A/N: So many ideas, so little time.
HP characters are Rowling's, Shakespeare quotes are Shakespeare's (duh)
Luna hummed tunelessly as she produced a small copper bowl and knife, and Hermione eyed both nervously, suddenly regretting her eagerness to indulge in ritual spellcasting. She glanced at Draco, who smiled sweetly at her, clearly enjoying her moment of panic, but gave the hand he held a gentle squeeze nevertheless. His reassurance was enough to steel her, and Hermione grit her teeth as Luna made a thin cut across her wrist, tilting her arm so that a few drops of blood tipped into the vessel.
She tried to ignore the memory that sprung unbidden to her mind of the last time a knife had sliced across her skin, but she couldn't hide her shudder as she watched the red liquid beading on her forearm. Looking up, she saw that Draco was still watching her, his mouth no longer smiling but drawn into a tight line, and she knew that he remembered that night in Malfoy Manor only too well. He held her gaze, and she wondered how it was that such a pale grey could seem so warm.
She heard Luna sigh "Oh," before she felt her magic, but she saw the glow as her wrist healed itself and swallowed hard. "Well at least we know why the Teg like you," the blonde girl remarked vaguely, and Hermione came back to herself with a snap as she frowned in confusion. She raised her eyebrows at Draco, who grimaced and shrugged. Hermione looked to Theo to see whether he could make anything of Luna's pronouncement, but he was already maneuvering a device that looked like a gigantic, many-lensed jeweller's loupe into place above the copper bowl containing her blood. He squinted through the layered crystal, then looked up at Neville, who was standing across the table from him.
"You ready?" Theo asked, and the Gryffindor boy smiled his answer, raising his wand.
Hermione watched, fascinated, as they began to move their wands in a complicated, synchronized movement above the device, finishing with a joint flourish that pointed directly through the crystal at the blood in the bowl, which, as the five of them watched, glowed golden and swirled of its own accord, finally settling into what looked like a pattern. Hermione was torn between demanding to know what sort of ancient blood ritual could be performed wordlessly and shoving Theo out of the way so that she could have a look through the crystal. Fortunately, he only glanced through for a moment before he was crowing, "Yes!" and motioning her forward to look. "Do you know Ogham runes?" he asked, after she had stared in silence for a few moments.
She lifted her head to scowl at him, "I took Advanced Runes with you, Nott, I know what I'm looking at."
Theo's hazel eyes glittered and he smiled smugly at her. Hermione moved aside and let Draco look, his sharp intake of breath enough to tell her that he, too, was aware of the druidic alphabet.
Beith, Saille, Nion, Ngetal, Ruis.
"This is amazing," Theo was saying. "Amazing. Your magic is all elemental power and potential and it's incredible, I mean -"
"What does it mean?" The lanky Slytherin paused, eyeing Hermione with a hint of uncertainty as she crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, clearly waiting for an answer.
"I'm sorry?"
"I know what the runes are, but what's got you all excited? Why is my magic any different to yours, or Draco's, or Luna's?"
Theo frowned, and opened his mouth to speak, but Luna got there before him. "It's to do with the specific combinations of DNA mutations that have resulted in your magic." Hermione opened her mouth, frowned, and then shut it again. Luna smiled winsomely at her as she continued, "It's simple really. Like I said before, there are a number of genetic markers for magic, most of which are found in minisatellite sequences in DNA. In most pureblood families these have stabilized and their magic is settled, but in Muggleborns because of the spontaneous occurrence some of the sites are hypermutable, so the level of magic contained in your DNA is difficult to quantify."
Luna paused, tipped her head and gave Hermione an uncharacteristically searching look, before continuing in her usual airy tone, "The runes are all about power; potential; beginning. Performing the ritual on a Pureblood you'll only see two or three runes. You've got five, and one of them is Ruis, for transformation, which according to Theo's book is the marker for the fons venificia." Her blue gaze drifted off across the room as she continued, "Ruis for Elder, like the wand. It's in all the old stories. You could say that since it's a matter of mutation then the founders of all the pureblood families were probably muggle-borns, if you look at it a certain way, so it makes sense that Ruis marks new bloodlines..." Luna made a little humming noise as she trailed off, smiling slightly.
Hermione looked at Draco to see his jaw hanging open, and when she glanced back at Luna the other girl met her eyes with a glimmer of dark humour. Suddenly she and Theo made more sense. Draco finally snapped his mouth shut and gave Theo an incredulous look. His friend simply shrugged, and when Draco turned to Neville he was openly smirking, "Luna's into the sort of thing not many of us understand, be it Nargles or DNA." He snickered, "Of course, once you do grasp the meaning it can make all that blood purity bollocks seem a little bit idiotic."
