Daily Deviant
- there is no such thing as 'too kinky'
FIC: "Who Do," Narcissa/Minerva, NC-17 
24th January 2011 23:20
Title: Who Do
Author: [info]thegildedmagpie
Characters/Pairings: Narcissa Malfoy/Minerva McGonagall, background Narcissa/Lucius and Lucius/Severus/Narcissa, others fantasized about
Rating: NC17
Kinks/Themes Chosen: Everything old is new: pediophilia (attraction to dolls), xenophilia (attraction to the exotic, strangers, and the unknown), handkerchief code (on this sort of meta level), tit torture, pyrophilia, thalpotentiginy (arousal by heat), tattooing, touch (eventually), humiliation, cunnilingus, genital shaving (existing), sacrifices
Other Warnings: Cross-gen teacher-student (though both are older adults), object insertion, dubcon, breathplay, D/s, piercing, and a first-time girl-on-girl experience. Also, not particularly peppy in mood.
Word Count: 4800 (cheeeesus when did I last eat)
Summary/Description: Among the weird things in the Black family attics was a little voodoo doll … and Narcissa doesn't quite know who she's using it on ...
Author's Notes: God, this is a weird pairing. Seriously. Where did this come from? Blame [info]pre_raphaelite1. It's her fault.



She didn't know from whence the doll came, from whom the hair. The former she'd had since she was fifteen: A young new woman, impatient, lifting the bundles of soft dyed human curls, exquisite child-sized silk robes still unfaded and bright, firm little bodies of stuffed muslin and porcelain under her hands as she turfed out her childhood dolls to amuse her irritation away on a rainy, idle summer afternoon. Her brow had furrowed when, in the midst of the mink-trimmed polonaises in which she used to dress her dolls against the cold with slim and motherly hands, her fingers brushed crude clay.

It was a primitive thing, faceless, eyeless, blocky and undressed in a bed of tiny eggshell demitasse cups spilling imaginary tea. She recognized its nature, vaguely, from a slide in her Ancient Runes class, though she didn't recall the people from which the sample had come. The maker seemed to have tapered the waist with quick thumbs, an uninspired attempt at giving it a suggestion of female form.

She tucked it in her robe pocket and kept it that afternoon, eventually stowing it with the rarely-used perfumes and the lacquers that were too bright to wear for everyday on her pale fingertips, a litter of gifts from admirers, so that she only occasionally would surprised to find it still there. There it stayed even now that, with unaccustomed quietness, she'd given up hope that the finer dolls would be unpacked again from their mothballs for the daughter who never came.

The hair was another mystery. Its provenance, unknown, except that the owner's hair was black. Its origin, the collar of Draco's robes when she went to see him that horrible time after the Potter boy attacked him, to find her baby scarred below the oil of dittany, his skin so pale, as pale as the nights when she stole to his cradle and feared he had stopped breathing without her there to stir him back to life.

She tucked it away on instinct then, the black thread hiding in her sleeve until she had time to take it out and examine it.

The first night she laid the hair across the ugly little doll's throat as she sat at her dressing table, pretending to brush her own spider-silk tresses a hundred hundred strokes to avoid going to bed when she was still so restless.

The Potter boy, perhaps, his untidy mop far too close to her Draco's throat?

A still-dark hair from below the wimple of Madam Pomfrey as she bent over the bed of a patient?

A tiny unknown memento from the Deputy Headmistress, escaped from her tight twist as she spoke quietly with Draco's frightened parents?

A girl from his House – a boy from his House – someone of whom he had not yet told his mother?

Or could it have been Severus himself, bent ministering over Draco's bleeding body?

Her long fingers pressed the hair hard into the clay and it stuck there.

Somewhere miles away, a sense of pressure; a gasping awakening, the reason for it unknown.

It was summer before she touched it again, and everything was upended by then.

In the safe house where she was waiting to see what the world would be by year's end, it turned up as a blocky, intruding object in the hastily packed valise of fine French undergarments out of which she was dressing each day. In her curious hand the rude, exotic thing came forth ludicrous, its abbreviated thrust of featureless head trailing a veil of lace-trimmed raspberry-pink knickers.

The hair was still on the throat like a slender collar, black and anonymous, and it came to her in a thought as blunt as the foreign doll itself: I don't actually care who it belonged to. I hope it was that damned Potter. But what business is it of mine if it is not?

