Stranger Than Paradise
Disclaimer: All things Potter belong to JKRowling.No teenage witches were harmed in the making of this fic.
A/N Dedicated to Ebony/AngieJ, author of the incomparable Trouble in Paradise, who will probably never let me beta again!
I was beginning to wish I had dedicated my life to minding my own business. As star sports reporter for the Daily Prophet, I could do nothing of the sort. It had been two weeks since the paternity scandal had broken over Quidditch star Ron Weasley's head and the wizarding world was still speaking of nothing else. Orla Quirke and her three year old daughter had retreated into seclusion and were not granting interviews to the press. Half the Weasley family wasn't speaking to me. Or to each other. The one big happy Weasley family had split like the Titanic and was headed for the bottom of the North Atlantic, with the good ship Carpathia nowhere in sight. (My dad had a thing for disaster movies.)
The only ones still on my side were Ginny, Fred and, surprisingly, Ron himself. I was touched by his faith in me. "I know you can get to the bottom of this, Angelina. I swear, everything I've told you is the truth. Have you ever known me lie to you? I don't lie. It's not, you know, like I'm moral or anything. I'm just not very good at it. My ears turn red, don't they? I might as well have a pair of sneak-o-scopes attached to my skull." I had to admit he had a point.
One thing was clear to me. There was more behind this than a gold-digging dryad. I could have done with a pensieve. I settled for sticky notes (a Muggle invention, but dead useful). I wrote down my scattered thoughts and observations in no particular order, one to each yellow rectangle, and placed them on the desktop in front of me, forming different patterns, occasionally stopping to scribble another.
The mysteries: Seven million galleons had been paid to silence Orla Quirke. Where had they gone? How could an airhead like Orla come up with a plot involving so much machination. I felt sure no Ravenclaw could be the instigator of such a plan. Criminal masterminds tended to be Slytherin, or, shame to say, Gryffindor. It was the whole type A thing. What was the Danae project? Was Ron telling the truth about Orla, and if so, who was the father of the child in the photograph? Come to that, who was its mother? The names of the mother and the child on the paternity test results had been blacked out. Whom did Hermione really love? Could her marriage be saved?
I thought back to the week before:
Ginny opened the door with her key and in we went. We could hear Hermione and Harry in the kitchen.
"Good, it's all settled," Harry was saying. "I'll be off then."
"One more thing," said Hermione.
As we walked into the kitchen I saw Hermione shove Harry back against the counter, jam her tongue into his mouth, and run her hands up under his shirt.
Oh well, I suppose platonic friendships get weird sometimes.
Ginny cleared her throat.
Harry disengaged himself with admirable flair.
"Carry on, ladies!" he said brightly, and disapparated with the usual faint pop. After that, Ginny had made her unsettling remarks about "sharing" Draco with Hermione, whatever that meant. I refused to consider the obvious.
Hermione had given us her mysterious package for Dr. Branford at the MMRI and then Ginny had disappeared and I'd gotten lost.
I had been wandering around the upper floor of the MMRI building for quite a while. Having gotten out of Hermione's office I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get back in. I wasn't even sure which door was hers anymore and I was nursing third degree burns on both hands from trying the wrong ones.
I was just about to give it up and stretch out in the corridor, when I heard voices. I made for them --well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. No Malfoy installation would be complete without its secret secluded sex garden.
Draco and Ginny were clearly enjoying themselves and weren't in any position to welcome an intrusion by me. As for the position they were in... to anybody who'd only known them from their school days it would have been more than unbelievable. Who would have thought the cool, stand-offish snob and the shy, blushing schoolgirl would ever morph into ... well suffice it to say they'd been hitting the gilly weed pretty hard. I couldn't help noticing, before I made my discrete exit, that the jello was the exact shade of Harry Potter's eyes.
It occured to me that perhaps I had found the secret of the Danae project... It wasn't much talked of, but one of the drawbacks of the wizarding life was the way wand use cut into the libido. After the first frenzy of youth, the excess life energy gets absorbed into the wand. We ended up living far longer but much tamer lives than our Muggle counterparts. The Weasleys had always been an exception to that rule, as I have cause to know, and many's the envious potion maker who has tried to duplicate that inborn Weasley magic and bottle it. And failed. But perhaps the combined resources of Fred and George, with Draco's backing had finally made a dent in the problem. If they had, the long term implications would be staggering.
