Tim Granger's face was still a bit green when he stepped into Hogwarts' Entrance Hall after apparating to the school gates with Minerva McGonagall. Unlike Narcissa Malfoy, McGonagall hadn't offered to let her Muggle side-along apparation partner bury his face in her shoulder and hold her tightly as they went. No, theirs had been a quick and professional trip, followed by a brisk walk to the castle to help him clear his head. Now, he found himself within the museum-smelling walls of the school, still faintly dizzy, following Professor McGonagall across the stone tiles toward her study.

She stopped abruptly in front of him. "Well, here is some good news, Dr. Granger," she said. "Look there."

Across the hall, Tim saw his own Hermione standing up from a bench where she'd been sitting with that fair-haired wizard boyfriend from the train station - the one who had spooked Ann enough for her to take Hermione to the doctor for a prescription. Pleased as he was to see Hermione, Tim couldn't help but cringe at the sight of the boy. Beside Hermione, he was standing up quickly - guiltily, Tim thought - nodding a greeting.

Tim returned the nod with cold, automatic politeness. Boy - he may still have had a tender prettiness about him, but he was too tall, too tired-looking, and too close to Tim's daughter for him to believe the harmless label of 'boy' could still suit him.

Tim looked away, to the figure seated on the other side of Hermione, sailing toward him dressed not in a school uniform but in some kind of ostentatious witch costume with which she seemed to be struggling. She was hitching up the skirts, shouting across the open space before anyone else could say anything, calling his name.

Tim squinted at her. "Ann?"

"Yes, darling," she said, close enough for him to see her clearly now, dropping the hem of the skirts to grab him, kissing him on both his cheeks and then his mouth, sighing loudly in relief. "Thank heavens they've brought you. You're safe."

"Ann." He was laughing his relief into her ear. "My darling Ann. Yes, I'm fine. But I nearly died of fright this morning when I couldn't find you. You've been here with Hermione the whole time."

She loosened her hold on his neck, hushing his laughter. "No, Tim. Not at all."

Professor McGonagall had spread both of her arms, smiling as she herded the lot of them toward her office. "Drs. Granger, if you please, we'd better have a private word."

"It's just a wizard ceremony," Hermione was rushing to say, after she and her mother and Professor McGonagall finished explaining their complicated situation to Tim as best they could, complete with the shocking news that his daughter was about to get married at the age of seventeen to a boy he had barely met. "It's under wizard law only, unless we register it with the government. There's no need to acknowledge it in Mu-, in normal society."

Tim lifted his head from where he'd dropped it into his hands, waving an arm toward Draco who'd taken a seat with the rest of them in McGonagall's parlor but had not yet spoken a word. "And he's satisfied to leave it unacknowledged, is he? He's satisfied with you playing as his wife here and then setting all commitment to him aside as soon as you come home for the holidays, or graduate, or simply get fed up with this lunacy and walk away? What kind of man - "

"Daddy, no. I never said I wouldn't acknowledge it myself, just that - "

"Now, Hermione - " Ann interrupted, glaring at her daughter with her I-told-you-to-let-me-handle-your-father look.

But since Tim had addressed his rhetorical questions to Draco, it was Draco himself who came forward to answer them.

"No, I am not satisfied with that," he said. "I'll be Hermione's husband no matter where she goes, or who's society she's in, or who acknowledges it, for the rest of her life. She'll be everything to me, and everywhere, always."

Tim rounded on him, looking him in the eyes for the first time. "Oh, I don't doubt you're keen right now," he said. "But I've been a seventeen-years-old male myself, you know. In the 1970s, no less. I know exactly what you're keen for. Don't sit here wide-eyed, trying to tell me about teenaged boys' deep and abiding interest in commitment."

Draco dropped his eyes but said, "Hermione only phrased it that way because she was trying to make you feel like she isn't trapped, so it doesn't upset you, because she loves you and can see you're unhappy."

Tim shook his head, clearing Draco's voice from his ears. "This is why you chose a girl with roots outside your own family's society isn't it? This is why you chose a - what's that stupid thing you call us - a Muggle, the daughter of Muggles. With a Muggle's daughter you could have the best of both worlds."

It hit hard - Tim's accidental but accurate calling out of the Malfoy family prejudice against Muggles, their centuries of thinking of them as inferior, not truly loveable, expendable. Draco recoiled from it, disgusted and implicated at the same time, all of the conflicts between who he had been and who he now was converging in one horrible moment, there in front of the people he most wanted to think well of him.

"Dad, no," Hermione was saying.