For now it belongs to me.

The pin she drew from her hair was just sharp enough to perform the function she wished of it. The flat, grainy chest of the doll should have crumbled below the onslaught but it was hard, resisting, unmarked as she attacked and scored it. On her knees on the coverlet of the cold bed to which Lucius had not yet come back, she rocked, pressing her thighs together, dampening her heels as she drove the ends into the clay, separated them and brought them together hard onto flesh that did not exist, imagining all the time that the one who had hurt her boy was being made to suffer in turn.

Far from her someone awoke with a cry in a still-unfamiliar bed, her own hand clamping over her mouth to stifle the sounds urged forth by sharp pain. She reached for her wand with a dueler's rapid reflexes and a sharp command lit the room, the glow intensifying as the piercing burn picked up again, making her moan as her hand flew to try to protect her still-firm breasts against the unseen assailant.

The room was empty, the doors still locked, two of the windows cracked to let in the summer breeze but the wards still in place. No one was here. Nothing was here.

She clawed off her nightdress to look and found her nipples flushed and full of blood, her breasts reddened with something that looked like swollen scratches, appearing slowly on untouched skin. The pain doubled her over again – but now it was growing more bearable if no less intense, such that she could have fleeting thoughts of checking the clock (but no good; she'd knocked her glasses off the table when she went to her wand, the warrior's habit of keeping them close together betraying her) and gasp out another few diagnostic spells as well as, when none of these gave her any information, a
Finite Incantatum that was precisely as effective as the rest of them.

There was nothing to do but ride it out, gasping, stifling first cries and then moans. It must have been about thirty minutes before it stopped, and another ten before she believed it really had.

She put on a robe, wide awake, and curled up in what had so recently been her Professor Dumbledore's study chair to wait for morning. She would write in her experimental journal,
Very odd experience about half past eleven o'clock last night. No source detectable. Hoping not to have further opportunity to investigate. This, she decided, was one occasion on which she would excuse herself from her personal rule of exacting self-examination; she didn't want to acknowledge the faint scent of arousal in this room.

In time her heat was spent. Functional or not, Narcissa found she couldn't deny that the object or the experience was a comfort, and she slept that night with the doll beside her as Lucius's side of the bed stayed so empty and so cold.

***

Even after she returned to the Manor, the doll stayed packed neatly away amidst layers of imported silk knickers and delicate brassieres and smoke-thin hosiery; a place that somehow felt, for this, appropriate. Hidden during the day, hidden in time from the meddling fingertips of Bellatrix and from bringing further exhausting questions to the eyes of her poor tired husband. Yet so often she dressed and undressed alone while she waited for Lucius to return from serving their master in the trying ways that wandlessness left open to him, and on frequent ragged whim she brought out the doll to ease her loneliness with moments of harsh anonymous power.

Once she sat on the bed with a violet velvet pincushion at her side, her head bent with studious seriousness over the rough figure, feeling the darkness out of time of another continent, strange wizarding ways unlike her own. The pins slid through the wrists of the figure, stuck there erect in the crude arms, crucifying it as she delicately pushed in another to quiver in the clay like the fatal pin through a still-living, catalogued insect. In her mind she half-imagined she could hear on the wind the pained moans of some dark-haired Hogwarts teenager suffering in a green-hung, four-post bed – or, given the occasion on which she'd found the hair, perhaps the stern Healer who had tended Draco's cuts and gashes so unsympathetically those so few years ago.

Pain took her just as she was going to her bed and she thrashed under it, falling to her knees and bent over the mattress, moving so difficult, her body feeling transfixed – low cries muffled in her coverlet so as not to echo in the smaller bedchamber she had resumed, not to wake her colleagues, not to have to explain this and give them another worry on top of everything, whether that someone was magically abusing her or that she'd finally cracked. She wondered which it was, really, but there was no more thought when the sharp, focused stabbing pain exploded through her clit, making her stifle a scream.

When she rose in the grey light of dawn, there were penny-sized spots of blood on her ivory flannel sheets.


Another night, when she was aching for someone to touch her – to hug her Draco and tell him he had not done so badly at all – to wake Lucius from where he lay next to her, thin as a laborer, white as paper, snoring softly like he would never admit he did – she instead rose and closeted herself in her dressing room, lifting the light pink negligee from around her pale thighs, and thrust the abbreviated, barrel-shaped head of the figure into her perversely moistened cunt. It hurt as she had never liked anyone to hurt her, but she stretched around it after a moment and the discomfort eased, and she rode it gasping and thoughtless as she rubbed herself shamelessly, coming bitterly hard but quietly as she used to when she was a teenager and had to avoid her roommates or her sister hearing her pleasure.