I mused again over the yellow rectangles in front of me.
Suddenly I had it. Like most mysteries, the answer seemed absurdly simple once I'd figured it out. I got Harry on the fire and filled him in on my suspicions. "You could be right," he said. "But if you are, then Orla and that child are in mortal peril."
I realized what he meant. Orla was no longer neccessary to the powers behind this horrible plot. Whatever she knew, it was too much. And what better than an awful tragic death to keep the whole business in the public eye a little longer? Long enough to make sure the 3W/Malfoysoft merger never happened. If Orla was found dead and Ron was implicated...even if he beat the murder rap, Quidditch star Ron Weasley would never made another knut off broomstick endorsements.
"But they're in hiding! How can we warn them in time?"
"No time to lose," Harry agreed. He waved his hand. A golden bubble appeared in front of me. I had ceased to be amazed at anything Harry could do. A moment later we were both standing in a hallway outside a closed door. "Amazing!" I said, contradicting myself, "but why not apparate us right inside?"
"More dramatic," Harry replied.
We burst into the flat, Harry wearing the red cape Hermione had given him for Christmas. The one with the giant 'S' on the back. I was still clueless as to what that was about, but he had seemed to think it was very funny.
We found the little girl in the living room, watching something called Scooby Doo.
And I had to say Ginny was absolutely right, if she wasn't a Weasley, then Ginny herself had been switched at birth. The toddler looked up at me with cinnamon brown eyes, huge in her pale freckly face.
"Where's your mum, then?" I asked, dropping down to speak to her.
The little one shook her head mutely.
"In here," Harry shouted. "She's been stunned."
Orla Quirke lay flat out, in the midst of her rifled belongings. Every drawer had been opened, and its contents flung about the room, the mattress was slashed, the pictures torn from their frames. A wicked looking knife lay on the floor beside her. It looked like we'd shown up just in time.
"Is she all right?" I asked anxiously. I had no love for Orla, but the welfare of a child always comes first with me.
"Nanny Orla's sleeping," the little girl announced.
For the third time in two weeks, my world spun upside down.
"Nanny Orla!" I exclaimed. "But isn't she- isn't that your Mum, then?"
"Course not." said the little girl stoutly.
I was getting more confused by the moment. "What's your name?" I asked, realizing suddenly that I didn't know it.
"Heather," said the girl
"And, what's your Mum's name, Heather?"
"Mummy!" she said, happy to know the answer. We weren't getting anywhere. "Heather, will you come with me?" I asked. "We need to find your Mum."
She appeared to think this over. "Okay!" she said.
"Take the child and go find Ron." Harry ordered "I'll bring Orla around, and catch up with you." Another golden bubble appeared in front of us. It brought us right to the main portal of the Emerald City.
I had an argument with the security guards about Heather, but they finally let me take her inside. I was going to find Ron and Hermione and have it out once and for all. I had a pretty good idea where to look.
The jello had been replaced with ordinary water, and Hermione was there alright, dressed in a pink bikini. Ron floated beside her, a dreamy expression on his face.
"We don't do this enough," he murmured, reaching for her.
"I'll say we don't!" said Hermione...but it wasn't the bikini wearing Hermione that had spoken. It was another Hermione, this one fully dressed, who was glaring down at the pair in the pool with a highly indignant expression. Her distress was as nothing though, compared to that of the child beside me.
"I've got two mommies!" Heather wailed.
Ron stared from one woman to the other with a look of utmost bewilderment.
"You worthless imposter!" the clothed Hermione screamed. "Get your hands off my husband!"
The Hermione in the pool dowsed us all with water as she levitated straight up, hit the ground running, and made for the door. She almost ran right into Harry. He didn't have time to go for his wand, but caught her on the jaw with a blow that knocked her flat.
"Stupefy!" he cried, stunning what certainly looked to be Hermione before she could get up again.
"I take it that's not Hermione?" I said in a puzzled way. Harry nodded.
"How can you be so sure?" I asked.
"Well, I've never known Hermione run from anything in her life," Harry replied.
"And I don't have a glass jaw," said the Hermione with clothes on.
Ron heaved himself out of the pool.
