We Can Work It Out

“You’re going to what?” To most people Draco Malfoy looked calm, perhaps slightly annoyed. Hermione knew better. He was gearing up for the mother of all hissy fits.

“I’m going to get pregnant,” she said as if she were telling him that she was going to nip down the hall for tea, would he like a cup?

“You can’t be serious… YOU ARE! Great Merlin, Granger!” He slapped his hand across his desk, knocking quills and parchment all over the place. “With whom?”

“No one,” she said as she walked around picking up his scattered items.

“You are aware of how the things are made?” Hermione rolled her eyes. She expected his snarkiness, but not this level of rebuke. Maybe she should have softened the blow with ice cream.

“I’m perfectly aware of how they are made. However, I have no one to make one with, so I’m going to be artificially inseminated.”

“Artificially inseminated? That’s disgusting, it sounds like one of Wendell the Weird’s experiments. What do you mean you don’t have anyone? I thought you were seeing that Christian bloke from Misuse of Muggle Artifacts. He’s been telling everyone that you’re practically engaged.” His robes were off and in his white dress shirt and tie he looked like a sulky school boy with his arms crossed and his hair mussed from running his hands through it in disbelief.

“I’m not seeing him anymore because of that very reason. I went to sleep on a one night stand and woke up feeling like I’d been married for forty years.” Hermione shuddered at the memory of Christian sitting at her kitchen table, drinking his morning tea and reading the newspaper while telling her he felt like ‘eggs benedict this morning, love’.

“Then what about Krum? You still go see him at least every other month for long weekends. Why haven’t you asked him for a commitment if you’re so ready to settle down?” Draco was demanding answers, not giving out helpful hints.

“Krum has made a commitment. He’s made a commitment to his boyfriend, Alexei. I have no doubt that were I to ask for a donation from either of them, they would agree, but I’m not going to impose that on my friendship with them. It’s much better that I start with Plan A and that plan is to go to a fertility doctor and request that I be artificially inseminated. I can pick an anonymous donor out of a catalogue, that way I don’t have to deal with finding a father and all the messy emotional trappings that go along with it.”

“Plan A?” Draco asked. Hermione handed him her notes and he looked at them. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” She nodded. He sighed. “I guess there’s nothing I can say that will stop you, is there?”

“Try to understand that this is something I’ve wanted my whole life and something I thought I would have accomplished by now. I’m two years shy of thirty and all the books say that the sooner you have your child before thirty, the better off both mother and baby are. I don’t have anyone special in my life and most of the men I sleep with I barely want to see next week, much less for the next fifty plus years of my life. I waited on Ron to be ready and look how that turned out. I’m done waiting on other people to have what I want. Just say you’ll support me on this, Draco, I could really use a friend.”

Draco stared at her and the look on his face almost broke her heart. She knew that the use of his first name from her always affected him this way and so she only used it in special instances. His steel grey eyes looked at her longingly and Hermione knew he was trying to find the words to say something. Finally, he swallowed and all that came out was, “Weasley is an absolute buffoon.” It wasn’t much, but she knew it was his way of saying he would be there for her.

“Thank you, Malfoy,” she sighed. She picked up her lists from his desk and went back to hers to start reading the final reports on Luna’s learning method.

“I’m going with you.”

“I beg you’re your pardon?” she asked, not quite sure she heard him correctly.

“I’m going with you to this fertility doctor and I’m going to help you pick a ‘donor’ out.” He spat out the word donor as if it tasted like acid on his tongue. “Knowing you, you’ll pick some sentimental, red headed, intellectual vacuum donor and I’ll be stuck with a screaming ginger kid with just enough I.Q. to do serious damage while you’re off rounding our office kids up.”

“Honestly, just because I went out with Ron for so long, everyone thinks I have a ginger fetish,” she said pretending to be exasperated, but barely suppressing the large grin spreading across her face. She couldn’t say more because there was a knock on the door.

“Hey, Dad, I was thinking that if we want to test out Lovegood’s new theory we should use both her method of testing and the old ministry test from way back when you and Mum were in school. Is it okay if I pop over to Hogwarts and run that by the professors?” Christine Dover had all the subtlety of a pipe bomb and she reminded Hermione very much of Tonks with her lack of social graces that somehow managed to be endearing.