Draco drew himself up, out of his guilt and self-loathing, and answered Dr. Granger. "Let me assure you, sir I won't ever be alright with letting go of her. I will never do it."

Hermione made a noise like a growl. "No one will be letting me go," she said. "I belong to all three of you - and to Draco's parents too. If it hadn't been for Madam Malfoy today - ah, Mum, I can hardly bear to think of it."

Tim was suddenly sitting straighter, as if waking up. "Malfoy - that name - that's the same smug prat Arthur Weasley got to rowing with after a few drinks, in a bookstore in Diagon Alley at the start of your second year, isn't it?" Time raised his finger at Draco. "And you were the sneering towheaded boy at his elbow, weren't you?"

Hermione was veering in front of her father's finger. "That was a long time ago, Daddy. Draco was a child trying his very best to be a good son."

"Well, where is your father in all this?" Tim demanded, speaking to Draco over the top of Hermione's head. "They tell me your mother has been heroic and noble. Why does she have to do it on her own?"

"Tim, really," Ann said.

"He's in prison," Draco blurted. "He did something wicked in the service of the Dark Lord and he's been put away for it."

Tim threw up both his hands, looking bug-eyed to Ann. "Better and better," was all he said.

Hermione sank to her knees on the floor in front of her father, her hands covering the toes of his black leather shoes. "Daddy, by wizarding law, I don't need your permission to do this. And by tradition, I don't need you to walk me down an aisle and give me away. That's patriarchal Muggle nonsense and you know it."

Behind her, Ann managed a slight smirk.

As she spoke, Draco slid out of his chair, crossing the floor on his knees to kneel beside her at Tim's feet. Hermione sensed him there and let go of her father's shoes, linking her arm through Draco's without taking her eyes from her father's.

"I don't need you to be part of this, Daddy. And eventually," her voice broke, "in time, I will learn to be something like happy even if you aren't a part of us. But please don't do that, Daddy. Please don't…" She bowed her head, crying now.

Draco let out his breath, turned toward her, pressed his chin to the back of her head.

Ann was advancing too, stepping past them to come to Tim's side, reaching for his hand, laying her other hand on his shoulder. "Tim, darling," was all she said.

She had already described to him the shock of meeting masked Death Eaters in their garden, Bellatrix Lestrange's murderous sneer, the dark malevolence of the unseen man in Malfoy Manor, Cissa's madness and fear. But without experiencing any of it for himself, it all seemed fanciful and far away to Tim. Keeping him distant from it was what she had wanted when she pulled her front door closed behind herself that morning, but now it was complicating the way forward.

Tim stood up, patting Ann's hand. "I'm sorry, everyone," he said. "I'm going to need a little time to myself." He nodded at Professor McGonagall. "Excuse me."

While Tim Granger took his solitary walk, Professor McGonagall took Ann upstairs to the disused married quarters on the seventh floor. She had already set the elves to cleaning them up and furnishing them properly for Draco and Hermione to use, but now they would go to the Grangers, a comfortable place to keep them safe for however long they needed sanctuary from Voldemort.

"The colour scheme is odd," Ann said, touring through the small suite after McGonagall left her and Hermione alone. "Red and green, as if it's Christmas in here."

Draco had left with McGonagall to show her the star chart he'd mapped from Snape's un-cyphered books on the Mitrian charms. She seemed somewhat relieved when he told her the matrimonial charm ceremony would need to happen in a matter of days.

"And the incantation, has Hermione written it yet?" she asked.

"No, there hasn't been time," he said. "Her parents - they've been very distracting today."

"Perhaps I'll send Professor Snape to explain to them the demands on her time," she mused.

Draco winced.

"Or perhaps not," she said. "And Mr. Malfoy, you were badly injured earlier this week. I do advise you to remember that. Now go to your dormitory to rest."

She didn't even know about the Cruciatus curse he'd suffered at home this week, along with everything else. He nodded and agreed to go to bed.

But as he stepped out of her office, the slanting late afternoon light coming through the high windows in the stairwell caught his eye. Hermione was upstairs, and he hadn't had a chance to speak to her since the difficult meetings with her parents. The encounters had left him wounded, and he knew he wouldn't be able to rest until he saw her.

Draco had not quite stepped into the beam of sunlight on the staircase when he heard a voice across the Entrance Hall. "Crookshanks - Crooksy is that you, old boy?"

Draco slipped back into the shadows, conjuring a disillusionment spell as Tim Granger followed Crookshanks out of a corridor and into the hall.

"Does your mistress know you're out and about?" Tim asked the cat.

