Accidental
She's sitting in a public toilet, the lid shut and the door locked, reading how Amy+Robbie=Luv and For a good time call. The boys are outside, somewhere, scrounging around for food and not paying attention to what she buys in Boots. She waves the plastic wand like a paper fan.
Two pink lines.
"Oh fuck," she says.
"How…how…how did this happen?" Ron is pacing, tugging at his hair and saying anything and everything because his mouth refuses to stay closed.
"Well, Ronald, when a man and a woman love each other very much, or are very randy…" She rolls her eyes.
"Do…did…love?" he stutters, and he's so pale his freckles stand out like chocolate chips on a biscuit.
She could really go for a biscuit.
"I don't know," she says, truthfully. "Maybe; it was…complicated." She sighs. "Harry? What do you think?"
Harry pokes a finger behind his glasses to rub his right eye and shrugs.
"Thanks," she drawls and grimaces.
"Sorry Hermione, but," he sighs, "really?"
"Yes, really."
He sighs again and she picks at a loose thread in the sofa. She knows what he's thinking, how could she not, having spent every minute, waking and sleeping, with him; sitting and walking and running and sleeping in turns. He's going to want her back at the Burrow or in Australia with her parents. No use for a pregnant woman on a life-or-death adventure, not matter how big her brain.
"God, Ron, your mother is going to kill me," she groans.
Remarkably, for the middle of a war, Hermione makes it to the Burrow without incident. She knocks on the door and answers some questions before Molly bundles her into the kitchen, pushing a cup of tea into her hands and tutting over how thin she's got.
"Harry and Ron, are they—"
"They're fine, Mrs. Weasley."
"But why aren't you—"
"I found myself no longer able to assist them."
She sips her tea, wincing and taking out the slice of lemon she used to love so much. Not anymore since her taste buds have been turning thanks to junior. Molly watches and her eyes go wide.
"Sweet Merlin," she says, "I'm going to kill that boy."
For a millisecond, Hermione thinks of letting Molly believe Ron's the father. It would save on fights and guarantee her a place to sleep and pee (which is becoming a far larger part of her life than it used to be), but decides it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't do to have Molly coo and coddle just to have no redheaded baby in the end.
She's always been crap at lying, anyway.
"It's not Ron's," she says. "It's not Harry's, either, 'cause Ginny would kill me."
"Then who—"
"I'd…rather not say."
Maybe it's the pause, maybe it's the unconscious fidget, but Molly smiles sadly and pats her hand and Hermione doesn't want to think too hard about what might be going through the older woman's head.
"You're welcome to stay, as long as you like, dear," Molly says and Hermione drains her tea.
When Ginny comes home for Christmas she almost faints, seeing Hermione sitting at the kitchen table cutting stars out of sugar cookie dough. Her mother rushes to her, babbling assurances and rubbing her arm, but Ginny grabs on to the doorframe when her friend stands up to wash her hands, baby bump jutting out between her bony hips.
"Holy shit," she says.
"Ginevra, watch your language!"
"Sorry mum, but…Merlin, Hermione, when did this happen?"
"June, I think. The beginning of," Hermione says, wiping her hands on a tea towel and tugging at her Weasley jumper. Six months on and she's having to transfigure her clothes.
After dinner, Ginny drags her up to her bedroom, sitting her down and demanding the dirt. Naturally, Hermione stalls.
"How's school?" she asks.
"Fuck school, who got you up the duff?" Ginny says.
"Classes okay?"
"Was it Ron?"
"I hear the DA's still going."
"Viktor?"
"How's the new headmaster?"
"Neville?"
"Has Hagrid rebuilt his house?"
"Please, tell me it's not Fred or George's."
"Honestly, Ginny, Fred and George?"
"Now we're back on track. Please, please, please, tell me who the dad is."
Hermione squirms, wondering. It would be nice, to have someone to talk to about it; to not have to hold it close and concealed and so shrouded she sometimes can't find it anymore, can't distinguish it from hazy dreams.
"I have to pee," she says instead.
Christmas is, not to put too fine a point on it, depressing. Harry and Ron are in the woods somewhere and the twins can't confuse anyone about their identity and Remus is extra twitchy. Tonks, round and glowing and wolfing down mince pies, is thrilled about another baby.
"Best friends, they'll be," she says. "I can see it."
"Yeah," Hermione mutters, wishing there was more than pumpkin juice in her glass.
"Probably same Hogwarts house."
