The Wedding - COMPLETE

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Updated 6-15-07

I want to thank each of you for taking the time to send me a review. I know it's easy to just read and leave, but for those who spend that little extra time to write me, I really, really appreciate your thoughtful gestures.


So without further ado...


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Chapter Forty-One

The Newest Malfoy

Hermione finally solved the legal question of the brash, young vampire who decided he had a claim on the Pureblood wizard he’d had ‘lunch’ with, by telling the vampire he had an excellent claim and as a newly adopted member of the Pureblood’s family he was required to attend the annual picnic in the local park in bright sunlight the following week when all his new relatives would welcome him into their ranks. The young vampire quickly renounced all legal claim and disappeared.


Sweet, little Saint Hermione had quietly decided that legalities and research were all well and good, but sometimes more direct methods were called for. Besides, she had a baby coming and the court battle had looked to be a long one. That scheming vampire would never find out that his Pureblood family would as soon stand naked in the middle of the main Ministry foyer at high noon singing, ‘Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall’, as go on anything so plebeian as a low-class picnic.


Another month and several moods, arguments, truces, tubes of ointment, and used vibrator batteries farther on –


“Sweet Goddess, Lucius, I feel like a stuffed sausage. I should have asked before we agreed to get pregnant, if Malfoy babies ran big. Is your bloodline part giant?” Hermione was ensconced in a rocking chair in their new nursery. The walls had been painted a cheerful yellow and were full of brightly colored murals of simple magical things: children on broomsticks, flying hippogriffs, Hogwarts, pixies, mermaids, and all manner of other animals and objects, done by a young wizard who specialized in that sort of art.


“I hope you’re joking. Malfoys were always Pureblood,” Lucius still had little sense of humor about his eroded dynasty.


“Well, look at me,” Hermione gestured to her outsize nine-month belly, “I look like I at least slept with a centaur. Is your bloodline part cen -”


The beleaguered wizard was feeling a little guilty about her discomfort, knowing he could do nothing for her, plus he belatedly realized he probably shouldn’t have made that Pureblood comment. Lucius huffed in exasperation, running his fingers through his hair indignantly, “No, of course not. Do I look like I’m part centaur?”


“Hmmm. Well, I do see a resemblance around the genitals, but otherwise, perhaps only the mane.” Hermione laughed at Lucius’ irritated expression. Really, he was so easy, it almost was not worth baiting him - almost. Then Hermione started to feel contrite about needling her long-suffering spouse again, “Oh, I’m sorry, my love, I’m just being nasty. Your hair is lovely and not a mane at all.” A few tears started to fall – again. “I just feel so restless and I’m having trouble sleeping, and I need to pee all the time. I’m ready for this baby to be born.” She added ascerbically, “And can you please stop pacing, you’re making me nervous.”


Lucius sighed. Her moods were all over the place. He couldn’t keep up, she changed so fast and he had ALSO been suffering from Hermione’s inability to sleep without twisting and turning every half-hour in discomfort. Because she still wanted to be up against Lucius’ chest while she slept, he was constantly awakened by her movement. His normally irascible personality was getting abraded even more, and snapping peevishly at each other was the order of the day. Lucius' temper was easily torched by the slightest thing as he worried incessantly about his wife and the birth, all his problems now exacerbated by the cessation of his pressure valve of sex.


In this last month, sex with her had gone out the floo and his hand jobs were completely unsatisfying. Hermione had tried to help him, but she was now beyond the intense sex-play he needed. So he suffered in silence – well, not really.


But strangely, Lucius was feeling more and more secure with his new life and marriage every day that Hermione sniped at him. No formal distance, no inattention or lack of interest for her! She lit into him or sobbed on his neck for any and every conceivable reason, reassuring him as nothing else could have, that he was central to her existence. That didn’t mean he would let her walk all over him, though.


In the last week or so, he’d been…hovering. He freely admitted it to himself. He knew she must be close to her confinement, and although the elves would tell him the instant she needed him, he couldn’t seem to stray very far from her, just in case. His constant proximity was causing friction, though, so the daily sniping had recently escalated.


