Princely Names
Chapter 2: Draco's Epilogue
"Dad, there's Dora!" Lyra broke from her father and ran through the crowd on Platform 9 and 3/4. The man's hair was platinum and the girl's deep gold, but both had the pale pointed faces that marked the Malfoy family.
Lyra rushed up to the other girl, talking at top speed. "Dora, where's your dad? We need to talk to him. We have to be in Slytherin."
Theodora said nothing. If her friend was dancing sunlight, she was quiet shadow. Her distinctive bushy hair was raven-black rather than her mother's plain brown, but it was her sense of silent focus that provided the real contrast between the two girls.
"All the Malfoys are Slytherins," continued Lyra, "and your Dad was—"
"Scor's a Ravenclaw," Theodora broke in. Unlike Lyra, she was constitutionally incapable of ignoring facts.
"Well, Scor's a brainbox." Lyra contemptuously dismissed her anomalous elder brother.
"The teachers say I'm a brainbox," Theodora said softly, looking down. It was impossible to tell whether she felt pride or embarrassment.
Lyra was not to be deflected. "But your dad was Head of Slytherin House. You can't be anything but—"
Draco walked up. "Morning, Granger." Then, to his daughter: "Lyra, where are your manners?"
"Oh, sorry." She looked up at Hermione. "Good morning, Ms. Granger. It's very nice to see you." Then, with one of her sudden shifts, she asked, "Can you check the wards on my computer, please?" Despite all efforts, Draco had yet to push proper Malfoy manners into his mercurial elder daughter.
Hermione laughed. "Good morning to you, too, Lyra." She took the palm-sized computer Lyra held out to her. "Didn't your parents test the wards already?"
Lyra said, "There's lots and lots of magic at Hogwarts that could completely frazzle the quantumboards, and frizzle all the software. It's Granger shielding, so you do it best, right?"
Hermione got out her wand and checked the warding on the electronics. "Just because I invented the spells doesn't mean I'm the only one who can cast them." She smiled, adding quietly, "It just means I'm the one who gets paid when other people cast them."
You just had to bring that up, didn't you Granger? Draco seethed silently. Although he was still well-off, Hermione's patents on the shielding of Muggle electronics had made her considerably richer than he was. Draco told himself he would not feel resentment. It was the Depression of the 'teens that hurt us. It hurt all the old families.
She handed the device back to Lyra. "The shielding is fine. It won't frizzle unless you take it through the Floo, and it shouldn't frazzle at all. Now, what were you saying about Slytherin House?"
"Dora and I have to be together in Slytherin. We have to!"
"It's all up to the Sorting Hat." Hermione said. "You can ask for Slytherin, but you can't be sure."
Theodora, standing slightly behind her friend, merely shrugged. Draco strongly suspected the offspring of Hermione Granger and Severus Snape would end up in Ravenclaw, and Lyra, though not unintelligent, would not be following her there. The friendship between his sparkling, excitable daughter the quiet, serious Theodora sometimes seemed an ideal matching of opposites and sometimes merely odd. If they were Sorted into the same House Theodora would doubtless end up doing most of Lyra's homework, just as her mother had done for her own two best friends. And that would not help Lyra to learn self-discipline, which is what Draco thought she needed most.
The girls moved away, talking more quietly as Theodora pulled out her own computer and the two became absorbed with their devices.
Draco said to Hermione, "She's absolutely determined to be a Slytherin. I think she means to corner Severus and ask him to make sure she gets in."
"Sev couldn't do that even when he was Headmaster."
"I know, but try telling that to Lyra. She's convinced Daddy can accomplish anything, and if Daddy can't, Uncle Severus can." He looked around. "Didn't he come?"
"He'll be here. The boys were accidentally levitating each other out in the station and Severus stayed to Obliviate."
"Flying seven-year-olds. That must have caused excitement."
"Not much. They never got more than six inches off the ground."
"Sometimes I think all the business of sending the older children to Hogwarts sets the younger ones off. Cassie was reaching for a book to bring with her today and managed to collapse every bookshelf in the library. And you know the size of our library."
"Oh, no! Was she hurt?"
"A bruise or two. Only a few books hit her and they weren't heavy, but Asteria is staying home with her. We decided the station would be too much stimulus. She's only eight."
"Is Scorpius on the train already? I had hoped to see him. This makes three consecutive generations of Malfoy prefects, doesn't it?"
"Four," said Draco. He couldn't quite keep the smugness out of his voice.
"And the first one to get it entirely on academic merit?" Hermione teased him.
"Still missing the nuances, aren't you, Granger? Prefect is a political post by its very nature. Academics are never the only thing involved."
