A/N: This story will be preslash to slash, and long.
First chapter is the setup. The payoff – development of H/D awesomeness – starts next chapter. Which I'm posting right now, so don't worry, no waiting :o)
It started, like so many things started, with Harry Potter.
Or rather, in a manner of speaking it started with Hermione – she was, after all, the first ever to have a magical scar that said MUDBLOOD carved into her arm. But she hated it, and struggled against it, and tried every spell and potion there was to be rid of it. She even swallowed her revulsion long enough to speak to a few ex-Death-Eaters, but each of them shook his head and showed her, reluctantly, that his mark of Cain was right where it had always been and wasn't going anywhere. She saw tattoo artists, she saw makeup specialists, she saw mediwizards. She even saw muggles. But nobody could help. Magical brands, everyone explained, were forever.
Forever. So, the artist thought Harry Potter had gone completely off his head when he walked into a magical tattoo shop and rolled up his sleeve and explained what he wanted. The next day he went to Hermione's to show her. It wasn't even done healing yet and it was hideous: a bold black tattoo on his forearm, MUDBLOOD, scrawled in that handwriting that looked like it belonged to a Confunded ten-year-old. A permanent, ugly magical brand made out of a dirty word.
"Your heritage is nothing to be ashamed of," he told her. (He'd had help preparing the speech; "heritage" was not his own idea). "My mum's family is about as muggle as you can be, and I'm not going to walk around being upset about it, am I? Mudblood is only an insult if we let it be."
Hermione grabbed his arm and stared at it in disbelief. "Harry – that'll never come off!"
"And I'll never be a pureblood," he said calmly. "And I'll never care."
She started to weep, which terrified him, but she threw her arms around his neck and held him so tight he couldn't get away.
Ron came by soon afterwards. "Harry told me about his tattoo," he said. "And I thought, all very well for him, you know, show solidarity and all… but what about me? I come from fifty generations of wizards. Ginger wizards," he added, "So we know we don't even have any mailman problems."
He couldn't look Hermione in the face as he said the rest. "But I thought this was sort of appropriate. The way people get MUM sometimes." He pulled up his sleeve to show her. MUDBLOOD – in a Cupid's heart. "I'm sorry it's so bloody romantic, Hermione, but I didn't know what else to-"
He didn't even get the whole sentence out before she was smothering him in a hug even weepier than the one Harry had gotten.
And of course, Harry Potter being Harry Potter, the gesture made the papers. Before long the tattoo was everywhere. Muggle-born wizards got it in droves, delighted to help rob the terrible insult of its power. Ron's version appeared too, on wizards of all backgrounds. Friends and relatives of the dead got the tattoo as a memorial. Angry pureblood teenagers got it as a rebellion – and sent photos to their parents in Azkaban. And a lot of repentant ex-voldemorters who were not in Azkaban grit their teeth and got the brand as well, as proof that their skull-and-snake days were over.
So it was soon everywhere. Harry was ambivalent. Some days he was just glad Hermione was smiling again and people had nothing to torture her with, but other times it set his teeth on edge to see so many wizards strutting around with Hermione's MUDBLOOD hanging out of their sleeve. Strangers who had no right.
Ron mostly laughed off his bad attitude. "It's become a fashion statement, mate," he'd say. "Which means you're in fashion for a change. Just smile and enjoy it."
Harry didn't think he would ever be able to write off Hermione's screams as fashion, but he did his best. He learned to smile and shake hands with every idiot who ran up to him to proudly show off their tattoo, and he didn't bite anybody's head off about it.
He was Harry Potter, after all. This was just the sort of thing he had to get used to.
TBC.