Dear Mother, Draco wrote the following morning. He considered whether he wanted to say 'mum', or, rather, that he desperately wanted to say mum and have his life be a thing she could fix with cake and a kiss, but, in the end, he decided that 'mother' was better. The Ministry was probably reading her mail, after all, and he should assume everything he wrote was going to be laughed at by some bureaucratic hack.
I need to apologize that I never told you about my marriage to Ginevra Weasley. You had significant other matters pressing on you and, to be honest, I did not think you would approve, either of the girl or that we did out vows on the sly in an empty classroom. I had resigned myself to concealing the entire matter to protect her but, lion that she is, she took the situation into her own hands and arrived at the Ministry and demanded they release me. I am currently residing with her at your Aunt Walburga's old townhouse and am fine. I know that you are under house arrest still, and I am not certain if they would let me in the door but I hope you are able to write.
As always, your loving and obedient son.
He hoped that would cover this lie, and that she would read between the lines to know the whole thing was a dodge. Why, after all, would his wife be living with Harry Potter?
Why would he be living with Harry Potter? The whole thing wasn't just a dodge. It was bizarre.
He wandered downstairs in search of an owl and breakfast, past portraits in desperate need of restoration and over rugs that had been threadbare a decade ago. He'd thought Potter was rich but apparently not. Or maybe he just didn't care he was living in near-squalor.
Someone had put a kettle on in the kitchen and he found a cup and a tin of teabags after poking in a few cupboards. "There's bread for toast in the box," a voice said.
Draco turned to see Potter dressed in ratty pajama bottoms and a grey t-shirt. He scowled at the man but swallowed his pride long enough to ask, "Do you have an owl I could borrow?"
Potter looked amused. "I have," he said. He held his hand out. "She bites strangers, though. Give it here and I'll pass it along."
Draco wanted to refuse. Somehow, handing over a letter to his mother and trusting his schoolyard nemesis would see it delivered felt like it took a bit of his soul and exposed it. The last thing he wanted was for Potter to know he cared about anything or anyone. Feelings made you vulnerable and vulnerability was exploitable. Potter must have read some of his hesitation because he waggled his hand and said, mockery evident, "Don't trust me?"
At that, Draco shrugged and passed over the note as thought it didn't matter. The shrug pulled at his sore shoulder, and he aborted the movement. Potter narrowed his eyes. "Too good to take a pain potion?" he asked.
"Leave him alone." Draco looked up to see Ginevra stomping into the kitchen. She'd tied her hair up in a sloppy knot on the top of her head, and her pajama bottoms dragged on the floor. The hem had worn and Draco wondered if he still had access to his wealth. He could get her something that fit, maybe clean this place up a little. He didn't want to ask her about that where Potter could hear, but he decided he'd corner her later. Gratitude would taste a little less bitter if he could sweeten it with gold.
"He flinched," Potter said.
"You need anything?" Ginny asked. "Trip to a Healer?" Draco looked at her. He wondered how many scars she had from the Carrows under her loose clothes. She couldn't be a stranger to going to bed in pain, or hiding the worst of it from prying eyes. He couldn't bear being less than she was.
"The stuff you left me is enough," he said. "Thank you."
"Then take it," Potter said.
"I'm fine," Draco said.
"I thought we might go see your mother today," Ginny said. She flicked a glance at the letter in Potter's hand. "Give it time for her to get that, then let her see you."
Draco felt a smile curve his lips up. He managed not to look at Potter as he said, "I can fetch you a wedding ring while we're there," he said. "What do you like? Whatever it is, there's sure to be something to your taste floating around. Rubies? Diamonds? Something exotic?"
The reaction was instant, predictable, and utterly gratifying. Ginny just looked amused, and maybe slightly pleased at the idea, but Potter almost growled at the idea of him draping Ginny in Malfoy heirlooms. "She's not really your wife, Malfoy," he said. "She's my girlfriend. Remember that."