"Except in Ravenclaw House."
"Perhaps," Draco admitted. "You know what really bothered Scor? Rose Weasley becoming Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain. He can't stop talking about it."
"Are those two ever going to give up competing?"
"Not unless they start sleeping together."
"That won't happen," she said.
"I know." Draco gave her a calculating look, then continued with deliberate casualness, "Scor's more than willing, but he says she prefers girls."
"I didn't know Scorpius knew." Hermione was just as carefully casual. "I hope this means she's feeling more comfortable with it. When she confided in me last Christmas she hadn't told anyone else. I suggested she talk to Madame Hooch."
"Ah, Hooch—the matriarch of Hogwarts lesbians!" Then the rest of Hermione's comment registered. "Rose Weasley confided in you? I didn't know you two were close."
"Apparently I'm a sophisticated older woman who understands things."
Draco snorted. "Sophisticated? You, Granger?"
"I think it's because Sev and I have never married. There are still wizards who find that scandalous. You'd think it was 1921 instead of 2021."
Draco gave a half-smirk, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
Hermione said, "Rose hasn't told her parents yet, so don't say anything to them. She needs to tell them on her own."
"When do I ever gossip with Ron and Ellen Weasley?"
"You must talk to them sometime."
"Not when I can avoid it. Do you realize there will be a child of Ron Weasley in the same year as every one of my children? Rose with Scorpius, Mary with Lyra, and Emily with Cassie. And there's another girl in between, isn't there? And two or three boys."
"Just two, Hugo and little Marcus."
"And that's not even counting the cousins, whom they reckon up by dozens."
"Well, if I had married Ron the way he wanted me to, there would be fewer Weasleys in this world. I would have stopped after Hugo."
A thought struck Draco: if Granger had married Weasley she might not have invented the shielding. The Weasel would never have supported her research the way Severus did. He would have expected her to play hausfrau while holding down some dull job at the Ministry. The Malfoy fortune still would have been more than halved by the Depression, but Draco wouldn't have had to suffer the humiliation of being topped by her—again!
"Too bad you turned the Weasel down," he smirked. "I would have loved seeing you popping out red-headed babies."
She snapped back, "Better that than a litter of blonde ferrets."
Draco realized he'd gone too far; there was real anger in her eyes. When did Snape teach her to glare like that? Restore the truce, Malfoy. Say something nice. "Uh, yeah. So—" He said, "I hear you've added a new wing to your mansion." He almost managed to keep the spitefulness out of his voice.
Hermione sighed. She and Draco would never truly be friends, but she recognized the olive branch. "It's not a mansion, it's a house. And we've just added a bio-chemistry lab. He's taking on a research associate, a Squib with a Ph.D. in molecular biology."
"He's still trying to link Potions with Muggle science? That doesn't sound lucrative." Damn! Draco told himself. Stop thinking about their money.
"It's pure research. Severus adores pure research. Sometimes I think the cruelest thing Dumbledore did was forcing him to teach beginners all those years. He hated teaching, and it showed."
"Is that what finally civilized him—giving up teaching?" Draco recovered his former bantering tone. "And all this time I thought it was you."
She laughed, and peace was restored.
No, he would not let Granger's success bother him. He was Draco Malfoy, a pureblood wizard with a pureblood wife and heirs. Granger was a mudblood shacked up with a half-blood. No matter what century it was, that still mattered.
Theodora Granger-Snape was Sorted into Ravenclaw House, Lyra Malfoy into Slytherin, and Mary Weasley into Gryffindor. The next year Diane Weasley followed her sister into Gryffindor House; two years after that Emily Weasley did the same, and Cassiopeia Malfoy became a Ravenclaw like her brother Scorpius.
Severus and his Squib colleague eventually revolutionized Potions, creating the new field of bio-alchemy and garnering some of the highest academic awards in the wizarding world. Most of the profitable developments, however, were made by the more practical researchers who followed, among them Cassiopeia Malfoy. Because of its connection with Muggle science relatively few purebloods became interested in bio-alchemy, so when Cassie married a colleague the Malfoys found themselves with a muggleborn son-in-law. The company founded by Cassie and her husband, AlchiTech Ltd., fully restored the Malfoy family fortunes. Draco tried not to let that bother him either.
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Author's Notes:
"Brainbox" is slang of the 2020's for a bright kid who does well in school; it is not a compliment. "Frazzle" and "frizzle" are technical terms referring to the damaging of electronics by magic. Hardware gets frazzled, software and data get frizzled, and when both are damaged it's called frizzle-frazzling.
Yes, Draco Malfoy quotes Gilbert and Sullivan. Why not?