Chapter 23
“Do you have time for a lunch break? I’d love to catch up.” The man with dirty-blond hair asked her as they shared a hug in her new office. She pulled back with a smile.
“Sure! I don’t have any paperwork to start today, so I’d love to have lunch with you.” She said, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. The two of them made pleasant small talk as they walked to the Ministry cafeteria (how was your first day, the trip in this morning, etc.).
“What can Kip be getting the Miss and Master?” An elf with abnormally tiny ears asked them as they sat down at one of the available tables.
“Could I get a Ham and Cheese Toastie, please?” Hermione answered.
“I’ll take a cheese and pickle, thanks,” Theo replied. The elf nodded before quickly disappearing and reappearing with a loud *POP*. It set the food in front of the two, bowed, and disappeared again before Hermione got the chance to tip it with the ten Sickles she’d fished from her handbag.
“I heard you and Daph got married, congratulations!”
“Yeah,” Theo said with a dopey grin on his face. “November 12th, 2001. We tried to send a couple of invites to you but the owls kept returning after a few days.”
“That’s what Stori said. Sorry, I would have come if I’d known. I was in Australia but I had some pretty extensive wards up.”
“We figured you were still looking for your parents and were using Harry’s cloak or something.” He replied as he took one of the chips off her plate. She rolled her eyes at his horrible table manners but still smiled fondly at the familiar gesture from when they’d been in school. “So they were in Australia, then? That’s a neat country. I think I’ve been twice.”
“When did you go to Australia?”
“Eh, the last couple years I’ve been to a few different countries for work. So, what did you do there for so long? Trying to help them get their memories back or just relaxing? Gotta say it looked like I would have enjoyed being there on holiday. Lots of sunny beaches, good food, I would have stayed forever if I could have.”
“Actually,” she squirmed in her seat, “I was just there to figure some of my life out. My parents passed away before I could find them. Car accident.” He paused with his food halfway to his mouth before letting his hand drop back to his plate.
“Oh... Sorry. I know how much you were looking forward to having them back.” He said softly, laying a hand on her arm over the table.
“Yeah... I’m still not completely fine, but I’m… getting there. Anyway, I got in contact with Luna since she was travelling for the Quibbler and we started working for Mr Scamander’s Creature Identification Team. We successfully documented and classified 254 new species and subspecies. I’m honestly going to miss it, working from home got a little boring at times but I got to work with my own classification system and didn’t have to wait for books or resources.” She said with a playful glare at her lunch mate. He’d been notorious for checking out the books she needed at Hogwarts. It was one of the reasons they’d first started studying together because he had trouble returning the books at a reasonable pace... Or at least at a Hermione pace...
“And now you’re stuck using Ministry resources,” he chuckled. “Best of luck. What’s your new position, anyway? All the memo said was you were joining the Creature division.”
“Memo? Why would you have gotten a memo about my starting here? Actually, how is it you knew where my office was today?” She asked her friend, overly suspicious now that she realized none of it was exactly common knowledge.
“Can’t tell you.” He told her cheerfully. “Nothing sinister, I promise.”
“Right.” She snorted, raising an eyebrow casually. “Well, I don’t think I can answer your question either then.”
“Hey, I’m not being an arse about it, I just actually can’t tell you.” He told her, making a zip motion with his lips.
“Oh!” She gasped, realizing what he meant. Who’d have thought, Theo Nott, an unspeakable? “That makes sense, then, that they’d keep you up to date with who works here and when. I got hired on as a Creature and Being Advocational Lawyer and Researcher, specifically in the Reclassification of Being Status Prioritization and Circumstantial Provisions unit. It’s a new sub-group in the department. I think Kingsley’s trying to make up this Marriage Law mess to me. I'm pretty sure it got implemented a few weeks ago specifically to tie my interests together. It used to be the Reclassification of Being and Creature Status division and the Provisional Being Circumstances unit.”
“That’s gonna be fun for you. Sorry, you got caught up in that whole mess, I did argue in front of the Wizengamot that anyone abroad should be excused from the law. Not that I knew you were abroad, but it still seems tyrannical to make everyone come back here and upend their lives and jobs and whatnot, just to be forced into a marriage. We didn’t have enough votes to implement it, obviously, but we did try.”
“There probably wasn’t enough of us away for them to justify making the exemption. Though, they probably would have been more pressed to ignore you if there were too many abroad.”