This night frightened her even more than the previous ones had, though the others had been alarming and confusing and sometimes agonizing, because it seemed at first not to be magical at all – just waking in the small morning hours unable to breathe. She was convinced at first that she was having an unreasonably youthful (for a witch) heart attack. Soon, as nothing changed over time but for the dimming of her vision, she found that her gasps would occasionally give her breath – but never enough, as though something invisible and impalpable was pressed tightly against her face. The next morning, chest still aching, she took her first day off from teaching in years, and spent the entire day alternately getting much-needed sleep and feeling guilty for failing to make an appearance before the children she had to seem strong for.

Quite consciously, Narcissa treated the object like a rough child treats her plaything, keeping it stowed away among her underthings all day but taking it out every few nights now to explore it. The weeks wore on, and the imprisonment in her home wore more unbearable. Her nocturnal tortures of the thing grew obsessive, using every implement that came to hand, and using them ever more across the figure's chest and between its legs, like a young girl who has just learned the sweet guilty throb of touching her toys in places that are secret and forbidden.

She rarely wondered about the hair that remained across its throat until the night when she was sitting in her bedroom seriously and soberly (so it seemed to her) contemplating burning down the house and all its many occupants with it. That night, her pale eyes alight with a fever not of the body, she held the doll in one hand, half-swaddled in a pair of creamy knickers with an overlay of umber lace – slipped her wand between its legs and whispered like a tender mother, “Incendio.”

This time she couldn't stifle the screams. The whole thing would come out in the morning, all vaguely-enough phrased to sound as though her tormentor was one of the people they were now required to refer to as Professor, though – to her abstract wincing horror, to her greater relief – no one came to help her tonight. The heat was intense on her and she thrashed, sure the bed would combust with her in it, sure she must be physically alight.

And in the fading moments afterward, when it declined to uncomfortable warmth for a time before it dissipated – Merlin, it had been too long not knowing, too much pain, too much weariness – she lost all energy to pretend that some of this invisible victimization wasn't perversely arousing her.

She had no choice but to conclude that she had utterly lost some vital little sliver of her sanity to this year, this hellish year … no choice but to let it go the way of her dignity.


The lace-patterned burn on Narcissa's hand didn't hurt her. She regretted it only because it made Lucius think it had been done to her by someone else, until she lovingly assured him otherwise, half-calming the fears she couldn't erase from him.

Only an accident, love, she told him again. Nothing to worry about. It's not nearly so bad as it looks. It doesn't even hurt much. Lucius, love. Her husband didn't speak, but bowed his head and held her uninjured hand for a moment and apologized in a quiet, formal, wretched way for what he'd brought them to.

It didn't hurt. But it did make her wonder if there were matching marks on someone else, arousing an interest in the identity of her victim that had nearly been scoured away.

A few days brought her to her dressing table with doll and wand once again, staring fixedly at the black hair. All her candidates – well, all but the Potter boy, and that fantasy was far too convenient for her to believe in it – all of them were at Hogwarts, weren't they?

With delicately poised hand, eyes not leaving the primitive clay figure and its thin black filament of a necklace, she reached for her little writing-desk and the glossy eagle-feather quill that was in the stand there. This time, with the rude perversity of so many such objects from the dark perimeters of the world of magic, the clay took the marks with ease.

It was Severus her mind's eye dwelled on – dark and abrupt and ill-suited for her silken boudoir as this crude little object itself, a welcomed shadow between herself and her husband so many times in the good days, when they came back together for Lucius's fine wine after a night of reclaiming their world together, when white masks were set aside and black sleeves rolled up, and she would come down to them pale and warm and refreshing to welcome them both back to her ancestral home and her marriage bed.

The flowing monogram that now marked the back of the doll's neck went on so easily that she half-fancied it was wanted to be there; so easily that a drop of the black ink's excess fell unheeded to stain the red-and-white silk of her dressing gown, leaving a perfectly round dark blot in the patterned fabric as she planned how to set this in motion.

