Lucifer

Chapter 3

December 1959

    The mail owls flew over, and the usual rain of letters and packages fell, apparently from the snowing sky above. It was early December, and everyone was looking forward to the holiday that would come in a few short weeks.

    "Who's that from, Adrian?" asked Lucius, mouth full of toast.

    "Dunno," he said. "Doesn't look like my father's handwriting."

    Lucius looked at the letter. What it looked like to him were the letters his father got from the ministry about consulting. Something official.

    "You going to open it?"

    "Going to finish my eggs first," Adrian Mulciber said, and proceeded to do so. At sixteen, he had matured into a slender boy, although not quite Lucius's height, with a long face and dark eyes, and he regularly got teased about the curls his long dark hair fell into when left to its own devices. Lucius took another piece of toast, and began talking to Gil Parkinson, the Slytherin Keeper, about Quidditch tactics, since he was one of the Slytherin chasers. He'd forgotten all about the letter when he heard Mulciber gasp.

    "Oh, God," Adrian whispered. He had gone chalk white, and the letter fell limply from his hand into his plate. "I..." and he clapped a hand over his mouth, dashing away from the table. Everyone turned. Lucius grabbed the letter, read it, blanched, and headed after him. Rookwood caught up with him at the door. "Go get Jowett," Lucius told him. "Now."

    When Professor Jowett arrived, Adrian was sobbing and retching. Lucius turned from where he was holding his friend's hair back and handed him the letter. "Sir, if there's anything my family or I can do...."

    Professor Jowett looked the letter over, and his brows went up. "I need to take this to the Headmaster," he said. "You two are excused from class for the day. Get him to bed and stay with him until he's over the shock. DAMN those officious Mudblooded shites...." He shut the door, and his voice could be heard chasing away the curious.

    Eventually Lucius was able to get Adrian to sit up, to flush away the remains of his breakfast, to walk through relatively quieter halls back to their dorm. The words in the letter were fresh in his mind.

    "...apparent psychotic break....already dead when the Aurors arrived...were forced to use deadly force in order to subdue him...due to the condition that the remains were in, disposal as hazardous magical materials was indicated and has been accomplished..."

    He loosened Adrian's tie, and drew off his shoes. Adrian rolled into a ball, and kept sobbing, broken, holding on to Lucius's hand. And Lucius let him. Gobshites. Send him a fucking official letter from the Aurors with the bloody incident report enclosed.. He's still in school. You could have sent someone. Or sent the letter to the headmaster and had him break the news. Some fucking Mudblood wanting to take a dig at the old families, that's what it was.

    It was a shadow that ran over many of the old houses, the ones who claimed the practice of the Dark Arts as their own birthright. Too much of it, and you go insane. And there's no hard line to know where "too much" is. It had taken Adrian's father, and by extension, his mother, at a relatively young age. It had killed Lucius's great-grandfather, only two years before. Etienne Malfoy was smart. He never used dark magic where light magic would do, and he'd taught Lucius the same. But there were some magical fields where dark magic is the only magic and Jocelin Mulciber had been a student of one of them, one of the best in the field. Lucius held his friend's hand, and stared at the stone wall, and the heavy drapery, and at the spider making a web between the bedpost and the wall, and was surprised to find his face wet. Eventually, they both fell asleep, holding on to each other's hand.

    Lucius was awakened by movement beside him. Memory rushed in. "What time is it?" Adrian said in a voice that was slightly hoarse. Lucius sat up, straightening his robes. He needed to change them. Adrian ran a hand down his face, and sighed.

    Lucius summoned a cloth and handed it over. Adrian wiped his face, and sat up, shakily.

    "Are you all right?" Lucius said, and then shook his head. "I'm such a git. Of course not."

    "No," Adrian agreed. "But I will be. The money is all right since..." He bit his lip and didn't continue for a moment, fighting back tears. Since he only killed his wife, and there's no compensation to be paid out to anyone but his son. They both knew the unspoken words, and avoided each other's eyes. There was no compensation for losing your parents.

    "I'll write my parents. To see if you could come to us over the summer."

    "Thanks," said Adrian. "But my grandparents are still alive, they'll probably take me. But I'll accept any invitations. There's no cousins my age at all, except that bitch Lacerta. "

    "All right," Lucius said, and smiled. "It gets pretty boring there in the summer, though. Father's at the ministry, and Mother locks herself in her lab."

    "It wouldn't be boring with you there," Adrian said, and then changed the subject. "Have you really been here all this time?"

    "Yes....Jowett excused us from classes."

    "You didn't have to do that," Adrian said. "God, I need a bath." He stood up and began unfastening his robe, and Lucius stood too, moving over to his own desk.

    "Can you eat? You missed lunch, but dinner will be soon."

    "I think so." Adrian had stripped and wound a towel around him, before picking up his soap. "Will you..." He looked vulnerable, suddenly, and younger.

    "I'll wait for you," said Lucius, and smiled at him. The smile that returned was sweet, but shadowed, and Adrian ducked out of the room.