Draco flushed and muttered something about not needing to be told that, but Hermione barely registered his discomfort, having turned her attention back to the bloody runes, feeling a stirring excitement as she ran through their meanings in her head. Vitality, subtlety, rebirth, harmony. Transformation.
"Can you do it on Draco?" she said suddenly, unconsciously ending the awkward pause as her mind whirred with possibility. Draco was already shoving his arm out as Theo nodded, and this time it was Neville who collected the blood. When the two wizards made their casting Hermione watched, trying to decipher the wand movements, but then they were finished and Draco's blood was emitting a silvery glow, Theo once again grinning over the loupe, pushing it towards her so she could look. Fearn, Huathe, Eadha.
She raised her eyebrows at Draco and he bent to look, straightening to smirk at her. "Strength, purity and cunning," Hermione said, "You're such a Malfoy."
"Oh, witch, that I am." Draco's eyes were full of wonder as they moved across her face, "And you're like nothing else."
They stayed for lunch with the three researchers, listening in awe as Theo and Luna bickered about quarks and moon phases, dowsing and phenotypes. Neville interjected the occasional quiet, thoughtful observation, which usually had the result of settling whatever was under discussion, and Hermione and Draco remained subdued and amused, catching one another's eye every so often.
Original magic. Hermione thought to herself. A new bloodline. She thought about what Luna had said about Lily Potter, and mused that the combination of whatever qualities his mother's genetic quirks had added to the Black and Peverell blood that Harry had inherited from his father had surely resulted in her friend's uniquely powerful and slightly wayward magic. She felt a whisper of anticipation curl in her belly as she looked at Draco again. Her wizard was a product of Black and Malfoy bloodlines…Hermione flushed and dropped her eyes to look at her salad. They were twenty years old, for God's sake. She didn't need to be thinking about what sort of magical children she and Draco might be capable of producing.
Draco's hand caught hers as she toyed with her fork and she looked up to see him watching her with a knowing expression. "I think Granger and I should probably get going if we're going to make it to our rehearsal this afternoon," he said, looking away from her to Theo, who nodded, offering a slow smile as he took in Hermione's blush.
She grit her teeth and smiled tightly at him, "Will you three be coming to see the play?"
Theo seemed to pause, looking at Draco, but Neville nodded enthusiastically, "Definitely! Harry said he, Ron and Ginny are going to the final performance, so I got him to buy us tickets too." Hermione felt her face relax, reminded by Neville's sudden earnestness of the way he'd been at school. Working with Nott had obviously done wonders for his confidence, but it was reassuring to see that the sweet, eager boy she remembered was still there.
"We'll be there," Theo said slowly, having obviously received silent permission from Draco. "If only to witness the fireworks when Potter and Weasley find out about this little union." Theo smirked, "Give Blaise my fondest, won't you." He winked at Hermione, "It should be fun to see you all ranged against one another onstage."
Draco apparated them back to a secluded spot in the corner of the Worcester grounds, catching Hermione's arm when she made to move towards the stairs, and pressing his lips to the spot where her veins wound across her wrist. "You're a wonder," he whispered, as though he couldn't quite believe she was real.
Hermione's heart stuttered at the look in his eyes, but she tried to be coy and teasing, "Well, inbreeding does have its downsides, so I guess it makes sense for something fresh to be added to the mix."
"Magic knows," Luna had murmured as she hugged her goodbye. "All these male pureblood heirs." A roll of her huge blue eyes, "Magic always knows."
"All that pureblood bullshit," Draco said now, "Longbottom's right, you only have to look at Theo's dad or my aunt Bellatrix to see how badly that can turn out." There was a pause as they both suppressed a shudder, and then he went on, his tone softer as he stroked his fingers along her arm. "It isn't some sort of...it's not like soulmates or anything." He gave her a searching look, "I mean, you have a choice."
Hermione cocked her head, "I know that." She placed her palm on his chest, feeling his heartbeat under her fingers: the movement deliberately, obviously possessive.
Draco leaned forwards so that their foreheads touched. "Good," he said finally, seeming to choose his words carefully, "Because for all that, it's as though your magic calls to mine." He made a tiny grimace, "And that book can say what it likes about it being a quirk to preserve and rejuvenate magical bloodlines. Loneliness is a curse to someone with a wizarding lifespan, and a bad marriage is worse. This is our magic, for us, not for whatever might come as a result." He bumped his nose against hers, the gesture tender in a way that would have surprised her a month ago. "I'm in no hurry for heirs, Miss Granger, no matter how powerful they might turn out to be."
Hermione laughed, "Well that's a relief, in any case." She pressed her lips briefly to his, before tugging on his hand, "Come on, we can't be late for rehearsal again."
