Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
ooo
Pansy leans forward, watching the chessboard across from Ron Weasley, whose pose mirrors hers. Against expectations, Draco finds that the chess match keeps his interest, less for its resurrection of old House rivalries than for its exotic details and silent tension. It's hard-fought and a close run thing indeed; toward the end, Pansy and Ron both have strained, feral smiles. Hypatia wakes and fusses several times during the match. She isn't hungry, only wanting Draco's attention, so he walks with her, keeping half an eye on the contest.
At very great length, Pansy makes her last move, and announces, "Checkmate."
Ron Weasley lets out a whistle and pauses, looking at the disposition of the pieces. He has a stunned, abstracted look—how one might look if one had discovered something unexpected and not unpleasant in a familiar place.
They look at each other for a long moment, and then Pansy says, "Good game, Weasley."
He nods and says, slowly, "It's different …" He frowns for a moment, searching for the words. "It's simpler, in one way—and a lot more complicated."
Pansy smiles, and it is not a smile she's ever shown Draco. There's no sex in it, but a very different sort of interest. "Play again some time, Weasley?"
"Oh yes," Ron Weasley says, still staring at the board. Granger makes eye contact with him, and he startles a bit, and then offers his hand. Pansy's smile broadens as she accepts the handshake.
After Weasley goes into his appointment, pale clever Theo says that he would like to have another bout (in spite of his reported resolution to the contrary). There was something intriguing about this stripped-down version of the game, he says.
As they place the pieces, Theo remarks that it was altogether a shame that they couldn't have had a better chess scene at Hogwarts. Blaise, flamboyant and annoying as always, saunters over and leans against Theo's shoulder. Today he's arrayed in full Muggle regalia, dark blazer and trousers and white shirt with a stiff collar adorned with neckwear that he described as the Slytherin Old School Tie, which sports tiny green-and-silver serpents that (if one looked close) actually wriggle on their black-silk ground.
Oh yes, and green iridescent eye shadow—just enough to be noticeable, and to annoy. Theo shrugs rather violently. "Blaise, there is a time and a place…"
"Well, if you don't appreciate me, then I shall throw my support to someone who does." He changes chairs to sit beside Pansy and rest his head on her shoulder.
"Zabini, don't think the Statute of Secrecy is going to keep me from hexing you…" she says.
The assorted Gryffindors and Ravenclaws don't so much disperse as re-arrange, some keeping their places behind Theo, who has taken Ron's chair, and some taking new positions behind Pansy. She favors them with a glance, but (to Draco's surprise) neither a sneer nor a glare. Certainly nothing like the look she still gives him whenever he crosses her field of vision.
Blaise, rebuffed by both combatants, wanders over to peer into Hypatia's bassinet. "She looks like you."
"She's my sister," Draco says, hoping that he won't have to underline my sister, not my half-sister, because that is matter for dueling.
Blaise shrugs. "I always wondered what it would be like. Mother never presented any of my stepfathers with an heir."
The fighting words that come to mind (and die there): They didn't live long enough. There are rumors, of course, as to whose unknown hand must have dispensed the fatal draught that put an end to Madam Zabini's checkered career. Certainly there is talk of just how mad she was, or must have been, just as there is talk about the paternity of little Hypatia.
In any case, however annoying Blaise might be, there are two uniformed and at least one undercover Auror in the room to be sure that no sparks catch. Best, all in all, to keep silence, given that he's still under suspicion and Blaise is actually on probation. Hypatia is looking back at Blaise with her bright grey eyes, unafraid in spite of the fact that he is most conspicuously a stranger.
The door opens, and Parvati Patil enters, dressed like a thorough Muggle, Draco notes: jeans and T-shirt and winter jacket. She checks in at the desk, and then catches sight of the chess game and exchanges a brief smile with Pansy. The old childhood alliances are re-asserting themselves in the post-war; the children who had played hide-and-seek in the maze in the formal gardens at the Manor might have fought on opposite sides in the battle, but now…
Now, they have been arriving early for their appointments, sometimes hours early, in this clinic waiting-room which is such conspicuously neutral ground that people can meet here who still cannot greet each other openly in Diagon Alley. Draco never would have imagined Ron Weasley and Pansy Parkinson doing other than trading insults over each other's facial features and war records, but here they've been, playing chess.
