Chapter 16
“- don’t understand!” There’s the sound of hands slamming into wood, a glass shattering, and more than a couple sharp breaths. Hermione had been getting used to the near-constant fighting since getting to the Order safehouse three days ago. It was Sirius Black’s house - the actual, ancestral home to the Black family line and yet it was smaller than Hermione expected. The Blacks were a Sacred 28 family, they should have an estate in the country. She had expected something bigger - closer to the Manor she was living in with the Malfoys - and instead found herself in a tall, crammed townhome in the city. But then again, the Blacks had been struggling for a long time from what Hermione understood. That’s why so many of them had been disowned.
“The kids are too young!” That was Molly’s shrill voice, cutting through the house even through all the floors between the kitchen and Hermione’s room. "They are children, Sirius, not soldiers for your-"
“Are they still at it?” Ginny asked, slipping through the door. Hermione gave her a terse nod.
“Yep,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t think this is what I was coming to visit for.”
“Why did you come?” Ginny asked. Her voice was just barely accusing, and Hermione regurgitated the same story she’d made up when she first got the idea to come see the Weasleys and Harry.
“Harry wrote to me,” she said honestly. “And I was just as concerned about him being expelled as I was missing home a bit. So I flew home to spend the rest of June with you all, at least until we know what’s going on with Harry.”
Ginny nodded, but it was clear she didn't believe Hermione. No one had been brave enough to push back on Hermione’s story yet, but she knew it was weak at best. There was no way Harry’s letter could have made it to Australia so fast, and she couldn’t have flown home the Muggle way from Australia in so few days, and she wasn’t jet-lagged enough for that. She could have gone to the Australian wizarding government and asked for an international portkey but that would have been a complicated process, and not even Hermione’s fierce brain could begin to lie through that part of the story. It was a weak story - borderline blatantly false - but no one had the energy to keep prodding at it. Not when they had bigger concerns to occupy their minds.
Molly had been too focused on fighting with Sirius to really notice Hermione’s story. And Harry was too distracted with his criminal record. And Ron and Ginny were too scared to bring up the fact they both knew Hermione was lying, even if they didn’t really have any information proving the lie. Once again, Hermione had been saved by being the least important thing in the room. It made her miss the Malfoys and Theo so much more than she already did, and yet, she was still caught on that kiss.
That kiss. It had been more painful than surprising, to see the boys pick one another without any consideration for Hermione. They didn’t owe her a damn thing, they didn’t belong to her. She knew that. But it still hurt that whatever she’d been feeling - mutual attraction, friendship, budding feelings, whatever - it hadn’t been worth nearly as much to them as it had been to her. They didn't even tell her they were together, they had snuck behind closed doors and turned backs. All those shy moments with Draco, the compliments and the blushing and the eyes glued to Hermione's legs meant nothing, because the whole time Hermione had thought she and Draco were getting close, Draco had just been waiting for Theo to come home.
The distance and change in company, no matter how frustratingly annoying and loud and difficult to deal with, was good for her.
There was the sound of another glass breaking downstairs, and then stomping. Molly’s voice screamed for Ginny, and the younger girl gave a put out sigh before hanging her head and leaving the cramped double room. The front door of Number 12 Grimmauld Place slammed shut a moment later, and the house was blissfully quiet.
Harry and Ron had both gone with Arthur back to the Burrow for the day, just to grab some things for the family and take care of the house, and Fred and George were off in Diagon Alley somewhere. They'd all left early in the morning, undoubtedly looking for excuses to leave before Sirius and Molly got into another fight. With Molly and Ginny now gone, Hermione had the house to herself. Or at least, she had the house to herself and Sirius, and maybe Remus if he was still around. So Hermione took a moment to get out of bed, put on a jumper because the house was drafty even in the middle of summer, and creep downstairs. She found Sirius in the kitchen, standing over a steaming kettle, and she nodded at it. “Is that black?”
“Rosemary,” Sirius said. “Remus is due back anytime now, and he prefers an herbal blend this close to the moon.”
It had been a momentary surprise to find her old professor living in the Black House with them all, but he was an ally to the Order, had been since the first war. He was largely the same as Hermione remembered him in their third year - he wore well-worn jumpers and patched corduroy pants, and he and Sirius sat too close to one another at meals, and they shared jokes, and he always offered her chocolate, and he looked at her like he knew something she didn’t. Like he already knew she wasn’t all shining gold like Harry and Ron. Like he could smell the salt of her Natural magic just standing beside her. Like he could see the stain of Draco and Theo's hands on her when no one else could.