Hermione was now noticeably nesting and Lucius was getting his own kicks from watching her clean, tidy, arrange, and rearrange the baby’s nursery, which she had chosen to place across the hall from their own bedroom, rather than use the one on the floor above theirs. For the first time, Lucius came to the realization that Hermione’s time would necessarily be taken up with their baby, lessening his chances for intimacies with her.


Rather than worry unnecessarily, he was learning to trust her and he stopped pacing to just ask her outright, “Hermione, does your becoming a mother mean our sex life will change?” He had to know if once more he would be sent away. He was nearly certain Hermione wouldn’t turn on him, but his previous experience of a disinterested wife and his more remote life as a son in yet another stale marriage still shadowed his own expectations.


“I hadn’t planned on it. Why?”


Hermione was frowning at her latest attempt at knitting some sort of fuzzy yellow infant garment. Lucius got distracted by her uneven, lumpy project that looked to him like their babe would need six legs to fit. He knew her intelligence was without peer, but her knitting was total crap. Probably it was just more nesting, but he hoped her parenting skills were better than her ability to follow a knitting pattern. Lucius struggled back on track, “If you become busy with the baby, maybe you’ll be too tired.” There! He’d said one of his fears out loud.


Hermione looked up at her anxious spouse, “That’s up to you, my love. The more you help take care of our baby with me, the less I’ll be tired, don’t you think?”


“But I know very little about taking care of a baby,” he said uneasily, suddenly getting a queasy vision of himself as Nanny Lucius.


Hermione gave him a sardonic eyebrow of her own, which Lucius recognized as having been copied from his own recurring expression. “We’ll learn together. I can’t imagine you don’t already have books on the subject of child-care. You studied my pregnancy carefully enough.”


Well, of course he did, but he had been assuming he would just be overseeing Hermione to make sure she had everything under control and was doing things correctly, not actually participating in the labor-intensive, mundane details himself. “I’ll still need to spend a great deal of my day with the Ministry finances, precious. I won’t be available to just jump in and tackle each little job of work that needs doing.” That sounded plausible enough to keep him from nappy duty.


“Don’t worry, there will still be plenty to do after your working hours are over. I don’t plan to abandon my research either, but adjustments will have to be made. I’m sure Arthur, who’s a father of seven himself, will recognize that you’ll be a bit preoccupied for the first little while.” Hermione put down her failed knitting and rose using the rocker to propel herself up and out of it. She waddled over to her husband and wrapped her arms about his waist the best she could with her girth. “You need to learn to take care of the baby, too, Lucius. What if something happened to me? Is it the nappies?”


“I beg your pardon? Nothing will happen to you and I’ll not be doing nappies.” Lucius looked scandalized.


Hermione wasn’t sure which had caused the scandalized look, the possibility of danger to her or the nappies. “So your duty ended with depositing the sperm? I didn’t realize you were going to make me the sole caregiver for our child. That disappoints me.”


Lucius’ mental plans for the baby really started when it was about ten years old – he hadn’t seen himself as being primarily involved with an infant. In the past that had been Narcissa’s responsibility. “I wasn’t involved with Draco as a baby and I think the elves can do just fine with our new baby. But-” he held up his hand when he saw his wife gearing up for another of what he privately called her motherhood miffs, “I’ll try to be more obliging if it means you’ll be more available for sex.” Lucius felt he’d been more than generous with his offer. He gave her one of his ‘charming’ smiles, which had zilch effect on her that he could see. He was really losing his touch – he reassured himself it was likely due to her advanced pregnancy.


“Lucius Malfoy, Death Eater Extraordinaire,” she scoffed. “Afraid of some nappies. You’ll definitely be more involved with your own baby, elves or no elves, even if my ‘knothole’ dries up and blows away and there is no more sex to be had.” Hermione crossed her arms over her rotund tummy and glared at him in total vexation.


“Bite your tongue, witch. What a horrible thought. That won’t happen, will it?” Lucius could think of no worse fate than to be married to his precious and have no way to make love while inside her.