Draco closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Hermione giggled and he glared at her. Not looking at Christine, he said, “I don’t care. Ask your mother.”

Hermione nodded her consent to Christine who then took off, bumping her shin on the doorway. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to chase her around as a toddler?” she asked.

“We’re only ten years older than her! Did you hear that? ‘Way back when you and Mum were in school’,” he mimicked in a high pitched voice. “I pick women her age up at the bar all time! None of them think I’m old because we’re not! Well, you’re going to be somebody’s mother soon, so I guess that would make you old.”

Hermione got up to floo McGonagall that Christine was coming and as she did, she hit Draco over the head with the parchment she was holding. “What was your main complaint about Stavros?” she asked, mirth in her eyes.

“That’s completely different! The man is pushing forty. I still have another seven years of partying ahead of me.” Draco said remembering the Greek correspondent from their education department who had been overly delighted at Hermione’s unconventional beauty.

“He’s only ten years older than me, but he could pass for thirty. Besides, I like older men.”

“The man was an absolute lech! I thought women liked older men because they were more mature and that man had the hands of a horny teenage octopus on its Yule Ball night. The way he ogled you, you’d think he’d never seen a woman before.” When Stavros had worked with British Wizarding Education office for three weeks, Draco had acted like Hermione’s knight errant, guarding her from the man’s advances, sometimes even slapping his hands away during board meetings. Stavros had been incredibly attractive, but far too intense for Hermione’s tastes. She liked intense relationships, but not suffocating ones.

Settling into her work, she began thinking of the men she had dated recently and began assessing why she couldn’t find one she liked well enough to settle down. Ever since Viktor had showed her how beautiful she was even if she was the plastic beauty found in modeling magazines, she’d felt much more comfortable in her own skin and it increased her level of attractiveness. She didn’t believe she was heart-stoppingly beautiful the way that Viktor said she was, but she knew she was certainly not ugly and that she did have a kind of feminine power. She also had retained her bookworm/prefect image from Hogwarts and for this reason most of the men she met assumed that she was ready to settle down or that she didn’t want or crave excitement. They often presumed that she was overly open to the idea of marriage because she was so orderly and often made the mistake of thinking that the relationship she shared with them was automatically headed that direction and that marriage was her supreme goal.

She blamed her ‘exotic’ looks (as Viktor called them) for most of it. If she’d been blonde, blue-eyed and stick thin, most men would probably not take their relationships seriously at all. After all, that appeared to be Draco’s type and he never saw a girl more than twice. The bookworm side also played to her disadvantage since most dates seemed to think that coffee in a bookstore was her only idea of a wonderful date. The reason she had given Christian a try was because he had invited her to go out on his friend’s boat. She’d had too much wine and slept with him on the first date. The first time had been in the boat and then they had apparated back to her flat and had sex two more times before succumbing to sleep. She’d been glad the sex was good because frankly, Christian was boring and self-obsessed.

Her relationship with Ron had been perfect, she thought, until she looked back on it. They had sexual chemistry and were very fond of each other, but it would have been best to stay friends. Her life with him after the war had been pleasant. One should not consider the love of their life merely pleasant, so obviously Ron was not it. She still felt wistful whenever she thought about him, but not because she missed him. Oh, she missed their close friendship, but she didn’t miss him as a boyfriend, she missed what he represented. Ron symbolized stability, solidarity and family and that’s what she missed the most. She had wanted to have children early, but he wanted to tour with the Canons first, saying that he should be home for his children’s early years. She had agreed and so they put it off for a year. Then the next year she wasn’t ready and each year after that he wasn’t ready until she found him that day with Lavender.

Thinking about Lavender and Ron only made her sad for what she didn’t have. She was a modern woman and she was going to get what she wanted without the help of a man. Taking a piece of parchment she wrote a note to the fertility clinic and attached to the leg of an owl. She was pro-active and she would have a new life within the year. Feeling very pleased with herself, she began to hum as she worked, earning a scowl from Draco.