"It's a…possibility."
Hermione rubs her eyes, feigning pregnancy tiredness, and wonders how close on the Black Family tapestry their kids will be.
It all comes to a head in the New Year. Seventh months pregnant and folding laundry in her room, she hears commotion downstairs. Cautiously, wand drawn, she makes her way down the stairs, peering into the living room. Arthur and Shaklebolt are there, propping a body up between them. Its feet drag on the rug, leaving trails of dirt Molly cleans absently with her wand, and Hermione watches from the doorway as Draco Malfoy is sat on the sofa.
She holds her wand so tight it almost snaps in two.
"What happened, Kingsley?" Molly asks.
"Found him in a raid on Borgin and Burkes. All the others scarpered and he just…gave himself up."
"What?"
"Barely put up a fight. Was going to take him straight to the Ministry, and we almost made it, but…"
"But what, Kingsley?" Arthur urges.
Kingsley rubs a hand over his face and sits heavily in a threadbare armchair. "I'm knackered, right, so we had to walk a few blocks to the nearest Ministry entrance. Figured it was safe, since he wasn't putting up a fight. Then he said he was done, with the Death Eaters. He said he wanted to help, that he knows I'm part of the Order."
"Do you think—" Arthur starts.
"That the Death Eaters know the identities of Order members? At least a few of 'em. Maybe Snape told them. Or maybe Snape just told Draco; in any case, he said he wants to tell us everything he knows, and be our willing prisoner."
"What?" Molly breathes.
"He said so long as the Death Eaters think he's here against his will, that we're using Veritaserum or something on him, that his parents will be safe, but he wants You-Know-Who gone. Passed out shortly after that, but I checked him over and he should be fine."
Arthur heaves a sigh and looks at his wife, the kind of non-verbal communication that has nothing to do with invading peoples thoughts. "I'll contact Remus and Minerva," he says.
"Where should I take him? I brought him here 'cause I couldn't think of anywhere else, and…Merlin I'm tired."
"Leave him here, Kingsley, and take Percy's room. Have a bit of a kip, if you can," Molly says.
One by one the adults leave, Molly moving Malfoy to lie across the sofa, head propped on a floral pillow. Hermione sits in a chair and watches him breathe.
It's morning when he wakes, Hermione asleep in the chair with stabbing pains in her back and fierce kicking at her bladder. She hauls herself up to the restroom and when she comes back his eyes are open. He sits up at her shuffling footsteps and his jaw drops.
"Guh," he says, and she lifts an eyebrow.
"Always articulate," she says.
"Who knocked you up?" he slurs out, voice rough with sleep.
She snaps. "YOU, YOU ARSEHOLE!"
"Arp," he says.
"Hermione, dear, what's going on?" Molly asks, in her housecoat, smelling of breakfast.
"I-I-I," Malfoy stutters and Hermione shakes with rage.
"How dare you ask me that! After…everything, how dare you sit there and think that I slept with anyone else! I'm not some Knockturn Alley slag, Draco, Jesus Christ!"
"I…I didn't…you're not a slag," he says, swallowing painfully.
"Nice apology."
"Hermione—"
Molly's eyebrows rise, Arthur's and Kingsley's too, standing in the doorway in pyjamas and rumpled clothes.
"Hermione, I just…it's a shock. Shit."
"It was a shock to me too. Obviously, I couldn't send you an owl."
"Fuck."
"That's what got us here."
"I assume Scarhead and the Weasel are still out there, fighting the good fight."
"Minus one of course; two if you count junior."
"Got a name all picked out I see, I'm flattered."
"Shut up."
Behind her, Hermione can hear Kingsley and Arthur dragging Molly back to the kitchen, muttering about privacy and trying to put a stopper in her sputtering. Hermione figures she has a nice fight to look forward to, but her eyes stay on Malfoy. He looks like hell and she tells him so.
"And you look…" he trails off.
"If you say one word about my weight I'll make the slap in third year look like a butterfly kiss."
He smirks, the lovely, insufferable arse that he is. "Beautiful. I was going to say beautiful."
"You're still better at lying than I am."
She sits back in her chair, rubbing her belly; an unconscious motion that draws his eye. He twitches.
"I didn't think…I didn't think that this would happen," he says, so soft she just barely hears it. "I didn't think this could. All I could ever think about…was you."