He picks up Hypatia, and Blaise leans in to touch her tiny fist, the one she's trying to stuff in her mouth as she tries out her tentative smile.
Draco instinctively flinches.
Blaise says, "I'm not going to eat her." He says, "I hardly ever eat babies."
Draco frowns; once more Blaise is having him on.
ooo
Granger is wearing her hair loose today, though her clothes are neat and sharp, a dark-red jumper and black trousers, that make her look as if she's in uniform. He finds himself staring at the hair, whose curly fringe casts a deep shadow over her eyes, and trails over the knitted fabric that covers her shoulders. He tries not to think about that, because he's seen those shoulders bare… the blouse slipping down her shoulder to leave it bare, and her arms golden from the sun. No, when he's out in the sun, he doesn't turn that color.
Blaise pokes him in the arm. "You're staring, Draco." Annoyed, he shakes off the offending hand. "She's off limits, anyway." Blaise has the art of provoking, doesn't he? Always has, in fact. He doesn't want to remember Blaise's flirtation with Pansy, but that was another score… from back before the beginning of the present world, before the war.
Longbottom walks in carrying boxes of take-away, and Draco finds himself glaring at him. Yes, he remembers when Longbottom was a fat little duffer who couldn't defend himself against a leg-locker curse, and now… well, now is a different matter. Granger looks up from her ledger and smiles.
"Give it up," Blaise says with altogether grating good cheer. "You're a poor candidate for Romeo. Anyway, you used to call her a bushy-haired—" Draco stomps on his foot, unrepentantly. Blaise glares at him. "What was that for? I'm just talking history."
Draco folds his arms and turns his glare to Blaise.
"Some people are awfully tetchy when they're not getting any," Blaise says, rather too loudly. Granger actually turns around and stares at them. It's more than plain she's heard everything that was said; the room's not large, and Blaise is far from discreet.
"Anyway, isn't your mother going to fix you up with some cousin?" Blaise says. "I hear she's fanciable. Though she hasn't much in the way of taste, because I also heard that she was flirting with Percy Weasley."
"You will please shut it." Draco is trying to keep his voice down, and failing.
"I didn't say anything against your cousin," Blaise says. "They say she's good-looking, for a Muggle." He smirks, and adds, "Though we're all going Muggle these days. Not so bad. The toys are fun." He takes a silvery wheel-shaped thing out of his satchel, about a hand-span in diameter. It has two black cords dangling from it, each ending in a button. "It's got music in it."
Draco frowns; he'd push Blaise away, but that would get the attention of the Aurors, and he's already had more of that than he'd like. "You're daft, Zabini. I don't hear any music."
"No, like this." And Blaise (who can always be counted on to get in one's personal space) has put one of the little buttons in Draco's ear, which would have gotten him cuffed like the schoolboy he still is, except that Draco startles at the sound filling his head. Someone is playing the piano, and the harp, and, yes, cymbals! Only on one side, though, which is a very odd sensation. He yanks the button out and hands it back to Blaise. "I'm not interested in your toys," he says.
"I like toys. They distract. If you had the right toys, you wouldn't be making trouble for yourself." Blaise sits back in his chair with a smirk, cradling his little wheel full of music. "You aren't going to get your way on this. And you always want what you can't have. You should have paid proper attention to Pansy when she was interested in you."
Draco rears back and glares at Blaise, thinking about how very much he'd like to hex him. Of course, he can't, because then the damned Aurors would be all over him… not to mention the Daily Prophet and (once she found out he'd made trouble for them) his mother, and of the three… well, he'd take his chances with the Aurors and the Prophet.
"Though I will say Granger's a fair bit better looking than she was. Maybe it's the flush of victory."
