InsaneJournal

FIC: Stoatshead Hill
Title: Stoatshead Hill
Rating: NC-17
Pairing(s): er, Lucius/self, with a light sprinkling of others, including Rodolphus, Fenrir, Bellatrix and Harry. Oh, and a prison guard. Whew.
Summary: It's far easier without the Dementors, but still, news from the outside world trickles slowly into Azkaban.
Warning: wanking, voyerism, violent and strange fantasies, prison setting, mention of deaths.
Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me. Please don't sue. Special hell, yes, I've been told.
A/N: Many thanks to reddwarfer for the efficient beta.
The alphabet breakdown Lucius and Rodolphus use to communicate worked much better in my original language(Russian), due to a more convenient number of letters. Still, it looks like this:




He listened for the guard's footsteps to disappear down the hallway before pressing up against the wall, rough blanket pulled almost fully over his head. The scrap of parchment clutched in his left hand, he balled his right into a fist and knocked.

Agonizing minutes with no sound but his own erratic pulse provided no answer, and he knocked on the wall again, daring to make each rap of his knuckles a bit louder than the last. Too loud, and the guard would be clanging at the door - "Prisoner Malfoy! Ya don't lie down in daytime! Up!"

A slight tapping came back through the wall at last, and Lucius looked down on his scrap of parchment to check the letters, but it was almost unnecessary now. He'd learned it well, the prison alphabet scrawled hastily down in six rows, five letters each in the first five, just one letter in the last. Each row's letters numbered one through five, to make the knocking quicker, easier, but still, Rodolphus rapped back slowly, with large gaps between each knock, and the delay was maddening.

The first knocks were the row number - one, his neighbor tapped, pausing before the knocks that designated the letter - two. "B".

Breaks between words were short pauses, breaks between sentences were a bit longer. An experienced prisoner should have had this down to a science, but in the beginning, it had taken Lucius hours to spell out a single question or fact.

He supposed that when Dementors, not humans, had run of the prison, even this slight attempt at communication would have been unlikely.



"Battle at Stoatshead Hill," his brother-in-law managed finally, causing Lucius to wonder where the news had come from this time. Few visitors were allowed in this corridor; exceptions had been made for Ministry officials who had come to offer him a reduced sentence in exchange for full cooperation. An Auror squad had interrogated Rodolphus and the prisoner in the cell to his right. They never found out who that other neighbor was; Lucius had tried to tap on their connecting wall several times, but received no reply.

Stoatshead Hill seemed to resonate familiarity; he tucked away an errant strand of greasy, unkempt hair as he tried to recall why it had mattered.

"Weasleys!" he tapped out in a moment, holding his breath for a casualty.

Hesitant taps from Rodolphus's side confirmed it; two of them dead, although which ones exactly remained a mystery. Lucius allowed himself a small smile, shifting on the hard, creaky bench, but the slide on his door rattled. Throwing off the blanket, he shoved the alphabet parchment into the small space between bench and wall, and sprang up to stand by the little barred window. Darkening rays of the sunset colored his glimpse of the outside.

"Dinner!" the guard barked, wand at the ready. He didn't unlock the door until after he'd had a good look inside through the little slide. A spotty little man in prison robes pushed in the metal cart holding a tureen of foul smelling broth and tin bowls, ladled out a portion, and set it on the floor.

"No dawdling, Shunpike! Get that cart moving, or I put you on toilet duty! And Malfoy! Get away from that window, you want I should report this to the warden?"

"I want some fresh air," Lucius forced himself to enunciate coolly, wanting nothing more than to seize the guard by his tight-collared neck and twist. Wandless and furious, Rodolphus had tried that the very night they had brought him back here; it had earned him three weeks of being hobbled with a length of magicked chain.

"Get on with yer food," the guard suggested, "I'm not gonna wait for ya t'finish when I come back."



Alone once more, Lucius returned to the cot.

"Continue," he tapped, his cheek pressed to the wall, anxious to find out anything else. The cold soup could wait; it was hardly going to become more inedible in a few minutes.

"We did well?"

Rodolphus didn't hesitate to answer this time; "v-e-r-y", he spelled out, with only slight pauses.

After the next sentence, Lucius scratched on the partition, hardly daring to believe his ears. Scratching meant "try it again". Had Rodolphus meant that? Row four, letter one, row three, letter five...?

"Potter seriously wounded. St. Mungo's," the knocking explained again, and once more, Lucius dragged his nails on the wall, wanting to savor it letter by letter. Rodolphus complied like a good sport, unlikely to get tired of reporting this. He followed up this delivery with "Fenrir and Bella", sending Lucius into a burst of unmitigated, gleeful laughter. He was still laughing, perched on the cot, when keys jingled down the hallway and the guard pushed Prisoner Shunpike into his cell to retrieve the untouched soup bowl.

Later, Lucius watched the moon, fractured by the thick bars of his window. Six paces from the back wall to the door, seven paces from corner to corner. The cot, with its musty, wet smell, was bolted to the left wall, connecting him to Rodolphus. His feet slid around in his unlaced shoes; everything he had worn on the night of his arrest had been removed, catalogued, inspected for hexes, charms and any potential uses. His belt buckle, heavy and sharp, could sting through skin, meat, and bone. The laces of his shoes, metal-tipped, could sneak around a neck, tighten, and squeeze. Numbered and tagged with scraps of parchment bearing his initials, packed away in a spelled box somewhere, they posed no threat to the guards or Lucius himself. His lidded chamber pot was chained down in a corner, the warden safe from having his skull split open unawares.