Crookshanks meowed, rubbing his back against Tim's shins. "Well, we should take you back. Seventh floor, they said." He stooped to gather Crookshanks in his arms but the cat darted away, stopping halfway up the first flight of stairs, turning back to meow peevishly, demanding to be followed.

"You'd rather walk up yourself? Well, of course you would, wouldn't you Crookshanks. Alright then."

Crookshanks led Tim upstairs. Draco flipped his hood over his head for good measure, and trailed behind them as soundlessly as he could.

Tim kept up his prattle with the cat. "She's got another boy in her life, you know," Tim said. "There's you, me, and now him. How do you like that?"

He grew quiet as students passed him, making their way down to the Great Hall for supper, looking askance at him, a middle-aged dentist wandering after a cat through Hogwarts.

"Oi, cat," Tim exclaimed when Crookshanks trotted purposefully out of the stairwell and into a fourth floor corridor. "It's this way. Come, Crookshanks, don't make me pick you up like some common housecat."

He followed the brushy orange tail further into a corridor hung with portraits, all of them moving in a way that gave him a sense of commotion and unease. "Crookshanks, come," he called in a whisper down the corridor, hanging back from walking along it any farther. The air was cold and electrified, as if it was - no, that couldn't be right. But yes, as if it was haunted.

Behind him, hooded in the shadows, coiled in his spell, Draco waited and watched. This was the Fat Friar's corridor, where his portrait had hung for hundreds of years. If the ghost appeared now, would Tim Granger, a Muggle, be able to see it? Watching his slow, cautious steps, Draco was fairly sure Tim could sense it whether he could see it or not.

"Come along, cat," he said.

There was a gust of wind and a flash of dim white light, like a mist settling in the centre of the corridor. With it came a great blustering, like someone clearing his throat with far too much fanfare, as if he was about to pronounce something binding and official.

There he was, the Fat Friar, coughing through some ornate church-y Latin.

Tim Granger had indeed seen him. He'd stumbled backward, away from the mist, and fallen hard on his tailbone. Draco emerged out of his disillusionment to take him by the shoulders from behind, propping him up, but also keeping him in place.

The Fat Friar noticed them and floated toward them, grinning and laughing. "Who do we have here?" he said by way of announcing them. "It's the bridegroom himself, Mr. Malfoy. I was just talking about you. Practicing for the big event."

Perhaps there was nothing the ghost could have said to make the scene more horrifying for Tim Granger. He shook himself free of Draco's hands and scrambled to his feet.

"Your guest, Mr. Malfoy," the Friar called, floating in a circle around them, keeping Tim from fleeing. "Who is your guest?"

"This is Dr. Granger."

The ghost smiled in a way that might have been charming if he wasn't dead. "A doctor - another man of learning, like myself. Dr. Granger was it? Granger - that's the name of our bride, isn't it, Mr. Malfoy?"

Draco nodded, sheepish to admit it when he knew Tim hated it. "Yes, Friar."

"An honour to meet you, sir," he said, making a slight bow and another turn around them. "Yes, I know your names. It's been ages since our last Hogwarts wedding. And once again, I am to help officiate at the matrimonial charm ceremony. It is an ancient and particular rite. Extraordinary, Dr. Granger, that your clever daughter was able to exercise it with such precision and force when she cast the first charm. Astounding, really. She's a credit to you."

Tim, no longer dumbfounded, was now growling. "Excuse me, I'm after my cat."

The Friar peered down the corridor, after Crookshanks. "That one?" he laughed, tucking his thumbs into his belt. "That is no one's cat but his own. Dr. Granger, before you go, allow me to thank you, privately between just ourselves, for joining us here for the ceremony. As I explained to your daughter, this spell requires witnesses, and the more goodwill she is able to assemble, the greater our chances of prevailing against You-know-who."

Tim frowned. "I'm sure I don't know who."

"Prevailing against the Dark Lord," Draco whispered over his shoulder. "The man who kidnapped Dr. Mrs. Granger this morning. The one my mother is risking her life at this moment to save her from."

"To tell you the truth, I worry about that Potter," the Friar went on. "Chosen One, or what have you. His power comes from his superiority over You-know-who in the ability to love. But when it comes to you, Mr. Malfoy - " he whistled through his insubstantial teeth. "Well, it's a good thing you weren't here to hear him when I told him he'd have to find some love to feel for you, just a little, during the ceremony. Why, I even told him not to come if he couldn't find any joy in it. But the headmaster says that won't do so - "

The Friar left off talking to Draco, reaching out a hand to Tim instead, as if to clap him on the shoulder, his misty hand falling through him. "So it's a good thing you'll be there in support of the young people. Not just good, necessary. And congratulations to you. The Malfoys are an ancient family - Norman, I believe - and they've certainly seen better days, but all is not lost for them. Not at all."