“Of course not. You think I’d do anything to jeopardize my favorite pastime in this entire world?”


“Even better than doing research? I’m flattered.” Lucius produced a quirky smile that was more genuine than the charming one; he was flattered.


Hermione let him bask in her encomium for a second but went back on the attack, “You’re going to be a marvelous father and I’m going to see that you learn everything I do. Don’t worry, you’ll love taking care of your new child, I just know it.” She gave him a pat on his chest and sat carefully back down in the rocker, absently rubbing her back.


Lucius mumbled under his breath, “I won’t love the nappies,” but he gave up the argument for now and went over to rub her back more firmly. She’d been complaining for a couple of days and he was very aware that she was near her time. Sweet Goddess, what would he do if anything did happen to her? His heart sank briefly to his toes, but then he decided not to borrow trouble and shoved the terrible thought away, as he successfully did with all his unwanted memories, into that crowded dark space in his mind.


“Uh, Lucius? Sweetheart? You can stop rubbing now.”


He stopped and stared at his little round fireball. She had never called him sweetheart before. He straightened up from rubbing her back and looked at her, somewhat startled at her new endearment.


“Now don’t get all excited and useless, but I think my water just broke.” Hermione struggled to rise from the rocking chair, using her self-propel method. The rocking chair seat was wet. “I need my little satchel and a change of clothing, then I think we’d better go to St. Mungo’s.”


Lucius just stood there transfixed by the magnitude of the event. Hermione was going to have their baby now. Right now. He was frozen with shock and fear and a great surge of happiness that swamped him, completely short-circuiting all his higher brain functions.


Hermione grabbed a bit of his hair and shook him out of his fog and he saw her move purposefully toward the door. He lifted her and carried her to their bedroom, allowing her only enough time to get her satchel, and instead of waiting on more clothes, he flicked his wand and ran a drying spell over her, making her call him a very unladylike name.


Lucius ignored her slur and immediately apparated her to the foyer of St Mungo’s. When she continued remonstrating with him he said, “Hush, precious. I am not taking any chances with your health or our baby’s. Don’t ask it of me. Or,” he frowned, “yell it at me.”


He went to the admissions desk and checked her in, then guided her over and into the lift, sending it up to the obstetrics floor. A nurse met them, frowning that the wizard hadn’t waited for her to bring the wheelchair to the front desk. She made Hermione sit down in the wheelchair, which she swiftly wheeled toward a waiting private birthing room, long reserved by Lucius for this day.


Hermione was shoved into a hospital gown (she would talk to the hospital administrators later about the old frayed gowns they supplied – didn’t the medical profession have any sense of style?) and told to lie down on the birthing bed. Several charms were instated and started floating over Hermione’s swollen tummy. Lucius wanted very much to be able to read and understand them, but after seeing them on his first visit to the doctor’s office, he hadn’t been able to discover any texts on the indicator charms. He thought now that he should have asked Hermione to do the research, but he hadn’t wanted her to know the depth of his sometimes slightly excessive attentiveness to her pregnancy.


After that, things went quickly. Hermione’s contractions began in earnest, and she alternately moaned and gasped with the strong involuntary muscle-tightening that ran across her abdomen. Lucius was allowed to stand near her shoulder after he was subjected to the same thorough sanitizing charm the nurse had run over his wife. Hermione looked up at him and saw his complexion was a little green as he viewed the paraphernalia and listened to the involuntary sounds she couldn’t help making during each contraction.


Lucius had read about everything he could but it was no substitute for actually being in the room with a wife who was making brave, little heartrending sounds designed to give him a permanent guilt complex. He didn’t know if he could stay through to the end. He felt a bit faint.


“Nurse, please get my husband a chair. He may as well be comfortable if I can’t be.” Hermione privately thought he looked about to keel over, but she didn’t want him to feel embarrassed asking for one himself – or have him laid out cold on the floor because he hadn’t asked. She wanted her Death Eater to be present for every aspect of this birth. He had shown an irritating interest in the pregnancy from Day One and she wasn’t going to let him back out now.