Draco says, "You were the one saying one shouldn't be interested in blood traitors no matter what they look like. Or, no doubt, the other sort." He hasn't said the M-word in months, he realizes. Not even thought it, really.
"Ah, but that was another day and time, and that was Ginny Weasley, wasn't it?" Blaise smirks. "Gingers never were my cup of tea. Now, blonds…" He ruffles Draco's hair, and ignores his glower.
"I am not interested in you," Draco says huffily, "and neither is anyone else here. Including Pansy."
Blaise smirks. "What would you know about it?"
ooo
When Draco emerges from his appointment with Dr, Burgess, Granger is gathering up the array of things on her little table. The person at the reception desk looks at him with indifference; it's not the usual person… what was her name, he'd heard someone say it. Mary Esmond. And who'd said it? The Auror, the one who hated him.
He looks at Granger, as she puts her little desk in order and discreetly tucks her files into that dainty little reticule… which he now understands is charmed, very seriously charmed; the tale is that she'd carried the entire expedition in there when she and Potter and Weasley set out to defeat the Dark Lord: not only some significant part of the Dark Arts holdings of the Hogwarts library, but a tent and clothes and various supplies…
He's staring at her, with a resurgence of his old resentment. "A girl of no wizarding family whatsoever," which contemptuous voice in his head is anonymous for a merciful moment until he realizes it's his father, whom he'll know only through letters until he's released from Azkaban in twenty years.
Twenty years. Draco will be almost forty years old when next he sees his father face to face.
Granger is responsible, he thinks, and then pushes the thought away. She and her like are responsible for the world changing, but he's not sure he would have liked to have lived in the other one … or that he would have lived long, in the Dark Lord's disfavor. At any rate, nothing is as it was. The perverse spark of attraction flares into flame every time he sees her, whether or not she's with Longbottom, though usually she is, and it's worse then, because he remembers who they both are… but more importantly, he remembers that she belongs to someone else. It's the duffer who has the right to touch her, not him.
Neville Longbottom is a Pureblood, but nonetheless not really one of them. For all he knows the old courtesies, he knows Muggle ways too well to be entirely comme il faut... Draco knows he's looking for an excuse for the resentment he feels. And what is it about Granger, of late? Before, she was merely alien, and deeply annoying, one who trod where she ought not. But now, she's exotic, which is to say alien but alluring.
It was the clothes, and her manner … so completely at ease, that night, and of course he wasn't to have seen her; she and Longbottom thought themselves alone. That picture continues to haunt him: what he can't have, what he'd never even thought to want.
It isn't just the Muggle influence, because now he's been introduced to a Muggle girl, at his mother's insistence: Audrey Tonks, his cousin by marriage, if you ignore the strictures of the Black Family Tapestry. Audrey Tonks resembles nothing so much as a much younger version of Madam Rosmerta, which makes sense given she's to inherit her father's pub. She's sturdy and plump, with rosy coloring and sleepy eyes and a thoroughly Mugglish sense of fun: she's rowdy and hearty and loud, with a fondness for ale and darts, which game she taught him in the spirit of hospitality. And yes, he did see the light in her eye when someone mentioned Percy Weasley. She didn't need to spell it out, either, that she finds Percy's prim swottiness irresistible.
Why, he won't venture to guess. He supposes Muggles have perverse tastes.
What compels about Granger, of course, is the combination of earth and fire—the Muggle antecedents and the spark of magic. Quite against his will, he finds himself staring at the lines of her body, and remembering Longbottom's big square hand caressing her foot and ankle as she sat on his lap. Longbottom the duffer. Longbottom the blood-traitor, who's done the unforgivable and forgiven him. Longbottom the hero of the Battle of Hogwarts, which makes him a fair match for Granger who is likewise, and more: Granger the logistical genius behind Potter the unnaturally lucky.