"It wasn't you?" Ron shook himself, physically and mentally. "What about that afternoon at La Belle Aurore, that wasn't you either?" Hermione shook her head, " Or the evening at the honeymoon suite at the the Four Witches? The cruise down the Rhine? the vat of milk and oreos?"
"Not me," said Hermione matter-of-factly. "Sounds like I missed a lot of fun though."
"But then who?" Ron agonized. "It's not," he hesitated,"not an unregistered Evil Twin, is it? " Of course, all evil twins have to be registered with Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
"If it's polyjuice, all we need to do is wait," said Harry.
And that's what we did. It was about fifteen minutes later that the stunned figure on the ground began to change. The sleek hair thinned, the slender body bulged, and a moment later we were treated to the most horrible sight I have ever seen: Peter Pettigrew in a pink string bikini. A butterfly lit on his nose.
Ron gagged. I hadn't seen him look so green since that afternoon in his second year when he'd been the recipient of his own misfired slug-eating curse.
"I let that --- sleep in my bed," he said. "Again."
"Oh, I can't believe this," said the real Hermione.
Heather stared at her with wide eyes. "Mummy?" she asked, tentatively.
"This is Heather," I said. "Your daughter."
Hermione covered her mouth with her hand. She hadn't even wanted one child. However would she cope with two?
At that moment, Harry showed up, with Orla. "Heather darling, are you all right? Oh thank goodness. Oh, Mr. Weasley, Mrs. Weasley, please forgive me! I didn't want to do it!" Orla said tearfully. "That man, Pettigrew, he said if I didn't do what they wanted, they'd hurt the child."
"So, you posed as Heather's mother, and the Ron in the picture with the baby was..."
"It was Pettigrew, of course," said Harry.
"But why?" Ron asked. "I don't get it at all."
"I suppose it's time we heard from Peter," said Harry wearily. Of all the decisions he'd made in his life, I suppose letting Pettigrew live was the one he'd regretted most. "Enervate!" he said, pointing a finger at Peter.
Ron got a bath towel and threw it over the groggy Pettigrew, to the relief of everyone. Pettigrew sobbed and snuffled and sneezed his way through the awful tale.
The mastermind behind it all was of course, Lucius Malfoy, who, it appeared, still wasn't dead. He'd been desperate to recreate his damaged fortune and ruin the Weasleys, and somehow he'd discovered what Peter had been doing. He'd blackmailed him into conceiving the baby during one of his trysts with Ron, a baby which had then been implanted into Orla, using muggle technology.
"I couldn't live without you," Pettigrew sniffed to Ron, "You were the only one who ever cared. You took care of me, you fed me tonic when I was ill. You mourned when you thought I was dead. She doesn't care about you, " he said, pointing to Hermione. "I knew I could prove it to you . And I have. She was ready to throw you over."
"No," said Hermione, "I have an announcement to make."
"I love you," said Hermione to Harry. Ron's face fell. "And you," she added, speaking to Draco, who was suddenly there, because the author needed him. "You're the best friends a girl could ever have."
Ron looked up, not daring to hope.
"Friends?" said Draco, "Why is it that the best ones always want to be friends!"
"But I'm brave and true!" said Harry, "and I'm worth millions."
"And I'm worth millions, have a bad attitude, am a nifty dresser, and am toosexytodie," protested Draco.
"They're right," said Ron, "You'd be better off with either one of them."
"No, I wouldn't." said Hermione.
"Whyever not?" Draco asked.
"Well, it's true what you said about yourselves. You are all those things, and you live in a world of adventure and that's wonderful to think about, but...well, it's all about you, isn't it? It's always about you and it's always going to be about you. I want a man who's about me. And fortunately, I've found one." She beamed at Ron, who beamed right back.
"Come on in" he beckoned. "The water's fine."
Together , they jumped into the pool, Hermione still fully dressed. I had a feeling our presence was about to become superflous. I nudged Draco, Orla picked up Heather and made for the door. She was an excellent nanny. And Ron and Hermione would be needing one, what with an instant family and another on the way. The ever efficient Malfosoft security forces took charge of Pettigrew.
"Come on, Harry, I'll buy you a drink," Draco said.
"People will talk," said Harry.
"True. On the other hand, I promise not to sue you for paternity."
"Point," said Harry.
We exited, to the sound of happy splashing behind us.
THE END