“Probably,” he remarked with a shrug before leaning back comfortably in the cheap, plastic cafeteria chairs. “Anyway, Tori told us you got shafted twice in all this. What with being paired with Draco and all. I love him like a brother, but I know he was always a prat to you in school.”
“I guess he’s not so bad. He’s still got a stick up his arse, but at least he’s been trying to be polite and we haven’t hexed each other yet. I’ve been going to Malfoy Manner for wedding planning almost every afternoon, so he’s had ample opportunity. Not that he’d realize that, since he keeps leaving me alone with his mother. ” She mumbled the last part under her breath.
“Cissa has dragged you into party planning?” He cackled with laughter. “Oh, you poor thing. She used to rope Blaise and me into helping her and Draco when we were still too young to know when to have other plans and make ourselves scarce.”
“You'll have to show me how to do that. Merlin, I’m going mad with all of the swatches and templates. I thought I’d been a thorough planner in school. She makes me look like Ron!” Mione giggled as Theo burst into another round of chuckles.
“Well, at least it will be picture-perfect. It will be an affair to remember. I got my tux a few weeks ago since I’m standing with Draco, and Daph has her dress all ready to go. We’ll just need to have it altered once more before the wedding.”
“Oh yeah, Stori told me you were expecting! Congratulations, Theo! Is this your first?”
“Yeah, Daphne is due October 19th. A girl.” He said, brimming with pride and excitement.
“A little girl.” Hermione cooed happily. “How’s Daph doing? The pregnancy is going well, I hope?”
“It was for a while. She didn’t have any morning sickness or heartburn, and no major cravings. But a couple of weeks ago she started having some cramping and pressure. We thought it was normal before she had some bleeding. Nothing major, thank Salazar, but I took her into the Medi-Witch anyway. She’s got cervical insufficiency so she’s been on pretty strict bedrest since.”
“Oh no! Is she okay?”
“She’s doing fine now, just really bored.” He chuckled nervously. “We wanted to make it to that shopping thing Tori invited us to, but the healer said no. She should be fine for the handful of weddings we’re going to, but she’ll have to take it easy.”
“I would really like you both to come, I can’t wait to say hi to Daph, but if she’s meant to be on bed rest shouldn’t she just stay home?” Hermione asked, biting her thumbnail anxiously.
“We got the all-clear from her Obstimedi-Witch. As long as she doesn’t do any strenuous dancing and stays seated for most of the night, it should be fine. She’s been itching to get out of the bed since she got put on rest, so I don’t think she’d let me tell her to stay home if I tried.”
“No, she’s pretty headstrong. I don’t think she’d let you either.” Mione chuckled softly, remembering just who wore the pants in her friends’ relationship.
“How are you feeling? About the whole... marriage thing?” He asked with a wave of his hands.
“Honestly? I’m not totally sure how I’m doing. I mean, I understand the law. I know why we need this as a society. But also I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I have to marry Malfoy, and I don’t know how everything is going to play out, and I’m nervous about the actual ceremony but more so about the honeymoon, because we still aren’t on a first-name basis so how on earth could that go well? But I kind of want it to go well and I don’t know if it’s the hormones they put in my body or it’s actually me because I’m starting to think I find Malfoy attractive which I mean, yeah, I’ve thought he was relatively good looking before if you ignored his other qualities but Merlin, now it’s just absolutely terrifying to think about and I don’t know if it’s my own mind or not which just makes it all worse! And I don’t want our first kiss to be a disaster because Cho Chang, who’s now Cho Montague, was talking about how bad it went at her ceremony yesterday and I’ve done nothing but focus on that since I heard, and now God help me I’ve even started to fantasize about kissing Malfoy when I should be focused on work I mean it’s my first day and I’m not paying any-”
“Hermione!” Theo interrupted her tirade. “Hermione, breathe! Breathe. Merlin, you really are wound up.” He laughed good-naturedly. “Ok, the law. It’s good that you understand the necessity. As far as why you’re marrying Draco, I assume you mean why the two of you were paired. While I wasn’t privy to a lot of the process, I will say that from the sounds of it your’s was one of the higher compatibility scores. Top five I think. If I remember correctly, of the people paired Johan Shrute and Clarinne Goldstein had the highest compatibility at like 99 something per cent. Luna and Neville had a rather high percentage, and I think Blaise and Ginevra Weasley were pretty high as well. Which, I wasn’t that surprised about since he never got over her when they hooked up in school. You and Draco broke the 90’s as well. I don’t think any other couples had anywhere near as high percentages. The average for our