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

Chapter Fourteen

Unable to sleep, Draco Malfoy took his wife's wedding ring from the end of his finger and snapped it back into its box. He was thinking of Pansy Parkinson's explanation of the two reasons a contraception spell could fail. What had she called it -- "beautiful and sacred" when love and connection overrode the magic? Sure, it was beautiful as long as it was disrupted by mutual love. Maybe that was where the sacred came in -- something like fate, who knows. How much was their agency, some latent but still potent power to choose, involved in a spell slip? How much of love and its consequences was ever choice?

And Hermione did love him. There were a thousand things to be unsure of right now, but not that. He'd never told her, never asked her, and she'd never said it but -- that night, she was the one who came to him, asking for everything. Love had to be part of everything. And asking him for love was the same as confessing her own to him -- wasn't it?

In the darkness of the room he'd grown up in, he blinked at the ceiling, at the faint stars charmed into it, barely visible in pale luminescent grey. That night with her came back to him, a regular meditation of his by now, intensifying his heart beat, dilating his eyes. Every distance between them finally closed -- warm and sublime, urgent, and so sad. He had cast the spell while grieving leaving her, when his desire to stay bound to her was at its peak. What he gave her truly was everything. And if his mother was right, everything was much vaster than either of them had known. They were not alone in it. There were worlds, futures.

He sat up in bed. Was it still too early for her to be able to tell? There was probably a book on the technicalities of reproduction downstairs in the library. But that was the kind of thing the Muggles would know too, and the Muggle-wand was right here in the room. He tapped it with his wand to power it up, and asked what was the soonest she might be able to detect it. There was no simple answer. It depended on too many things -- things she would just be learning about herself if...

And he couldn't very well ask her to check -- send a huge white animal flying across the ocean, up to the Wilkins's place with a letter saying, "Hey, I guess I'm even more into you than I realized. Can you go see a doctor?" The Muggle-wand was still in his hand, connected to all the other Muggle-wands on the planet, hundreds of millions of them. But the only person's number he had in his phone was Tim Granger's, and he wasn't about to involve him. Instead, he'd buy a second one in the city on Monday, after court, and send it to Hermione in Upper Raleigh so they could send messages. The Muggles really are clever, in their way.

The screen glowed helpfully in the dark room. He swiped at it, looking through the photos in its memory. He hadn't deleted the last round of shots taken between their bickering, and he was glad, smirking, flicking through the screens. He reached the photo Tim Granger had sent him, of Malfoy and Hermione, newly married, Hermione in that white dress she hadn't wanted to spend much money on, standing arm-in-arm with him against parking lot honeysuckle shrubbery.

Here in his phone was the key to -- how had Blaise put it -- keeping the Gralfoy Affair in the public imagination, swaying sympathy. All he had to do was get this image of the Gralfoy wedding to the Daily Prophet and people would be fawning over them again, just like the airport customs officer wizard with all the daughters had done when he took Malfoy off the no-fly list without proper documentation. The fact was, Malfoy was in need of an official's good graces again, this time for his mother's sake, and Gralfoy Affair fans might be the best chance he had. No one at the newspaper would trace this phone to him. It was a Muggle device, for crying out loud. No one would suspect him of being the opportunist who revived the story that had gone cold after the appearance of that photo of him alone on the deck of the Hightail.

But opportunistic -- "evilly opportunistic" -- that was how Pansy had described the other reason a contraception spell might fail. Maybe it wasn't love but a deeply seated drive to preserve the Malfoy family from any more devastation that had been at work when he botched the spell and created a mixed-blood heir. If even his mad mother had made the connection, how hard could it be for his subconscious to have done the same?