The Christmas stockings did indeed match, and had been filled with cakes and candies and tiny magical toys. Hermione pulled out a top that spun itself. Draco had a Quidditch playing dragon. Unfortunately, the dragon's charm wasn't very sophisticated and it decided the top was the Snitch, grabbed it, and ran under one of the arm chairs from where it hissed at anyone who tried to come close.

The full breakfast was delicious. The usual trays of French pastries and low-calorie yogurt had been replaced with grilled tomatoes and fried mushrooms and enough beans and bangers for at least twice as many people as were at the table. Draco hunted down a radio and, with some effort, tuned in a station playing the Queen's Speech. It was as dull as Hermione remembered but somehow, sitting here with these people who were family, it filled her with a warm sense of tradition.

"I had no idea you were such a royalist," was all Lucius Malfoy had to say on the matter.

Hard to believe he counted as family now. But then, everything seemed like it was part of a slightly surreal dream. Christmas passed, and then they were on their honeymoon, and that passed. Sand was good, though not everywhere. Sun was good as long as Draco remembered charms against burning. The ocean was blue and beautiful and it was all so bloody peaceful she thought she'd go out of her mind.

"Remind me what our assets are," Draco said the last day as he rubbed a local potion made of aloe and something unpronounceable that screamed when you harvested it on his legs. She thought she might hear a little whimper from the potion itself, like an echo of the rage it has felt at being harvested.

"Harry," she said. Draco snorted and she ignored that. "The Order." He snorted again and she picked up the hunk of coconut that had been in her drink and tossed it at his head. He ducked.

"How about, what are our useful assets," he said.

"Your mother."

"Dubious and agenda laden, but go on."

"Rodolphus Lestrange."

"Insane."

"Percy Weasley."

"Okay, that's one."

"Arabella Figg."

"Who?" he asked, and she realized that in all the chaos of getting ready for the wedding she'd never clarified that funny little thing.

"The artist," she said. "The one whose opening we went to?"

"The one with the pretentious and inept would-be rebellion?"

"Yeah," she said though spending too long thinking about just how inept the people making noises against the government were would result in her needing another drink. It wasn't that she expected people to all be brilliant and brave and noble. That was Harry and look where it had gotten him: hiding in France. It was Ron, too, and Molly, and they were just as gone. But if these people couldn't be as good as the Order, was it too much to ask that they just be competent? "That's the one."

"She suddenly develop talent?"

"I'm going to hit you."

He just raised his eyebrows at her. That was one good thing that had come out of this honeymoon. Draco had relaxed. He didn't flinch when she moved too quickly any more. He didn't check every door of every room they went into, looking for the fastest way out. He ate. His hands still shook occasionally. Nerve damage never went all the way away. And she was sure that as soon as they were back in Britain he'd go back to his cautious habits. It was still good to see him less tense.

"Her real name is Arabella Figg. She was a member of the old Order under Dumbledore and now -."

"This list of assets is not encouraging. Crazies and has-beens and one Weasley."

"And a tiny movement we aren't quite sure of with the reporter and her necklace."

"So… two probably worthless undergrounds, an Order off in another country, a bad artist, a Weasley, and us. Did I miss anyone?"

"Rodolphus? Your mother?"

Draco raised his hand to signal one of the staff of the resort they'd gone to. "Could I get another pina colada?" he asked. Of course he could. It would be the waiter's pleasure. Should that be charged to their room?

Hermione waited for the unctuous and surely underpaid waiter to walk off before she said, "I never would have taken you for a mixed drink guy."

"Live a little," Draco said. "When this is over, we're going to move someplace like this permanently, get a small house, and I'm going to collect shells and old manuscripts."

"Over," she said. "That sounds nice."

"It sounds impossible," he said.

"Well, I guess that means it will take a little more time than the merely difficult," she said. He smiled, one side of his mouth going up a little more and she leaned over and took his hands in hers. One of them trembled and it was all she could do not to grip it too tightly. "Crazies, has-beens and us against the whole Ministry for Magic.

"Poor bastards won't know what hit them," he said.

The waiter brought the garish drink, and she reached over to pull out the slice of pineapple and hunk of coconut. Whenever he ordered one of these concoctions, she stole the fruit. She'd had cherries dyed bright red, pineapple soaked in rum, and more coconut than she'd ever had in her life. She sucked the bit of the drink clinging to the pineapple off as Draco took a sip, then leaned over to kiss him.

They'd been frantic at first. Two weeks away from the cold and the damp and the worries and living in a house with his parents where magic meant no lock really held and they'd been desperate to learn one another. They'd done all the things every new pair of lovers does. They'd traced scars and told stories and discovered that yes, touch here, and no, don't do that. Insatiability had given way to a lazy pleasure that was, if anything, more delightful than the first days when they hadn't been able to get their clothes off quickly enough.