"There's rutting with Mudbloods, and then there's sealing it with marriage." His father, talking about James Potter. Not a remark he'd been meant to overhear, but it stayed in his mind for a long time after, always with a shiver that felt indecent. Doing it with one of them …
… and then at the trial it had come out that the Dark Lord himself was the result of a witch's illicit connection with one of them, no, even worse than a Muggle-born, a plain Muggle. The lowest sort of Half-blood …
So why shouldn't he want Granger, then? It's post-war reconciliation, isn't it? Except that she's out of reach, which stings, and Blaise Zabini knows it too, damn him, and the only thing that saves that is his sure knowledge that Pansy isn't having to do with Zabini, either. Pansy wants children and Zabini is a Pureblood, scion of a line that's pure back to Carthage and Phoenicia. The witticism is legendary, that Magdalena made to Bella Black in the Slytherin common room when they were both students, about what the Zabinis' ancestors had been about in the Temple of Moloch when the Blacks were yet casting runes in northern darkness or painting themselves blue.
Toujours pur is taken to even greater lengths by the really old families. Blaise is related by blood to the wizarding aristocracy of much of the Mediterranean basin as well as old Nubia and Abyssinia.
Which makes his truck with Muggle nonsense all the more a travesty.
Draco only realizes that he's been glowering when he sees Granger's furious expression.
She has turned in her chair to face him, leaving Longbottom to gather up their winter coats. She's looking right at him.
"I think this has gone quite far enough," she says. "We need to have a talk." His heart skips a beat, and he feels his face grow hot.
Longbottom turns to her and as she stands, he helps her on with her coat. Draco doesn't miss the way those big hands brush her shoulders, decorously enough but unmistakably. Longbottom's brief glance at him, and his more lingering look at Granger, tell him that they've talked about this, talked about him … gods, it's bad enough that she and her mother and his aunt are closeted two and three times a week, conspiring about his case, "the Malfoy case" as the Quibbler is calling it.
ooo
Granger nods to Longbottom, her cloud of hair bobbing. Longbottom says, "I'll see you later—at home?" To Draco's relief, there are no more gestures of possession.
Then they are off, he carrying Hypatia, and she, walking rather faster than he would expect. He finds that he was having trouble keeping up with her. Eventually she notices, and slows her pace.
They walk down the corridor, out the double doors of the clinic, and thence to the street.
She stops briefly to repeat, "We're going to have a talk, because this can't persist." They walk up the street to the pub-café place, the one where he'd had that very uncomfortable conversation with Pansy. Of course, she doesn't know that, nor does she seem to be aware that the Slytherin contingent has taken it over, of late.
Well, she does realize, once she steps inside to see Theo Nott and Tracey Davis sitting in a booth drinking glasses of wine and chatting over the starters to their supper, and Pansy with Daphne and Astoria and Blaise, and …
She frowns. "Well, this won't do," she says, as more than one head turns in their direction. She ignores the stares of the room full of Slytherins, and turns on her heel.
ooo
After a bus ride and a tricky bit of Apparition, it's at another location entirely, an anonymous café in Charing Cross Road, that they sit down and order coffee drinks—well, she orders for both of them. She looks around with a shudder, though he sees no reason for her apprehension. She says only that she had a spot of bad luck here during the war, but that's nothing to stop her making use of it.
She means to have a proper talk with him out of earshot of anybody who was likely to bear the tale elsewhere. His recent nonsense has a serious bearing on his case, which is to say, Hypatia's case. That makes him sit up and take notice.
She says that she had thought that they'd come to a reasonable accommodation, given all the things that had passed… until the night he showed up on her doorstep and interrupted her and Neville. "And you've been glaring at me ever since, and I don't like it."
He stares at the tabletop, with its abstract pearlescent swirls, and then glances up to meet her eyes. "You do know what I mean, don't you? That look, as if you'd like to kill me or eat me up, but you're not sure which." She bites her lip and then says, "As if you hate me, and you fancy me, at the same time. You know the look I mean, Malfoy, and I don't like it."
He's already in trouble, if they are back to surnames.
He says, slowly, "I don't know what you mean."
"Don't play games with me," she said. "I've put in extra hours on your case, but it's not because I fancy you. It's a point of law I'd like to see changed."
"So I'm like your house elves. It's nothing personal."