As he was floating away, back to the portrait of himself, Tim took a courageous step closer to the Friar. "If I refuse," he began, "if I refuse to attend this ceremony, what will happen to my daughter?"

The Friar stopped, frowning. "The situation in which she finds herself is unprecedented. I cannot predict it with any certainty. But if it was me, with a child of my own, I know I would take every advantage, and risk nothing."

With that he darted through a picture frame, and vanished.

Tim and Draco arrived together in the married quarters on the seventh floor.

"Hermione, I'd like a word alone with your mother, if you please," Tim said, holding the door open for her.

"You want to be alone with me?" Ann teased. "It's the dress isn't it, darling?"

Tim couldn't bring himself to laugh.

Hermione was only too happy to leave them, scooting out the door, finding Draco outside and taking his hand, nearly running away from her parents' door.

"Draco, I'm so sorry," she said, kissing his hand as she led him along the corridor.

"It's alright," he said. "What kind of a father would he be if he didn't object to this? Imagine what my father would have to say about it if he was here?"

"Look at you," she said, stopping to examine his face, taking it between her hands. "You're exhausted."

He let his eyes close. "Yes, McGonagall told me to go to bed."

"Well then you'd better," she said as she pushed against the next door along the corridor. "Remember, McGonagall said this area was for married quarters, as in, there must be more than just the rooms Mum and Dad are staying in. Alohomora."

The door in front of her swung open, revealing a dim, dusty room full of ramshackle furniture. "In here, Draco. There's got to be somewhere you can rest without leaving me to go all the way to the dungeons."

He followed her inside, telling her what the monk had told her father about how crucial loving witnesses were to their ceremony, and how Harry would need to be free from anger, getting along with him as well as possible for the charm to reach its fullest potential.

"So we need to find Potter," he said, shadowing her as she used her wand to clear a path across the floor, toward the bedstead shoved haphazardly into one corner of the room. "We need to warm him up to this, so he can stop hating it so much, and not end up killed by the Dark Lord, or - "

She hushed him. "We will, Draco. We will. Harry comes later. For now - Scourgify." She spoke the cleaning spell and a great cloud of dust puffed out of the mattress, swirling into a neatly peaked pile on the floor. "It's the best I can do, darling. Come have a lie down."

She led him by the hand to the lumpy old mattress. "Darling," he repeated. "That's what your mum calls your dad."

"Oh - it is, isn't it. Do you mind?"

He was taking off his robe, spreading it like a sheet on the bed, turning to take her in his arms. "No, I love it."

She fell beside him on the bed, spreading her robe over them. "Good, because I don't think I'll be able to help calling you that, once we're a family."

He grinned as he fidgeted against the mattress, trying to position his back to where the lumps would be least aggravating. "We've never been in a bed together like this before."

"Haven't we?"

"No. I'm sure I would have remembered," he said, settled enough now to pull her close. "Rugs, grass, sofas, hospital cots, but no beds."

She nestled her face against his chest. "Hospital cots count as beds, don't they?"

Draco furrowed his brow, thinking of an excuse. "It's not the same with Pomfrey bursting in and out without warning. In the hospital, there was none of this." He rolled over, his entire body resting on top of hers, his elbows on either side of her head. "And this is definitely different."

She laughed at him. "Draco Malfoy, wherever you are thinking of going from here, you are too tired for it."

"Am I?" he whispered in her ear before dragging his lips down the length of her neck.

"You are," she said, bending one leg around his waist, her heel in the small of his back. "See, you are completely unaffected by my wiles."

He bore less of his weight on his elbows, allowing himself to settle more closely and heavily onto her, the warmth at the center of her radiating against his stomach. He pulled his mouth away from her neck, looking into her face, his voice quiet, his breath noisy, his eyes wide and dark, suddenly not at all tired.

She took a deep breath to clear her head but it just pushed her chest more insistently against his. She watched his throat as he swallowed. His lips quivered but he didn't dare kiss hers, as if to do so here, now, might be an edge he wasn't sure he could step back from.

She dropped her leg, shifting sideways to lie beside rather than beneath him. He pulled her close again, kissing her forehead. "Four more nights," he whispered. "That's all."

She boosted herself to kiss his mouth, softly. "Go to sleep, Draco. After you drift off, I'll go fetch us something to eat."

"Don't let me sleep too long," he said, his eyes closed now as she smoothed his hair from his forehead. "Still need to find Potter."

She smiled, kissing his eyelids. "No talking about Harry Potter while you're in bed with me. Go to sleep."