Wedlocked
Chapter 34: Recitals & Realisations

The lights were on and the wreath was hanging cheerfully on the front door, advertising to the whole of Oxford that the house at Number 106, Banbury Road was a warm and welcoming place. Any year but this one and that would have been true, but this year was different. This year, Hermione wasn't alone. This year, she had a husband in addition to her secrets. The secrets were easy to keep quiet; the husband was not so easily silenced.

"Behave yourself or you will regret it," Hermione warned, in no way joking.

"I always behave," sniffed Sirius indignantly.

Snorting her disbelief, she put her finger to the buzzer and waited nervously for her mother to open the door. It was taking too long. Why was it taking too long? Her mother usually ran the length of the house to throw the door wide and wrap her daughter in a bone-breaking hug.

The lights were on. Someone ought to be coming to the door. Minutes passed and panic began to build. Had the Death Eaters found a way through the wards? Were her parents dead?

"Just wait," Sirius held her back as she reached for the door handle.

Another minute of growing worry ended with the door opening and her father sighing. "Welcome home," he smiled, a bit of strain showing on his face. "Your mother's… still getting ready."

"Hoping I'd get bored and wander off to the pub?" Sirius smiled, knowingly.

"Something like that."

Hermione frowned. For a man who had never met any girl's parents before hers, he certainly seemed to know how his mother-in-law worked. A thought came to her, one she found rather disturbing. Perhaps he understood her mother so well because Martha was very much like his own. From what she had seen of and heard about Walburga Black, she was nothing like Martha Granger. Martha was loving and open-minded… except where Sirius was concerned; in that one respect she was as stubborn and prejudiced as the mad Black matriarch was about Muggle-borns.

"Come in, come in," Phillip stood aside and gestured. "There's brandy in the sitting-room or lager in the kitchen."

"Lager," Sirius said without pause and made for the kitchen like he had been visiting the house every Christmas since he was born.

Phillip leaned in and hugged his daughter. "Have I mentioned how much I like that one? Smart bloke, much better than that ginger you were after before."

"Too bad mum can't see it," she grumbled and held her father tight. She could not express how grateful she was for his acceptance of Sirius. If he hated her husband as much as her mother seemed to, she doubted there would have been a wedding, which would not have ended well for any of the Grangers, least of all Hermione.

"She'll come around, especially if he's not going anywhere," he commented, pausing on their way to the kitchen. "Is he?"

"No, he's not going anywhere." She breathed a quiet laugh. He could not leave her even if he wanted to, which, much to her surprise, he didn't. Looking at the man leaning on the kitchen counter with his bottle of lager and pleasant smile, she had a hard time believing he wanted to stay married to her, that her opinion mattered enough to make him attempt suicide. There was something more than a little odd there. She was not given time enough to contemplate it, however, as her mother came into the kitchen.

"Hermione!" Martha Granger cried and gripped her daughter in a hug so tight Hermione really did lose the ability to breathe. "My baby!"

"Mum!" she gasped with the last of her oxygen.

"Martha, leave the girl alone," Phillip chided with considerably more gentleness than Hermione would have liked given that her head was growing light from want of air.

"It's just I haven't seen her in ages," the woman complained. "You look lovely. I don't recognise that skirt."

"Thank you, mum. Sirius bought it for me," Hermione replied, narrowing her eyes at him in warning. He just smirked as the woman took on the appearance of someone who had swallowed a lemon.

Somehow Martha managed to keep her mouth shut about the skirt and instead began to coo and pet her daughter on the head, something she had stopped doing around the time Hermione started Kindergarten. "How's school, Mimi?"

"Mimi?" Sirius muttered quietly.

"Our girl's old nickname," Phillip explained in an equally low voice. "Poor girl couldn't even pronounce her own name as a child, came out 'Mimi'. It just stuck after that, until she got so bossy she told us to stop, cheeky thing."

"Mimi," he repeated with a smirk. "I like it."

"You would," Hermione snipped at him before turning back to her mother. "Mum, you haven't called me that in years. Please don't start now."

"Might as well ask her to stop breathing, my darling," Phillip sighed. "She's been doing nothing but look at baby pictures and replay all your old recital videos."

The blood drained from her face. "Recital videos?" she repeated, horrified.

Sirius grinned. "What's that?"

"Nothing!" Hermione said quickly. "Nothing at all. It will never be mentioned again. Ever."

"But you looked so pretty, Mimi," her mother insisted, either blind to her daughter's discomfort or seizing on it to form a rift between the girl and her husband. "I spent so much time fixing your hair… don't you want him to see?"

"No!"

"Yes," Sirius smiled. "I'm dying to see a recital video. Whatever that is."

"What it is," Hermione groaned, "is horribly embarrassing. There's a reason why I quit ballet, mum."

Martha waved the logic and complaint away. "The video is in the player. Go show your husband how adorable you were. She was only six… just eleven years ago. How quickly time flies."