pairing system was sitting somewhere around fifty-three point seven one per cent per couple.” She was relatively shocked by the news. She knew that her and Ginny’s percentages had been high (92.7 for herself and Malfoy, and 98-even for Ginny and Blaise). Harry, Ron, and Percy’s percentages had all been much lower (she believed Harry and Astoria had a 68.4 per cent compatibility, while Percy and Audrey were down at 55.3, and Ron and Pansy were sitting at just 49.92). Even George and Angelina only had a 70 per cent match, and they were the ones who wanted to marry each other! But she’d assumed all of the pairings had been skewed high like that to make the numbers fit. “We went by the highest percentage per person. So using you as an example, since I did get to see some of your other matches, had you not been paired with Draco because he had someone else with higher compatibility than you, you would have moved to the next highest after him. I believe that would have been Terry Boot. You had a 31.1% match with him. If he’d been paired with someone else higher than you, you would have gone down to Adrian Pucey. Your match with him was only 12.4%. We got pretty lucky, since if one person was highly compatible with someone it was typical they would be the top match for one another. I think we really only had to go down one or two people for maybe a handful of pairings. And you know, of course, what the criteria the Ministry looked at was since it was all in the paperwork you filled out.”
“Yes, the likes, pet peeves, magical ability, things like that. And Kingsley did explain a little bit more about who all would look over what we filled out. He didn’t go into specifics or anything but I got a general idea.”
“Good. I hope that this helped a little bit more. As for kissing Draco, I really can’t help you there. I’ve never made out with him myself. Though, I did have a tryst with Wayne Hopkins. His ex-girlfriend shagged Draco a couple of times and he complained that she was always comparing him to Draco when they were going out. Suffice to say that I didn’t hang on to that relationship for long since he always talked about her, but she did seem to think Draco was some kind of Demi-God or something the way Wayne said she went on about how good everything was.” She wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or made her feel worse. “So I don’t think you have anything to worry about, in regards to kissing or shagging Draco.” He said with a waggle of his eyebrows. She gave him an unimpressed scowl as her cheeks heated up, and he let out another laugh. “And you know that they can’t give you love potions or anything in your shots since babies conceived under the effects could turn into the next You-Know-Who. So I don’t know if you want to hear it or not but I’m pretty sure that the attraction you’re feeling is all you. I’m not getting the shots right now, since Daphne’s already pregnant, but I’ve gone over the information with the healers and it sounds like it’s all just libido hormones and stuff to-”
“Yeah, I know. I spoke to my healers about it too.” She interrupted politely.
“So you know, then, that it’s nothing that would persuade you one way or the other in terms of finding someone attractive.”
“That’s disconcerting.”
“Why?”
“Because it means I’m actually starting to... like... Malfoy,” she told her friend with a small shudder.
“Gasp, I’m shocked!” He mock fainted. “You, Hermione Granger, finding your soon to be husband pleasant looking enough to be shaggable! What a conundrum! The audacity of your body!” She buried her head in her arms as he made a scene, reminding her uncomfortably about the time he’d gotten them kicked out of the library for a similar display.
“Ok, ok! I get it! I know it’s not actually what some would consider a problem. Would you keep your voice down, I don’t think China heard you.” She harumphed as he snickered at her. “That doesn’t change the fact that Malfoy and I are being barely companionable these days. We still aren’t on a first-name basis and we don’t really know anything about one another. We’re supposed to be getting married in a week and a half. So we either don’t kiss until the wedding and be embarrassed in front of the three hundred fucking guests Narcissa insisted on inviting, or I talk to him about it and try to get him to kiss me before then. How the hell do I bring up kissing to him in a way that isn’t incredibly cringe-inducing or...sterile? I could forgo the conversation and just kiss him instead of trying to get him to kiss me, but then I run the risk of putting us back into argument territory or I freak him out!”
“Mione, you really don’t need to put that much thought into this. I mean, he’s a guy. I can assure you that if you put on some lip-gloss or lipstick and just ask him to kiss you, you will have absolutely no problem. Put on a short skirt or a tight dress and you may even get to take his shagging on a test drive before the wedding too.” She smacked him with her bag as he laughed at himself.
“Real mature, Theo.” She grumbled.
“As I said, he’s a man. The straights all go for that kind of thing.”