"Doing the right thing is personal. I can make a difference on this case, but not if you're going to play games." She looks positively fierce, and he shivers a little, remembering how she'd slapped him, third year. Apparently she is thinking of the same thing, because she says, "You always had a way of getting under Harry's skin, and Ron's, but the only time you ever really got at me was telling me that I was wasting my efforts."
He said, "Well, you are. I have no prospects here." Pansy tolerates him in the waiting room, but only by keeping the largest possible distance, and he's a figure of fun to Blaise, and the others ignore him ...
She takes a sip of her coffee drink, and looks at a spot somewhere in the middle distance over his left shoulder. If he doesn't mistake, she's mentally counting to ten. Finally she says, "It seems you're taking that resentment out on me, and I have nothing to do with it. And I haven't missed the way you've been looking at Neville, as if he has something you want."
Draco squares his shoulders and says, "He does."
"Well, I'm not a thing to covet." She takes a breath and lets it out in a long sigh. "I don't know how to talk sense to you." She says, "This is more explanation than you deserve, given the way you're behaving… well, in general it's none of your business. But I'm with Neville because we understand each other. We get on, and I can imagine looking at him across the breakfast table for the next fifty years and more. I'm not interested in romantic drama. I have work to do. I like getting things done, and if I'm going to have a fight, I want to have it with something that needs to be fought. Not the person I'm living with. There was a time I thought that was exciting …"
She pauses, as if aware she's told too much. From across the Great Hall, the sparks between her and Ron Weasley had been more than evident. Even now, there's fire and energy in their friendly arguments… which seem to be a great deal friendlier since they've stopped being a couple.
He says, "Haven't you felt the slightest… curiosity?" She frowns and shakes her head.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Not even the lure of the exotic?"
She said, "If you mean the whole Pureblood thing, let me remind you that Ron is a Pureblood. So was Viktor, and so is Neville. Not that I credit blood status as anything but a collective delusion. As for sleeping with the enemy…"
The observation that this is beyond bad form doesn't help the blush from spreading across his face.
"… you're not my enemy. And I'm not interested in playing those games." She says, "And you wouldn't like living with me, and you know it. I don't even think you could tolerate me for the duration of a respectable fling." She says, "Nor I you. Among other things, you're rigid and prudish about all sorts of things ..." She forebears to say the next thing, but he can almost hear her thinking it: and I don't imagine you'd be much fun in bed. He'd be insulted, except that suddenly he imagines it, that which had transpired with Pansy in awkward and tender silence, with this plain-spoken, brisk, practical person before him.
It's a chilly and deflating picture.
She says, "And I'm not bringing this up to be gratuitously hurtful, but I don't want any more of this … this nonsense." She says, "Andromeda Tonks thinks she may have found a solution to your dilemma, but it will be awkward if you're going to insist that you have some sort of attraction to me." She gathers herself and says, "No. Not awkward. Impossible."
He leans forward. "You have something?" Because it had seemed impossible; his mother's marriage contract is quite clear on the disposition of Squib offspring, and his sister is designated as a bearer of the Name if she should prove a witch, so adoption into another family is not an option…
She said, "It's a contract. A very old form. No one's done it for centuries, certainly not since the Statute of Secrecy. It requires a willing Muggle signatory…" She pauses. "My parents are willing to take it on. But not if I'm not willing, and I'm not, if you're going to be stalking me and brooding about how I ought to belong to you." She says, "And in any case, it has very specific clauses about what sort of relationship you may have with my family."
He knows he's staring, but can't help it.
"Muggle kings and queens didn't fancy the notion of the court wizard seducing their heirs, male or female. So there are magically binding requirements forbidding any kind of sexual relationship." She says, "The sanctions are really quite dire."
"So what do I have to gain from it?"
"Well, you remain the heir of your family, for one. But you have the option of placing any of your siblings or heirs under the protection of your Muggle patron." She says, "And it's a more ancient form, so my understanding is that it supersedes bindings of more recent date. I don't claim to understand how all of it works. You'll have to ask Andromeda. But the main thing is that Hypatia is protected, however things turn out."