Hermione hummed and got herself a little packet of Black tea from a box in the cupboards. She pulled down a mug, too, and filled it with water at the sink, heated it with a gentle prodding of her wand, and let the bag of tea bob along in the hot, steaming water. If she’d been home, at the Manor, she’d have practiced her nonverbal, wandless magic with these kinds of things, but Hermione didn’t need the increased scrutiny with her already weak story as to why she was there. Sirius watched impassively.
“You’re settling in okay?” he asked finally.
Hermione shrugged. “Fine. You have some great books here for studying, when you aren’t screaming at Molly.”
Sirius gave a half-hearted sigh and a little chuckle. “Sorry. I know it must not be very fun for you kids to be dealing with us fighting. I just wish I could make her see that keeping you all out of the loop isn’t helpful. It’s what got people killed in the last war, and we need to be smarter this time around.”
“She’s worried,” Hermione said. “Death Eaters are known for being merciless, aren’t they? Violent, and willing to kill anyone who gets in their way.”
“So if we know they’re going to kill people without a reason,” Sirius argued. “Maybe we should be training our people to expect it and defend against it.”
“Harry defended himself and he’s getting expelled.”
Sirius conceded the point easily enough with a shrug, and Hermione tilted her head. “Of course, he was doing pretty advanced magic. Which is why it triggered his Trace but my tea doesn’t.”
Sirius let out a genuine laugh at that. “What did you find to read?”
Hermione smiled in spite of herself and nodded her head a little. “I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell the boys.”
“Something saucy?” Sirius wiggled his eyebrows, and Hermione was struck in the moment with how much Sirius reminded her of Theodore. Maybe there was something in their poncey upbringing that made them alike, something that encouraged salacious humor and wit and silliness unbecoming of an heir to a bloodline.
“Actually, a book on the Sacred 28 bloodlines. There were originally over a hundred, right?”
“Noble and royal families in England, yes. Down to 28 now because some of the families got eaten up in others. The Malfoys, for example, came in from the French Pureblood societies and ate up a few branches of the English families. Most recently, one of the Black family branches.”
Hermione scrunched her eyebrows. “What?”
Sirius smiled and cocked his head to the side. “Come look.”
He led Hermione from the kitchen, her warm mug of tea clasped tightly in her hands. The house wasn’t very open, but it was spacious enough, and they crossed the main hall, past the stairs, and to a small sitting room just on the other side of the front door. Hermione hadn’t been in this room before, mostly because it always made Sirius and Remus uncomfortable when they walked past the closed door, and it wasn’t big enough to host in so she hadn’t sat in there with the boys or the Weasleys at all. It was dusty, with a scent like something had died here, and Hermione took a breath of her tea to try and dispel the foul scent.
“Here we go,” Sirius said, pointing to the far wall. There was a tapestry there, old and blasted apart in some places. He stepped closer and pointed to a dark, burned out spot. “That’s me. My mum blasted me off the tapestry back when I started telling her that I thought Muggles weren’t so bad. I moved in with the Potters right before this, when she kicked me out."
His finger drifted upwards, towards his mother and father. “They were cousins. Distant, but still gross if you ask me." His finger drifted to his Aunts and Uncles, cousins, down the family tree. "Alphard Black got the bad end of a wand because he gave me some money when I got disowned, before I landed with the Potters. Andromeda is a distant cousin, she married a Muggle-born. Cedrella married Septimus, and he was known for his work in the Muggle world. Of course, that’s where the Weasley line comes from, and the Weasley line ate up that branch of the Black family when Septimus married Cedrella. Sometimes I think that’s why Arthur is so interested in Muggle technologies, since that’s what got his father in trouble in the first place. He was convicted of breaking the Secrecy Act.”
Sirius’s hand drifted further and further across the wall.
“Marius, Phineas, Iola, Eduardus, and Artemisa. They all got blasted off for marrying Muggles or advocating for Muggle-born inclusion in the world.”
