Eight years ago

"This is insanity!" Hermione hideously scoffed as she set the Daily Prophet down. "Thrown" was a better verb, for she pushed the newspaper so far from her that it nearly slid across the countertop. Harry had saved it from hitting the floor, and he sighed as he re-read the headline.

Ministry Decree: Magical Populace Subject to Century Old Agreement

Harry looked from the newspaper and over to Hermione who had her hands in her hair, quite possibly attempting to rip her hair out. He felt sorry for her. He was exempt from the law that had been recently enacted because he was already married. Ron was engaged, so he was also free from this mess. The only other people who were able to get away from this magical matchmaking were those in committed relationships with the intent to marry. While Hermione could very well find a friend who would agree to marry her, well, it would be the same thing wouldn't it? An arranged marriage, but with someone she'd be sure to tolerate. Either way it was a catastrophe.

"The Ministry knew about this and they didn't tell anyone," Hermione grumbled as she set her hands down. "They knew that this was going to affect us, and they didn't warn people. We could've made preparations!"

"Like what? Made sure you were engaged or married by now?" Harry questioned. "Love doesn't work like that."

Hermione wrinkled her nose and huffed. "It doesn't work like this either."

"Well that's just it, isn't it? This law has absolutely nothing to do with love and all about survival."

"Yes. The only difference is that family lines aren't cursed like they used to be," Hermione grumbled before sulking in her chair. "A dated law to fix a problem that no longer exists. It's absolutely horrid."

"This is perfect, Draco."

Draco raised a sharp brow at his father who had just finished reading the article that he'd brought him. He had expected outrage. . Instead, he had gotten approval and watched as a contented smile decorated his father's features.

"Perfect?" Draco scoffed. "Nothing is perfect about this."

"No? So you'd rather gradually lose all of your faculties than marry?" Lucius asked with a raised brow to compliment his offspring's. Draco groaned and ungracefully plopped down onto the armchair opposite his father.

"Of course not. I just… I'd rather that my future wife had a choice. The curses on other families are a finger prick compared to ours."

"I don't know," Lucius shrugged. "Feeling like your loins are on fire is an awful family curse. The young Nott certainly married quickly."

Draco groaned louder this time and leaned his head back. It was a bit dizzying this way, but his life had gotten a rather good jostling, so what was the difference?

Lucius stared at his son for several minutes before attempting to comfort him in a rather uncomforting way. "It's only the consummation that's difficult. After that it will get better for the both of you."

"Unless she's like my mother," Draco grimly chuckled. He raised his head up so that he could see his father's face as he asked what he already knew. "She didn't find it difficult, did she?"

Lucius' lips morphed into a smile. A cruel one. "She was a Black. Of course she didn't."

Hermione was dreading today. She was so unnerved by this whole mess that she could barely sleep last night. She even woke up to vomit twice . In the morning, she didn't even bother to eat because she just knew that she would be upchucking it shortly afterwards. Instead, she sat on her couch, rethinking the Ministry-sealed letter that had come shortly after the Daily Prophet had outed them.

There was a time when curses in wizard families were common. Some were benign like males being born every third generation. Others were more heinous like dying at an early age. And then there were some curses that could only be remedied through the act of marriage by a certain age. As it turned out, it was the latter that was the cause of every witch's and wizard's nightmare in England. Hermione had spent the past four days digging into wizarding history that culminated into an innumerable amount of books, scrolls, and even memories stored in the Ministry's record-keeping department. It wasn't until yesterday that she had come across what she had been looking for. It had been complicated magic, but carried out nonetheless, by a member of the Selwyn family, who wanted to ensure his family's survival. His family had been cursed, and its only remedy was a marriage for his daughter before her twenty-first birthday. He had advocated for not only himself, but for all of the wizard families who were plagued by family curses. The wizarding world was small. What would happen if they died out? What would happen to the magical community?

An exaggeration, Hermione thought, but considering the population size at that time perhaps not wholly impossible. It was unfortunate that the Minister of Magic back then was rather impressionable and so fearful for the future of the wizarding world that he had entered a pact with Selwyn. One where every time the magical populace dropped to a certain number, the pact would be initiated, and the same would happen every one hundred years to be safe. Hermione knew good and well that the population had been on a steady incline since the pact, but that damn one hundred years kept it strong. The Minister's position, no matter who it was, was inclined to fulfill that pact.