Draco looked down at his hands. He could see the edge of one of his scrapes at one wrist, and he tugged his sleeves down to cover it. The movement gave him time to summon an arrogant smirk that wouldn't have been out of place on one of the filthy portraits of the endless generations of Blacks that hung in this place. They were his great-great-aunts and such, of course, and it was no wonder he could mimic their expressions, even if all he really wanted was to curl up in a ball and cry for a week. "But, Potter," he said. "She really is my wife. Magically bonded and everything."
He paused and looked at Ginny as a thought occurred to him for the first time. "You've probably already appeared on the Malfoy family mural."
. . . . . . . . . .
The Ministry Aurors postured at the end of the Malfoy drive, bored and happy to have someone to harass, but Ginny pulled out piles of paper with permits and orders and permissions and Draco looked at them in shock. She seemed terribly well prepared. The shock turned to a delighted smile when he asked on their walk from guarded gate to the Manor where, exactly, she'd gotten all those permits.
"Forged them," she said cheerfully. "George did most of the work, but you'd be surprised what people will believe as long as it's on official looking papers."
"I thought you people were the house of honor and all the good things," he said as the gravel drive crunched under their feet. A peacock strutted by and eyed them as if they were unwelcome but he couldn't be quite bothered to bestir himself to peck at them. Ginny laughed as if he'd made an excellent joke, but before he could ask what was so funny about his — everyones! — opinion of the lions, they were at the front door and his mother was waiting.
Daughters of the House of Black didn't display unwonted emotions but he could see the way her eyes searched over him, reassuring herself he was unharmed before she held her hands out to Ginny and said, "I'm so pleased to finally have a daughter."
Draco narrowed his eyes, and his mother tipped her head ever so slightly to the house. A curtain dropped back into place and he glanced at Ginny. She'd seen too. She beamed at his mother and said, "I cannot apologize enough that we kept this a secret."
Narcissa drew them into the foyer. The marble floor still had a crack in it where the chandelier had fallen during the war, and Draco could hear muffled footsteps as the inept spy retreated. "You do not need to apologize, my dear," she said as she led them over the crack, down a corridor, and to the smaller, family library. "It was wartime, and we all kept our alliances close to our chests."
"We did," Ginny said. "Still, it must have been a shock."
"Any shock that came with the news my son had been freed from prison is a shock I can easily endure," Narcissa said.
The family library had the Malfoy tree painted on one wall. The mural had always enchanted Draco as a child. He'd trace the lines connecting one name to another, and the line that led from himself to his father, from his father to the grandfather he'd never met. Each miniature portrait gazed out, some stiff, some smiling. Lucius and Narcissa spent most of their time looking either at one another, or at the tiny Draco below them. He'd loved to see how the painting of himself grew magically older as he did, and he'd asked his mother once if that would happen forever.
"Most people opt to stop aging in their family tree portrait when they get married," she'd said, and it was true that her own image hadn't grown any older in all the time he'd watched her.
"Will we have to bring a painter in," he'd asked, and she'd ruffled his hair and said no, the magic would do the work.
It had.
Draco looked at the tree and the small oval that contained a serious, worried blond boy, barely a young man, had been connected by a single line to a portrait of Ginevra Weasley. Her name had appeared in script below it, along with what he assumed was her birth date. Her portrait looked both pleased with itself and a bit impish. He wanted to reach out a finger and touch it. Something stirred in his gut at the sight of this proof that he was really and truly married.
"That's beautiful," Ginny said. She seemed more impressed than he would have expected, and her mouth hung open a bit as she took in the whole tree.
"We had a tapestry when I was a girl," Narcissa said. "I admit I like this better."
Ginny turned to Draco. "You look so sad in yours," she said.
"The last few years have been a bit shite," he said. He flushed as he realized his mother was standing right there. "Begging your pardon," he added.
"We'll have to make the next few better," Ginny said.
"On that front," Narcissa said, "I thought you might want to find your bride a ring. I'm sure you weren't able to do more than something as sweet as a bit of string at school, and sorting through the various boxes and bedrooms of this place gave me something to do once I saw Ginevra's name on the wall."