***

Draco was glad of her visit – almost pathetically so – holding her tightly as he hadn't since he was a small boy with far too little baby-roundness hugging her round the waist for comfort after an innocent disappointment. She was graciously invited to join the quiet hall for lunch. She felt an unease about the Great Hall, the silence of the students in it, the bruises she could see on some of them. Farming the Mudbloods together and slapping them about, still with their betters alongside them – that was never the brave world she anticipated building. Yet she had the chance to walk measuredly along the long room and the staff table, surveying the occupants, and that was what she had wanted when she decided to come here.

None of the students bore any marks above their robes besides those that came from the rough new wartime governance of the school. Madam Pomfrey, innocent of blemish. No other dark hair at the staff table brushed over anything unusual. Her heart was invisibly in her mouth as she walked behind the new Headmaster, giving him a soft and lovely smile, and a bitter, angry coldness at fate touched her as she saw he was also uninked.

And then, on the woman-shaped column of quiveringly silent rage beside him – there she saw the edges of her initials, just barely legible to one looking for it, on the pale skin above the conveniently high neck of Minerva McGonagall's robes.

***

The sight of the woman in the mirror behind her froze Minerva, sent her snatching for her wand in the under-sleeve holster still on her otherwise bare arm. Narcissa, though, was only standing there smiling, frosty and lovely and fully clothed while Minerva was bent over her washstand in skirt and bra, her robes laid aside for the moment.

“Look,” she said, and held up a small silver hand-mirror so it was visible in the larger one, showing her where she had been initialed.

Minerva read it backwards with a teacher's speed and stared for a moment, their eyes meeting in the mirror. Then she said with well-controlled force and a Headmistress' voice, “Explain yourself.”

“I won't pretend I wasn't disappointed to find it was you,” Narcissa remarked as though over tea, drawing the voodoo doll from her robe pocket so that Minerva can see the matching mark on it. “Though I rather expect that a woman like you ought to be glad of the attentions of one like me.”

The reply was a clearly enunciated, “I hope you rot in hell, Mrs. Malfoy.

Narcissa's answer was clipped. “How lovely. But I expect I have a lot of experience in that by now. Were you enjoying what I was doing to you, then?”

Minerva went white. “Do your victims usually enjoy that sort of thing? You bitch.

“Really, the things you think of me. How many victims do you think I've had?” The society-gracing loveliness of manner still came easily; it had always been her function to the Dark Lord. “But I should mind your tongue if I were you – because I can make you my bitch, dear Professor.” The crudity slipped viciously off her tongue like sweet icing. “Do you imagine we've reached a limit of how I can hurt you? I could make you do precisely as I instructed you. Perhaps we shall humiliate you by letting you spend some time in detention for me. Or perhaps you need a bit of humbling before your betters. I could make you beg me for the things I've done to you. I could make you prostitute yourself to whom I chose. I could make you crawl to my feet. Mutilate yourself. Wish to die. The options, dear Professor, are quite literally limitless.”

Minerva listened to this with a tight jawline but with apparent restraint. Finally she said in a low voice, “Why me?”

Narcissa laughed suddenly, girlish and merry in a way that might perhaps have suggested something less than sanity. “I have been wondering the same thing myself, you know.” She looked at Minerva for a moment with her head on one side while her former teacher stood there straight and proud in her brassiere with her hair falling heavily over one shoulder, its coal-black length now softly ribboned with grey.

“Unbind your hair,” Narcissa commanded, almost absently.

“And as a matter of interest,” said Minerva, matching her elegant tone of restraint, “what happens if I don't?”

“It would be to your benefit,” Narcissa told her coolly. “I am, to be frank, rather bored with you and find you a less than satisfactory toy. If you can demonstrate that you didn't enjoy the previous magic by not provoking me to more – well, then, perhaps I will remove the linkage between you and this crude little thing. We shall see.”

Minerva closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them, she put her hands up and pulled the remaining pins from her half-undone coil of hair. “Just for the sake of my dignity,” she said, “let me say that I wouldn't do this if I didn't have children relying on me – and I can't afford your meddling taking up my energy.”

“I would hardly call it meddling,” said Narcissa as Minerva's hair came loose and was shaken free, a dark mane falling to the Professor's waist. “But your point is noted. Undress.”

Minerva seemed to be expecting this command and did not delay, though she moved without haste. The brassiere was unhooked, the skirt unbuttoned and allowed to fall to the floor. She was already without shoes, but she moved to unhook her garter belt and slide her knickers down.