Hermione’s eyes were glued to Sirius’s cousin, Narcissa. She wasn’t subtle, but Sirius just nodded. “You go to school with her boy,” he said, assuming that was why Hermione was stuck on the sudden appearance of the Malfoy line on the Black family tapestry. “The Malfoys came over from France back in the late 1700s. They started eating up families pretty early, it was inevitable with that family curse of only first-born sons. With Andromeda and her line disowned, Bellatrix being childless, and every other branch of the family childless, the Malfoys have effectively taken over the Black family line now. It’ll incorporate itself into the Malfoy family histories as soon as the older Blacks start dying.”
“So then it’ll be 27 families?” Hermione asked, and Sirius smiled.
“I guess so. It’s a little bit complicated tracking all the lines. Some of them try to keep their lines going through generations of female-only offspring by marrying cousins together. Others lean into the mix of family lines because it means more power.”
“What’s that?” Hermione asked, pointing to a strange part of the tree where three portraits were intertwined. They weren’t scattered across a branch of the family, so not siblings, but where the other couples of the family had a little bouquet of flowers between the portraits, the trio had birds all around their images. Two wizards and a witch, and judging by their position in the tree, they must have been alive in the 17- or 1800s.
“Castor Black II,” Sirius said. “And his husband and wife, Devon and Ann Marie.”
“He had two partners?”
Sirius gave Hermione a surprised look. “Is that not common in the Muggle world?” When Hermione shook his head, he shrugged. “I suppose that makes sense, Muggles are more advanced in that regard. It’s been losing favor in the wizarding world for years now, even with all the other issues Pureblood families are facing.”
“I don’t understand.” Hermione hated those words, but she needed to understand this. She needed to understand what she was staring at.
“For a time, it was not only quite popular to take multiple partners, it was actually encouraged. You see, Pureblood families were having a problem keeping their lines going. Infertility ran rampant, and families kept losing their kids to Muggle men and women. And they would sometimes arrange marriages between young women or men and much, much older partners who couldn’t have kids. So a third partner allowed them to have heirs for all three families in one match, and it evened the gender gap in certain generations. I know there were a lot of girls born in the same generation as my cousins.” Sirius tapped the tapestry over Narcissa, Bellatrix, and Andromeda’s portraits. “Lucius Malfoy was, from what I’ve heard, supposed to enter a formal agreement with two other families to have two wives. But Narcissa and he were possessive of one another, and somehow they got away with a singular match. My brother was betrothed to two witches, but he disappeared before they could move ahead with the process”
Hermione chewed on her lip. It was certainly unexpected - like Theo flirting in the Library back home, like Draco joining in with Hermione to tease him about the way he stared at the other students, like Hermione liking them both. Hermione’s memory of Ron scowling at Dean and Seamus back in third year when everyone had started to suspect they might be more than friends came back to the front of her mind, and she wondered how someone related to a Pureblood Sacred 28 could be so small minded about things like same-sex relationships when there were apparently pathways to multiple-partner relationships within the families.
And then Sirius answered her questions on that issue. “It’s awful, right?”
“What is?”
“Pureblood families acting like multiple partners is excusable as long as they make it part of their arranged marriages,” Sirius said. “It’s just a way for them to make cheating acceptable, or to further make women into breedstock. I find the whole concept of arranged marriages out of date and sexist. Let alone forcing a woman to carry two men’s children.”
“I thought their arranged matches were mutually decided upon,” Hermione said. “Neville at school told me that all parties get a say.”
“That’s what every Pureblood says,” Sirius snorted. “But they’re not interested in making people happy, they’re interested in gaining money and power. If they want some young woman to carry on family names for multiple people, then that’s what they do.”
“It might not be about heirs,” Hermione said. “I mean, I’m sure that heirs and childbearing is a main part of why families first began to entertain the idea of a multiple-partner match, but mightn’t it be about love? Two wizards and a witch, two witches in a wizard, hell. Three wizards or three witches. Can’t that be about love?”
“It’s unnatural,” Sirius stressed. “Hermione, it’s not normal. A relationship is between two people. And it should be about two people who love one another and have picked one another by their own genuine interest in one another, not because their parents stand to gain from such a match.”
Something ugly and heated rose up in Hermione’s body, her magic welling up to burn in her blood and her lungs and her stomach. She hadn’t talked to either Draco or Theo, and there had never been a conversation about any arrangements at all. They might not want her, or any other witch for that matter, but they had a right to be together. They deserved that bit of happiness, that true love. They shouldn’t have to decide between each other and the approval of these small-minded people Hermione had fallen in with. If they had entered a formal match with one another, would Sirius assume they did not love one another? Would he assume they were pawns instead of genuine players?