And so, here she was, walking down the Ministry's halls all because of a marriage law that the government was obligated to keep. As her Ministry letter had told her, to keep the nature of matchmaking "fair," it had been left to a drawing. A pitiful, dehumanizing drawing of two names who would be linked for the rest of their lives.

"Do you need help, Miss?"

Hermione blinked. She had apparently stopped walking in the middle of the hallway, and now she was thoroughly embarrassed. With a chuckle and a bit of rouge to her cheeks she smiled at the kindly older woman who had put a hand on her shoulder.

"Um, yes, please." Hermione raised the letter in her hand so that the woman could see. "I'm supposed to go to Meeting Room 3. Could you show me? I know that it's on this floor somewhere, but I'm a bit turned around."

"Oh dear," the woman said, a frown instantly adorning her face. "You're here to meet your suitor, aren't you?"

"He isn't my suitor," Hermione snapped, gasped at her own rudeness, and let out a deep, tired breath. "I'm sorry. I'm a bit put off by this whole thing as I'm sure you can imagine."

"It's alright. My aunt had to go through this herself, and so my mother told me she wasn't very keen on the idea either."

Hermione gulped and tentatively asked, "H-how did it turn out for her?"

The woman grimly smiled and shrugged. "They loved each other enough to have three children. So, I guess that means something. Meeting Room 3 is just at the end of the hall."

Hermione watched the woman take off in the opposite direction. She looked down at the letter and noticed how its edges shook. With a soft groan she stuffed the piece of parchment away and kept her hands tucked in her pockets to hide her nervousness. As it turned out, she hadn't been very far from the meeting room. This, however, only ensured that once she had arrived, she hesitated. She stood outside of the room for an eternity before putting her hand on the doorknob and heading inside.

Meeting Room 3 was a bare, four-walled room with nothing but a table, several chairs, and a board for writing. While she wasn't expecting a fanfare, the minimalistic room was adding to her disgruntled attitude. Although, all emotion had been put on pause for the moment for she hadn't been the only person in the room. When Draco Malfoy stopped in the middle of drumming his fingers on the table and looked up at her, there had been no sneer. There'd been no sign of anything honestly, not even surprise. It was either shock or maturity. It had been almost ten years, after all.

"Are you going to sit?"

Draco's words had jostled her. Hermione took two quick steps inside before closing the door behind her. He watched all of her actions, anything to keep his mind off of the fact that this was the witch who would be accompanying him in his misery. What made matters worse was that she wasn't his mother. She wasn't a Black. She didn't have that "instinct" families like his had. What were they going to do?

"Anyone in there, Malfoy?"

Draco took a sharp inhale. It was his turn to be shaken from his thoughts, and he cleared his throat before resuming his finger-drumming. "It's binding, you know," he said after a short pause. He refused to look at her as he spoke and instead kept his gaze on the table. "There won't be a re-drawing of names either. What's done is done and there's…no way out of it."

Like Draco, Hermione hadn't been able to look at him, and instead she had kept her eyes towards her hands. She couldn't help but lift her head at his last few words though. With a lazy shrug and as indifferently as possible she said, "You must hate that it's me then. We don't exactly have the best history."

A slight curl came to Draco's lips and he tilted his head. "No, we don't. And yes, I hate that it's you, but not because of our history. Granger," he closed his eyes briefly before letting his head loll back for just a moment. "You're too good to be married to me."

"Too good?" Hermione echoed. She crossed her arms over her chest and egged him on. "What exactly does 'too good' mean?"

"Bluntly put? I'm going to corrupt you, and there's nothing that you can do about it."

The sound of a chair scratching the floor rang throughout the room. Hermione's heart was bound to burst if it beat any faster, but there was no slowing it down. It wasn't just Draco's answer. It was the way that he had said it. "Blunt" was too light of a term to describe the calm, matter-of-fact tone voice and unblinking eyes that never left hers.

"That's not funny."

The crisp tone that the brunette had spoken in shook Draco a bit, but not enough so that he could calmly answer, "It wasn't meant to be."

"Then what the hell are you playing at?"

"Nothing except giving you insight into the curse that you're walking into."