    Lucius changed his robe, and thought very, very hard. And he made sure that he didn't look up from his Transfiguration text when the door banged, announcing his roommate had returned, until Adrian said, "You coming or not? I'm famished." Because although robes hid a lot, it was still uncomfortable to have one's body doing...that...around one's roommate. Around one's best friend. Around one's best friend whose father just fucking murdered his mother in a fit of Dark Magic-induced psychosis, for God's sake didn't he have ANY sense of decency? Now was NOT the time. Not at all. Even if he did have a gorgeous smile and the curve of his spine was beautiful enough to make Michelangelo weep, and hair that made his hands itch to touch it, it was not the right bloody time to do anything about it.

    This would be a good night to read that book on the theory of charms that his father'd sent to him last week. To lose himself in a book.

    Adrian closed his Transfiguration book, and sighed. He was tired, and was going to go to bed. He looked at his watch. Well past curfew. Definitely time. He just hoped he could sleep. Turning out some lights would be a good start.

    "Lucius," Adrian said. There was no reply. "Lucius!" he said, a little louder. Still no response. Adrian sighed and shook his head. True, his best friend was sitting there in an elegant sprawl on his own bed (and looking damned beautiful, all that silver hair and long graceful body against the green hangings), but he really wasn't there. He was so far inside the book he was reading that he couldn't hear anything. Adrian wasn't sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. You could set off a dungbomb right next to him and he wouldn't notice at this point. Someone had, once, when he was reading in the Great Hall. It had won Lucius some respect that his only response was a charm to blow the stink away from him about three minutes later, followed by a quick return to the book.

    Adrian knew how to deal with this. He walked around his own bed, and touched Lucius's shoulder, only to find his own wrist caught in a quick, steely grip. It almost hurt. It did hurt. Fuck, when had he got that strong? Lucius was staring at him, eyes dilated and face frozen as he pulled his mind back out of the book.

    "You can let go," Adrian said pointedly, and Lucius thawed, a wry smile touching his mouth, and releasing Adrian's wrist as he set the book down on his nightstand.

    "Did I hurt you?" Lucius said. "I didn't realize that my reflexes had improved that much." He'd been studying an Advanced Defence course, and it had given him a hairtrigger response.

    Adrian held up his arm where a set of finger marks showed red. "It'll go away." He sounded sulky, even to his own ears, and he realized that he was vaguely angry. Just one more bloody thing going wrong today.

    "Damn. I'm sorry." Lucius looked contrite.

     Somehow this annoyed Adrian more. He stepped back away from Lucius's bed, and angrily pulled at his tie. "It's all right," he muttered.

    "I'm...."

    "It's all right, I said!" Adrian snapped, and Lucius's eyes widened.

    He shoved himself off the bed, and said, "What the hell do you want me to do, Adrian? I SAID I was sorry. Do you want me to fucking kiss it better or something?"

    The statement fell like lead into the room, and they both just....stood there, for a moment. Their eyes had locked, light to dark, and they both realized things had....changed. Lucius cocked his head and looked at Adrian, and there was a strange tension in him. His anger had changed into something else. It could go either way. God, if he played this wrong, he was going to lose his best friend.

    Adrian waved his wand at the door, locking it, and then said, carefully keeping tones out of it, "Yeah. Yeah, go ahead....if you want to." There were a host of things implied in that, and Adrian hoped, so hoped...he'd want to.

    And of all the things he could have done, somehow it surprised Adrian when Lucius took his hand, and kissed his wrist, lightly, once, twice, three, four times, where the imprint of his fingers showed red against the skin. And then he turned his arm over, kissing where the thumb had marked him. Adrian's eyes were wide, and slowly, slowly, he reached one hand out and touched Lucius's head, stroking over the hair back and down to where it was moored with a tie at the base of his neck, then pulling the end and letting his hair free. His fingers caressed Lucius's neck as he pulled the ribbon away. Soft hair, like satin. Lucius shivered, and looked up at Adrian. There were suddenly a thousand questions in his mind, Adrian knew. Lucius overanalyzed everything. He was going to think too much again. Screw that.

    "Are you...."

    "Lucius." said Adrian. "Shut up." And he leaned forward and kissed him.

     It was good. Oh, it was good. Adrian tasted like the apple crumble from dinner, mace and cinnamon and sweet heat, and Lucius was suddenly hit by a great hard slap of WANT that stiffened him and set his skin on fire. Adrian was gasping into his mouth, and Lucius suddenly realized they had too many clothes on and what the hell was the fucking point of robes anyway they were in the way very badly right now. Adrian pushed him back, mouth reddened and hair waving loose around his face. His eyes were burning, and all the questions about what the hell this was had kind of evaporated out of Lucius's mind.

    They lay sprawled in Lucius's bed, Adrian wearing a lovely smile and nothing more.

        "I've been wanting to do that for ages," he said, looking up Lucius's body. "You're fucking beautiful, Lucifer."

    "You're bloody brilliant, Dri," Lucius said with a sated grin. "Turnabout's fair play."

    If anyone had looked in on that particular dorm room, they would have found the two boys curled together like puppies in a basket in one bed that night. Adrian didn't get much sleep, but it wasn't for the reasons he'd thought.