The doctor came in at that moment and saw Lucius, “Oh hello, Mister Malfoy. I’m so glad you’re with your wife. Your little one is ready to meet you, I hear. Well, let’s see what we have.” The doctor checked out the birth canal, making Lucius squirm in his chair, but Hermione reached for his hand and he clung to her as if he were the one needing reassurance. “Ah, splendid, not long now. Mister Malfoy, you can raise your wife’s bed at the head perhaps 45 degrees, if you will. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” The doctor quickly exited the room in the wake of another nurse’s urgent summons.


Lucius stood, “She’s leaving? What if the baby comes before she gets back?” He was beginning to look like a tall, blond thundercloud topped by icy gray eyes.


Hermione pulled on his hand, “Lucius, it will be a few minutes at least, the doctor knows what she’s doing. Help me, please.”


He glowered after the doctor’s retreating form, but did as she said. He was now more irritated than scared, so one benefit had emerged from the doctor’s temporary exodus - if an irritated Lucius could ever be called a benefit.


Hermione got a bit of relief having her bed elevated, but was soon moaning again and adding panting to her litany. Lucius recollected his readings and helped her to surmount each contraction as it came, but wished she wouldn’t squeeze his hand so tightly – she was stronger than she looked.


The doctor returned a couple of hours later, just as Hermione and her nurse had determined she could start pushing. Lucius was beside himself with worry and anticipation, but Hermione seemed to have settled into a workmanlike attitude and she was aiming all her energy at expediting the birth. Fifteen minutes later, the newest little Malfoy entered the world, screaming at being unceremoniously ejected into such a cold place. The doctor announced, “It’s a girl. A beautiful baby girl. Congratulations, Hermione, Mister Malfoy.” The doctor efficiently cleaned and wrapped their new daughter and handed the infant without ceremony to Hermione. “I need a few minutes to clean up and repair your wife, so why don’t you two meet your daughter and get acquainted?”


Lucius beamed at his wife over the head of his tiny Slytherin sprout and blinded Hermione with one of his rare, genuine smiles, making her heart skip a beat. She unwrapped the baby a bit to show Lucius their daughter had everything in the right numbers and position, then held her up to look straight at his face. Her little fist waved erratically and bopped him on the nose. Lucius smiled and put his hand up to protect his face and got her little fingers wrapped around one of his, surprisingly tightly. His heart started to hurt and he ignored his unraveling emotions, saying, “Precious, look! She’s holding my finger. She must be very clever. Clearly both our genes took with this one.”


Hermione laughed at her husband’s goofy smile – he must know his assertion of intelligence was ridiculous. All babies could do that. Ah, never mind, she wasn’t going to burst his bubble. The more he fell in love with his daughter the better. Being present at her birth would go a long way to cement him to them even now that his year’s monitoring was up.


Hermione sighed - his limitation to the estate had ended five days ago and, along with his latest quarterly report to the Minister of Magic, he had been given his official release from her custody, but he hadn’t left her side – literally. He’d even trailed into the loo with her once or twice. Today was actually his first time off the estate since he’d been freed.


The doctor broke into Hermione’s pensive thoughts asking, “Have you a name for your new baby?”


Hermione replied, “We’re going to call her Chloe Rose. Chloe means ‘green shoot’ and she’s a new shoot of green on the Malfoys’ Slytherin family tree. Rose is for the red of Gryffindor, my house.” (Author’s note: Chloe is pronounced Kloh’-ee)


“Those are lovely names. Well, I’ve repaired everything good as new. No waiting for the husband,” she winked at Lucius who straightened in his chair looking like a birddog who’s sighted a fat pheasant, hoping the doctor was saying what he thought she said. She turned to Hermione, “We just want to check on little Chloe and you for a few more hours, then you can go home with your new daughter. You’ll be sleeping in your own bed tonight.”


Lucius’ hot eyes bored into his wife’s. It had been a painful dry spell for him, chafing him physically even though mentally he understood his wife’s inability to accept his advances.