Draco wanted to tell her no, and he wanted to put jewellery on Ginny's hand, and he heard the story under her words. Narcissa had never been a woman with a lot of interests. She'd been raised to be a political hostess, and she'd done that with consummate skill. She'd liked to shop, and plan parties, and talk to people in power. She'd liked to bend those people until they grew towards her, espaliered trees who never realized their own deformities. Now she wandered through an empty house, trapped by Aurors and her husband's choices. Finding jewellery for her new daughter-in-law was something to do Ginny must have come to the same conclusion, because she set a gentle hand on his mother's arm. "I'd be honored," she said.
The look that flashed across Narcissa's face would have been relief on anyone less aristocratic. She simply sniffed and pulled open a box of the rings she'd gathered. Draco looked down and pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth as he examined them. They ranged from simple elegance to gaudy. "We should check them for lingering curses before you put one on," Narcissa said. "Some previous generations were a bit obsessive when it came to fidelity and, should wartime romance not, shall we say, work out, I'd hate for one or both of you to find yourselves… trapped."
Ginny had her hand poised above a simple band with rubies all the way around it. "They cold do that?" she asked.
"And did," Narcissa said. "Too often, if you ask me."
Ginny looked intrigued, but she was careful not to let the ring slide onto her finger as she pulled it out. Narcissa clucked approvingly. "I didn't know your taste, of course," she said, "So I picked up everything, but some of the Malfoys of the 1800s seemed to believe if big was good, bigger was better."
Having seen some of the rings in the box, Draco had to agree that, contrary to the common saying, diamonds could be too large.
Narcissa pulled out her wand and ran a few checks on the band before pronouncing it clean. "I'll just go put this away," she said, "give you two a few moments."
The moments felt oppressive. Draco weighed the wedding ring in his hand and looked at his bride. She twitched her head toward the doorway and he sighed. They were surely being listened to and all the words he wanted to say about how he really did honor her, despite the irregularity of this situation, would have just exposed them both. He settled on, "A beautiful ring for a beautiful woman," and slid it onto her finger.
She pressed herself up onto her toes and wrapped her hands around his neck before she kissed him. He hadn't been expecting it, though, as soon as her lips were on his he knew she'd made the right choice. His mother's keeper probably had a spy-hole and normal couples would kiss at a moment like this.
He felt strangely lost as she swayed against him. He'd kissed Pansy any number of times, and there'd been that one, horrible night with Tracey when he'd been drunk and told her he was afraid he'd die a virgin and she'd taken that as a personal challenge. It didn't amount to a lot of experience. Fear, expectations, and death were all tunes he knew well. This one might be sweeter, but he didn't know how how it went. She did. Vivacious, popular Ginny Weasley had laughed from one boyfriend to the next until she'd transformed herself into a rebel and a fighter, and even then he suspected more than one boy at Hogwarts had fought as much for her as against Voldemort. She inspired that in people. He'd watched her do it. Her, and Neville Longbottom, and Potter. Heroes, all of them.
He wasn't like that.
And she swayed against him and kissed him as though he were all she'd ever wanted and he hated himself for wishing it were true, and that she weren't playing pretend for the Auror at the peep hole.
He wished it all the way home. He wished it as they kissed his mother goodbye and he promised to write to her every day, and to come back soon. He wished it as they held hands going back down the walk and she made a show of admiring the ring. He wished it as they apparated back onto Potter's front stoop and he yanked his hand out of hers and threw himself up the stairs.
"What's his problem?" Potter asked as he turned out of sight and leaned against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut because he would not cry. He would not. He could hear Ginny sigh, and he could hear her speak, though he couldn't make out the words, and then she wasn't talking and he pictured her kissing Potter the way she'd kissed him, only this time she meant it, and he went the rest of the way to his room. His room in Potter's house, where he was Potter's charity case.
Maybe Azkaban would have been better.