elicits from Draco, or the savage fire burning in Lucius’ eyes as he slides forwards again, the muscles in his thighs and stomach contracting as he comes in perfect silence.

Lucius looks towards him, and smiles.

“It’s such a shame, isn’t it?” he asks, but does not elaborate as he waves a flippant hand – Fudge has but three agonizing seconds to feel his own cartilage give way, to experience the division of his flesh as the rope tightens impossibly against his throat and the razor-edges of the shackles tear his wrists open.

After that, he can feel no more, and there are just the two bodies intertwined in the firelight and the soft sound of Lucius speaking.

“No,” he amends, and runs his fingers along Draco’s cheekbones. “Not actually a shame at all.”

- finished -