Narcissa looked her over frankly, noting that her charms were not nearly as faded as her years might suggest. Though her skin was in some places finely lined, and though her breasts had lost the proud rosy lift that Narcissa expected they might still have retained when Narcissa and Lucius were her students, those still were not unshapely; her legs were long, and she had the narrower-waisted figure of a woman born in the era of corsetry – not so long ago after all in wizarding society, as Narcissa too remembered, in her girlhood, wearing the garments even outside the bedroom for the most formal of occasions. Her hair reached to her well-turned hips – and there, interestingly enough, it ended, for the Professor apparently kept herself smoothly bare between the legs. Yes, Narcissa decided, it had been well worth commanding her to be nude.

“You are quite as attractive as I expected.” The compliment drew a faint snort.

Narcissa turned from the pleasing sight and slipped off her pale blue robe utterly without shame. She glanced over the seat of the chair by the small fireplace – worn, but apparently clean – and seated herself, her knees held demurely together and the doll in her lap. “Come and kneel in front of me.”

“You might have chosen a less comfortable place than the hearth, I expect, if you really thought hard about it,” Minerva rejoined dryly, but after a moment she came forward and, grimacing, lowered herself to her knees. Narcissa could see a weariness in her eyes as she did so. She knew, without much sympathy, that the past several months must not have been easy.

Narcissa set the doll atop a pile of aging books on a side table and spread her legs, revealing damp, platinum-pale curls and a complete lack of knickers. “Now lick me.”

There was a tense wavering moment, then Minerva bent to obey, balancing with one hand on the seat of the chair between Narcissa's thighs as she tentatively touched her tongue to the pinkness of the flushed slit, seeking.

Narcissa found that she need not instruct her, the moisture of the tip of her old teacher's tongue meeting the muskier wetness of herself. “Done this before?” she asked with only a trace of a gasp as the tip of Minerva's tongue traced ever deeper between her lips.

“Hardly,” came the crisp reply, the effect only slightly destroyed by the face that Minerva's nose bumped her as she looked up. “Quite capable of extrapolating from a knowledge of one's own anatomy, actually.”

“Oh naturally,” Narcissa returned, but she found herself breathless – because Minerva had located her clit. She didn't make that amateur mistake of sucking it hard like a cock, but lapped at it broad-tongued, wetly, and with the force of having a grudge against it. Narcissa found herself commanding her without thinking about it – Softer, faster – and Minerva obeyed, her tongue picking up a tiring butterfly rhythm for a moment before she settled into a catlike gliding lick.

It was the first unfettered orgasm Narcissa had had in weeks – months – for once utterly uncaring about who might be passing in the hall, and she made the most of it for Minerva's benefit, writhing against her face and moaning like a she-cat. Though I expect that probably helps the poor thing enjoy it, Narcissa thought condescendingly.

Still in a haze of orgasm, she ordered, “Lie on the bed. Facing me. Spread your legs.”

This seemed to be much harder for Minerva than to kneel and lick her torturer had been. Still she eventually rose and went to the bed, leaning back on her elbows as an apparent compromise, her knees a foot apart.

“I'm sure you can do better than that, dear Professor,” Narcissa advised her. As Minerva slid her legs six inches wider, stone-faced, Narcissa rose from the chair, proceeding sylphlike across the cozy but Spartan teacher's quarters in her white slip. Minerva's thighs parted stiffly to the pressure of Narcissa's slender hands.

From inside the bodice of her slip Narcissa drew a perfumed and lace-edged handkerchief and, with the fine square of white fabric protecting her pale fingers somewhat from the moisture which was now noticeable on Minerva's lips – darker red and more prominent than her own – she began to expertly rub Minerva's clit.

Minerva's hands fisted in the blanket, creasing it as her head fell back, hair spreading across the bed. Narcissa thought with quiet amusement and no small stir of arousal that her teacher looked a proper aging whore, her breasts pushed high by the position, throat exposed, cunt exposed – a sight to arouse her again with effortless immediacy, a memory to comfort many a cold night when this amusement was given up. When Minerva's hips began to switch, trying to escape the touch, and then to lift to her hand she felt her own body tighten at its center, and when Minerva came, with a cry of defeat that sounded quite befitting her secondary species, Narcissa climaxed again with her, the wetness of her sex slipping over her upper thighs.

