The Gralfoy Affair (or, The Oblivious Ones) - Dramione

Chapter Fifteen - The End of Part One

AN: Thanks for reading. If you like this AU, there's more. There are three one-shots: Amortentia at Home, Slytherin Fairy Godmother, and Return of the Young Husband and one multi-chapter, Always Something. DDD

Perhaps they weren't so different from other generations of young people who had gone to war. They came through violence and death craving life, new life, and like their forebears -- like their parents who had done the same -- they wanted marriage and families while they were still very young themselves.

Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy may have been formed differently from the rest, needing more than ordinary circumstances to enlist them into wizarding Britain's new marriage and baby boom, but many of the others did not. Harry Potter was already engaged to Ginny Weasley, and Ron Weasley did not take long to discover that his desire for new life hadn't ended when Hermione left. He was, in all ways, a family man, and as soon as Lavender Brown would consent to it, he brought her back to England to marry her.

Everyone was invited.

It would be late winter, still too cold for a wedding under a tent at the Burrow, so they were to be married in a church in Rochester, where most of Lavender's family still lived.

"We can't skip it," Hermione told Malfoy when the invitation was first owled to the manor.

He sneered over the top of the book he was reading in his mother's green leather chair. "Sure we can. We've got loads of excuses. No one will expect you to be flitting around the countryside in the cold in your condition. By then, all it will take will be one look at you to give them all the excuses we need."

She waited two terrifying beats before she replied. "What is THAT supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he stammered, sitting up quickly, closing his book. "I mean, you'll be six months pregnant by then and -- so you'll be -- so beautiful -- "

She was reaching for a book small enough to swat him with but he was filling her hands with his, lacing all of their fingers together. "Liar," she said, quick to cloud with sadness these days. New life is not easy to come by.

"Beautiful," Malfoy said again, more sincerely than defensively this time, as he ducked to kiss her. They were, after all, still newlyweds, and there wasn't much that physical affection couldn't make better by at least a little. "Don't go if you don't want to."

She sighed. "No, it's not just an invitation, it's a peace offering, from Ron and maybe from the rest of my old life too. It's an invitation to be normal again, finally. And really I can't put it off any longer. I got sick and ran away to St. Mungo's last spring, but I need to reckon with what I left behind. And frankly, we will eventually want more to our world than what we have here and in Heathgate with Mum and Dad. I mean, when does a honeymoon become a hideout?"

"Hey, we've had visitors here. And you've met up Potter and Weasley's sister in the city already."

She laughed, still melancholy. "Listen to the way you talk about them. And you weren't even with me when I met them, not even after I turned up for that ghastly dinner party at Goyle's."

He smirked. "I stand by my decision to not be within wand range of them when you told them about Perdita. However," he went on, "I'm through complaining and I'll go to the wedding with you. My hearty congratulations to Weasley for a long and happy life with a woman who isn't you couldn't be more sincere." He laid his head on her shoulder and his hand on the rising crest of her belly. "So all of them will know by now?"

"Yes, they must. And since it's not in the papers yet, I'd say they're being very kind and discreet about it."

With the changes in her size, she needed a new dress to wear to the wedding. Malfoy suggested something in green which she refused. Self-conscious, her impulse was to hide in dark colours, and she chose something in a deep purple, with a floor length skirt hung from an empire waistline, falling in rich gathers over her abdomen. It was a style in which the pregnancy might not even be noticeable at a quick glance. She wore the dress with her hair piled on top of her head, leaving her neck and most of her shoulders bare. It was something like a costume from the ballroom scenes of a Muggle movie based on a Jane Austen novel -- old-fashioned, modest. At least, it felt modest until Malfoy drew one fingertip from her ear to the edge of her shoulder in a slow, silky curve.