"I know," she says. "I'm supposed to be the smartest witch of my age, so everyone says, and I…didn't think. I never could, around you. Especially not that…" She swallows. She remembers the last few times, so desperate, almost painful. He dragged her into cupboards and classrooms, pushing her up against walls and into her with desperation, rocking and panting and biting her neck. He mumbled things, words swallowed by the skin of her throat and the starched collars of her shirts, and he smothered her, in his smell and his fingertips and the grind of his hips against hers. She never got a chance to do anything else but feel.
"I didn't think—I knew—I would never see you again. Even if I didn't…succeed, I knew I wouldn't. You would hate me. I don't want you to hate me."
"You lowered your wand."
"What?"
She smiles at him. She remembers what he was like, last year, the near-imperceptible shake of his hands on her thighs and the hollowed edges of his cheekbones pressed against her skin. He wasn't that good at hiding it, the wild look in his eyes, like a cornered animal, especially not with her. The ragged exhale he let out when he came in her arms, damp and teetering on some edge she didn't understand, then, still echoes inside her head. "You lowered your wand."
After a lengthy session with Remus and Minerva and other assorted Order members in the Weasley kitchen, Draco ends up in Bill's old room. No one mentions the morning he woke up here, except for Molly while peeling potatoes, disappointment and disapproval coating her voice like paint on a wall.
They never talk about the baby, her and Draco, although he keeps staring at her stomach.
They talk about other things, and read and play Muggle card games she teaches him (he's so good at poker she refuses to play with him anymore) and teach themselves spells out of Percy's old seventh year textbooks.
It's companionable, comfortable, the things they missed at school when it was just harsh words and fierce kisses. They never got to sit still for very long.
"You're fidgeting."
"I know."
"Then stop it."
"I can't," she snaps, pulling at her jumper and crossing and uncrossing her legs, stretching them out on the rug in front of her and crossing the ankles. She sits straighter and slouches but nothing keeps the pain from her spine.
"What's wrong?"
"Your kid wants to kill me, that's what's wrong," she grinds out and freezes. Looking at him, he's not blinking.
She thinks she can actually see the tension, tangible and as dense as tapioca. Then, without a sound, he rises and sits behind her, sliding her into the cradle of his legs.
"What hurts?" he asks and his breath moves across her ear like a summer breeze.
"Lower back."
Pushing up the hem of her jumper, cold thumbs press against her spine, rubbing in hard circles. Slowly, she eases, his hands heating against her skin and soaking in to her back. Through her back and down between her legs and she's read about the changes in libido but figured the war had deadened her from the pelvis down.
Not so, apparently. The baby kicks.
"Ow," she moans.
"Did I hurt you?"
"No, it's," she waves a hand at herself, "Kicks something fierce."
One hand still on her back, he lifts the other, palm hovering over her globed belly. She can feel the space between them, goosebumps rising beneath her lumpy jumper as the air sparks like a thousand struck matches. When his hand finally touches her, fingers splayed, she lets out a breath.
He moves slowly, unsure, hand inching like he's moving in the dark, which she supposes he is. All the lights went out the minute he looked at her the morning he arrived, and he hasn't tried very hard to look for light switches. She can feel the baby moving, tumbling, and she thinks it's searching too. It senses him, through the wool and flesh and fluid, senses its blood and is moving towards it.
The baby kicks and Draco feels it. He stiffens.
"That was…" he whispers, and she can feel his heart pounding through her back. She licks her lips twice before speaking.
"Baby knows its daddy."
After that, Draco's antsy, pacing and muttering like a homeless person at a bus station. She thinks it was something she said, that openly calling him a father has him freaked, like every seventeen-year-old would be, but he's stuck at the Burrow on pain of death by Dark Lord, so instead of bolting he's decided to be the twitchy ferret she once said he was.
It's driving her crazy.
After a full week, she corners him as he's coming out of the bathroom, smelling of spearmint toothpaste and soap.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" she says.
He looks at her, a long look, a piercing, burning, aching look; the kind they write novels about. Then he kisses her, sweeping his tongue across her lips and inside her mouth and when he pulls away she says "huh", which is as intelligent as she can be.
"I know you like it, but we're not naming him Hugo," he says and drags her to his room, where they find that his libido is in perfect working order, too.
She ends up being overdue, grumpy and sullen in the middle of March, snapping at everyone and getting into hour-long rows with Draco. When her water breaks all over the living room floor just after breakfast, she thinks the garden gnomes could hear Draco's sigh of relief.
She doesn't make it upstairs to bed, and there end up being far too many projectiles within reach.