She tucked the handkerchief away again and stood calmly, watching Minerva lie spread and spent and gasping before her for those moments of self-forgetting.

Once Narcissa guessed by the close of her thighs that Minerva was recovering, she stepped aside for her and pointed to the side table. “Fetch the doll,” she told her. “I would not suggest trying to harm it, dear.”

Minerva stared at her for just a moment before rising to get the object, thrusting it at her with something that was certainly not mannerly reluctance. Though her movements were offended-cat stiff, she managed to speak with wry reserve. “I expect I can't convince you to donate it to the school as a lesson sample. Our voudoun collection is, to put it kindly, sparse.”

“Hardly.” Narcissa held up the doll and took hold of the end of the hair with fingers dampened through the cloth and plucked it forth. It came far too easily free from the throat. Minerva gasped, like a swimmer rising for air after too long underwater.

“I expect the letters will wash off now … or you can bear my mark of ownership forever. I don't particularly care which.” Narcissa stood. “And do look into lesbianism. I think it would suit you.”

She shrugged into her robe, fastened it with unhurried grace, and looked back at Minerva for a moment – still standing in the middle of the room naked and watching her.

Without a farewell, and with less regret than she'd expected for relinquishing her sadism's toy, Narcissa left the school that had become Minerva's prison to return to the home that had become hers.

Comments 
25th January 2011 06:59
that was very lovely and hot!
25th January 2011 17:12
Thank you!
25th January 2011 10:37
Hot, so.very.hot.
25th January 2011 17:12
Thank you thank you! Also, icon love.
26th January 2011 14:19
Thanks! I figured it would be appropriate to use (seeing like it might have been Narcissa's plan the whole time)
25th January 2011 13:04
Oh my goodness! That was a fascinating use of the prompt. The language is so lazy and sensual, and uncaring. You really have caught the mood of that period for both Narcissa and Minerva. The move from torture to pleasure is so subtle.

And I do wonder what Narcissa would have done if it had been Harry's hair...
25th January 2011 17:14
Ohhh thank you! I was worried it would just come across as purple prose. I'm glad the tonal change came through ... I sort of wanted the experience to actually be good for both of them in their little private hells? Which is a little fucked-up, but let's be frank, they're both kinda fucked-up people, so I'm okay with that.

Let's say the war would have been a lot shorter. :p
26th January 2011 02:52
Damn. I don't know what to say. That was damn beautiful to read, I love sumptuous descriptions and that really fit this. And the voodoo doll was a great magical way to bring Narcissa and Minerva together - I like this pairing, but it's rather to do... plausibly.
27th January 2011 02:03
Thank you so much! The prose in this one was such fun to do. I just knew these two would be awesome together, it was just a matter of finding a prompt that would force them together for my perverted amusement. :p
29th January 2011 03:43
Now this was powerful; I actually had to walk away for a while during the final confrontation. Tense? I'll say. And compelling. You had me sucked in from the moment -- well, from the moment I saw the pairing with your name as author, actually, but certainly by the time I finished the list of kinks, I knew this story would be a keeper.

And you didn't disappoint. It's just gripping, and wonderfully-imagined, and twisted in exactly the ways I want my twisted stories to be twisted.

Once, years ago, I read a short story about two kind-seeming spinster old ladies who are only gradually revealed to be less-than-stable. The moment you realize just how much "less than" is when one of them captures a sparrow and stabs a pin in its eye. I remember gasping aloud when I read it, it was that visceral.

I had a similar reaction to your Narcissa here -- that wonderful moment when she "soberly" considers burning the house down. She's over-the-top by the end, but you've taken us so skillfully along the road of her instability that her actions are all-of-a-piece with her character (down the perfumed hankie/dam). The language is perfectly in synch with her mental state: controlled on the surface but oozing madness all around the edges (epitomized for me, for some reason, by the violet velvet pincushion.)

The entire voodoo doll premise is inventive and effective, and wow, do I love the way you interweave the parallel stories of Narcissa's actions and their vivid consequences for Minerva. Your imagining of how Narcissa's handlings of the doll might physicially manifest themselves for Minerva is wonderfully done. Poor Minerva, my god. If all that pain could translate itself to her as arousal, even a little -- well, no wonder she thinks she lost a "sliver of sanity." Delicious and hot and wrong; I kept wanting to read more at the same time that I was closing my eyes and saying, "no!"