Sirius had said Muggles were more advanced in this regard - Hermione had never known anyone in the Muggle world who had multiple partners except for that American group who practiced polygamy. But the documentaries about them had made it seem dirty and sexist and just as disgusting as Sirius made it seem for those three people in his own family tree. Looking up at their portrait, Hermione didn’t see something disgusting. She saw three people, genuinely smiling. Looking happy, looking like they loved one another. It seemed to her, in that moment, that Purebloods were more appropriately open-minded about these things than Muggles.
Selfishly, Hermione had to remind herself that Sirius’s comments weren’t just hurtful because they were about Draco and Theo, two of her dearest friends, but also because they were about her. Every snide comment about Draco and his father from Harry over the last year was about the men she lived with and turned to in difficult times. Every bigoted remark about gay wizards was about these boys she lov- liked and considered her good friends. Every prejudiced idea about multi-matches was about a life she wanted, even if she didn’t know it had been an option until 10 minutes ago. It was insulting to hear how these people who called themselves her family would treat her if she followed her heart into the arms of Draco and Theo.
If they would have her, that was.
Something in Hermione shifted, a piece of her heart slipping into place. She wanted them both, and that wasn’t a fault of hers. It wasn’t a sign that she had a fickle heart or was a greedy girl. Hermione was allowed this kindness, this gift of more than one love. And if they would have her, she would give herself to them. She imagined it - reading with Draco, curled together on one couch. Turns around the garden with Theo at her arm, warm hands slotted into her own. Draco’s tall frame folding over hers with hugs and-
Kissing. Hermione imagined kissing them. Not just on the cheek, but actually kissing the boys. Would Theo’s lips be warm like the rest of him? Would she be able to see his freckles that close to his face? Would Draco be commanding, or demure and gentle as he was in private? Would he put his hands on Hermione’s waist like a romantic in a movie?
Would Draco and Theo kiss each other with Hermione in the room?
It was a dangerous train of thought to follow, and one that Hermione couldn’t bear to indulge while standing in Sirius Black’s sitting room, starting at a half-torn apart tapestry of the family, listening to this man talk about how he’d never support Hermione’s life if she pursued Draco and Theo.
If they would have her.
“Come on,” Sirius said, his hand landing hard on Hermione’s shoulder. “Let’s go make the tea for the others. They should be home soon.”
They left again, and Sirius worked quietly alongside Hermione to prepare biscuits and cups for tea. The stasis charm had only been over everything for a few minutes when the Weasleys came tumbling through the floor - Arthur, Ron, and Harry, followed by the twins, and then Molly and Ginny carrying bags from Diagon Alley. And Remus, too, heading up the rear with that same old, tired look on his face. He'd been busy with some kind of job from Dumbledore, one he didn't speak about to anyone.
They all made for the tea as soon as they realized there was a warm pot on the stove and snacks. Sirius and Molly fell back into an argument almost as quickly as they had before, and Hermione found herself slipping away without much notice.
She had better, brighter things on her mind than the return of Death Eaters and how to defend against the Unforgivable curses. Like the way Draco looked in the early mornings, tired from reading all night. Like the way Theo made light of just about everything, joking and happy. Like the way they seemed to fill the gaps in Hermione's life with books and levity, with beautiful things, with manners and thoughtful, old-fashioned ways of talking. With joy.
Like how she’d like to have been kissing them that night, when they’d kissed one another. About how she’d like to ask them more about an arranged marriage, about matches and multiple partner relationships, and whether or not they wanted her. Especially if they wanted her. Gods, she hoped more than anything, for the first time in her life, that Draco and Theo wanted her. She wanted them, and she wanted them to want her.
Hermione's thoughts turned towards what they were doing now - were they in the Library back home? Was Draco at work with his father, and Theo at home with Narcissa and Toma? She thought of the Dark Lord, and how she’d left Draco and Theo at the Manor, confused and without any explanation, with Tom Riddle staying a few doors down from them. They were completely at his mercy, and Hermione at least had a small amount of control in the situation. She could push back on him without the same level of fear - she'd already felt the worst of his anger. Draco and Theo had nothing, no bartering chips, no power.
And she’d left them.