"Mind the breakables, dear," Molly says, fluffing pillows behind Hermione's tense shoulders.
"I wish you were dead," Hermione groans at Draco, gripping the sheets that have been spread out on the magically cleaned floor.
"They always say that," Arthur says, clapping the younger man's shoulder.
"Uh," he says, and jerkily kneels beside her, waving his hand in her face. "You can…you know…if you OW OW FUCK WOMAN!"
He bitches about his 'broken' hand for an hour. She throws a ceramic lion at him.
In the wee hours of next morning, a squirming, squalling thing slips from her body and into Molly's hands. Hermione thinks she's hallucinating.
"Is it over?" she asks.
"Yeah," Draco says softly, eyes fixed, and she follows them. Molly's holding a wriggling checkered blanket and Hermione feels her heart try to crawl out her mouth. She had a baby. Right.
"Congratulations, it's a girl," Molly says and hands the baby—her daughter, Hermione reminds herself—over, murmuring about supporting newborn heads.
She's not at all like Hermione thought, even though the books said she wouldn't be. She's not peach coloured and plump, but red and thin and covered in white film like cobwebs. Her face is screwed up, eyes slashes above her blotchy cheeks and mouth pinched. Hermione adjusts her, dragging a finger down one soft arm to tiny fingers tipped in tiny nails. Her face softens, smoothing all at once like a rose blooming.
"Hello Rose," Hermione says.
"I like Rose," Draco says and kisses her temple. He touches his daughter's hand and Hermione sniffles.
"Merlin, Hermione."
"Shut up."
Hermione's heart swells like the sea when her daughter opens her eyes.
Harry Potter kills the Dark Lord and Neville Longbottom kills a snake and Hermione gets shipped off to Andromeda's during the final battle, while Draco pulls a Gryffindor and goes off to fight and look for his parents. Hermione wants to wring his neck, especially when he's Slytherin enough to use their daughter as a bargaining chip. Better to have at least one parent, if he dies.
Rose and Teddy get along famously.
"I'm going to murder him," she says to Andromeda over tea.
"So you've said."
When the battle's done, all four of them floo to Hogwarts, Andromeda moving to stand over the body of her daughter, stroking her grandson's sky blue hair, and Hermione scanning the crowd for blond heads.
She finds red first.
"Hermione!" It's Ron, dirty with tear tracks on his cheeks and wonderfully alive.
"Ron, oh thank god," she says and hugs him with one arm.
"Wow, look at that," he says when they part, rubbing a knuckle over Rose's chubby cheek, "you've got a kid."
"That generally happens after the whole pregnancy debacle. Is everyone all right?"
He tells her what happened, a list of the dead including one of his brothers and she hugs him again, so tight Rose starts fussing.
"I saw Malfoy over there," he says, waving at the teacher's table, splintered and scorched from hexes, "with his parents."
"Thanks."
She hugs him again and winds through the crowd, heart pounding because Ron never specified what condition Draco was in, whether he was standing or sitting or bleeding or lying dead in a row next to his mother and father.
He's hugging his mum when she sees him.
"If you ever do that to me again I will…I'll…I don't know but you're going to hate it," she stammers, stupid tears in her eyes, and Draco strides over and kisses her forehead. Lucius looks like he's about to have a stroke.
"You okay?" Draco asks and she can feel the words, his lips still pressed against her skin.
"Yeah."
He stands with her, running hands up and down her side and across Rose's fair hair. She has her daddy's hair, but her mummy's eyes.
"Mother, father," he says, turning, hands still everywhere, "meet your granddaughter."
Lucius drops his wand.
They spend hours at Hogwarts, Lucius sitting slumped on the teacher's table platform, hands dangling between his legs and wand in his wife's pocket. Hermione flits back and forth between them and the Weasley's, the two families huddled away from one another, and she wonders if the rest of her life will be like this: everyone separated like oil and water. Draco walks Rose in circles, but his exhaustion makes her fussy and him snappish and Narcissa takes her granddaughter from his arms.
When Hermione comes back from talking to Ginny, she sees three women triangulated. One fair, the other dark, stand with their families with grandchildren in their arms. One family lives, the other doesn't, and at the tip of the triangle is a third woman, dark hair spread under her unmoving body like a puddle of ink.
Narcissa and Andromeda stare at each other for a long time, occasionally casting glances at their dead sister. Hermione takes Draco's hand.