Hermione saw the intent in her husband’s eyes and quietly groaned. She wanted at least one night’s good rest to recuperate from her many poor nights’ sleep and her labor. But she had married a man with a very high sex drive and knew her reprieve wasn’t going to last long. At least the doctor had repaired any bits of internal damage. Hermione rocked her tiny girl, who was starting to get fractious, so she settled her daughter to nurse while Lucius sat again, idly watching his daughter being fed, but daydreaming of what he wanted to do when they got home. He was deep in a hot sequence involving both the black and purple vibrators when Hermione yanked his hair again. He really was going to have to explain his hair was not an accepted method of communication.


“Lucius, get your mind out of my knickers and pay attention. Baby first, sex second. That’s the new rule in our home.” When she saw him start to panic, she soothed, “I didn’t say no sex, my love. I hope you haven’t been comparing me to Narcissa again. I’m sure we’ll find all sorts of ways to satisfy ourselves, but just now, I need you to take Chloe, so I can go to the loo. She gently placed his daughter in Lucius’ hands and slowly got up, leaving the room.


Lucius was still concerned that Hermione was perfectly okay and would recover well from the birth when he got his first brief view of his new daughter. He remembered Hermione’s comment ‘what if something happened to her’ and having read books about all the pitfalls of childbirth, his attention had been more on his wife than his child, but now his eyes skimmed over, then settled on the features of his newborn tiny sprite seeing wispy threads of pale blond hair and eyes already a very light non-color, so he assumed she would have his arctic gray eyes as well. He thought he could see faint, little whorls in her hair, and envisioned a riot of curly blonde hair on his daughter when she was older.


His baby daughter looked up at him, trying to focus on her father and he stilled, abruptly mesmerized by this miniature Malfoy. His child! Lucius looked down at his little girl as her eyes drooped and she fell asleep, completely trusting. His new little daughter, this precious gift, was trusting him with her whole future.


Suddenly he saw her as her own little person, a separate individual depending on him and vulnerable to her father’s cruel past and reputation and he was blindsided, swamped by his overwhelming love for this tiny, new life. She was his and had to be protected at all costs, even from himself. He never wanted her to have a moment’s pain or upset, and his deplorable, vicious past could give her a great deal of both. Lucius’ heart sped up and started racing.


The blond wizard sat there staring poleaxed at his infant and without the least warning the dark stronghold of all his repressed emotions and memories broke and his mind and heart cracked wide open; all the years of his rage and anguish, his vindictiveness and misery and fear came boiling out at once to engulf and suffocate him, leaving him gasping for air, struggling to breathe past the crushing weight of his abhorrent history as it invaded every part of his conscious psyche. His protective, flexible conscience congealed in that instant and began inexorably strangling him with a grim parade of his many transgressions, making him feel like he was going mad.


He didn’t deserve his tiny, exquisite daughter, he didn’t deserve any of this fairytale, why had he ever thought he did? What kind of man was he to step forward and be a father to this innocent child? Lucius couldn’t stuff his past into a remote corner of his mind any more and ignore it. The year he’d spent with Hermione had thinned and weakened his defensive wall as he’d begun to trust her and now the dam had broken. He saw now he was foully tainted, and would only contaminate his beautiful Chloe Rose. Hermione had to understand. Lucius rose unsteadily and held his innocent baby in stiff arms, waiting for his wife to return.


Hermione entered the hospital room and saw Lucius cradling their tiny daughter strangely in his arms, looking completely distraught. “What’s wrong? Is she okay? Tell me! Lucius?” Hermione hurried over to them and anxiously checked her baby, but Chloe was fast asleep and seemed fine. Hermione looked up at her husband and saw his haunted expression increase as he handed over his daughter to her.


“Hermione, I have to go,” he whispered, his voice stilted. “I need…I need…” He backed away a step, his arctic eyes eerily blank, his face bleached a ghastly gray as though a corpse stood there talking. “Please understand, I need… to stop… to stop being who I am,” he shuddered. “Oh Gods, I don’t want to be him any more!”