He looks at his sister, sleeping in her nest of blankets. Outside the plate-glass window of the café, a thin spiteful sleet has begun to fall, giving the blue twilight a grimy look.
"She'd be safe?"
"As far as Andromeda can tell. Your isolationist ancestors didn't count on a descendant taking up a post of this sort again, so they didn't think to forbid it in the marriage contract."
The absurdity of it strikes him and he feels his mouth quirking into something like a smile. "So your parents would take me on … as their court wizard. In spite of being commoners."
"Nothing in the contract actually specifies that the Muggle signatory has to be royalty. The main point is that we'd be something like brother and sister." She smiles, though it's a bit strained. "There's been more than a bit of sibling rivalry already, if I'm to be frank."
"That would make Hypatia your niece."
She nods. "I think I'd be a better aunt than some." He shivers, remembering Bellatrix. "But I don't care for your attitude just now. I thought we'd worked things out, but you seem to be regressing of late."
Hypatia stirs, and he picks her up. There in the dim reflection in the plate-glass, the same vague reflection: a back view of the girl with the voluminous hair, the boy holding the baby, a happy little family, some might assume.
He knows that she overheard Zabini in the waiting room. "If this is about the noise that Zabini was making ..." She frowns for a minute, and then shakes her head.
"No. Not that I enjoy listening to his opinion of my looks. But he's right. You're not going to get your way on this one. I am not interested in you. Not that way."
He feels the tears prickle his eyes. Hypatia shifts in his arms and tugs at his hair. He disengages it from her fist. Otherwise, she'd have a lock of it in her fist by way of toy, and fall asleep that way. It really isn't fair, though. He's alone in the postwar. Even the defeated are pairing off, but he …
"He likes to annoy you, and anyway I don't think he's anyone to be taking very seriously. He's under suspicion for murdering his mother, but no one's been able to prove anything." He starts at her sheer bad form of saying it aloud. "He has his own problems, and he distracts himself from them by annoying you."
"I don't think that's any of your business."
"It wouldn't be my business at all, except that I'm mixed up in it." She said, "And your treatment of Pansy is no advertisement either." He glowers at her; how does she know about that? Has she been peeking at the records? She continues, "I don't know the particulars, but she can barely stand to be in the same room with you."
"And you assume it's my fault."
She looks at him, and says nothing.
At length she says, "And I'm not flattered by being sized up as breeding stock, either."
He thinks that's a rather vulgar way of putting it, and says so. "And who told you anyone was saying such a thing?"
"Andromeda Tonks. She said that your mother had said something to you about how she'd make my parents an offer if we weren't out of reach. Things have changed in the postwar, she said." Granger puts her cup down. "Your case isn't unique. The Purebloods are facing a genetic crisis. Suddenly your Housemates are marrying half-bloods. Would marry muggle-borns if they could." She stared at him. "So apparently now I'm desirable, and before I was beneath contempt, and in both cases for nothing to do with me personally."
She takes another sip of her drink and looks at him steadily over the rim of the tall glass. He looks at Hypatia, asleep in her bassinet, in the corner of the booth. "You've lived your whole life by other people's opinions. Have you ever thought for yourself?" He feels the heat rising in his face. "You weren't interested in me before, except to taunt. And now that apparently your mother has decided that it's not so wise to continue the selective inbreeding, I suddenly have genetic cachet, so you resent me for being out of reach."
She says, "I don't know if you understand how serious this is. This contract is the only thing Andromeda has found to circumvent your mother's marriage contract."
"Hypatia could be a witch," Draco says, though of course he feels foolish. They wouldn't have gone this far if he really believed that.
Granger looks at him and says nothing. She picks up her glass and takes a long, considered sip, puts it down, and pushes it to one side.
"Everything is a gamble," she says, "but I thought we were agreed that you didn't want to bet and lose. The Statute of Secrecy narrows your choice of potential Muggle signatories. My parents are willing to do it. There aren't any other families of Muggle-borns who'd want to do with it." She adds, "They would have been dead if your father's Dark Lord had had his way."