"Ah," Draco sighed, as he let himself be dragged through the grounds towards the rehearsal room, "A maiden never bold, of spirit so still and quiet that her motion blushed at herself. And she, in spite of nature -"
"Shut up, Malfoy."
"...Myself will straight aboard: and to the state, this heavy act, with heavy heart relate."
Hermione watched through cracked eyelids as Simon delivered the play's closing lines, his posture slumped and defeated as he supported the 'wounded' Freddie. Blaise lay prone on the floor beside her, and Dominic (who was playing Gratiano as well as Brabantio) knelt over him, his head bowed in grief. Draco was off somewhere to the right, restrained by Mike, but Hermione couldn't see him from where she lay half on the bed, with Caro sprawled beside her. She hadn't realised until they'd started blocking the final scene that their bodies would end up piled around the bed, but now that they had she imagined it made for quite an affecting tableau. "Like a sort of Massacre of the Innocents vibe," Ed had said at dinner a few nights before, "You know, like the Tintoretto in Venice."
Blaise had laughed and teased, "You and your high artistic ideals," but when his eyes had met Hermione's across the table their usual playfulness had turned sombre and she knew that he too was trying not to think about the way bodies had been laid out in the Great Hall after the Battle of Hogwarts. She'd been grateful for Draco's arm around her and the warmth of his sigh into her hair as she hoped that when her friends came to see the play they wouldn't make the connection.
As the directors and other cast members whooped Hermione came back to herself, then realised that they'd just made it through their first full rehearsal. She lifted her head from the bed and caught Blaise's eye as he sat up. "My lady," he said, inclining his head. "I think that went rather well." Hermione laughed and swiped at his shoulder, feeling a wave of exhilaration break through her as Caro dove into her side for a hug. It had gone well; Blaise might have teased Ed about the artiness of the staging but Hermione knew that the directors had achieved something special, and she hugged Caroline back one-armed, using her other hand to squeeze Blaise's shoulder. When Caroline got up to bound across to Freddie, Hermione snatched at the opportunity of a few moments alone with Blaise.
"So Ed's probably going to be pretty thrilled with this? His Tintoretto vision brought to glorious fruition?"
Blaise laughed as he stood, pulling her up with him and slinging an arm around her shoulders. His gaze ranged across the gathered cast and crew until the lighted on Ed's straw-blonde head, and Hermione watched a small smile settle across his mouth that she recognised as a very similar expression to the one that Draco wore when he looked at her. "You're happy?" she asked him, her voice soft as she leant into his side.
Blaise looked down at her, his smile widening, "Yeah, very. I never...I guess I didn't think..." he blew out a sigh and ran his hand over his close-cropped hair. "Until he felt the wards on Draco's house, I wasn't sure, but then it was obvious that he was attuned to my magic so..."
"Attuned to your magic?" Hermione said, frowning in confusion, "Like - like I'm attuned to Draco's magic? Is Ed...does Ed have...like me?" She and Draco had told Blaise the broad strokes of Hermione's Original Magic (leaving out any of the more need-to-know details about the Seekers) after the rehearsal a couple of days ago, while Ed was on his way over with a takeaway.
He huffed a laugh, "Merlin, no. Ed's as Muggle as they come!" He gave her a searching look, "It's so funny the things you don't know, Granger." She scowled and punched his arm, and Blaise laughed again as he hugged her to him, "OK, so as you and Draco prove, with magical couples where the connection's strong enough you have a sense of one another's magic." He waited for her to nod before he went on, "And the same is true of Muggles with magical partners. If that bond is there, they get an impression, like a sort of aftertaste." He smiled goofily, the expression softening his handsomeness, "Ed says it's like having an extra colour added to the spectrum." Blaise gazed at the floor, apparently lost in thought as he scuffed one toe of his immaculate Converse on the boards, before looking back at Hermione. "How come Draco didn't tell you this? He realised after London."
Hermione rolled her eyes, shooting a mock glare across the room at Draco, who caught the look and smirked over Alan's shoulder. "Draco has an annoyingly noble attitude to other people's secrets which translates into leaving them to be divulged by their owners," she grumbled. For Hermione, whose insatiable curiosity had been known to result in perhaps a little less respect than was appropriate for other people's boundaries, her boyfriend's unexpected uprightness in that regard had proved a little frustrating. And something of a turn-on. But mostly frustrating.
"You can always tell when a wizard has been raised with proper ideals," Blaise said, nodding primly. Then he yelped as Hermione caught him on the backside with a wandless, wordless Stinging Hex.
A/N: Robert Frost was really into the Ogham Few, which is a Celtic runic language based around trees (and I think quite possibly had a lot of influence on JK's wand wood lore).
Two (maybe three depending how they split after rewriting) more chapters to go. Thank you again everyone who keeps coming back to this, especially if you're one of the lovely people whose reviews are just the nicest things to read.