"Curse?" Hermione didn't move her chair back, but she still leaned forward in her seat with her brows furrowed and her mouth hanging open. "The Malfoys have a family curse?"

"That surprises you?" Draco chuckled. He, too, leaned forward and cupped his hands on the table. "We're an old, pureblood family, Granger. For us not to have a curse would be strange."

"Of course it would," Hermione scoffed. She paused for a moment, her hands running over her face and through her hair as she questioned, "What…what kind of curse is it?"

Draco's face fell and he looked off to the side. "A malicious one. There are so many stories about how it started that no one knows truth from fiction anymore. The fact of the matter is that we know what happens when the curse is fulfilled versus when it's not. It's because of that that the Malfoys have a very questionable history. A very deadly history. And that's the curse. A Malfoy marriage is consummated and maintained by death."

Hermione had heard him, she did, but the words had somehow fizzled in her brain so that she couldn't comprehend him. "I don't think that I heard you properly. Malfoy marriages are consummated and maintained by what? "

"Death," Draco repeated. "Murder, if you want to be precise."

"I don't understand," she gulped. "How is that a curse?"

"Of all the stories that I've heard, the one from my grandfather sounds the most plausible. It was said that Castor Malfoy was a vicious man and fighter and that he lay waste to anyone who upset him. Unfortunately, he killed a man whose wife was a very skilled witch. She cursed the Malfoy family so that whoever would marry into it would die within a few years."

Hermione's eyes bulged and she rose out of her seat in clear outrage and panic. "Malfoy, are you telling me that I'm going to die? "

"Is my mother dead?" Draco countered. Hermione huffed and flopped down onto her seat and urged him with a wave of her hand.

"How did she beat it?"

"She didn't. The curse isn't the same as it originally was because of decades upon decades of tampering."

"What were they thinking?" Hermione quickly reprimanded. "Curses are dangerous enough as it is, but to tamper with one? You could very well make it worse!"

"You're right. And it did get worse. The stories all get fuzzy from the initial curse, but the point is this: the Malfoys are the new age Black Plague. 'Only death and misery make us happy,' or so an ancestor once said. Every Malfoy spouse is required to take a life, and then, as an aspiring couple from hell, continue to do so to keep our minds happy and sane."

Hermione's mouth had fallen open. She kept waiting for the joke. For the upturn of the corners of his lips, the laugh, and then telling her to loosen her knickers and that he was just messing with her. However, the longer she stared into the serious, no-nonsense face of her suitor, the more she shook her head and struggled to find the words to speak.

"Malfoy this is… This is absurd! Do you really want me to believe that your family curse is to kill people? Really? That your parents have been murdering people for the past however the hell long they've been married?"

"They were part of two wizarding wars, Granger," Draco said pointedly. "Plenty of targets."

"It's not possible!" Hermione sputtered. "I've studied family curses, and none of them are that far-fetched!"

"Well, forgive me in forgetting that your scope of wizarding knowledge is only limited by your narrow thinking," Draco sneered. It was his turn to stand now, and he placed his palms on the table as he tried to keep himself calm. "It doesn't matter whether you believe me or not. It doesn't take away from the very real fact that one of two things is going to happen. Either you, by some miracle, consummate our marriage by killing someone, or we both slowly spiral into insanity and depression because a Malfoy knows no other way to live."

"I'd rather go insane."

"So would I."

Hermione had been prepared to argue but she faltered, mumbling out a pitiful, "What?"

Draco smiled a little, albeit a sadly, and nodded. " I don't like this any much more than you do. I'd rather live my life at the edge of my insanity than to take an innocent life. The problem is that the curse always plays out. One way or another it'll be too much, and you'll do it, and then we won't stop."

Silence fell between them and it was suffocating. The pair had gone back to ignoring each other's faces and looking at everything else. Considering the bare room that they were in, there wasn't much. It wasn't long before they were both in their seats again, dreadfully aware that they were still waiting for the Ministry worker to come so the betrothal agreement could be read and signed.

"Curses aren't prophesies," Hermione said after some time past passed. "They can be broken."

Draco had begun drumming his fingers on the table again, and he pursed his lips in disbelief. "If you say so."

Author's note: Once the last chapter is finished and beta'd it'll be up with the rest! :)

-WP