Draco frowns.
"And I don't understand why you're all wound up about this, except that I'm off limits. You don't know me. You don't particularly like me. We don't have a lot in common."
Hypatia cuddles against him, and he drapes another blanket around her, to protect her from the cold draft that wafts through the booth as patrons open and close the door of the café.
He says, a propos of nothing, "A child needs two parents."
"She'll have them," Granger says. "She does already. She has you, and she has Andromeda. A brother and an aunt will do as well, if they're set on being father and mother. Andromeda tells me that Teddy adores his little cousin." Draco smiles in spite of himself.
She says, "Fatherhood becomes you, actually. I wouldn't have thought." He shakes his head. He wouldn't have thought, either.
He says, "But there's a duty to the Line. You don't understand…"
"I think you don't need to worry about that just now. Your first worry is Hypatia."
He thinks about that contract, about the sanctions that make Hermione Granger a foster-sister, which is to say, not a potential lover. He shifts Hypatia on his shoulder, where she regards him with sleepy eyes, and thinks about the feeling that takes him over when he imagines any sort of threat to her.
Finally he says, "Why are you doing this? Really, why?"
"It's the right thing. At least I think so. And … we owe you a life debt, at least by omission." She swallows, hard, stares at the table for a moment, then looks up to meet his eyes almost defiantly. "At the Manor. When they brought us in… you didn't identify Harry, or me either, really. It was your mother …" She leans in, and says, "I've wondered for months, actually. Did you know it was Harry?"
The last thing in the world he wants to remember.
He nods.
"And you stopped Crabbe killing us in the Room of Requirement. Even if it were for very much the wrong reasons." She says, "But life debts are payable in only one currency. I'm doing my best on this one. It doesn't include marrying you."
"What earthly use do your parents have for a court wizard?"
She shrugs. "They'll think of something. Or not. Surely you could cope with a sinecure."
"But the contract … What witch or wizard needs the protection of a Muggle?"
She looks at him with a slight smile, as if waiting for the penny to drop. It infuriates him, not least because it proves her right. He does find her infuriating, pretty chronically if he admits it.
He says, "It would seem to solve your problem, of course. Keep me at arm's length forever."
She narrows her eyes at him, and bites her lip. She's conspicuously keeping both hands on the table — no reach for a wand — but even that feels like a threat. As her silence stretches out, he can hear the faint clatter in the kitchen, and the murmured conversations at other booths.
At length she says, "Malfoy, I wouldn't have thought you were this dense. Witches and wizards don't need the protection of Muggles… but their Squib kin do." She adds, "Andromeda found several contracts of this sort in the Black family archives. Toujours pur is true only by a technicality." She smiles, the sort of smile that accompanies a firm quod erat demonstratum. "Kingsley found more examples on file at the Ministry, from defunct lines, and …"
"And what?" She has the air of someone about to burst from the effort of suppressing laughter.
"That's how your lot got the Manor in the first place. Geoffroy Alphonse Percival de Malfoy, also known as Geoffroy the Forsworn, signed such a contract with William Rufus. In return for services rendered, he got the grant of land for Malfoy Manor, and his Squib sister married a Norman knight." She says, "At least we assume Genevieve de Malfoy was a Squib, because it would appear that intermarriage with Muggles was frowned on even then."
Then she adds in her lecturer's manner, "It would appear that the practice of killing Squib offspring is not consistently practiced in the Malfoy line until the Renaissance, which coincides with the rise of witch-hunting, an increase in wizarding isolationism, and a turn back to classical models."
You sound like a bloody textbook, and you don't have any right to talk about my family. The words rise spontaneously and then die at the back of his throat. She didn't ferret that out; his mother must have done so, with help from her blood-traitor sister. Apparently, his mother's marriage contract doesn't forbid ransacking the archives of the Manor.
Granger's smile is more like a smirk now. "Hypatia will be more than safe, we think. Though I'm afraid my parents aren't in a position to sponsor a marriage into the peerage. And in any case, that wouldn't mean what it did in Geoffroy's day."