Explaining everything to the Malfoy's isn't easy; Lucius whacks his son upside the head and insults him ten ways from Sunday and demands he does the right thing before it's too late to use the war as an excuse. Narcissa plays peek-a-boo. Hermione can't decide which one is more surreal.
"It's all about family honour, especially right now," Draco tells her, rubbing the sore spot on his skull. "You may not be pureblood or well connected or any of that bollocks—"
Hermione smiles proudly.
"—but if I had a kid with you and never married you, well, my great-great-great-great-grandkids would still be feeling the societal shame. It's what you do."
Explaining everything to her parents once they're back from Australia, memories unmodified, is, in fact, worse than the Malfoy's. Her mother turns white and Rose starts to cry and Draco gets into a screaming match with her father and Hermione paces up and down the living room, bouncing her balling baby.
"You don't have to marry me, you know," she says, during a Malfoy-Granger dinner that's like something out of Lewis Carroll. "I mean, we haven't even taken our NEWT's! And statistically—"
Draco presses a kiss to her mouth. "I do have to, on pain of something cruel and unusual father would do to me. But, silly girl, I also want to."
She and Draco get married two months later. The shotgun's out of shells, by this point.
Nineteen months after the war is over, Rose turns two. It's a strange affair, Malfoy Manor decorated in pink and white streamers and balloons, toddlers from Rose's daycare running around on chubby legs and getting grass stains on their clothes. The Weasley's are there, looking uncomfortable, until Teddy spots Narcissa in the crowd and breaks away from his grandmother and godfather, proudly showing his Auntie Cissy that he can make his hair as blonde as hers.
Lucius and Hermione's father talk about the stock exchange (muggle and wizarding), and bemoan all the children strung out on sugary cake. It still boggles Hermione's mind how well they get on.
"All the presents in the world, and our daughter is playing in a box," Draco moans, a glass of punch in his hand. She can smell the alcohol. She swipes it and dumps it on the lawn.
"It's her party, she can play in boxes if she wants to," she says. "And wipe that look off your face. If I have to go through this sober, than so do you."
"Who says either of us has to be sober?"
She smirks and he lifts an eyebrow and all around them children squeal and adults mingle and Molly smacks George for bringing a flask to a children's birthday party. An owl drops a letter on Draco's head.
"Really?" he says after he reads it, both eyebrows at his hairline.
"This time, I was able to send you an owl," she says.
He draws her in close, pressing his face to her neck. She drops the pink party favours from her hands and grips his t-shirt in her fingers. She knows that, even after two years, it still rankles that he missed so much, that he wasn't the first person she told; that he can't share stories about dealing with her cravings and that he didn't see her body change, gradually, slowly. Rose was a punch in the gut, and one she knows he'd take again in a heartbeat, if given the choice. But she also knows what it means to him, to be here from the beginning.
"We're still not naming him Hugo," he says, and she smacks him on the arm.
Author's Note and Disclaimer
Firstly, I don't own anything.
Secondly, a lot is implied in this fic, not stated clearly, so I hope it wasn't too confusing. It was just the way it came out. Also, I don't remember strict details like how far along Tonks was at Christmas during DH, and what month the actual final battle took place, and would look them up except my copy of DH is in another country. I guess that just makes this fic even more AU.
Thirdly, this story is an aberration. It has been five years (lord do I feel old) since I last posted anything to this website. In that time, I've graduated from high school, got my undergraduate degree, and am now working on my Master's degree. I am concentrating on original fiction, trying to complete a novel and working on getting short stories published, and while I've written a little bit of fic, the majority of it has either been posted off of this site or hasn't been finished and thus has remained on my hard drive.
Do not expect the incomplete stories published on this account to be updated. As evidenced by the above fic, my writing style has changed drastically and as such if I were to continue writing those pieces I would have to give them a complete overhaul. But that, dear readers, is a time consuming process and one that I do not wish to give attention to as it would detract from my completing other, more important projects. That I was able to complete this fic at all while trying to finish coursework still astounds me.
There may be other fic. Ideas are always floating around, but whether they are completed and brought up to a level I'm happy with is another matter entirely. In short, I make no promises.
I apologize for those of you who would really like to see new chapters in the old stories. Even though so much time has passed, I still get comments, and the account and the stories are still favourited, and it really touches me that people still read them and get enjoyment out of them. Hopefully, readers, your disappointment isn't too great, and you had just as much fun reading this new material as you did the old.
Happy reading!
Little Witch