"Malfoy! Center of the cell, legs apart, hands where I can see them!" one of the night-guards spat through the door. Obeying wordlessly was nothing when Potter lay in a bloodied hospital bed, the few remaining Weasleys milling about, searching vainly for a speck of comfort.

"Clean up time," the man pronounced less gruffly, pulling open the heavy door. These were the only rare times Lucius got a chance to step outside his cell, and he welcomed them whether they came at dawn, mid-day or midnight. An unhurried walk down the corridor, a right turn, a staircase down, a metal door, and then the simple bliss of water pouring from a showerhead, clean and hot, while Potter's bandages crusted with dried ooze.

Wand up, the guard watched him as he undressed, finally plopping down on a chair as Lucius stepped into the shower. There was no curtain, no partition here; they couldn't risk letting a convicted Death Eater out of their sight as he soaped his hair and his legs.

"You expect me to let you... watch?" he had demanded the first time, enraged by the guard's indifferent "Yes," but as the year went on, he forced himself to admit that clean was better than not. Up in his corridor, another guard would be replacing his bedding and the prisoner on the unfortunate duty would be scouring his chamber pot with soap and brush, while down here, he scoured his chest and his toes and his cock. While Potter... did Potter still have toes and chest and cock? Or had they been shredded, obliterated by Greyback's yellow claws in fractured moonlight?

Allowing himself to relax in the steaming warmth, Lucius closed his eyes, his soapy hands trailing across his smooth chest. After the initial few weeks, he had learned that the guard was far too afraid to do anything other than watch, terrified of losing his grip on his wand, inadequate before a naked, helpless prisoner, trembling and worried about his miserable job, the only perk of which seemed to be watching captives strip and lather. Rodolphus would be walked down here next, and then his neighbor from farther down the corridor, and then another, an endless parade of wet, glistening chests and arses until dawn. Perhaps the guard touched himself between rotations, or perhaps he waited until the dayshift assumed responsibility and he was safe in his own cell-like quarters, his blanket as scratchy on the jailer's bare arse as on those jailed.

He thought of his wife, vanished, hidden in some hole and waiting for the inevitable wrath of either side to rain down onto her traitorous head. He'd had this news from the Ministry officials, whose erroneous supposition that he would have planned out her actions far ahead of time had sent him into a fit of rage. He had spat at the one in charge, Robards, even as they'd ordered him restrained.

"I thought you'd be reasonable about this, Malfoy," the lanky Auror had intoned, "you've got nothing else to bargain with, you've lost, and you will rot in here unless you give us something."

She was trying to save their son, and she had at least a sliver of a chance to do it; he had given the Ministry men nothing after demanding they leave him to rot in peace. He imagined Narcissa there, in the water, looking the way she had looked when they'd married, when she had known where her loyalties lay and was capable of something more than miserable flight. He had gotten the wrong sister; Rodolphus picked the strong one, the clever one, Bellatrix, unstoppable, unbreakable, unwavering.



His eyes snapped open as he heard the guard shift through the din of the shower; the man had stood and was leaning back against the wall, watching Lucius with undisguised interest. Azkaban no longer had the capacity to reduce its prisoners to skeletal remnants of men; while the daily bowls of brown soup had made him thinner, the guard's half-hungry, half-terrified gaze told Lucius he hadn't lost too much in the way of appearance. Here, in the water, free of the striped robes, he was still pale skin and pale hair, cascading in a wet sheet down his muscled back. He spent hours each day counting steps around his cell, and, when he was sure no guards were near, holding on to the window bars and lifting himself up. Again, he thought of Bellatrix, able to somehow have done the same when the former keepers of the fortress should have drained her resolve. "This is nothing. This is just a room they say I cannot leave. This isn't Azkaban," Rodolphus had tapped out in one of the very first messages they exchanged, "and we will be gone from here once more, when the time is right."

"Time's up, Malfoy," the guard pronounced, waiting for Lucius to dry off and put on a clean, mended robe. The black and white stripes seemed to put more distance between them, making the guard more confident, more assured; would that Greyback would do the same to this fool that he did to Potter! The moon was still bright back in his cell, and for a moment, Lucius imagined himself, leaping freely with its blessing, slaver dripping from his readied fangs, Potter crumpling to the ground under the sweep of his talons. Potter lay helpless, mewling an unintelligible string of half-words, his clothes disintegrating, his legs parting as Lucius ripped into him with tooth and claw and cock until the boy begged to crawl to St Mungo's, leaving behind a trail of hot blood.

There was a wand in his slim, manicured hand, his little breasts topped with reddened nipples, hard and sharp, like spikes. A keening wail escaped Potter's mouth as his own wand was yanked out of his mangled hands, as Lucius - Bellatrix - advanced, sending the boy flying backwards with a single word, ropes springing snake-like from her wand to circle Potter's throat, wrists and ankles, before Lucius - Fenrir - leapt on top, skin and meat and bone parting under his assault.

The door of his cell slammed behind him; three quick steps, and he was on the cot, fumbling with the closings of the striped trousers. His cock was almost painfully hard under his hands, three quick pulls and it was finished, hot and sticky, and Lucius fell back against the wall.

The tapping came then, quick and insistent.

"Be ready. The right time is soon."