Hermione took his hand and dragged him from the kitchen, glaring her anger at the carpet and walls and paintings. So that was her game. She was trying to make Sirius feel horrid for being so much older than her. If he was even half as observant as she knew he was, he would be contemplating the age gap again, thinking that eleven years ago, when his wife was six, he was twenty-six and already in prison. She turned to say something to deflect his doubtlessly foul mood only to find him grinning.

"What?" she asked.

"I want to see the recital video," he explained.

"No, that is not a good idea. Let's pretend we did. You just have to say something about how adorable I was and she'll not say another word," she said, panic forcing her voice to unbearably high levels.

He looked at her meaningfully. "If she knows I have tattoos just by looking at me with my shirt on, then she'll know I haven't watched the video. Now stop stalling and get it started."

'Stupid git always winning arguments,' she scowled and turned the television on. The tape was in the machine and queued up, so this had clearly been part of her mother's plan from the start. Hermione dropped onto the couch and covered her face as the piano music started. She had not seen the video in years, but she remembered this recital as well as any other. It was humiliating.

"I don't see you," he commented, disappointed. The slow piano music continued a moment before Sirius announced, "Oh! There you are!" He fell silent, watching little Hermione perform her group piece with three other girls from her class.

She wished he would say something, even if it was something rude. Not knowing what he was thinking was torturous. Daring her own embarrassment, she glanced at him. He was staring intently at the television, his face devoid of any clue to what was passing between his ears. If he was amused with her appearance or ashamed of himself it didn't show. She looked over at the television, curious if she could see herself through his eyes, but she was no longer dancing. Another quartet of girls was at the centre of the small studio, Hermione and her group had moved off to the side.

She was still there, though, little Mimi.

She looked past the horrifyingly pink leotard and fluffy tutu, past the dance she had not gotten right despite hours of practice, and remembered what she had done between the group dance and her solo performance. She had thrown herself down on the polished oak floor and read. That was what Sirius was watching her do now, read alone in the corner while the other girls danced or had their mothers fuss over their costumes.

"You haven't changed," he said quietly. It was the nicest thing he could have said. Fighting the tears that threatened to ruin her makeup, she kissed his cheek and sat closer to watch the rest of the video.

As the screen turned to blue and the tape rewound itself to the beginning, Sirius took a breath, readying himself to speak. Hermione knew the sweet comment could not have been the end of it. His honesty and lack of tact would come out to play now. She closed her eyes and started to count to ten, calming herself before he even spoke.

"I was thinking about your wand question," he said unexpectedly.

Her eyes flew open and she looked at him as if he had sprouted a second mouth, "What?"

"Why we can use each other's wands," he reminded her. "I was thinking it might be a question of compatibility. Given that you could find a new wand if yours broke, it's clearly not the only one for you. So maybe there's another compatible wand out there for you and for me, and we both happen to have the same ones."

Thinking about it, that did make sense, but so had his shirt analogy. Compatibility of people and wands; what if it was not that complicated? What if it was simply compatibility of the people using the wands? James was able to use his wife's wand because he and she were compatible. While Orion and Walburga—

"Did your parents get on well?" she asked.

"Merlin, no! Hated each other from day one," he laughed darkly. "Arranged marriage."

"So is ours," she reminded him.

"Yes, but I actually like you."

"Thank you," she said with slight flush. "So they hated each other and couldn't use each other's wands. But James could use Lily's…"

"You think it has something to do with how much we like each other?" he questioned, the corner of his mouth rising with his eyebrow.

"It's a thought," she muttered, unsure what to make of his smirk. By her own words, the fact that he had used her wand so easily while half-asleep meant that he liked her rather a lot, and the same went for her. She shook her head, refusing to start on the slippery slope of worrying whether her fake husband actually had feelings for her. A simple marriage of convenience, that was what she wanted.

"Come on, dinner has to be ready by now," said the girl hurriedly, stood and walked from the sitting-room without looking at him.

She paused in the kitchen doorway, watching her parents finish up dinner. Martha easily moved between basting the roast, mashing the potatoes and tossing the salad while Phillip wove his path around her, collecting plates and cutlery and the cutting board for the chicken. It was a dance she had watched them perform nearly every night of her childhood; two people working seamlessly together to complete a single task.

"You know," Sirius whispered, "if they had magic, I think they could use each other's wands."

It was true. They were perfect together. Oh, they fought, every couple did, but never for long and never seriously enough for Hermione to fear their separation. This was what marriage was to her and what she had always wanted.

Martha turned in time to see her daughter wiping the tears from her eyes. "Oh! What's the matter, sweetheart? Did he not like your video?"

Hermione laughed. "No, it's not that."

"What is it?"

"Nothing," she shook her head and forced the tears down, moving instead to the pleasant and safe subjects she always stuck to when she came to visit. To say what she wanted was impossible. To say 'because I'll never have what you and dad have' would mean admitting to her parents that the marriage she had entered was a lie. It was a pretty lie with lots of gifts and kisses and sex, but it was not a real marriage, not one like Martha and Phillip had. Sirius was kind and handsome and rich, but he would never be that sort of husband, the real sort.