I did have a couple of quibbles, though. Now, maybe I'm guilty of demanding too much plausibility from my voodoo sadism porn, but I didn't feel quite prepared for Narcissa's giving up her overt power at the end. Why would she be willing to give up that heady feeling of control? I would think her appetite would be more whetted than satisfied by the confrontation with Minerva. (Although that excellent last line might give us a clue, perhaps, to why she feels she has finished: Narcissa left the school that had become Minerva's prison to return to the home that had become hers.).

Also, the shaved pubes seemed less an organic part of Minerva's character than a make-sure-we-tick-off-our-list-of-kinks moment. Or at least, such was my first reaction. But the more I thought about it (well, what would you think about if you had to sit in a boring meeting?), the more I thought that perhaps it does fit the character by suggesting the kinky potential that Minerva keeps carefully hidden behind a prim manner and severely-bound hair, the sort of kinkiness that can be brought to the surface by something like voodoo sadism. By the time my meeting was over, I'd concluded that the shaving is highly symbolic and just a damn piece of genius.

And your description of naked Minerva, btw, is just mad hot (loved the "corseted-figure" detail).

I was going to quote my two dozen or so favorite lines, but I think that would be overkill at this point. So I'll just summarize: this story is strongly-written; it stayed with me long after I read it; it made me think all sorts of fascinatingly deviant thinky things, and it was hot to boot.
29th January 2011 05:11
Oh, god, your comments give me JOY. Thank you.

Yeah ... I realized ever more as I wrote it that Cissa's nuts. This might be partly because I live with her hex_files player, but she kept surprising me. Interestingly, I'm not entirely sure that Lucius knows this. She seems to hide it pretty well from him, or possibly he just really loves his wife and she can do no wrong in his eyes. But yeah, this ridiculous cinematic level of insanity -- [info]pre_raphaelite1 says it's the Victorian angel-mother progressed through its logical extreme, which possibly explains the rather disturbing number of times she thinks about Draco during sex. And I'm so glad you noted her weird perfumed-hanky "I won't touch you" thing.

I find you guilty of demanding too much plausibility from your voodoo sadism porn! *gavel bang* No, not really, I just wanted to bang a gavel. :p It was one of those seven-pages one-day marathon fics, there's definitely a couple moments I could have turned better now that I look at it again. Que sera, sera.

Do remember that I'm one of Those People who consider Tom/Minerva absolutely canon -- she left the relationship with a touch of masochism and a depilation fetish. :p Possibly this quirk of hers is so embedded in my conception of her that I didn't integrate it well.

And as for the ending ... well ... I felt like the encounter needed a clear stop point because I was trying for a very subtle disturbing twist here: I'm sort of half-meditating on, half-parodying the rape-as-redemption fic trope. We're meeting these characters at a point where both of their lives are pretty much falling down on top of them. I don't know how well I worked it in or even if it comes through at all, but the concept of forced sexual encounter being psychologically helpful in a traumatic situation, that can be so offensive if done wrong and yet is rather compelling in its sheer wrong if done very well -- so somehow ending on this note of "completion," pun decidedly intended, rendered the whole thing a little more fucked up to me. In, hopefully, a subtle way.

Thank you so much for your lovely insightful comment. *hugs*
29th January 2011 19:48
I find you guilty of demanding too much plausibility from your voodoo sadism porn! *gavel bang*

Ah, but Your Honor, there are mitigating circumstances. You see, the Gilded MP does write plausible voodoo sadism porn (and scorching hot it is, too, if I may beg the Court's indulgence), so I feel I'm justified in raising the issue of believability.

I'm with you on canon Tom/Minerva. It makes sense on so many levels. Before DH was published, I would seriously have bet real (Muggle) money
that some sort of Tom-Minerva connections was going to play a part in the denouement. Why else set things up so that they would have been at school together? It's like Chekhov and the pistols: if pistols show up on the wall in Act I, they damn well better be shot off before the end of Act V (paraphrase; I don't know if C actually said "damn"). I'd love to know whether JKR initially intended to make the connection relevant and then found it didn't fit, or if she just hadn't thought deeply enough about the intersections of her various time lines.

I'm very intrigued by the rape-as-redemption trope. It definitely works here, although I hadn't thought of the story in quite those terms until you mentioned it. But I love how it fits in.
1st February 2011 17:14
Nah, you're quite justified. :p And thank you.