If Longbottom can tolerate the prospect of that over breakfast every day for the next fifty years… well, it's not only Muggles who have perverse tastes. He frowns. "So what are her prospects?"
"Well, if she's of a studious disposition, and works hard at school… and does well on her O-levels and A-levels …"
"Her what?"
"Like OWLs and NEWTs, only for Muggles. If she does well, she can go to university, and thence into a profession, depending on her inclinations, of course." Draco shakes his head. This is more Muggle Studies than he's up for just now, and the picture of his sister as a miniature Granger swot is just a little hard to take.
"There are other lines of work, too." She waves her hand vaguely. "Zabini's wanting to be an actor, I hear. I suppose your sister could pursue a career on the stage." She smirks. "If she's anything like her brother…"
Draco finishes his drink, which is bittersweet and stimulating. Muggle concoctions have their points, though really his nerves don't need any more jangling just now. He can't escape the conviction that she is laughing at him, and her notions of appropriate ambitions for Hypatia are nothing he recognizes. There is going to be a fight, more than one, on the subject of his sister's upbringing. Granger is not going to carry the field on that question, not if he has anything to say about it.
He realizes that he's been narrowing his eyes, when Granger says, "You really would like to hex me, wouldn't you? And that's just in a conversation about how to keep your sister safe, which is something we've both agreed is a good thing." She says, "And I'm understating it to say we have unhappy history."
"But I apologized."
"Which was grace on your part, but it doesn't wipe out what happened. You were the first person to call me 'mudblood,' and that was the least of it." She picks up the menu, peruses it, puts it back down. "But I did mean it when I said I didn't want to be retailing our grudges for the next hundred years."
"You don't fancy me as a … you don't fancy me, but you'd accept me as a brother. Knowing that I'd want to hex you at least once a week."
She shrugs. "Well, as long as you don't actually do it. Ron and Ginny have an argument at least that often, and they'd tell you they get on fine as brother and sister." She says, "I don't actually know how the food is at this place. We didn't have time to try it."
"When were you here?"
"The day the Ministry fell. Dolohov and Rowle just missed capturing Harry." He can feel his color dropping; that was the first time, but by no means the last, that the Dark Lord enlisted him as torturer.
"Let's go somewhere else," she says. "I know a place that has an excellent shepherd's pie." She reaches across the table and touches his hand. Her fingertips are cool. "You don't have to make up your mind right away, of course. It is awkward. I've held off talking to Harry and Ron about it."
She puts on her coat and pays the tab, as Draco contemplates yet another unwelcome twist in his sister's rescue. As they push through the doors of the café onto the impossibly noisy street, he says, "That contract would make them …"
"They're already your cousins. I've been looking at enough Pureblood genealogies lately… it's third cousins or closer, you and Harry." She says, "And yes, I know that cousins doesn't mean friends." He remembers that Andromeda's daughter Nymphadora, his own first cousin, died at the hand of her own aunt —and his. Bellatrix Lestrange had vowed to prune the family tree, and she was a woman of her word. "And brothers and sisters can hate each other in earnest."
He says, "Your parents would be willing? Even after … all that?" By which he means the war, and the fact that his father's people – no, his father, and his aunt, and possibly his mother – more than willingly would have killed them, and not mercifully.
"My mother was very impressed by how much you cared for your mother and sister. She told me that she wouldn't mind being on the right side of your family feeling."
ooo
Author's notes:
The disposition of literary properties, or credit where credit is due:
How the Malfoys got their Manor: by way of A. J. Hall in Dissipation and Despair, though Geoffroy and Genevieve are my invention, as are some of the details of the court wizard's contract.
Audrey Tonks (whom some may know from In Which the Princess Rescues the Dragon) does appear to be that Audrey. I should have suspected as much when she was coy about the question in the beginning.
As previously noted, this version of Blaise Zabini was originally written by Silver Sailor Ganymede. The green eye-shadow is Ganymede-canon, as are the crush on Theo Nott and the brief liaison with Pansy; the Slytherin Old School Tie is mine.