He picked the pineapple out of her hand, set it down on the table between their beach chairs, and she mumbled an objection against his mouth. That table was covered in sand and now she couldn't eat the rest of the pineapple slice. Then he cupped a hand behind her head and she fumbled her way across the gap between them until she was on his lap, her own hands wound up in his hair. He was, she had decided, the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. Angular, yes, and scarred, yes. Angular and scarred and shaking but he could look up at her from those grey eyes and the spark of intelligence grabbed her. The dry wit and humor – most of which was so mean she'd gasp and hit him on the arm even as she laughed – pulled her in in a way model-beauty without that lancing mind never would. And, of course, it helped that he turned out to be very good at this. He bit at the side of her mouth, then ran his lips along the curve of her neck, and when she said, in a last-ditch effort at not being those people, "We're in public," his response was simple and succinct.

He stood up, grinned at her, and said, "Bet I get back to the room first."

She gave him enough time to think she'd run after him, scooped up the drink, and apparated to their room. She was on the bed when he arrived, bikini top already untied.

"I win," she said.

He was already kicking off his sandals. "If this is losing, I'm all for it."

When they were done, when she was tracing her fingers over the scars where Harry had almost killed him and he had his hand over the puckered mark Dolohov had left on her shoulder, she let her body line up with his. Feet and legs and hips and arms. They curled into one another as if some god had carved them from the same marble and cast them loose on the world.

"Remember when you told me you'd have preferred to trade for Ginny," she asked. It had been an eternity ago or a few months depending on how you charted time.

He kicked her.

"You did say it," she said.

"It would have been a pragmatic choice," he said. "She would have been more acceptable to the people in and about the manor."

His voice hesitated for a moment on the word people. They were people. Monsters, but people. Toadies. They held their prejudice as common sense and felt sorry for people so naïve they didn't share it. They would have hated Ginny. They could feel pleased with themselves for being so open-minded they didn't mind her. Oh, Hermione Malfoy, she could hear them in her mind. She's so polite, and smart. Did you know she got all those N.E.W.T.s?

Ginny would have been a rebuke. There was no virtue in liking a pureblood girl who was trying to tear down the very structure they lived in. A sweet little Mudblood who seemed to want to succeed on their terms was much easier to swallow.

She couldn't wait to make them choke.

"A pragmatic choice," Draco repeated. His voice took on the mean teasing lilt she knew covered a gaping hole in his sense of self. "Too bad Harry would never have let her go."

"Not really," Hermione said. She decided to ignore his obnoxious gibe. She didn't feel like getting into it. "It was a dumb choice."

"Are you calling me dumb?" Mock outrage. Real fear.

"You," she said, "are brilliant. You're also not the best stagiest I've ever known."

"And who is."

That was another thing she wasn't going to go into. Maybe Ron, and she was fairly sure that praising your ex while in bed with your husband was a good way to start a fight. His mother was another possibility and one should avoid thinking about a man's mother while he lay naked next to you. Since both honest answers were out, she went with, "Me," delivered in as arch a tone as possible.

Draco laughed and kissed the side of her neck. "That," he said, "I cannot argue with."

"See," she said. "So brilliant you know not to argue with your wife."

They lay in silence, half-asleep, as the sun sank down along her allotted path and darkness grew up in her wake. "Tomorrow we return," Hermione said at last. She itched to start the fight again.

"I can hardly wait," Draco said and, much as she'd opted to ignore the snide comment earlier she let this one lie too. It would all be worth it when they won.

Of course, she thought as she set her handbag down on the desk in their suite and picked up the pile of correspondence that had accumulated in their absence, it was much easier to feel confident about winning when you were safely in an expensive resort watching the sun go down, the only real risk that you'd dislike your dinner order.

"Anything good?" Draco asked. She knew by his tone he meant especially bad.

She opened up one that didn't have a return address and skimmed it before she handed it over. If she understood the code right, and she was fairly sure she did, Percy and the little reporter had created a series of articles that praised the authoritarian nature of the current regime with heavy-handed enthusiasm.

"But none of this is false," Draco said. She could see his eyes moving across the sample of the article Percy had enclosed. "They do send people to Azkaban without trials, claiming they are holding them as enemy combatants. And they do separate children from Muggle-born parents if those parents have done anything wrong. They kept one little girl in near solitary confinement for a month while her parents got all their paperwork in order. I remember seeing notes about that in one of those memos."

Hermione nodded grimly. None of it was false. The idea was to praise the government so enthusiastically the Ministry itself couldn't object. The less clever people in Yaxley's circle might even think the articles were complimentary. The hope was that ordinary, regular people would slowly become outraged.

She opened the next envelope. This one was an invitation to a small viewing for serious collectors, signed Doreen Ficus. She smiled. That might be horrible – Arabella, god love her, was a dedicated and sincere operative but a terrible artist – but at least they would be surrounded by people who were tied into one of the local rebel groups. They could drink bad wine and get a feel for the current mood.

She pulled open the large envelope where she kept the paper with the protean charm. She should at least check to see if Molly had written anything.

She had.

Or someone had.

Congratulations on your wedding. That didn't take long.

She had to read it twice before she could quite fathom the depths of anger she felt. Then she walked across the room and set the sheet of paper on the grate in the fireplace. Every action felt calmly deliberate, even when she pulled out her wand, murmured the charm, and set the sheet on fire.

She'd do the rest of this without them.

Draco didn't say anything.