Lucius threw a tormented glance at his wife and child, and reached forward, resting one hand gently on Hermione’s hair, threading long, elegant, trembling fingers through her curls to touch her skin. He drew on his rusty legilimency powers and reversed them, transferring his chaotic thoughts to her, trying to help her understand the collapse of his mind’s barriers, his need to rid himself of the ugliness he finally saw all too clearly within.


Lucius felt unbalanced, schizoid, overwrought; his facility for subduing his past to a remote corner of his mind had been utterly shattered and the tenuous hope he’d cherished - to see a future with his wife and his much-loved, pure baby daughter – was now forfeit to his repulsive past. It had been there always, keeping him from trusting and committing himself entirely to Hermione. Keeping him from polluting her. He had to find a way to confront and truly deal with what he had managed up until now to bury and gloss over in his serpentine mind. If he couldn’t…if he couldn’t…Lucius knew there was nothing more for him.


“I need you to let me go,” Lucius rasped unsteadily.


Hermione’s eyes widened at the unfocused shadows of horrific images he fleetingly sent to her and the tsunami of negative emotions boiling up out of her husband’s mind. It was himself he hated, not her, not Chloe. She pulled his hand from her head and held it tightly; her tears started to fall wetting her sleeping daughter’s blanket.


“You belong to me and to Chloe,” she said fiercely, “forever. I’ve come to terms with your past. I’ve moved on, but I see that you haven’t. Your past, those terrible events can’t be changed, but they can be forgiven, and Lucius, you’re the only one who can accomplish that now. If you need to come to terms with it, I do understand.” Hermione wiped her eyes on a corner of Chloe’s blanket. “I see it’s for us, Lucius, but even more it must be for you.”


Hermione stepped forward and grabbed his hair with her free hand, yanking it down so she could see him eye to eye, “But you’re not alone any more so don’t you dare fail. I’ll never let your soul rest if you give up.” She let go of his hair and he straightened up rubbing his scalp ruefully, a ghost of a smile briefly lessening the devastation behind his eyes. “Mind you,” she warned, “I won’t wait passively for very long. If you don’t come back within the month, I’m going to hunt you down and chain you in the mansion’s dungeon until you come to your senses.”


Lucius gazed sadly at his tiny, passionate wife, his mind trying to concentrate, “Hermione, we…we don’t have a dungeon. It was made into a wine cellar years ago. I’m so sorry, but I have to find some sort of peace if I can, and I have to do it now.” A single finger lightly stroked his daughter’s cheek. “I need to be a different man for us. For her. I can’t bear what I am,” he choked, looking desolately at his little angel, his inner devils etched on his tortured face. Then his eyes dissociated from the present, staring inward at the unholy abominations that were now crushing him under their deadly weight.


Hermione nodded, but iterated, “If you’re not back, you can look forward to the dungeon. Believe it. I can make an excellent one in the next month. No light, dripping water, freezing cold and,” she blustered, “bad, bad smells. Or maybe wonderful cooking smells that will torture you with what you can’t have. Plus, I’ll have Crookshanks catch some rats so you have some company.” She rocked Chloe back and forth, willing her husband to understand that she was deadly serious about securing his return.


“You should have been a Death Eater,” he murmured, “You certainly have the imagination for it.” Lucius shuddered again, bringing another wave of appalling, guilty remembrances crashing through his wide-open, unprotected mind. “I understand, precious. But let me go for now, please?”


“One month, Lucius. Then I start hunting.” Hermione knew it would be cruel to tell him she loved him just then. That would be more than he could absorb or stand in that scarred, wounded, and now openly bleeding mind of his. She controlled her stricken emotions, battling her own flaring case of post-partum blues at her husband’s acute suffering.


Lucius fled.

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Did you all forget the ROLLERCOASTER?


Those of you who have read my other works will know my style. I believe in happily ever afters. Eventually.

This chapter wrung me out. So...please review...zzzzzzzzzzz
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