Yeah. It broke my little heart when that didn't come up. But then dear JKR and math ... not that I can talk, in a now-buried older fic I have my Minerva being involved in historical stuff she's two years off for. And now she won't admit she wasn't there. Oops? :D

So many pistols. So many, many unfired pistols.
29th January 2011 21:53
Either I was too blown away to comment when I read this yesterday, or IJ ate my comment. Anyhow, here goes again.
I absolutely loved this story. The whole voodoo idea is inspired. And the way you depict Narcissa, outwardly normal, composed, and very lady-like, and inwardly gliding down the slippery slope to madness, is exquisite.
She's totally believable. And the scenes where Minerva reacts to the voodoo-acts are wonderfully IC, too. I agree with Kelly, if she feels even the slightest bit of arousal, she would doubt her own sanity.

The scene between the two of them - wow. Just wow. Which is not very constructive, I know, but how else to put it?
I would not suggest trying to harm it, dear. Chilling.
And Minerva manages to remain so perfectly IC, while it is still believable that she does have an orgasm.
The handkerchief is a brilliant detail. Somehow it sums up Narcissa.

Narcissa left the school that had become Minerva's prison to return to the home that had become hers. An all-time great in last lines.
1st February 2011 17:16
I really like playing with nonwestern magic like voodoo. I've kinda been waiting for the chance ever since the prompt came up in my off month. :p

Thank you so much! The hanky weirded out [info]pre_raphaelite1 so much I almost dropped it and let Crazy Cissa's lingerie carry the whole theme, but I think it was necessary. I'm glad you liked. :)
14th March 2011 06:31
Here from [info]dexstarr's rec on [info]crack_broom.

This was luscious and disturbing, and I'm absolutely smitten with the language you found to convey the texture of Narcissa's mental disintegration. The words are cool and beautiful and self-absorbed, like the obsessive resort to finery, the lingering on silky, sexually charged, symbolic lingerie, and all the aristocratic decadence and luxurious narcissism implied therein. You've created a marvelous picture of Narcissa as both ruthless and hotly anguished, like a spoiled child shocked by her first real encounter with unfairness or loss. The therapeutic sadism seems so perfectly in character, and the fact that it's provoked by a crude, alien doll, the antithesis of anything Narcissa would ever have in her keeping, makes so much sense - the lack of conscience about hurting something she finds ugly, as out of place in her world as a Muggleborn. That, and the desire for revenge, any revenge, regardless of whoever's on the other end.

I think the moment that tipped me off to her growing psychosis was when she decides she doesn't care to whom the black hair belongs; she's willing to torment anybody, even Severus. This seems to me a likely metaphor for what most Death Eaters must have experienced towards the end, that collapse from the appearance of power and sanity into controlled hysteria. Also, the seething hatred that blurs into sexual release is a fabulous contrast with Narcissa's pale, silvery outward demeanor; it gives the lie to wealth and elegance as a guarantor of superiority of any kind. How thoroughly the pampered lose perspective when things don't go their way.

I also love what you do with and to Minerva; her determination to keep the unpredictable agonies a secret is so Gryffindor, and the whiff of arousal adds an undercurrent of martyrdom. Her silent resistance and endurance are exquisitely painful. Her encounter with Narcissa is just plain exquisite, and horrible, and riveting. It was brilliant to have Minerva bent over her washstand, half-undressed, when Narcissa finds her, and I adore your careful enumeration of Minerva's charms through Narcissa's eyes, so suggestive of a predator's appreciation of flesh. The business with the hankie is perfect - it's an arresting moment, and it fits with Narcissa's quick assessment of the cleanness or otherwise of the chair.

It took me a moment, I admit, to accept Minerva's bare pubes, but then I remembered the Incendio she'd been subjected to - it seemed right that the hair would be burnt away, even if only figuratively. Also, like [info]kellychambliss above, I thought Narcissa let her go too easily - although I could be persuaded that, once she'd discovered and wielded her power over her random victim, Narcissa would drop her like a toy whose diversions she'd outgrown. Because, after all, Minerva is beneath her and not really a person it would amuse her to own, like Severus, or destroy, like Harry.

But what a beautiful, hot, kinky, and uncomfortable fic. Now that I've read it I feel compelled to track down more of your work.
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